The Origins of Autocracy

But in that case, what was the alternative to the Oprichnina? How otherwise could the tsar have acted in the face of the disintegration which threatened the country? What could he have done if the Mus­covite government itself (or the "Chosen Rada," as Platonov by tradi­tion called it) had taken the side of the formerly sovereign princes? The historian, after all, himself notes that "the Rada, we must sup­pose, was made up of princes, and its tendency was apparently also in accordance with their interests. The influence of the 'priest' and his 'collection of dogs' in the first years of their activity was very strong. . . . The entire mechanism of administration was in their hands."" Was the tsar's victory conceivable without the Oprichnina—that is to say, without a coup d'etat, without the creation of his own army and police, free of the influence of the formerly sovereign princes, without mass terror and all those atrocities which were so repugnant to Platonov? In the final analysis, Platonov himself, almost 400 years later, is unable to think up any alternative to the Oprichnina. Moral lamentations ap­pear to be of no more help to him than they were to Solov'ev: his logic leads inexorably to justification of the Oprichnina.

But this is only half the problem. The real trouble begins when the reader recognizes to his astonishment that despite his loud declara­tions, Platonov is, in fact, not even sure of his main thesis that the Oprichnina was directed against the formerly sovereign princes and not against the nobility in general.

The touchstone, which gives an appearance of novelty to Plato­nov's deductions, is "expulsion." "The father and grandfather of [Ivan] the Terrible, following the old custom, when they conquered Novgorod, Pskov, Riazan', Viatka, and other places, expelled the leading strata of the population, which were dangerous for Muscovy, to the internal districts of Muscovy, and placed settlers from central

Muscovy in the newly conquered districts," Platonov says. True, the father and the grandfather applied "expulsion" to the conquered dis­tricts; but the grandson applied it to the Muscovite heartland. This, Platonov solemnly declares, however, is precisely what the grandson's political innovation consisted in: "That which succeeded so well with external enemies, [Ivan] the Terrible thought of trying with internal enemies."[207] In other words, the tsar, just like Lenin, applied the meth­ods of international war to class war. But the question still remains: Who were these sinister "internal enemies" who were expelled?

Platonov gives two answers. "On the one hand," he tells us in his book Ivan the Terrible, in full accordance with his "appanage" concept, "the tsar decided to remove from the hereditary appanage lands their owners, the formerly sovereign princes,

and to settle them in places dis­tant from their former residence, where there were no memories of ap­panage conditions or conditions conducive to opposition."[208] His for­mulation of the role of the Oprichnina in his Outlines of the History of the Rebellions supports this: "The Oprichnina systematically broke up the land tenure of the service princes."™

The following page of Ivan the Terrible, however, contains some­thing more reminiscent of Gorskii than of Platonov: "This opera­tion ... of removal of landowners took on the character [of] replace­ment of large-scale votchina [hereditary] land tenure by small-scale service-estate [conditional] land tenure.'"³

As we see, there is no talk here of "formerly sovereign princes" and "memories of appanage conditions." Likewise in the Outlines another formulation with re­spect to the Oprichnina supports Gorskii: "The Oprichnina was the first attempt to resolve one of the contradictions of the structure of the Muscovite state; it destroyed the land holdings of the nobility in the form in which they had existed from old times.'"⁴ Here every­thing is simple: the tsar is against the aristocracy.