The Origins of Autocracy

As we already know, the Oprichnina, according to Pokrovskii, al­though it was "the state of the service-landowning class,"¹" was not only formed "with the participation of [commercial] capital,'⁴⁵

' but proved essentially to be a stepping stone to the ascent to the throne of Muscovy of "commercial capital wearing the cap of Monomakh." We might call it in this sense a Russian equivalent of the Western bour­geois revolutions. So interpreted, Muscovy ought perhaps to contend with the Netherlands for the role of pioneer on the path of European economic development. If the triumph of the small vassals in fact em­bodied the march of progress, then Eastern Europe, and especially Russia, should have gained a decisive advantage over the countries of the West, which did not allow so progressive a process among them­selves. The West was in that case doomed to lag behind, and the Mus­covy of Ivan the Terrible should have become the torchbearer of world progress.

Only one thing remained incomprehensible: What was one to do with the subsequent four centuries of Russian history? How was one to explain why all these wonders somehow did not take place? More than this, that precisely the reverse occurred: Russia was thrown down into "the darkness of nonexistence," and the "progressive ser­vice-landowner" suddenly became the organizer of feudal slavery.

Pokrovskii was a scholar first and then a Marxist: apparently the bourgeois leavening was still too strong in him. In any case, he did not even try to distract the reader's attention from the metamorphosis of the service landowner, which made nonsense of his whole conception. This metamorphosis always remained mysterious and inexplicable for Pokrovskii:

His [the service landowner's] victory should have signified a major eco­nomic success—the final triumph of the "monetary" system over the "subsistence" one. In fact, we see something quite different. Obligations in kind, crystallized into a complex whole known under the name of "serfdom," again take center stage and are maintained, this time firmly and for a long interval. . . . Having suppressed the feudal votchina

owner in the name of economic progress, the service landowner very swiftly himself becomes a backward type: this is the paradox with which the history of the Russian economy of the epoch of [Ivan] the Terrible concludes.²"

However, this paradox did not compel Pokrovskii to review the economic apologia for the Oprichnina or to doubt the Marxist under­standing of history. He doubted himself; he doubted the possibilities of the scholarship of that time, pinning his hopes on the idea that the "followers in the cause of applying the materialist method to the data of the Russian past will be more fortunate."²

' Such was the testament of the patriarch of Soviet historical scholarship.

5. The Political Meaning of "Collectivization"

On the ruins of Platonov's "misunderstanding through and through" and Pokrovskii's "paradox," there developed—and it is functioning prosperously to this day—the so-called "agrarian school" of Soviet historians. By the authoritative testimony of N. E. Nosov, "it is pre­cisely this point of view which is brought forward in the works of B. D. Grekov, I. I. Polosin, I. I. Smirnov, A. A. Zimin, R. G. Skryn­nikov, Iu. G. Alekseev, and it is perhaps the most widespread up to the present time." [209] Almost all of the luminaries of Soviet historiogra­phy are mentioned in this list.