The Origins of Autocracy

As the reader may have noticed, my role in criticizing Russia Under the Old Regime has been minimal: the author himself, without outside help, has destroyed his "conspiratorial-patrimonial" thesis by, to use his own expression, "swallowing it bit by bit."

Of course, Pipes is not obliged to follow the logic of Wittfogel, or Toynbee, or A. N. Sakharov, or anybody at all, but his own logic he must follow. And, as strange as it may seem after so much self-contra­diction, a logic can be discovered to which he still adheres. Alas, this is the familiar logic of the bipolar model, which he so decisively de­bunked in the theoretical introduction to his book. "The distinguish­able characteristic of la monarchie seigneuriale was that 'the prince has become lord of the goods and persons of his subjects,'" Pipes writes, quoting Jean Bodin, with whom he agrees that "in Europe there were only two such regimes, one in Turkey, the other in Muscovy, although they were common in Asia and Africa."

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This is, once again, the black-and-white version of the political uni­verse: if Russian autocracy differed from European absolutism, then consequently it was . . . what? Certainly, Oriental despotism (Witt­fogel would say, in his harsh language, "of the nonhydraulic semi- marginal subtype," while Pipes expresses himself more mildly: "of the patrimonial type"). The designations may differ, but the essence is one and the same; the check list of despotic features is identical. There is the absolute sovereignty of the state over the national prod­uct of the country. There is the absence of alternatives, and con­sequently of political opposition ("one can see no way in which the Muscovite population could have altered the system had it wanted to"). There is, finally, the incapacity of the system for internal change.

And if, nevertheless, the system, as distinct from its Hellenistic and Oriental-despotic relatives, did change from within (and as a profes­sional historian of Russia, Pipes can't deny this), this is explained by . . . what would you think, reader, already being familiar with Witt­fogel and Szamuely? Well, of course, by geography: what else? It sim­ply turns out that "of all the regimes of the Hellenistic and Oriental- despotic type, Russia was geographically closest to Western Europe."[67]Paraphrasing a well-known saying, we can say that "the patrimonial state" of Richard Pipes is despotism, moderated by geography.

Thus, just as all roads lead to Rome, all the interpretations of Rus­sian history which we have considered—the "Tatar," the "Byzantine," and the "patrimonial"—lead inexorably and inevitably to despotism, and hence to the bipolar model of political development, effectively making it impossible to explain the Russian historical process.

CHAPTER IV

THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON

1. The Stereotype

In the work of the contemporary Western despotists, Muscovy is de­picted, at the dawn of its existence as a state, as a narrow horseshoe of land caught between the Lithuanian hammer and the Tatar anvil, locked into a miserable northern territory, without an outlet to the sea, where it is not even possible to grow grain in quantity. Having taken this stereotype as sound coin, Tibor Szamuely was sure, it will be remembered, that for Muscovy national survival played the same role that irrigation facilities played in the Asiatic empires.

Even so prominent a native despotist as Georgii Plekhanov was se­duced by this logic. One of Plekhanov's strongest arguments was the fact that Nikolai Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, the forefather of the native abso­lutists, himself conceded that "the external circumstances of the life of Muscovite Rus', its stubborn struggle against its eastern and west­ern neighbors for existence, demanded an extreme expenditure of effort by the people," as a result of which "there was developed in the society a consciousness that the first obligation of each subject was to serve the state to the limit of his ability and to sacrifice himself for the defense of the Russian land."'

The "stubborn struggle for existence," "the defense of the Russian land"—in a word, self-defense—is the root of the stereotype, which is already so venerable that it does not enter anyone's head to doubt its truth. But is it, after all, true—at least as applied to the time of Ivan III, which took up almost the entire latter half of the fifteenth cen­tury, when, according to Wittfogel, the "institutional time bomb" was getting ready to explode; when, according to Pipes, indescribable "civil tumult" was taking place; and when, according to Szamuely, the "Muscovite variety of Asiatic despotism" was being created? Here is how this period is described by one of the most authoritative experts, Sergei Solov'ev: