Is it really conceivable that modern physiologists would argue about the functions of the kidneys, for example, or chemists about an element, without having determined beforehand just what they were discussing? And that, as a result, it would turn out that by "kidney" some people actually meant the liver, while others, in referring to an element, meant the entire periodic table? But isn't this exactly what happens to us when we placidly list "autocracy," "authoritarianism," "absolutism," "unlimited power," "despotism," and "totalitarianism" simply as synonyms, separated from each other only by commas? And is this not why our arguments, instead of generating the truth, as they were supposed to do, are transformed into a babel—a definitional chaos, a dialogue among the deaf?
Faced with the tormenting riddles of Russian history, which over time took on the increasingly urgent and practical outlines of the fateful question of where we are going and what will become of us, I decided on a step as extraordinary as it was presumptuous. What else remained to one who had abandoned Marxist scholasticism as powerless to answer his questions, and was at the same time cut off from any systematic acquaintance with contemporary Western literature, but to suggest his own conceptual language—his own instrumental apparatus, capable, at least, of adequately describing the prerequisites of the task?
I started by asking why, inasmuch as not all non-European states answered the description of Asiatic despotism, all European states must necessarily be absolutist. Had not even Aristotle in his Politics posed the question: "Is there in fact only one form of royal power or are there several varieties within it?" And did he not answer it in categorical terms: "It is not hard to see that there exist several forms of royal power and that the very means by which it is manifested are not one and the same"?[16] And, to say nothing of Aristotle, if we are to believe Xenophon, even Socrates recognized this! Is it not strange that the ancient Greeks knew several forms of monarchy, while we—2,500 years later—are shut up like communities of peasants within the bounds of an impoverished bipolar geographical model of political classification?
Having now come to the West, I was glad to discover that many prominent scholars here also think that it is difficult, if not impossible, to analyze the history of a particular country outside of the conceptual context of world history, and that, as Cyril Black, for example, has observed: "One cannot interpret Russian developments without some general conception of what is universal and what is particular in the evolution of societies."[17] Though proceeding from an analogous assumption, my thought in Russia followed a different path, however. It seemed to me necessary first of all to build up as carefully as possible a set of, as it were, "ideal constructions" (or paradigms) of both poles of the bipolar model, and literally to count out their parameters on one's fingers. Of course, one might as a result obtain something very schematic, and for this reason debatable—something which in its pure form has not existed anywhere on earth. This would be something which would show various political structures, as the mathematicians say, "in their extremes," rather than their actual outlines in this or that country. But I consciously took the risk of this schematiza- tion: in the final analysis, does one ever get anything without losing something in exchange? And what I wanted was a great deal. First of all, I wanted the categories and terms with which we operate to become clear to the point of transparency, so that in the future when we argued we would at least know what we were talking about. My intention may to the Western reader seem like naive intellectual extremism. So it probably was. But for me, in any case, it cleared up the picture somewhat. The result at which I finally arrived turned out to be paradoxical. In the first place, as the reader will see in what follows, none of my ideal constructions described the Russian political structure adequately. It turned out that, beginning at a definite historical point, this structure behaved very strangely—that it was subject to its own laws, which coincided with neither the parameters of despotism nor those of absolutism. And it turned out, moreover, to be considerably more flexible and adaptable than the ideal constructions were. While what is usually called "modernization" destroys despotism and has in most cases transformed absolutism into democracy, the Russian political structure has, as it were, digested this "modernization," while retaining its basic medieval parameters to this day.
But the paradoxical nature of my findings did not by any means consist in this. Russian nationalists in all ages have proudly pronounced Russia to be a special civilization, following its own thorny path between the Charybdis of the West and the Scylla of the East. This was declared before the emergence of the nineteenth-century Slavophiles, and it is declared after them. Suffice it to recall the preaching of the fiery Ioakim, patriarch of Moscow in the late seventeenth century, contrasting Russian piety both to Islam and to Latin heresy, or the analogous preaching of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in the late twentieth century. Assertions of the uniqueness of the historical fate of a nation constitute the great temptation for nationalists. My results revealed something much more complex and much more distressing, however: the Russian political structure not only could not be described with the help of the bipolar model, but it was also not sui generis in its sources. It had been violently transformed into what it is now—that is, an autocracy. Starting like the rest of Europe within the limits of a single absolutist paradigm, at a certain moment—in complete conformity with Aristotle's political conception—Russia "deviated" from the ordinary absolutist axis. But by virtue of a number of historical circumstances, its "deviation" (in contrast to the "deviation" of monarchy toward tyranny, which is usual according to Aristotle) gave rise to a strange new political species, which led to national tragedy for a great people over the course of many centuries. From the ordinary absolutist root there grew a wild, ugly, wayward branch. If there was anything to be proud of, it was only that somewhere in the depths of the national subconscious Russia proved unable entirely to rid herself of her European beginnings, and again and again stubbornly returned to them.
This new political structure, unheard of in European history, was called forth by Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina revolution. Ivan the Terrible and the origins of the modern Russian political structure were thus indissolubly connected. Such was my result, and there is apparently no other way of familiarizing the reader with it than through the elementary comparison and correction of definitions, and speculations and interpretations at first glance not even related to Ivan the Terrible.
I understand how strange such an abstract theoretical wringing process, full of allusions and terms unfamiliar to the Western ear, must seem. Moreover, it may turn out that in proposing a system of categories forjudging political structures, I have, as they say, reinvented the wheel. I understand all this. But I can do nothing about it: otherwise my encounter with the reader is in danger of becoming yet another dialogue of the deaf.