The Origins of Autocracy

[New evidence] explains the terror of the critical epoch of 1567-72, and shows that the dangers which surrounded the cause and the person of Ivan the Terrible were still more menacing, and the political at­mosphere still more saturated with treachery than might have been as­sumed on the basis of the sources hostile to the Muscovite state which were known earlier. Ivan the Terrible cannot be accused of excessive suspicion; on the contrary, his mistake consisted, perhaps, in having been too trusting . . . [and] in inadequate attention to the danger which threatened him from the side of the conservative and reactionary opposition, and which he not only did not exaggerate, but even under­estimated. . . . After all, it was a matter of treason . . . highly dan­gerous for the Muscovite state. And at what moment did it threaten to break out? Among the difficulties of a war for which the government had mobilized all the means possessed by the state, had gathered all military and financial reserves, and had demanded from the popula­tion the greatest possible patriotic inspiration. Those historians of our time, who, speaking in chorus with the reactionary opposition of the sixteenth century, would insist on the objectless cruelty of Ivan the Ter­rible . . . should have thought about how antipatriotic and antistate was the mood of the upper classes in that time. . . . The attempt on the life of the tsar was very closely connected with the yielding up to the enemy not only of the newly conquered territories but also the old Rus­sian lands. ... It was a matter of internal subversion, of intervention, of the division of a great state! '"

This is no longer Stalin—or even the state prosecutor at the trial of the boyar opposition of the "Right-Trotskyist bloc." This is the histo­rian Vipper anticipating Stalin's argument about the unmurdered families.

But the main thing for Stalin was nevertheless not serfdom or ter­ror as such. These were merely means. What was really needed was the transformation of the country into a colony of the military-indus­trial complex, as an instrument of world dominion. It was precisely this, the main thing, which had to be suitably legitimized by the tradition.

For all his ignorance of Russian history, Stalin intuitively picked out from the multitude of Russian tsars his most appropriate prede­cessors. And they—what a strange coincidence!—proved to be the same ones whose exploits, in the opinion of Lomonosov (during the period of the first "historiographic nightmare"), had made it possible "that Russia should be feared by the whole world." They proved to be the same "two extremely great statesmen," who in the opinion of Ka­velin (during the period of the second "historiographic nightmare") "were equally keenly aware of the idea of the Russian state." And Sta­lin openly valued them for the same thing—their Northern Wars. The main hangman of the Oprichnina, Maliuta Skuratov, that medi­eval Beriia, he called "a great Russian commander, who fell heroically in the struggle with Livonia."[215] He valued Peter because the tsar "fe­verishly built factories and workshops to supply the army and to strengthen the defense of the country."[216]