The Origins of Autocracy

Having barely indicted Avrekh for a terrible heresy and solemnly declared that "it is incorrect to counterpose Russian absolutism to Western European,"³⁶ the hunters thus immediately fell into a still more terrible heresy, making it ultimately impossible to compare Western absolutism and Russian autocracy in any way.

The next disputant, S. Troitskii, as we might expect, struck at Avrekh from another angle, accusing him of separating the "super­structure" from the "base," and of "trying to explain the origin of ab­solutism in Russia without connecting it with the genesis of bourgeois relationships."³⁷ Following this, by all the rules for an accusation of political unreliability, comes a long passage about the suspicious close­ness of Avrekh's views (and likewise those of A. Chistozvonov) to the view taken by the bourgeois historian P. N. Miliukov. No, Troitskii personally does not see any particular problem in the fact that "here there is an echo of the views of a bourgeois historian." But still, any normal person will understand that "in the works of the classical authors of Marxism-Leninism [and not in any clouded bourgeois source], there are valuable indications which help us to clear up what historical causes called for the transition to absolute monarchy in Russia."³⁸

We see at once what these "valuable indications" help Troitskii to clear up. Here is his line of reasoning. "The Russian bourgeoisie was in fact weak and few in number at the initial stage of its develop­ment."³⁹ But in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was also weak

Ibid., pp. 60-61.

Ibid., p. 62.

S. M. Troitskii, "O nekotorykh spornykh voprosakh istorii absoliutizma v Rossii," p. 135.

Ibid., p. 139.

Ibid., p. 142.

in France and Holland. "And since this was so, it needed the support of the royal power."⁴" And the royal power helped it, just as the royal power did in Russia. Thus, carefully avoiding the "equilibrium" com­promised by Avrekh, Troitskii still tries to create the impression that absolutism in Russia was nevertheless formed under the influence of the "demands of the bourgeoisie," and that the bourgeoisie "strug­gled for their implementation against the ruling class of feudal lords."[54] Having driven the long-suffering "equilibrium" out of the door, he attempts to drag it back through the window. Unfortunately, the "valuable indications" once again work against their adept. For in speaking of an equilibrium, Engels had in mind by no means the weakness of the bourgeoisie and the help given it by the state, but precisely the reverse—the weakness of the nobility, which made pos­sible the independence of the state from both of these social groups. And the nobility in Russia, as distinct from the bourgeoisie, did not grow weak, but rather grew strong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If we are to believe the allies of Troitskii, Davidovich, and Pokrovskii, this nobility was even implementing a serf-holding dic­tatorship

in Russia at this time. How, then, does the dictatorship of the serf-owners mesh with the independence of the absolutist state?

In conclusion, Troitskii goes after Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia's concept of despotism as the starting-point of the Russian political process. And, to tell the truth, the destruction of this concept presents no great dif­ficulties, since it is based not so much on concrete analysis, as on those same "vyskazyvaniia." But this is precisely what annoys Troitskii. How are we to drive back this genie, incautiously released from the bottle? How are we to neutralize the unequivocal sound of Lenin's "vyskazy­vaniia"—for example, about the "Asiatic virginity of Russian despo­tism"?[55] And here in a desperate attempt to combine reality with "vyskazyvaniia," Troitskii ventures on an extraordinary action: he turns Avrekh's conception upside-down, and proposes his own "re­versed" periodization of Russian history.

According to this periodization, the epoch of the estate-representa­tive monarchy lasted in Russia from the fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century (would not Troitskii's head be taken off by Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina for such a heresy!); from the middle of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century there was the epoch of absolu­tism (here Troitskii would have to answer to the Oprichniki of Peter and Paul); the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (of course, before 1917) were the epoch of the gradual formation of despotism (!):