The Origins of Autocracy

The socio-political system of the great Asian empires had been created by the paramount need for building and maintaining the waterworks upon which the very lives of their peoples depended. Russia knew nothing of this, yet for centuries she too had been confronted by a task which, though different in nature, was for her just as much a matter of life and death: national survival depended upon the permanent mobi­lization and organization of all her meager resources

for defense, war and colonization, on a scale beyond the European comprehension. Des­potic government with all its implications was the instrument she shaped to cope with the everlasting emergency. The ideas may have been brought in from the outside, but the necessity was terrifyingly real.'⁰

Szamuely's first "motive" does not stand up to even the slightest contact with the chronology. Russia became the gigantic power which the world now knows only long after the detonation of the institu­tional time bomb. Consequently, its current dimensions simply can­not have anything to do with the explosion in question."

The second "motive" is considerably more serious—if only be­cause such prominent scholars as Kliuchevskii, Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, and Plekhanov paid some degree of tribute to it, as a result of which it found its way into the majority of popular surveys of Russian histo­ry. The geopolitical position of Muscovy—so runs the stereotype— placed it in essentially the same position in which climatic conditions placed the great Asiatic empires. Finding itself for centuries in the position of a besieged fortress, Muscovy had to defend itself by any and every means. Thus, it was geography (represented in this case by the location of the country) which gave rise to the "Muscovite variety of Asiatic despotism," to use Szamuely's words, just as (in the form of the absence of rain) it had conditioned the ancient Egyptian or Chi­nese variants. In both cases, national survival depended on geogra­phy, which left the respective governments no other choice than to establish a despotism. In this interpretation, despotism was Russia's predestined fate.

We will speak in detail of this stereotype in the concrete historical analysis of Russia's absolutist century immediately preceding the "ex­plosion." But in general terms we must touch upon it here. Sur­rounded on the West by Lithuania, Poland, Livonia, and Sweden, and on the South and the East by the Tatars, Moscow really did produce the impression of a besieged fortress. And wars did in fact consume a huge part of its resources and energy. Sigismund Herberstein, ambas­sador of the German emperor, who visited Moscow twice during the reign of Vasilii III, received the impression that, for Muscovy, peace was an accident. During the course of the sixteenth century, it waged ten wars to the West, which took up about fifty years. But the situa­tion in the Tatar South and East was considerably more difficult: from here, if we can believe Fletcher, Muscovy was attacked every year, and sometimes twice a year. Hundreds of thousands of people, and par­ticularly children, who were especially sought after by the Tatar raid­ers, were driven off into slavery. They were sold in the bazaars of Asia and Africa in such numbers that, Iurii Krizhanich relates, Russian slaves in the Crimea, seeing their fellow countrymen as new pris­oners, asked each other whether there were still people in Muscovy or whether they had already all been sold into slavery. This frightening picture, which so struck many Russian historians, requires a closer look, however.

First of all, the wars which Muscovy waged in the West had nothing to do with defense, let alone national survival. Beginning at least in the 1480s, Muscovy was permanently on the offensive against its west­ern neighbors, obtaining western Rus' from Poland-Lithuania, and Kareliia and the Baltic shore from the Swedes and Livonia. Thus, its political "encirclement" was a myth, and its wars in the West were the result of strategic and political choice, and by no means a geograph­ical inevitability.