The Origins of Autocracy

"The centralization of the state" thus proves to be the last word of genuine science. The formula does not rest on any characterization of the state, whether social or political. It is completely amorphous, and, therefore, fruitless, since a democratic state can be no less cen­tralized than an autocratic one. If sacrifices to this heathen idol are forgivable in the "bourgeois" Solov'ev, who reasons in abstract terms about the struggle between the "state" and the "votchina" elements, how are they to be explained in the works of historians who call them­selves Marxists? However, the abstract nature of the sacred formula is only half the trouble. The other half is that for the sixteenth-century Russia of Ivan the Terrible and the Government of Compromise, to which they apply it, it is simply false.

It is false because centralization—to the degree to which this was possible in a medieval state, and in the sense in which Soviet histo­rians use this formula, i.e., the administration of all the regions of the country from a single center—had already been completed in the fif­teenth century. The publication of the law code of 1497, which sig­nalized the juridical unification of the country, was the concluding ac­cord of this centralization. For two centuries, the House of Rurik, like the French Capetians, had been gathering together northeastern Rus' piece by piece, through intrigues and flattery, threats and violence. Their will had become law from one frontier to another. They could

57. S. Gorskii, Zhizn' i istoricheskoe znachenie kniazia A. M. Kurbskogo,

p. 414; D. S. Likhachev, "Ivan Peresvetov i ego literaturnaia sovremennost'," p. 35.

dictate from the Kremlin how to give judgment, how to farm, and how to live, whether in Novgorod, in Tver', or in Riazan'. No one, either in the country or outside it, doubted the right of Muscovy's grand prince to rule over the entire area from the White Sea to Putivl', to make laws as he thought best, to appoint and depose vice­gerents, or to destroy altogether the institution of vicegerents. The administrative center of the system had been created. And the pe­riphery recognized it as the center. Unity of will and unity of program had become a political fact in the Muscovite state. What more central­ization was needed?

What passed on unsolved to the heirs of Ivan III was quite another task, completely different from the "gathering-in" and infinitely more complex than "centralization"—the integration of the newly central­ized state: the transformation of its external, administrative, and juridical unity into an internal, moral, and economic unity.

This integration could be absolutist or autocratic in nature. It could proceed from elements in the state program of Ivan III (en­visaging the formation of juridical and cultural guarantees of security of life and property for the citizen) or from the opposite elements in the program of Ivan IV (which negate these guarantees). After all, we must not forget that this was only the beginning,

that the cultural norms were only just being formed. By violently splitting the country into two parts, destroying all the limitations on the arbitrary behavior of the "administrative center," legalizing the disorder in the state as order, causing the rebirth of the appanage morality, setting Moscow against Tver' and Novgorod, the service landholders against the bo­yars, the Muscovite boyars on the formerly sovereign princes of Suz­dal', the "plebs" on the patricians, the Oprichnina on the Zemshchi- na, by abolishing St. George's Day and thereby clearing the road for serfdom—Ivan the Terrible disintegrated Russian absolutism by integrat­ing autocracy.

He sowed terror of the state, and not sympathy with the national idea. If, after all he had done to it, the country did not fall to pieces, this only shows that the work of centralization had so thoroughly been worked out by the sixteenth century that even the royal hang­man and his Oprichnina "centralizers" were not able to break it up.

10. The Attacks of the 1960s