The Origins of Autocracy

It seems to me that Kliuchevskii's error arises out of the fact that he does not attempt to analyze the category of "absolute power" (which in turn prevented him from distinguishing absolutism from despo­tism). Authoritarianism presented itself to him—and to his contem­poraries as well—as a single, undifferentiated phenomenon. "Ab­solute power" is a synonym for "unlimited power." He conceived of limitations on power, as was customary for the "state school," ex­clusively as political (juridical) limitations. The category of latent lim­itations on power, which was the paradoxical core of the "limited/ unlimited" structure of absolutism, did not exist for him. And here a riddle arose: how and by what means could there nevertheless be in pre-Oprichnina Russia "absolute power . . . with an aristocratic ad­ministration," if from the very beginning, even under Ivan III, "the character of this power did not correspond to the nature of the govern­mental tools through which it had to act?"^7,1

Kliuchevskii sees the answer to this question as twofold: first, this impossible combination was possible only as long as its impossibility was not recognized, and as long as the conflict between the two politi­cal forces had not come out into the open; secondly, the "personal character of Tsar Ivan" comes into play here. It turns out that,

Having acquired an extremely exclusive and impatient, purely abstract idea of supreme power, he decided that he could not rule the state as his father and grandfather had done, with the collaboration of the boy­ars . . . and he incautiously raised the old question of the relationship between the sovereign and the boyardom—a question which he was not in a position to answer and which, therefore, he should not have raised.⁷"'

Kliuchevskii admits that until Tsar Ivan "raised the question," the collaboration of the single leadership ("absolute power") with the boyar Duma (the "aristocratic personnel") proceeded relatively smoothly, and the disagreements which arose between the tsar and the Duma were smoothed over without reaching the level of political confrontation.

Its [the Duma's] structure, authority, and customary order of business seemed to be based on the assumption of an unshakable mutual con­fidence between its chairman and the counsellors, and bore witness to the fact that between the sovereign and his boyars there could not be a conflict of interest, and that these political forces had grown together, and become accustomed to acting in concert, hand in hand, and could not—did not know how to—proceed otherwise. There were colli­sions . . . and arguments, but about business, not about power; opin­ions about business came into conflict, but not political claims.™

And even the development of "bureaucratic governmental person­nel," which was natural as the state grew and became more complex, could not destroy this order of things: being directly subject to the tsar, the bureaucracy in the government departments was trans­formed into an apparatus of executive power, which did not claim to take part in legislation and the adoption of political decisions. Thus, both the aristocratic and the bureaucratic personnel in this system of absolute monarchy had their own separate and nonintersecting func­tions, which did not contradict each other.

But all this was true only so long as the conflict was not discerned.

Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia

(2nd ed.), vol. 2, pp. 180-81.

Ibid., p. 197.

Ibid., p. 348.

Once having arisen, it had to grow into a confrontation to the death, a war of annihilation, what is now called a zero-sum game. This had to be, because the organic incompatibility was, as Kliuchevskii liked to say, a political fact. There was no getting away from it. Had it not been Tsar Ivan, some other tsar would have detonated this delayed- action bomb built into the Muscovite political mechanism.