The Origins of Autocracy

This picture plainly shows that Russian historiography even in the twentieth century is still in the paws of the Middle Ages. But if this is so, then a completely different question arises: how did it happen that Russian historiography was not transformed into an undifferen­tiated heap of lies? The only answer consists, I believe, in the fact that, along with the tradition of collaborationism, there exists in Rus­sian historiography another, parallel tradition, deriving precisely from the "oppositionist circles" which Vipper damns—one which I would call the tradition of Resistance, which passed like a torch from Kurbskii to Krizhanich, from Shcherbatov to Aksakov, from Lunin to Herzen, from Kliuchevskii to Veselovskii. There has never been an epoch when the tradition of Resistance was not present in Russian historiography. Even in the somber years of the "historiographic nightmares," this torch flickered before our eyes, even if it did not exactly shine. In this, in our capacity for opposition, is our real hope. Every oppositionist, individually, is easy to slander as an "enemy of the people," to throw into prison, to exile, or to slay—"with his wife and his sons and his daughters." But for some reason there always remain five families which have not been murdered, and perhaps thanks to this, it has been impossible to murder completely the tradi­tion of Resistance. Russia lives by it, and Russian historiography lives by it.

8. The Mutiny of Dubrovskii

This tradition did not die out in Ivaniana even under the ice of Stalin's Oprichnina. Exactly as the terrible tsar was exposed after his death by M. Katyrev and I. Timofeev during the first Russian Time of Troubles, so S. Dubrovskii and V. Sheviakov rebelled against the heirs of the Oprichnina during the seventh Time of Troubles. "Ivan IV must be considered ... as the tsar of the serfholding service landholders," de­clared the rebels. "The personality of Ivan IV has overshadowed [in Soviet historiography] the people, and overshadowed the epoch. The people have been allowed to appear on the historical scene only in order to show 'love' for Ivan IV and to praise his actions."⁵⁴

Ibid., p. 90. Emphasis added.

S. Dubrovskii, "Protiv idealizatsii deiatel'nosti Ivana IV," pp. 123-29.

Professor Dubrovskii sincerely believed that he was combatting Vipper, Bakhrushin, and Smirnov. But, as we have seen, they were not his only opponents in this battle. Karamzin, Kavelin, Platonov, and the entire mighty collaborationist tradition stood against him. It could not be overcome simply by appeals to obvious facts and com­mon sense. The rebellions of Pogodin and Veselovskii had already shown this. Facts were powerless against the hypnosis of the myth. Dubrovskii could rely on the tradition of the "oppositionist circles," on Kurbskii and Krizhanich in the attempt to create an alternative conception of Ivaniana. But are we entitled to demand so much of him? After all, he came out of the same school as the collaborationists. He himself considered autocracy—"the dictatorship of the serf hold­ers," as he called it—an inevitable and natural dominant feature of Russian history. He himself had grown up with the traditional con­tempt for "reactionary boyardom." And for this reason an instrumen­tal apparatus different from the one with which his opponents, the collaborationists, worked was simply not available to him. And this was easily demonstrated by I. I. Smirnov in a rebuff (which I would rather call a punitive expedition) that deserves description. If the reader finds this rebuff to be a terrible oversimplification, full of logi­cal and factual errors, I would agree with him completely. But I am here only the modest reporter of a discussion which actually took place in Moscow, in the summer of 1956 (that is, in the middle of the post-Stalinist thaw).