14. "Unpredictability is an essential weapon of absolute terror," Wittfogel notes (ibid., p. 141).
15. Of course, the world which seemed to Aristotle an impenetrable darkness may seem to people of another culture a world of eternal equilibrium and harmony—if not entirely just, then at least a tolerable alternative to the restless, dynamic world of "progress." For example, Senator Raul Manglapus, a well-known Filipino politician, and at
16. I understand that the argument about the differences between European political structures and despotism is customarily conducted within the limits of the concept of feudalism. But there is a problem here, inasmuch as there is as yet no agreement as to one small detaiclass="underline" namely, what feudalism is. In one authoritative source, it is defined as follows: "Feudalism is primarily a method of government ... in which the essential relation is not that between ruler and subject, nor state and citizen, but between lord and vassal" (Feudalism in History, pp. 4-5). The forefather of the Russian "absolutists," N. P. Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, in attempting to demonstrate the membership of Russia in the European family, thought it sufficient to assert (in his monograph Feodalism v drevnei Rusi), that a feudal hierarchy—that is, relations between lord and vassal—also existed in Russia. Correspondingly, the "despotists" try to show that in Russia—as distinct from Europe—such relations did not exist (see, for example, Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition).
However, the authoritative definition of feudalism quoted above is criticized both in the West and in the East. On the one hand, we encounter the following conclusion: "The existence of a hierarchy is no longer thought to be a prerequisite to feudalism in the West, largely because the neat hierarchy assumed to have existed in the West is found to have been virtually a phantom" (Oswald P. Backus III, "The Problem of Unity in the Polish-Lithuanian State," p. 650). On the other hand, Soviet historians have attempted to make the concept of feudalism universal, by declaring it to be one of the stages in the development of mankind and thereby extending it not only to Russia but to the entire oikumene: "the Marxist-Leninist conception of the fundamental features of feudalism ... as a special socioeconomic order ... is formulated with extreme clarity in Capital by Karl Marx and in The Development of Capitalism in Russia by V. I. Lenin.
18. Quoted in N. N. Kareev, Zapadno-evropeiskaia absolutnaia monarkhna XVI, XVII i XVIII vekov, p. 330.
19. Ibid., p. 130.
3. P. N. Miliukov, Ocherkipo istorii russkoi kul'tury, p. 147.
6. D. S. Likhachev, "Ivan Peresvetov i ego literaturnaia sovremennost'," pp. 30, 36,
11. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Sochineniia (2nd ed.), vol. 21, pp. 171, 172. Engels wrote elsewhere that the equilibrium between the landed nobility and the bourgeoisie is the basic condition for absolute monarchy (ibid., vol. 18, p. 254).
12. Avrekh, p. 83.
16. Avrekh, p. 82.
17. Ibid., p. 87.
23. Ibid., p. 92. This contradiction on Avrekh's part is so glaring that Sakharov, of course, immediately jumped on him, commenting ironically: "It turns out that when serfdom was weaker, 'Asiatic despotism' was stronger; but when serfdom became more severe, 'Asiatic forms of government' were relaxed to such a point that 'external' analogies to Western European absolutism appeared" (A. N. Sakharov, p. 113).
25. M. P. Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia, "K voprosu ob osobennostiakh absoliutizma v Rossii," p. 77.
26. Ibid., p. 85.
40. Ibid., p. 143.
43. S. M. Troitskii, p. 148.
4. Ibid., p. 332.
6. Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, p. 87.
7. Treadgold, ed., p. 332.
8. Ibid., p. 336.
10. Tibor Szamuely, p. 88.
11. Conversely, the resources of Russia were meager only while it remained a relatively small country. When it became gigantic, Russia simultaneously became one of the richest nations in resources.
4. The "Byzantine" Interpretation
Wittfogel takes very seriously the argument that it was the Tatars, and not the Byzantines, who were the forefathers of despotism in Russia. "Byzantium's influence on Kievan Russia was great, but it was primarily cultural," he writes.
14. A. Toynbee, "Russia's Byzantine Heritage," pp. 83, 87, 94, 95.
12. K. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, pp. 224-25.
13. Treadgold, ed„ p. 355.
25. Ibid., p. 70. 26. Ibid., p. 23.. 27. Ibid., p. 95.
35. Ibid., p. 69. 36. Ibid., p. 112. 37. Ibid., p. 69. 38. Ibid., p. 104.
39. A. M. Sakharov, "Ob evoliutsii feodal'noi sobstvennosti na zemliu v Rossiiskom gosudarstve XVI veka," p. 28.
40. R. Pipes, p. 106.
41. Ibid., p. 65.
1. N. P. Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, Gosudarevy sluzhilye liudi, liudi kabal'nye i zakladnye, p. 223.
11. J. L. I. Fennel, Ivan the Great of Moscow, p. 36.
13. Ibid., p. 47.
14. R. G. Skrynnikov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 150.
15. R. G. Skrynnikov, Oprichnyi terror, p. 54; Ivan Groznyi, p. 150.
16. Skrynnikov, Oprichnyi terror, p. 59.
20. Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, p. 97.
28. D. P. Makovskii, Razvitie tovarno-denezhnykk otnoshenii . . . , p. 96.
29. Ibid., p. 97. In fact, Article 60 of the 1497 law code states: "If any person dies intestate and leaves no sons, then all his movable property and land [will pass] to his daughters, and if he leaves no daughters, then it is his relatives who inherit [movable and immovable property]" (Pamiatniki russkogo prava, vol. 3, p. 371). The fact that this law, for the first time in Russian history, protects not only the movable property of the peasant but also his land, seems to me even more significant and innovative than the absence of privileges in terms of inheritance to which Makovskii calls attention. This does not look like attachment of the peasants to the land, but rather like attachment of the land to the peasant. It thus confirms once more the contradiction between the social policy of the grandfather and that of the grandson, whose reign was marked by almost complete expropriation of peasant lands. Before the Oprichnina, the peasants in the central regions of the Muscovite state cultivated seven or eight chetverti (three or four hectares) per household. After the Oprichnina, their cultivated lands were catastroph- ically reduced, approximately to the limits of the modern-day kolkhoz household plot.
Turkey, Iran, Bukhara, and Urgench, expeditions are undertaken to establish trade relations with China. Just as, in the fifteenth century, the Russian merchant was the first . . . European to penetrate into India, so, in the sixteenth century, two cossack hetmans sent by the Russian government arrived in Peking. Stable trade relations are established between Russia and all the European countries. Russia has emerged into the world market and has been transformed into a great world power (ibid., pp. 487-88).