The Origins of Autocracy

Was the liquidation of the feudal fragmentation, and the central­ization of the country, not a current necessity of state in the epoch of Ivan the Terrible? Smirnov asked. Was the absolute monarchy not an inevitable phase in the history of feudal society, and did it not play the role of the centralizing element in the state? Did all the European countries in the Middle Ages not know a "terrible, bloody struggle" (compare the Wars of the Roses in England, the Massacre of St. Bar­tholomew in France, the Stockholm Bloodbath, etc.)? From this col­lection of cliches Smirnov drew the conclusion—as simple as two times two equals four—that the Oprichnina was an inevitable form of the struggle of absolute monarchy for the centralization of the coun­try against the reactionary boyars and formerly sovereign princes. As for the "cruel form" which was taken by this struggle for centraliza­tion in the epoch of the Oprichnina, and as for the enserfment of the peasants and the atrocities of the terror, on these questions Smirnov was excellently prepared—once more, with Kavelin. Alas, he replied, such is the price of progress and of liberation from "the forces of re­action and stagnation."

It made no difference that the "progress" in question, for which such an immoderate price had been paid, turned out to be the im­penetrable darkness of the same "reaction and stagnation" of which it was supposed to free the country. It made no difference that besides serfdom and permanent backwardness, the Oprichnina also estab­lished a serflike cultural tradition, of which Smirnov himself—to­gether with his opponents, unfortunately—was a victim.

For Dubrovskii, like Kliuchevskii before him, did not reflect on the content of the concept of "absolute monarchy," which beat him over the head like a club. He was unable, therefore, to object that absolut­ism and despotism and autocracy are all of them forms of "absolute monarchy," and that what is important in Ivaniana is not so much their similarity as their differences.

In 1956, after all of the triumphs of "genuine science," Dubrovskii found himself in the same position in which the primeval and "pre- scientific" Karamzin had found himself in 1821. And, just like Ka­ramzin, he had nothing with which to respond to his opponents but emotional protest and wounded moral feelings. His defeat was built into his methodology. Of course, this by no means diminishes what he had done: on the contrary, we must pay tribute to his courage. The apparently indestructible ice of the "militarist apologia" had indeed been cracked. By the end of the 1950s, there was no trace of it left. And if, in 1963, A. A. Zimin was able to write, in his Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, that "in the works of a number of [Soviet] historians, an idyllic image of Ivan IV and a prettied up representation of the Oprichnina have been given," this is indisputably to the credit of Du­brovskii. And if Zimin added: "This was facilitated to no small degree by the statements of I. V. Stalin, who praised Ivan the Terrible with­out restraint, forgetting about those innumerable calamities which the spread of serfdom in the sixteenth century brought to the peo­ple,"[229] this sounded like a mere echo of Dubrovskii, who was the first to draw attention to this strange—or so it seemed at the time—emo­tional attraction of one tyrant to another.