The Origins of Autocracy

This looks all the more paradoxical inasmuch as the Soviet histo­rians themselves showed that there was no "paradox" in the economic results of the "revolution from above." In the first place, large-scale landholding in medieval Russia by no means corresponded to large- scale farming. Quite the contrary: the former was only an organiza­tional form, the protective envelope within which the truly progres­sive process of peasant differentiation took place. Here, as Nosov says, "development proceeds along a new, bourgeois, and nonfeudal path. We have in mind the social differentiation of the countryside, the buying up of land by the rich . . . the development of commercial and industrial capital by peasants. But it was precisely this process that was sharply slowed down, and then totally stopped, on service landholdings."[210] Academician S. D. Skazkin describes the metamor­phosis of the "votchina"

farm into a service farm in precisely the same way: "The landlord's land is transformed into a large-scale, purely entrepreneurial operation. In connection with this, the significance of the peasant farm also changes. . . . The peasant farm becomes a source of unpaid labor power, and for the peasant himself, his allot­ment and farm become, as Lenin expressed it, 'wages in kind.'"[211]

One would have to be very incurious not to wonder what Skazkin and Nosov are actually describing—the economic results of the "Oprichnina of Ivan" in the 1570s, or those of Stalin's "collectiviza­tion" in the 1930s. Did not the real meaning of this "collectivization" consist in the same "change in the significance of the peasant farm" of which Skazkin is speaking? In the same transformation of the house­hold plot, left in the possession of the peasant as his "wages in kind," of which Lenin spoke? In the same transformation of the peasants' labor into "unpaid labor power" for the working of the "landlord's land" of the collective farms? Is it not true that the economic signifi­cance of "collectivization" consisted in the violent arrest of the pro­cess of peasant differentiation, and in the scattering and robbing of the "best people" of the Russian countryside (which in Stalin's time was called "dekulakization"), of which Nosov speaks?

The analogy between the "collectivization" which destroyed Rus­sian agriculture in the 1930s and the "agrarian revolution" of the 1570s is inescapable. In both cases, the economic result of the Oprich­nina was autocratic reaction, which put an end to the process of bour­geois differentiation of the peasantry, and thereby destroyed not only the fruits of previous development, but also the potential it embod­ied. The Oprichnina rises before us as a monstrous embodiment of reaction, in both the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, in the eco­nomic sense no less than in the political. And this is the real answer to "Pokrovskii's paradox"—one delivered not by the logic of the histo­rians but by the logic of history itself.

6. The Militarist Apologia for the Oprichnina

In the 1930s, the so-called "Pokrovskii school" collapsed. The matur­ing regime no longer needed a "revolutionary" historiography. It thirsted rather for stabilization and national roots. It needed a histo­riography which would unify it with the Russian historical tradition, not one which cut it off from that tradition. And, for this purpose, it was willing to make sacrifices, and prepared to prefer old professors to new revolutionaries. R. Iu. Vipper, for example, who first pub­lished his book on Ivan the Terrible in 1922, when there was no smell of Marxism about him (in fact, Vipper, along with Platonov and Ia- rosh, belonged to the right wing), was able twenty years later to write proudly in the preface to the second edition of this book: "I am glad of the fact that the basic positions of my first work have remained un­shaken and, it seems to me, have been confirmed once more by the studies of highly authoritative scholars in the past two decades."" Vipper was entitled to be triumphant: the Marxists had come to him, and not he to the Marxists. And once again, like Kavelin in the 1840s and Platonov in the 1920s, he advanced the standard and invincible justification of "the studies of the past two decades."