The Origins of Autocracy

Let us leave it to experts to judge the equivalence of the political structures of Ptolemaic Egypt and Attalid Pergamum (I'm afraid that they will hardly agree on this) and return, as Rabelais says, to our rams. First of all, let us state with relief that both Wittfogel's Tatars and Toynbee's Byzantines have, in Pipes's interpretation, ceased to be a "high model" (Wittfogel's term) for the Russian political structure. It is true that the reasons for which Pipes has demoted them are somewhat exotic. Neither the Tatars nor the Byzantines can boast of the patriarchal peace which, according to Pipes, must have reigned in the "primitive family" of the Russian patrimonial state. In neither case could matters have gone as smoothly and as naturally as they must have gone there. There was no one in Russia to throw down the challenge to the supreme property rights of the "father of the Rus­sian family." Everyone was content with his family position. No won­der that "[t]he Muscovite service class, from which, in direct line of succession, descend the dvorianstvo of imperial Russia and the com­munist apparatus of Soviet Russia, represents a unique phenomenon in the history of social institutions."²³ In a society saturated with the "patrimonial mentality,"

²⁴ the notion that property could belong to anyone other than the sovereign could never even enter anyone's head, it seems. Even the Hellenistic states have ceased, within a mat­ter of some fifty pages, to serve as a "high model" for this unique phenomenon.

The very "idea of state was absent in Russia until the middle of the seventeenth century. . . . And since there was no notion of state, its corollary, society, was also unknown," Pipes asserts.²³

Moreover, ac­cording to him, "[bjecause there was no free market, social classes in the customary sense of the word could not arise."[64] It was all the more impossible that there should be political opposition in that primitive family. After all, what cause was there for opposition to arise, if the basic area of social conflicts—the struggle for property—was ex­cluded in the nature of things?

In this patriarchal picture there is, of course, no room for Oprich­nina revolutions and Stalinizations, for "Times of Troubles," de-Stalin- izations, and analogous political dramas. Sons, it is true, do not al­ways obey their parents, but they don't try to change the structure of their family. They do not introduce local self-government or trial by jury; they do not call Assemblies of the Land; they do not try to carry out major reforms, and—what is most important—they do not make claims on the property naturally belonging to the head of the family. It is not surprising, therefore, that the entire Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible is accommodated in Pipes's book in two paragraphs and has the character rather of an epic family chronicle than of a "revolution from above." In any case, it is noted that "[t]he method used [by Ivan the Terrible] was basically not different from that first employed by Ivan III on the territory of conquered Novgorod."²⁷

In fact, as soon as we and the author pass from the free flight of abstract theory to earthly reality, we immediately enter a world which is precisely the opposite of what has just been described, a world boil­ing with ferocious struggle and competition—all of it over property, which, according to Pipes, was indistinguishable from sovereignty. And the author himself knows this. "The transformation of Russia into its ruler's patrimony required two centuries to accomplish. The process began in the middle of the fifteenth century and was com­pleted by the middle of the seventeenth," he writes. (In the middle of the seventeenth century, therefore, "the idea of the state" might be supposed to have disappeared from the face of the Russian earth; in­stead, for some reason it arose precisely at this point, by Pipes's own account.) "Between these dates lies an age of civil turbulence unprece­dented even for Russia,

when state and society engaged in ceaseless con­flict, as the former sought to impose its will and the latter made des­perate attempts to elude it."²⁸

The meaning of this unending conflict consisted precisely in the fact that "in order to fashion their empire on the model of an ap­panage domain—to make all Russia their votchina . . . the tsars had to . . . put an end to the traditional right of the free population to circulate: all landowners had to be compelled to serve the ruler of Moscow, which meant converting their votchiny into fiefs." In Pipes's interpretation, "Outright property in land . . . was to give way to ten­ure conditional on royal favour."[65] Here is indistinguishability of sov­ereignty from ownership for you, when in practice it took two cen­turies of "civil tumult" and finally "a social revolution imposed from above" to take the property away from its owners.