The Origins of Autocracy

As for the Tatars, in this direction as well Moscow was so strong under Ivan III that in the East it placed its own candidates as khans on the throne of Kazan', and was at the same time clever enough to channel the Crimean raids into southern Lithuania. If Sigismund Herberstein had visited Moscow under Vasilii Ill's father, he would probably have gotten an entirely different impression. For the wars which Russia waged during this period (Ivan III reigned for forty- three years) were none of them defensive. Not only were Ivan Ill's wars all offensive, they were rare for that time. After him, Muscovy passed over to direct attacks on the Tatars. Conquest of the Volga khanates eliminated the threat from the East, and a war was begun against the Crimea which could have eradicated the nest of slave raid­ers in the South (or, at least, have made it as uncomfortable for them to raid Muscovy as it had been during Ivan Ill's reign), if Ivan the Ter­rible had not suddenly "turned on the Germans."

This miscalculation cost Muscovy very dear, and not only in terms of human and material resources: it changed Russia's entire history. As I am trying to show, it actually did face the country with the prob­lem of national survival. But this was a strategic error, and not a "frighteningly real necessity" following inevitably from the geopoliti­cal position of Russia, as Szamuely tries to persuade us.

On the contrary, in the middle of the sixteenth century (that is, at the moment of the "explosion") Russia's geopolitical position was un­usually favorable. It is not impossible that, if she had left the West, from which no one threatened her, in peace, and had concentrated on the liquidation of the threat from the Crimea, she could have es­tablished herself on the shores of the Black Sea within two or three generations, and put an end once and for all to Tatar control over her fertile South, and to the predatory raids of the slavers. These are not my speculations. This was the conviction, reflected in documents, of the leaders of the Muscovite government of that time, who, we must assume, knew at least as well what they were talking about as subse­quent historians.

It may be objected that war is war, whether it is aggressive or de­fensive, and that it strains a nation to the limit, and in any case does not exert a favorable influence on its political structure. And this is true. But if wars in and of themselves can be the cause of the estab­lishment of despotism, then the Hundred Years' War between En­gland and France, which consumed four generations of the young people of those countries, should have given rise in the heart of Eu­rope to despotic rigors of which not even Shah Abbas would have dreamed. At the worst, such wars produced tyranny—as was even­tually the case in England and France—but not despotism.

Like China's influence on Japan, it did not seriously alter the conditions of power, class, and property. Ottoman Turkey's influence on 16th cen­tury Russia stimulated a regime that was already Orientally despotic, but it did not bring it into being. Tatar rule alone among the three ma­jor Oriental influences affecting Russia was decisive both in destroying the non-Oriental Kievan society and in laying the foundations for the despotic state of Muscovite and post-Muscovite Russia.¹'²

Though Wittfogel proved unable to demonstrate this thesis, I see nothing illegitimate, let alone offensive, in it. Nonetheless, it seems to be this which, for some reason, annoys the experts most. In any case, in arguing with him, they emphasize primarily that Russia was cer­tainly formed, for the most part, precisely under Byzantine (that is, non-Tatar) influence. Wittfogel himself felt this annoyance. "Let us for the sake of argument assume that the political institutions of tsar­ist Russia not only resembled those of Byzantium but were actually derived from them," he responded.