The Origins of Autocracy

However, Stalin had much to do besides rehabilitating Ivan the Terrible and Peter. He entrusted the concrete working out of a new militarist apologia for the Oprichnina to experts.

One of the first to recognize this patriotic duty was the prominent student of the Oprichnina, P. A. Sadikov (on whose works Platonov had constructed his unfortunate hypothesis). Sadikov introduced a completely new note into Platonov's canonical interpretation. In his opinion,

having been thrust like a wedge into . . . the Muscovite territory, "the appanage of the sovereign" [the Oprichnina] was supposed, according to [Ivan] the Terrible's plan, not only to be a means for decisive struggle with the feudal princes and the boyardom by rearranging their land- holdings, but also to become an organizational nucleus for creating the possibility of struggle against enemies on the external front™

Thus, the Oprichnina outgrew the infantile tasks in internal policy on which Russian historians had concentrated for centuries, and re­vealed a completely new military-mobilizational function, which had previously remained in the shadows for some reason. It is no accident that Vipper comments as follows on this discovery by Sadikov:

If, like the malcontents of the princely and boyar opposition, the histo­rians of the nineteenth century liked to speak easily of the disorderly plundering by Ivan the Terrible and his Oprichniki of the entire Trans- Muscovite region, a historian of our time has contrasted to these un­substantiated assertions documented facts which show . . . the con­structive work which was performed within the limits of the territory of the Oprichnina.³¹

And the constructiveness of this work is seen by Vipper no longer, as Platonov did, in the quarrel with the "formerly sovereign princes," or, as Pokrovskii did, in the "class struggle" (the category of class strug­gle is completely replaced in his work by "the struggle with treason"), but in the fact that Ivan the Terrible began the transformation of the country into a "military monarchy."

For this reason, the Oprichnina was for Vipper primarily a "measure of a military-organizational charac­ter."'⁵

(While I disagree totally with Vipper in the evaluation of this "measure," I am in full agreement with him, and with Sadikov, on the principle: contrary to what the "despotists" think, Ivan the Terrible actually did begin the history of the autocracy, which was militaristic and mobilizational in nature, using the Oprichnina as a tool, a school, and a laboratory for the total militarization of the country.) From this point of view, however, the war in whose name, according to Sadikov and Vipper, the Oprichnina transformation of Russia was under­taken, assumes a completely different significance.

The founders of the "agrarian school" (like their predecessors, the "statists") stood entirely on the tsar's side in the strategic argument with the Government of Compromise. Platonov wrote that "the times called Muscovy to the West, to the shores of the sea, and [Ivan] the Terrible did not let pass the moment to state his claims to a part of the Livonian heritage."[217] Pokrovskii noted that "the Oprichnina terror can be understood only in connection with the failures of the Livon­ian War."[218] However, for them, the Livonian War, and the terror, were only elements in the great "agrarian revolution." For the "militarists," the "agrarian revolution" was merely an element in the war.[219] The war itself ceased to be for them a prosaic adventure of conquest, a mere claim to "a part of the Livonian heritage," as it had been for Platonov, or a "war over trade routes—that is, indirectly over mar­kets,"[220] as it had been for Pokrovskii. It became a crusade, a sacred task taking on features of national, historical, and almost mystical sig­nificance. "In the second half of the 1560s, Russia was solving com­plex questions of foreign policy," writes Polosin.