The Origins of Autocracy

Toynbee despises such workaday topics as irrigation facilities. You will not find in his work mention of the managerial class as a dis­tinguishing feature of despotism. He does not even mention the term "despotism." He is a historian, not of material, but of spiritual cul­ture. And it is natural that he is chiefly interested in such aspects of this history as the millennial hostility between the Romans and the Greeks, each of whom considered themselves a chosen people; as the fortunate failure of Charlemagne to restore the Western empire, and the fatal success of Leo the Syrian in restoring the empire of the East; as the schism between Western and Eastern Christianity, which was only the material embodiment of the same old Greco-Roman cultural hostility; and other similar topics. Even by the word "totalitarianism," he means essentially only the subordination of the church to the state[62]—that is, in terms of our conception, the denial of ideological limitations on power, of which Montesquieu had written some two centuries before him. In other words, for Toynbee, as for Solzheni­tsyn thirty years later, economic peculiarities, social differences, and political structures are by-products of ideology, which—as a cultural tradition—is all-powerful and stands alone in determining the direc­tion of the historical process.

But this quite legitimate attempt (even though it is no more valid than Wittfogel's) to explain the Russian political process on the basis of an implacable hatred between Greeks

and Romans has its vulnerable points. Toynbee asserts that "In this Byzantine totalitarian State, the church may be Christian or Marxian, so long as it submits to being the secular government's tool.'"

⁶ But by no means every specialist will agree with him that the "Marxian church" is merely a department of the Soviet state; others might assert the precise opposite—namely that the Soviet state is, as yet, a department of the Marxian church. At any rate, which is subordinate to which is not obvious, as it appears to Toynbee, but on the contrary a difficult and debatable point. For ex­ample, the followers of Solzhenitsyn in the Russian dissident move­ment are struggling, it seems, not so much for the separation of the church from the state, as for the separation of the state from the church.

In the second place, "Why did Byzantine Constantinople go down to ruin? And why, on the other hand, did Byzantine Moscow sur­vive?" Again Toynbee himself asks a question which is fatal to his the­sis. "The key to both these historical riddles is the Byzantine institu­tion of the totalitarian State,'"⁷

he triumphantly declares, but this does not seem any more convincing than "the class struggle" of the Soviet absolutists as a solution. Even from a purely methodological point of view, we can predict that Toynbee is exulting a bit premature­ly at the beginning of his essay. He will not be able to keep his promise to open two different locks with the same key. Just as the absolutists, in trying to explain Russia's backwardness, appealed for help to the Tatars, so Toynbee must, like his debunked opponent, Wittfogel, in the end appeal to geography for help. Russia, he writes, "owed her survival in the early middle ages [according to the thesis, this sentence should end 'to the Byzantine institution of the totalitarian state'] to a happy geographical accident.'"⁸ Now we've got it again.

In the third place, and most importantly, how does the cultural hostility of Greeks and Romans help us to explain certain events in Russian history? For example, the enserfment of the peasants? And then their liberation? The Oprichnina revolution of Ivan the Terri­ble? And the Time of Troubles which followed it? The "new classes" bringing periodic catastrophe on the Russian aristocracy? And its equally periodic rebirth? The Russian political opposition? The Sta­linist Gulag? And the attempts to de-Stalinize the country which followed it? The reader will agree that these events, and others like them, are the keys to Russian history. And a hypothesis which tries to derive them from the conflicts between John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia, or between Pope Silverius and the Emperor Justin­ian, would hardly seem any more convincing than Wittfogel's attempt to explain them by the influence of the Tatars.