The Origins of Autocracy

What happened in Ivaniana subsequently simultaneously demon­strated two opposite things: the fragility of the gray consensus reached in the 1960s and the power of the shaken, but unshattered, "myth of the state." A. A. Zimin furiously attacked the consensus, blasting its fundamental postulates one after another. He rejected the main the­sis of the "agrarian school," asserting that "the counterposition of the votchina boyars to the landholding service nobility is untenable."³⁸ He denied the very existence of the "reactionary boyar ideology" rehabil­itating not only Vassian Patrikeev and Maxim the Greek, but appar­ently even Kurbskii himself: "It is now impossible to point to

a single Russian thinker of the sixteenth century whose views can be evalu­ated as reactionary and boyar."³⁹ He fearlessly invaded the very holy of holies of the consensus—the postulate about the alleged struggle of the feudal boyars against "centralization." "We can speak," he de­clared, "only of a struggle for different paths

towards the centralization of the state."⁶⁰ What, it would seem, could be more radical than this critique? Since Pokrovskii's time, no one had dared to declare that "the time has come for a radical reinterpretation of questions of six­teenth-century Russian political history."⁶¹ And this critique was based on entirely sound reasoning, which would have done honor even to Kliuchevskii himself. Although "the elite of high lords was not in­clined to yield its enormous latifundias for the benefit of the small holdings of the service landholders," neither did the boyardom "strive for the immediate liquidation of the freedom of peasant movement." From here it was only one step to the recognition of the fundamental point that the boyardom shielded peasant differentia­tion from the serfholding aggression of the service landholders, and that the political rout of the boyardom was, therefore, only a prelude to the economic and social rout of the peasantry.

And Zimin takes that step—but, to our surprise and disappoint­ment, it is in the opposite direction. "The need for further attack of the feudal elite was obvious," he says, "and was perceived by such far- sighted thinkers as I. S. Peresvetov."⁶² What can this mean? After all, what he has said implies a completely opposite conclusion. Alas, it turns out that this furious attack on the new Marxist-Solov'evist con­sensus has been undertaken only in order to replace it with the old, equally fruitless Marxist-Platonovist consensus. Zimin rehabilitates the boyardom only in order to again accuse the unfortunate "for­merly sovereign princes" (and thereby again to justify the Oprich­nina). He is convinced that

A. A. Zimin, "O politicheskikh predposylkakh vozniknoveniia russkogo abso­liutizma," p. 22.

Ibid., p. 27. Emphasis added. 60. Ibid., p. 23. 61. Ibid., p. 21.

62. Ibid., p. 41.

the basic hindrance to the socio-economic and political progress of Rus­sia at the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth centuries was not the boyardom but the real heirs of feudal fragmentation—the last ap­panages. . . . Hence, naturally, it is not the notorious collision of the service nobility with the boyardom, but the struggle with the remnants of fragmentation that constitutes the basis of the political history of that period.[231]