The Origins of Autocracy

Working with his eyes open, and having before him the horrifying facts, many of which he himself introduced into scholarly discourse, does he make an attempt to reinterpret the Oprichnina? Unfortu­nately, once again, as in the case of Zimin, we are doomed to experi­ence a dramatic disappointment. In Skrynnikov's understanding, it turns out, "the Oprichnina terror, the limitation of the competence of the boyar duma . . . unarguably promoted . . . the reinforcement of the centralized monarchy, developing in the direction of absolu­tism."[238] The sacred invocation has been pronounced. Skrynnikov re­mains within the limits of the consensus. The "great purge" of Ivan the Terrible, which Skrynnikov described with unexampled power, nevertheless proves to be "historically inevitable and progressive." The king is dead: long live the king! The Marxist-Platonovist hypo­stasis of the myth, once again advanced by Zimin, is once again refuted—for the sake of a new triumph of its Marxist-Solov'evist hypostasis.

On closer consideration of Skrynnikov's paradigm, we see clear traces of the myth. Zimin had firmly denied "the notorious collision of the boyardom with the service landholders" and rehabilitated the great oppositionists of the sixteenth century. In refuting him, Skryn­nikov not only condemns "the treasonous relations of Kurbskii," but gives us to understand that the terror against the aristocracy, "which imprisoned the monarchy," was by no means such a bad thing. The outrageousness began when the terror spread to other social strata, who were objectively the allies of the monarchy in its struggle with the aristocracy. "The Oprichnina terror," he says, "weakened the boyar aristocracy, but it also did great damage to the service landholders, the church, the higher government bureaucracy—that is, to those so­cial forces which served as the most reliable support of the monarchy. From a political point of view, the terror against these strata and groups

was complete nonsense."[239]

Speaking in my terms, Skrynnikov sympathizes with the attempt of Ivan the Terrible to transform Russian absolutism into a despotic sys­tem by liberating it from the aristocracy. He rejects only the "political nonsense" and irrationality of despotism in destroying its own allies. As if, for Tsar Ivan, it was only the boyars, and not all his subjects, who were slaves—as Kliuchevskii already knew. In chapter two, by reference to the cases of Henry VIII and Louis XI, I have tried to explore the gulf between outbursts of ordinary tyranny (possible in any absolutist state) and despotism (which by distorting the sociopo­litical process makes tyranny permanent). I am not the first to point out the distinction. Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Krizhanich did so cen­turies ago. But the logic of myth apparently precludes Russian histo­rians, Marxist or not, from perceiving it.

Skrynnikov asserts that "meaningless and brutal beating of the en­tirely innocent population made the very concept of the Oprichnina a synonym for arbitrariness and lawlessness."[240] But in his analysis he almost unnoticeably shifts the stress from "arbitrariness and lawless­ness" to natural catastrophe and increase in taxes: