The Origins of Autocracy

It was not for nothing that Platonov vacillated between the "ap­panage" and "state" explanations of the Oprichnina. In fact, the "scholarly studies of recent decades" by no means furnished him with data to support the hypothesis of the tsar's struggle with the "class of formerly sovereign princes"—a hypothesis which he incautiously presented as an unconditional fact. When so powerful and scru­pulous an investigator as S. B. Veselovskii undertook to verify Pla- tonov's hypothesis, it proved to be simply a fiction. "In a search for effective and striking lectures, S. F. Platonov abandoned his charac­teristic caution of thought and language, and presented a conception of the policy of Tsar Ivan . . . which was filled with flaws and fac­tually inaccurate assertions," Veselovskii says. Calling Platonov's inter­pretation downright "pseudoscientific" and even "a circuitous ma­neuver to rehabilitate the monarchy," Veselovskii somberly states that "the idea that the Oprichnina was directed against the old land hold­ings of the formerly sovereign appanage princes must be recognized as a misunderstanding through and through.'"⁵ This conclusion is fully shared by the leading (after A. A. Zimin) contemporary Soviet expert on the Oprichnina, R. G. Skrynnikov, who also asserts that "the Oprichnina was not a special measure against the appanage. . . . Neither Tsar Ivan nor his Oprichnina Duma ever emerged as consis­tent opponents of appanage landholding.'"⁶

4. Pokrovskii's Paradox

All of this, however, only became clear many decades afterwards. For Pokrovskii, who at the beginning of the century revised Russian his­tory from a Marxist point of view, and therefore needed an economic explanation of its fundamental phenomena, Platonov's hypothesis was a gift from heaven. For Platonov was the first to depict the drama of the Oprichnina neither as an empty battle of "the new" against "the old" nor as the destruction of the "oligarchy," but as the embodiment of class struggle and of indomitable economic progress. And the atrocities of the Oprichnina did not confuse Pokrovskii as they had confused Karamzin and Solov'ev. Because what is progress after all? When you chop wood, the chips fly. If the liberal Kavelin was not ashamed to use the nineteenth-century vogue for "the progress of the state idea" as a justification of the Oprichnina, then why should the Marxist liberal Pokrovskii hesitate to use the twentieth-century vogue for "economic progress"? Relying on Platonov's hypothesis, Pokrov­skii invented what I would call the economic apologia for the Oprich­nina. He introduced it at the very point when Tsar Ivan was apparently being irrevocably banished from contemporary political reality to the obscurity of the Middle Ages to which he belonged. The Oprichnina suddenly acquired a rational economic underpinning. It was no longer "purposeless," as Kliuchevskii had asserted. It fulfilled a necessary

S. V Veselovskii, Issledovaniia po istorii oprichniny, p.

32.

R. G. Skrynnikov, Oprichnyi terror,

pp. 214-15.

function in Russian history by destroying the aristocratic latifundia and making room for the "progressive economical type" of service landholding, which was supposed to bring with it the replacement of obligations in kind by commodity-and-money relationships. Tsar Ivan proved to be a tool of Marxist Providence. Against this, what were Kliuchevskii's highbrow speculations about the struggle of the "abso­lute monarchy" with the "aristocratic governmental personnel"? What use was moral indignation? All these were disorderly "superstruc- tural" sentiments. Thus Ivan the Terrible, unexpectedly elevated to a pedestal by economic determinism, again underwent rehabilitation.

But, in order to support this rehabilitation, one had still to demon­strate that the Oprichnina actually pursued a progressive economic role; and, in the second place, that the aristocratic latifundia had in the sixteenth century actually become a reactionary bastion in the path of progress; and, finally, that service landholding somehow corre­sponded to this sought-after progress. Pokrovskii fearlessly undertook the task: