The Origins of Autocracy

Here, it might seem, is just the place to catch me up. For, objecting to Toynbee, I assert that Byzantinism—if by this we mean autoc­racy—was a fundamentally new phenomenon in sixteenth-century Russia; and, objecting to Kliuchevskii, I assert the reverse—that it was a traditional phenomenon. This is not a logical contradiction, how­ever, but an ontological one. It reflects the fundamental dualism of Russian political culture itself, which already existed in Kievan Rus'. Before Ivan the Terrible—even despite the Tatar influence—absolut­ist (European) tendencies predominated; after him they passed over into the opposition, yielding the historical proscenium to the vic­torious autocracy.

does not intend to continue the autocratic policy of Ivan the Terrible. On the contrary, he publicly and solemnly renounces it. Physical safety, an end to terror, the introduction of the category of "political death"—this is what he promises in his declaration, which is a medi­eval analog to the famous secret speech of Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. But Shuiskii goes further: in the memorandum which he distributed to all the cities in the Russian land, we read,

I, the tsar and great prince Vasilii Ivanovich of all Rus' have kissed the cross that I, the great sovereign, will not give over to death any person not judged by a true court made up of my own boyars and will not take his patrimony and his house and his property from his brother and his wife and his children. . . . Likewise, I will not take houses and stores and property from merchants and trading people and peasants. . . .

Likewise, I, the great sovereign, will not listen to false information and will try all cases well, by face to face contact, so that guiltless Orthodox Christians will not perish.⁷"

An end to denunciations, confiscations, executions of entire fam­ilies, mass plundering, murder without trial and investigation, an end to unlimited arbitrary rule—this is what the tormented Russian land cries for through the mouth of the tsar. It was not a matter of the liq­uidation of absolute monarchy. It was not a matter, consequently, of political limitations on power. This did not enter anyone's head. It was only a matter of elementary guarantees of life and property—of the latent limitations on power, in my terms—that is, a matter of res­toration of the absolutist spirit of Ivan III and the Government of Compromise. And Russian historiography proved unable to explain this, which is like not being able to explain the difference between Khrushchev and Stalin.

Kliuchevskii, though, with his fine historical intuition, felt some­thing unusual and historically significant in the declaration of the new tsar. He says: "The crowning of Prince Vasilii marked an epoch in our political history. On ascending the throne, he limited his power and officially set forth the conditions of this limitation in a document distributed to all the regions, on which he kissed the cross on being crowned."⁷⁴ This assertion of Kliuchevskii's called forth a protest by another classical figure in Russian historiography—Academician S. F. Platonov, with whom we shall have occasion to become familiar in more detail in the next chapter. In his famous Outlines of the History of

Cited in N. V. Latkin, Zemskie sobory drevnei Rusi,

p. 104.

Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia (1st ed.), vol. 3, p. 37.

the Rebellions in the Muscovite State of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Platonov inserted a subsection entitled "The Cross-Kissing Document is Not a Limitation." His commentary deserves to be reproduced: