The Origins of Autocracy

Thus, the dramatic quality of the times entered into Ivaniana. An­cient history returned, as it were, to modern Russia. The dead seized the living. A contemporary civilized country, which had succeeded in astonishing the world not only with its military might, as in the time of Lomonosov and Kavelin, but also with its great literature—a coun­try to whose greatest historian, Kliuchevskii, the Oprichnina had quite recently seemed "purposeless"—stood again on the point of un­dergoing a medieval spasm.

Platonov, an infinitely more serious and subtle scholar than Iarosh, depicted the sources of the Oprichnina in this way: "[Ivan] the Terri­ble felt around himself the danger of an opposition, and of course understood that this was a class opposition, a princely opposition, led by the political memories and instincts of formerly sovereign princes 'who desired by their traitorous custom' to become appanage 'lords' along with the Muscovite sovereign."[205] Thus, Platonov refused to con­sider the conflict which led to the Oprichnina in the traditional terms of Solov'ev and Gorskii—in the terms of a "struggle of the service no­bility (the new) with the boyardom (the old)." For him the matter was much more serious: the might of the formerly sovereign princes was so great that it threatened the very existence of the centralized Rus­sian state, which might perhaps collapse again into a collection of ap­panage principalities. For this reason I will call his view the "ap­panage" conception.

Pokrovskii was even more adamant in refusing to accept the over­simplified scheme of the "state school." Platonov gave the "class of for­merly sovereign princes" the center of the stage. Pokrovskii placed the "class of the bourgeoisie" there. Whereas for Platonov, the Govern­ment of Compromise accordingly represented this "class of formerly sovereign princes," for Pokrovskii it represented a class alliance of the bourgeoisie with the boyardom. For Platonov the essence of the Oprichnina consisted in the fact that the tsar took land away from the formerly sovereign princes, who had a great deal, and gave it to the service landholders, who had little, and thereby strengthened his power. For Pokrovskii its essence consisted in more or less the same thing—with the difference that the tsar himself appeared in this con­flict as the tool of the bourgeoisie, which, having repudiated its class alliance with the boyardom, had chosen a new partner, the service landholders. For Pokrovskii, "the whole coup was a matter of estab­lishing a new class

regime, for which the personal power of the tsar was only a tool, and not at all a matter of freeing [Ivan] the Terrible personally from the tutelage of the boyars which hindered him."⁽ⁱ

But for both Platonov and Pokrovskii, the basis of the conflict was the redistribution of the land and the agrarian crisis, that is, the eco­nomic revolution. Both of them, in trying to replace the old models with their own, even more fantastic ones, suffered defeat. At the same time, both triumphed: the mongrel "agrarian school" born of their unnatural alliance prevails to this day in Ivaniana.

3. Platonov's Contradiction

Platonov's attitude towards the Oprichnina was no less complex than Solov'ev's. On the one hand, he declares just as categorically as So­lov'ev that "the meaning of the Oprichnina had been thoroughly ex­plained by the scholarly studies of recent decades."[206] And we already know that this meaning consisted, according to Platonov, in the con­fiscation of the lands of the formerly sovereign princes. But on the other hand, the blood and bestialities of the Oprichnina provoke ex­actly the same revulsion in the new classical writer as they did in the old one. And Platonov makes the qualification that "the goal of the Oprichnina could have been achieved by less complex means," since "the means which were used by [Ivan] the Terrible, although they proved effective, brought with them not only the destruction of the nobility, but also a number of other consequences which [Ivan] the Terrible can hardly have wished or expected.""