The Origins of Autocracy

there is developed a grandiose picture of how the "struggle for the steppe" forged and created the Russian state. The steppe people, like wild beasts, attacked Rus'; in order to save itself from these raids, the entire state was constructed along military lines: half of it—the service landholders [pomeshchiki]—had to live in constant readiness for battle; the other half—the taxable people [merchants, craftsmen, and peas­ants]—were supposed to support the first. . . . Thus the state, in the name of the common interest,

enserfed the society to itself,

but when the struggle for the steppe ended in the victory of the Russian state, eman­cipation began: first, in the eighteenth century, the military obligations of the nobility were lifted, and then in the nineteenth century, serfdom for the peasants also fell. . . . This grandiose picture has one defect: it does not correspond at all to historical reality. The most intense strug­gle with the steppe came in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries . . . but it was not just then that the unified state was formed . . . and there was no enserfment. . . . And in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when both the Muscovite state and serfdom originated, the Tatars had al­ready grown so weak that they could not dream of conquering Rus'.[203]

The "state school" continued to reign but, like the queen of En­gland, it had ceased to rule. A coup d'etat (one might call it an "agrar­ian coup," because the mythology of the "state school" was replaced by the mythology of the "agrarian school") had taken place in Ivaniana.

The nineteenth century had been tormented by the riddle of the strength of the Russian state, which raised Russia from the "darkness of nonexistence" to the rank of a superpower. The twentieth century began with the riddle of the weakness

of the Russian state, which hung over a precipice and threatened once again to plunge Russia into the "darkness of nonexistence." Central to the problem was the "agrarian question"—the question of the redistribution of land resources. As may be supposed, the right wing of Russian historiography fa­vored strengthening the monarchy by giving land to the peasants and thereby creating a strong conservative social base. The left wing, on the other hand, hoped to destroy the monarchy by rousing the land- hungry peasants against it. For both, the aristocracy surrounding the tsar was a hostile force. It was perhaps for this reason that the "agrar­ian coup" in Ivaniana was carried out by an unnatural coalition of right-wingers (led by the monarchist Platonov) and left-wingers (led by the Marxist Pokrovskii).

The monarchist K. Iarosh—who, if the reader remembers, was horrified by the Sinodik of Ivan the Terrible—nevertheless justified the tsar's destruction of his advisors. In the middle of the sixteenth century, in his opinion, the tsar "understood that the sole danger in terms of the establishment of cordial relations between the Russian people and the throne consisted of these importunate 'councillors' holding letters patent. Ivan wanted to reduce them entirely to the ranks of ordinary citizens of Russia and servants of the fatherland."[204]And since they did not wish to be "reduced," he destroyed them. This was a recommendation to Nicholas II to head a new Oprichnina.