The Origins of Autocracy

But on closer examination, it is not hard to see that Dubrovskii's opponents had not retreated very far. They had withdrawn, as the military expression has it, to previously prepared positions—and, furthermore, to ones established a long time ago and with no help whatever from Marxism. They had retreated to Solov'ev's position: moral condemnation was the only price which they would agree to pay for the political rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible. Hardening their hearts, they agreed that the moral qualities of the tyrant did not deserve to be "idealized"; on the other hand, they came unanimously to the defense of Ivan's terror as a means of "centralization." This is immediately apparent in the commentaries to volume six of Solov'ev's History of Russia published in 1960 under the editorship of Academi­cian L. V. Cherepnin, which, as it were, summarize the discussion called forth by the mutiny of Dubrovskii. Here, among other things, it is said that "no matter how great the actual cruelties by which Ivan IV implemented his policy, they cannot conceal the fact that the struggle against the princely and boyar elite was historically condi­tioned, inevitable, and progressive."

Furthermore, the authors of the commentaries say, "the government of Ivan IV was compelled by the objective situation to act primarily by violent methods

in the struggle to centralize the power in the state." As regards the critique of the "reb­els" of 1956, Dubrovskii and Sheviakov, the commentary says, with implacable bureaucratic haughtiness: "Having correctly noted the in­admissibility of the idealization of Ivan IV, the authors of these arti­cles were unable to argue for their proposed reconsideration of the policy of Ivan IV in the direction of regarding it as reactionary and even historically meaningless."[230]

The de-Stalinization of Ivaniana did not take place. After the thunderous explosion of the militarist apologia and a Kavelinist out­burst of "idealization," genuine science had peaceably returned to the accustomed, cozy swamp of Solov'evian "centralization"—of course, with the obligatory addition of Platonov's "agrarian revolution." The place of the solemn hymns of Vipper-Bakhrushin is taken by the grey consensus of Cherepnin-Likhachev. Whereas before the revolt of Du­brovskii, the position of genuine science in Ivaniana was an eclectic blend of Platonov and Kavelin, after that revolt, it was transformed into a cocktail mixed from the ideas of Platonov and Solov'ev. It re­mained essentially what it had been before—a symbiosis of the "agrarian" and "state" schools of Ivaniana. Thus, out of a mixture of two "bourgeois" ideas, we get Marxism-Leninism as the sum. Alas, de­spite its revolutionary promises, Marxism has not saved "genuine sci­ence" from enslavement to the "myth of the state."

Even if we did not have any other indicators of this slavery, one— and the most important—still remains: its attitude towards the politi­cal opposition. In the year in which Dubrovskii rebelled, his colleague Likhachev repeated literally what had been written in 1856 by So­lov'ev's pupil Gorskii. At the risk of exhausting the reader's patience,

I will again double up the quotations. Try to separate the revelations of the 1956-model Marxist from those of the 1856-model monarchist. Here is what they wrote:

In arguing for the old tradition, Kurbskii was led not by the interests of the fatherland, but only by purely selfish considerations. . . . His ideal was not in the future, but in the past. In the person of Kurbskii, the reactionary boyars and princes had found themselves a bard and a phi­losopher. ... To this reactionary ideology, Ivan the Terrible counter- posed . . . the principle of the construction of a new state . . . branding Kurbskii as a criminal and a traitor to his fatherland. . . . He [Kurbskii] in vain spent his efforts in the struggle against the innovations. . . . Be­fore this severe judgment of posterity he is the defender of the immo­bility and stagnation, which went counter to history and counter to the development of the society.³⁷

9. The Sacred Formula