The Origins of Autocracy

Once again, despite Veselovskii's annihilating critique, Platonov's paradigm arises from the grave, freshly rouged and modernized. Zimin's junior competitor, R. G. Skrynnikov, subjected him to devas­tating criticism, literally dismantling the new edition of the "appan­age" revision of the myth stone by stone. Skrynnikov, in fact, did more. His works actually did bring a breath of fresh air into Ivan­iana.[232] He was the first to study in detail the mechanism

of the Oprich­nina terror, and in the picture emerging from his studies the reader encounters something oddly familiar. Of what does the endless chain of "cases" arising one out of another (the "case of Metropolitan Fil- ipp," the "Moscow case," the "Novgorodian case," the "case of Vladi­mir Staritskii," etc.) remind us? What does the wave of falsified show trials—with the confessions of the accused exacted by torture, with a bloody spiderweb of mutual slanders, with the boorish triumph of "state prosecutors," and with the horrible jargon of the hangmen (in­stead of "kill" they said "do away with," writing that in one place 50 people were "done away with" and in another place 150)—call to mind? There's no doubt that in describing the "great purge" of the 1560s, Skrynnikov is recounting the history of the "great purge" of the 1930s. But what is surprising is that Skrynnikov tells us this not only without hinting at the Stalinist terror, but perhaps even without thinking of it. He is a medievalist, a scrupulous historian of Ivan's Oprichnina, and he speaks only of this. Let us pause for a moment to consider it.

Among the first victims of the Oprichnina was one of the most in­fluential members of the Duma, the conqueror of Kazan', Prince Gor- batyi. The most prominent of the Russian military leaders, he was suddenly beheaded, together with his fifteen-year-old son and his fa­ther-in-law, the Okol'nichii

Golovin. Immediately after him, the boyar Prince Kurakin, the boyar Prince Obolenskii, and the boyar Prince Rostovskii were beheaded. Prince Shevyrev was impaled on a stake.

The idea involuntarily occurs to one that this is a purge of the last of the "right opposition" from the Politburo-Duma (perhaps members or fellow travelers of the Government of Compromise), and that it was supposed to be the prelude to some kind of broad social action. In fact, it was followed by the confiscation of the lands of the titled aristocracy (formerly sovereign princes) and the expulsion of prince­ly families to Kazan', which in the Russia of that time fulfilled the function of Siberia. The confiscation was accompanied, of course, by robbery and ruination of the peasants living on the confiscated land, and spoliation of the lands themselves. In a word, this was a medieval equivalent of what in the 1930s was called "dekulakization." The fixed quitrent paid by the peasants "by the old ways" was liquidated, and along with it whatever legal or traditional limitations on arbitrary behavior of the landowners might have existed. This was the begin­ning not only of mass famine and devastation in the central regions of Russia, but essentially also of serfdom (since, as Academician B. D. Grekov would say later, "the government of the service landholders could not be silent" in the face of the "great ruin" which threatened its social base).[233] But the main analogy, in any case, is the mechanism of the purge: first phase—removal of a faction in the Politburo- Duma representing both a particular social group and an intellectual current within the elite; second phase—removal of this social group itself; third phase—mass "dekulakization" of the "best people" (which is to say those who have something which can be stolen).