The Origins of Autocracy

This was a time when the struggle for Lithuania, the Ukrrine, and Be- lorussia became especially acute. This was a time when the question of the kingdom of Livonia was being decided. . . . This was a time when the Vatican was going over to the offensive. From behind the backs of the king of Poland and the archbishop of Riga, the figure of the pope, who had closed the Council of Trent in order to develop the attack of Catholicism more energetically, revealed himself. Not only Latvia and Lithuania were under threat, but also the Ukraine and Belorussia. . . . It was with complete justification that [Ivan] the Terrible considered the Vatican his major enemy, and it was not without reference to the papal orders that the Oprichnina was organized."¹

What price, then, the Tatar threat or the struggle with the "aristo­cratic personnel" propounded by the naive Kliuchevskii, or even the struggle against the "class of formerly sovereign princes" mooted by the now hopelessly obsolete Platonov? All of Eastern Europe was un­der mortal threat of a "Catholic offensive," it turns out, with Muscovy defending Latvia and Lithuania, not to speak of the Ukraine and Be­lorussia, with its own breast. A general European Catholic conspir­acy was developing, if not a worldwide one, and Muscovy somehow turned out to be the only force able to withstand it. In trying to seize Livonia, Tsar Ivan was performing not only a patriotic duty, but a kind of great religio-political mission. He was suddenly transformed "into one of the most significant political and military figures of Euro­pean history in the sixteenth century."[221]

The contours of the assignment given to Russian historiography by Stalin are starting to become clear. This was at the same time an ag­gressive and a defensive spirit, both justifying conquests and affected by an inferiority complex—a monstrous amalgam of persecution ma­nia and striving for absolute dominance. It was the same mixture which had compelled Ivan the Terrible to seek salvation from the boyar conspiracy which surrounded him (or so it seemed to him) in the physical destruction of his opponents. In the speeches of a mod­ern Tsar Ivan and in the interpretations of the contemporary Oprich­niki, the old boyar conspiracy grew to the dimensions of a world conspiracy, inspired now by the Tatars, now by the papacy, now by imperialism, but always pursuing one and the same goal—to deprive Russia of its independence, to turn it into a colony, and to prevent it from fulfilling its historical mission. It was now no longer sufficient, in order to make absolute the power of the tyrant as the instrument of Russia's salvation, merely to exterminate internal opponents. Now, for this purpose, one had to exterminate the organizers of the world conspiracy, and, therefore, upset not only Russia, but the whole planet. This is how the twentieth-century Ivan the Terrible formu­lated the task: "We are doing a job which, if it succeeds, will turn the whole world upside down."[222] And what was the alternative to-the suc­cess of this job? "Do you want our fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence?"[223]

Either we "turn the world upside down," or "we lose our indepen­dence." There is no middle road. On the one hand Stalin asserted that the history of Russia consisted in her being beaten (and, con­sequently, that the time had finally come for her to be avenged for the humiliations of the past), and on the other hand he called down the blessings of the victorious tsars on the Russian banners.

As applied to the epoch of Ivan the Terrible, Stalin's approach went: if the tsar had not attacked Livonia, Russia would have been the prey of the Mongols. As applied to the period of Peter: if Peter had not conquered the Baltic, Russia would have been a colony of Swe­den, etc., etc. This was not said by Stalin. This was said by experts. In the officially approved textbook of N. Rubinshtein, Russian Histo­riography, designed for students in the historical faculties of the Soviet universities in the 1940s, we read: