The Origins of Autocracy

The representatives of the apologistic tendency reveal their school by open glorification of their teachers. S. Gorskii, who in Kazan' wrote a fat book, The Life and Historical Significance of Prince A. M. Kurbskii (the sole monograph on the patriarch of the Russian opposition, which unfortunately is sadly reminiscent of a poor joke), writes as follows: "Not taking upon myself the boldness to claim complete indepen­dence for my work, I will say openly that the works of Messrs. So­lov'ev, Kavelin, and other prominent figures in the field of native his­tory have guided me."[186] In fact, Gorskii has a single idea on his mind, one let fall by Solov'ev in the sixth volume of his

History of Russia. It would hardly be worthwhile discussing, were it not that it became the leitmotif of all the subsequent apologetics for Ivan the Terrible. Cer­tainly, the apologists make every effort to conceal their relationship to the most stupid of the reactionaries of the last century (as a rule they do not even mention Gorskii's book), but their language irrefutably betrays them:

Ivan was concerned that the idea of the state should triumph over the elements opposed to it, and wished to see it prevail in Russian society, because he saw in it the guarantee of the glory and prosperity of the fatherland. . . . This idea placed Ivan above the conceptions of the cen­tury; it raised him to a height inaccessible to his contemporaries, and therefore it is not surprising that they . . . began a life-and-death strug­gle with Ivan. . . . The old

does not give way to the new without a strug­gle. . . . Boyardom strove to retain

the old. This was chiefly what the ideology of boyardom consisted of. . . . The epoch of the creation of the Russian national state appears before us as a time of acute and tense struggle: of the old and the new.™

Gorskii wrote only part of this passage. The rest is the inalienable property of our distinguished contemporaries, D. S. Likhachev and I. I. Smirnov, and was published a century after the appearance of Gorskii's book. The reader will perhaps succeed in finding an essen­tial difference in these quotations; I did not.

Asking whom we are to believe in the dispute between the tsar "standing on an inaccessible height," and the traitor making a brave front abroad, Gorskii answers, "It is better to believe a tsar than a trai­tor who is unscrupulously slandering his sovereign."[187] But what was simple for a primitive monarchist (who was, furthermore, a captive of the stereotypes of the "state school") becomes complicated for our contemporaries. And for that matter, for Gorskii's own contempo­raries it was far from clear-cut. As Kurbskii's nineteenth-century suc­cessor, Aleksandr Herzen, who also fled his country and struggled in exile against its autocracy, explained: "We are not slaves to our love for our country, any more than we are slaves to anything else. A free person cannot admit a dependence on his native land which would compel him to participate in matters contrary to his conscience."[188]

Here we touch upon the most sensitive spot in Ivaniana. The "myth of the state" arose in the epoch of Ivan the Terrible, and Ivan­iana—that is to say, the argument over Tsar Ivan—is the form in which it has developed. But in its hypnotic and almost mystical power, the myth goes far beyond the limits of this argument, and influences the Russian world-view itself. In no other area, perhaps, does this dic­tatorship of the myth manifest itself so vividly as in attitudes toward the political opposition as a whole and political emigration in particu­lar. This is the test for freedom of thought; here lies the bad con­science of all of Russian historiography. And we must be grateful to Gorskii for having posed this question so openly—even if he did so out of stupidity.