The Origins of Autocracy

The author agrees, thus, that there was no such thing as a "pat­rimonial state" in Russia before the seventeenth century. On the con­trary, it turns out that from the beginning of the existence of Russia as a state, in the centuries which Pipes calls "the time of civil tumult," before "the crown . . . expropriated society,"[66] "ownership of land and rendering of service" were "traditionally separated in Russia." Furthermore, in it there existed a strong and proud aristocracy who "took great pride in their ancestry and consciously separated them­selves from upstart service families."³¹ And even the state itself "had to honour the system or risk the united opposition of the leading houses of the realm."

⁹²

Thus, for Pipes the "time bomb" explodes a century later than for Wittfogel. It is not only a matter of chronology, however, but one of the character of the "explosion" and of what stood behind it. For Wittfogel, as we know, the fuse to this bomb was laid by the Tatars, who brought Chinese models of Oriental despotism to Russia, and thus Sinicized the country. According to Pipes, it was a conspiracy of the "patrimonial state," on a national scale, against society. It is true that, as he says, this state did not exist before the middle of the seven­teenth century, but this did not prevent it from intriguing and con­spiring as long ago as the middle of the fifteenth century. This treach­erous state "neither grew out of society, nor was imposed on it from above. Rather it grew up side by side with society and bit by bit swal­lowed it,"³³

until it brought "the process of expropriation [of society] to its conclusion."³⁴ Just as Mikhail Katkov, the famous right-wing publicist of the 1860s, saw "Polish intrigue" in Russia's every misfor­tune, so Pipes seems to detect a sort of "patrimonial intrigue" behind her woes.

This intrigue, as we know, consisted in transforming the whole country into a gigantic royal domain, so that no patrimonies, no priv­ileges, and no courts other than the tsar's could exist in it. Everything had to belong to the tsar. Everyone had to serve him directly, as his household servants and serfs did. "They are all slaves and just slaves, and no one is more than a slave," as V. O. Kliuchevskii tersely summed up the contents of Ivan the Terrible's revolutionary manifesto—his first letter to Prince Kurbskii.

There is no doubt that Ivan the Terrible thirsted after this. That in the name of this he made Russia dance with his Oprichnina revolu­tion is undisputed. But the history of the Russian state is not reduc­ible to Ivan the Terrible. There was a time before him and a time after him—a time to gather stones, as the Preacher says, and a time to cast them away.

The fact remains that, during the absolutist century of the Mus­covite state, the so-called Government of Compromise suddenly in­troduced local self-government and trial by jury in Russia, and, in ad­dition, called something like a national parliament—the Assembly of the Land. It not only did not try to destroy the privileges of the bo- yars, or attempt to stop the process of peasant differentiation leading directly to the formation of a bourgeoisie (such was Lenin's opinion, and in this department, after all, he is undeniably an authority), it in fact furthered this process.

In the 1760s, the Russian government, in the "Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility," guaranteed to the latter the privileges of a corporation, one of which was the privilege of not serving that govern­ment. In the 1780s, the government guaranteed the nobility the in­alienability of its property. In the 1860s, it again returned to the old, just forgotten experiment of the Government of Compromise, and again, as in the sixteenth century, introduced local self-government and trial by jury. It is true that the final step was not taken at this time. The Assembly of the Land was not called, and Russia was in a fever for another half-century, until in 1906 it was summoned in the shape of the State Duma. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia thus again returned to the position from which Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina revolution had toppled it in the middle of the sixteenth. Unfortunately, it was not for long. A new Oprichnina revolution, this time under the guidance of Vladimir Lenin, again locked it up in the prison of autocracy. Such were the essential facts of this stormy, con­tradictory, and tragic history.