The Origins of Autocracy

This was an essentially medieval vision, symbolized and confirmed by the divine mandate of the suzerain. But, surprisingly, in the nine­teenth century it was again reborn in Russian historiography. Only now justification was provided in the shape of the alleged need to destroy the "clan element," or by the postulate of a poor nation, de­prived of "stone," or of a nation threatened by the fate of Poland. And once again it seemed that Russia could not overcome these obsta­cles without an Ivan the Terrible. In other words, the "myth of the state" took on the scholarly form of the state school, but it was based as before on the vision of the consensual society, in which the admin­istration performed the necessary historical function of organizing and defending the system, of saving it—whether from the clan ele­ment, from aggressive neighbors, or from the oligarchy. For this rea­son, the interests of the administration not only could not differ from the interests and goals of the system, but properly speaking, the latter did not even exist in and of themselves. The system and the admin­istration were one—undivided and indivisible.

When later, in the twentieth century, the time came for the "agrar­ian school," with its "class struggle" and its "economic revolution," it seemed that the time to part company with the vision of the con­sensual society had finally arrived. The "class struggle" itself presup­posed that the society is neither a family nor a homogeneous unit, that the interests of its various groups not only differ, but are opposed to each other. And still, in some strange way, it again turned out that the goals of the state coincided with the goals of a "progressive" class, and thereby, just as in the time of Ivan the Terrible, were indistin­guishable from the goals of the society.

Once again—for both "agrarianist" and "militarist" historiogra­phy—the state is perceived as having saved the nation: in the one case from the "class of formerly sovereign princes," from the reac­tionary latifundia, and the opponents of commodity-and-money rela­tionships; and in the other from the "Catholic assault," from military backwardness, from the world conspiracy of the Vatican. The opposi­tionists remained "enemies of the people."

None of these historiographic schools, which successively replaced each other, admitted that there could exist a divergence between the goals of the administration and those of the system, that the leader could pursue his own interests, opposed to the interests both of the state and of the nation. The medieval vision of the consensual society hung over both the "left-wingers" and the "right-wingers." Even the Marxists, for whom the state in theory constituted "the organization of the ruling class," could not keep from officially proclaiming it "the state of all the people"—that is, capitulating before the thesis of the bourgeois state school.

However, history has confirmed Aristotle, who, as we have seen, argued 500 years before the birth of Christ that divergences between the goals of the administration and those of the system are in the na­ture of things, and, consequently, that consensual political structures are simply not found on earth. It was already clear to him that "devia­tions"—that is, the striving of the state to subject the society to the interests of particular groups or to the personal interests of the lead­er—were politically inevitable. The problem, therefore, consists not in preserving a mythical consensus, but in making society capable of correcting the "deviations" of the state. And the sole means of such correction invented by the political genius of mankind—the sole means of preventing destructive revolutions which sow chaos and an­archy—is the very opposition which in Russian historiography is tra­ditionally branded "treason." In this sense, the political history of mankind can be summed up as the history of the legalization and le­gitimization of the opposition.

It was neither the heritage of the primeval clan which threatened the integrity of the nation, as the "statists" thought, nor feudal eco­nomics, as the Marxists had it. With these the nation was learning to cope; but there was something against which it was, and still is, help­less: the elemental force embodied in arbitrary state power, which was, and still is, fraught with the like of Ivan's Oprichnina and Stalin's Gulag. It is this force which thus proves to be the real source of chaos in social systems, and the only tool for curbing its terrible power (that is, for preserving the much-desired "order") is the free functioning of the opposition. We thus come to the heretical and—from the view­point of the "myth of the state"—criminal conclusion that the basis of order is freedom. A historiography which depicts opposition as trea­son falls inevitably—and always will fall—into a logical trap, the only escape from which is in lies, collaborationism, and Stalinization.