The Origins of Autocracy

But even taking all this into account, it is difficult to explain the solemn manifestations of loyalty to Ivan the Terrible—the new coro­nation of him in Russian historiography—which occurred in the 1940s. It would probably have been unimaginable if Russia had not, during the previous decade, entered the most severe phase of pseu­dodespotism in its history, with all the traditionally characteristic at­tributes: a "new class," an explosion of modernization, total terror, a militarist-nationalist delirium, and, of course, a new Ivan the Terri­ble. Once again, its traitorous boyars and the opposition (who were now called "the Right-Trotskyist bloc") were eliminated on a national scale. Once again, its Kurbskiis fled the country (having, incidentally, no notion of their medieval predecessors), and some of them (for ex­ample, Fedor Raskol'nikov)²

" wrote desperate letters to the tsar from abroad. Once again, serfdom was introduced, and once again, the Baltic had to be conquered.

Stalin's Oprichnina had to be historically legitimized; not only force, but the memory and tradition of the nation had to be mobi­lized towards its justification. Folksongs about Ivan the Terrible sur­faced—a conclusive argument in the dispute with the opponents of the tsar. Serfdom was rehabilitated. "The Oprichnina in its class ex­pression," wrote I. I. Polosin,

was the formation of serfdom, the organized robbing of the peas­antry. . . . The survey book of 1571—72 tells how the members of the Oprichnina drowned the peasant rebels in streams of blood, how they burned whole regions, how those of the peasants who survived after the . . . punitive expeditions wandered "in the world" and "between the houses" as beggars.[212]

We have again before us a picture of the collectivization of 1929-33. And what, other than indignation and grief, could this picture of the extermination of one's own people provoke? In a Soviet historian, it provoked a prideful declaration that serfdom was an absolute neces­sity for the "intensified and accelerated development of production."

This may seem an open revision of Marxism, not to say cynicism. But in the 1940s it seemed to be filled with Marxist fire and pioneer enthusiasm. In the new "myth of the state" created by the new Ivan the Terrible, the first postulate was that the history of society is pri­marily the history of production. And the second postulate was that as this society-production develops, both the treason within it and the danger from outside grow. The third postulate, that terror ("the strug­gle against treason") and the cultivation of military might are the sole guarantees of "the intensified and accelerated development" of so­ciety-production, flowed logically out of this. Two general motifs, "treason" and "war" and "war" and "treason," are inextricably bound up together.

The new Ivan the Terrible himself spoke of his predecessor in con­sistent terms. His conversation with the actor N. K. Cherkasov, who played the part of Ivan the Terrible in Eizenshtein's film, has pre­served this precious testimony for posterity: