The Origins of Autocracy

This picture of the triumphal progress of the "service" or "pat­rimonial" state well suits the despotists, with their "institutional time bomb." True, by the logic of things, it must annoy the Soviet absolut­ists, if only because it refutes the fundamental Marxist postulate that the movement of the superstructure is determined by the movement of the base. In the Russian case, superstructure and base turn out to move not only in different, but in diametrically opposite directions. The superstructure, as conceived by Soviet historians, moves con­stantly towards absolutism—that is, in a progressive direction. And the base moves towards slavery—that is, in a regressive direction.

This scandalous behavior of the base does not, however, reduce the optimistic tone of genuine science, which alertly masks its dismay, as we have seen, either by boldly attacking Oriental despotism in the West or by consoling itself with the unusually active class struggle in Russia. Even an honest, although supercautious, historian like S. O. Shmidt, for example, writes with pride that in Russia there existed "conditions for the beginning of mass scale uprisings of the 'muti­nous peasantry' cherishing a dream of a peasant state, which had no precedent in the other parts of Europe."[77] Here is how Jerome Blum describes the regularity of the process of disappearance of peasant self-government, in his classical work Lord and Peasants in Russia:

With the increase in privately held property resulting from royal dis­tribution of black land to seigniors, the "volost" form of organization began to disintegrate. Often the princes paid no heed to "volost" bound­aries in making their grants so that the organic unity of the commune was destroyed by its land being distributed among several proprietors. The most debilitating development, however, was the penetration of the landlord into the "volost" organization. First, agents of the seignior began to bypass the commune's own officials. Then the lord forbade the selection of these officials by the peasants. Instead he named them him­self, often selecting them from among his own unfree servants. The final stage was reached when the lord took away all the remaining powers of self-government from the "volost," and placed its entire ad­ministration in the hands of one of his employees or slaves. The grad­ual destruction of the power of the commune on privately-owned land, and the simultaneous disappearance of the black land in much of the state, ended the existence of the independent "volost" as a form of or­ganization so far as most of the peasantry were concerned.²"

Here you see how regularly and, one might say, organically the process of disintegration of peasant self-government proceeded, par­allel with an equally regular process of enserfment of the peasantry. "By the end of the fifteenth century," Blum maintains on this score, "the right of the peasant to free movement had already been cur­tailed. The Code of 1497 had fixed the two weeks at St. George's Day in autumn (25 November) as the only legal time at which the peasant renter could leave his landlord, and had fixed heavy fees that he had to pay before he could depart."