The Origins of Autocracy

What follows with regard to the overall interpretation of Russia? If the Byzantine Empire was a variant of a multicentered society of the medi­eval Western type, then, of course, this would be very basic to our argu­ment—but also very puzzling, since tsarist Russia, in contrast to the West, constituted (as generally agreed) a single-centered society. And if the Byzantine Empire was a variant of an Oriental despotism (as com­parative institutional analysis suggests), then the establishment of By­zantium as Muscovy's "high model" only replaces an ugly Tatar picture by a culturally attractive picture of an Orientally despotic ancestor.¹⁴

Indeed, does our conception of the Russian political process change in essence if we dress up its origins in a Byzantine brocade coat rather than a Tatar beshmet

? Is it easier for us to explain the rid­dles of Russian history if we replace Wittfogel's arguments with those of Toynbee? Let us see. In his essay "Russia's Byzantine Heritage," Toynbee writes:

For nearly a thousand years past, the Russians have . . . been members, not of our Western civilization, but of the Byzantine. ... In thus as­suming the Byzantine heritage deliberately and self-consciously, the Russians were taking over . . . the traditional Byzantine attitude to­wards the West; and this has had a profound effect on Russia's own atti­tude towards the West, not only before the Revolution of 1917 but after it. . . . In this long and grim struggle to preserve their independence [from the West], the Russians have sought salvation in the political in­stitution that was the bane of the medieval Byzantine world. Feeling that their one hope of survival lay in a ruthless concentration of politi­cal power, they worked out for themselves a Russian version of the By­zantine totalitarian state. . . . This Muscovite political edifice has twice been given a new facade—first by Peter the Great, and then again by Lenin—but the essence of the structure has remained unaltered, and the Soviet Union of today, like the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the four­teenth century, reproduces the salient features of the medieval East Ro­man Empire. . . . Under the Hammer and Sickle, as under the Cross, Russia is still "Holy Russia," and Moscow still "The Third Rome."¹¹