[22] To the best of my knowledge, this subject was first discussed on a theoretical level by Iurii Krizhanich in the seventeenth century. A Croatian by nationality and a gradu-
chy. In the face of this dilemma, insoluble at first glance (at least, as we shall see below, for Soviet historians), Krizhanich does what a scholar must do: he differentiates among privileges. There are three kinds of political structures, he reflects. In some, "immoderate privileges" lead to anarchy (Poland); in others, the absence of privileges leads to "tormenting of people," which is what Krizhanich calls despotism (Turkey). The optimum, from his point of view, is a state which permits "moderate privileges" to the aristocracy, which serve as a guarantee against despotism, defending the people against arbitrary action by the authorities, and the king himself against arbitrary action by his own servants. "Among the French and the Spanish," he says,
the rulers have decent hereditary advantages and privileges, and for this reason neither the plain people nor the military cause the kings any dishonor. And among the Turks, where there are no privileges for people of noble birth, the kings are dependent on the brazen impudence of their simple soldiers. For what the janissaries want, that the king must do (ibid., p. 599).
In other words, what we now call social limitations on power were, in Krizhanich's eyes, "the only method of maintaining justice in the kingdom," and "the only means by which subjects can be defended against the abuse of the king's servants" (ibid., p. 593).
Montesquieu, pp. 31-32.
Ibid., p. 64.
one time (in 1965) even a candidate for the presidency of that country, described the despotic mode of existence in the following terms only a decade ago: "Once all of Asia was in a state of equilibrium, with its agrarian societies relying for survival on a delicate balance between land and population. Land suitable for rice-growing was limited and rice-eating populations struggled for subsistence; they had neither the time, ability nor energy to think of governing themselves or even of participating in government. The task of governing was left to the few, a small, specialized class of scholar-officials. To labor and obey was left to the many. Thus the centralized state came into being, strong enough to protect these precarious balances from ever-threatening natural or artificial forces, skilled enough to undertake the control of the flow of water, the life-blood of the staple production. . . . Confucius gave this stability a philosophic base which sanctified harmony and reverence for authority. . . . This kind of equilibrium was to last four thousand years, until one day Western man arrived with ideas more explosive than the powder the Chinese had invented for firecrackers at the harvest festival (and which the Westerner would later push into the mouths of cannon)" ("Asian Revolution and American Ideology," pp. 344-45).
Sigmund Freud asserted that there are no accidental slips of the tongue, and the fact that Senator Manglapus uses the word "survival" instead of "life" serves, it seems to me, as an exhaustive commentary on the passage quoted here.
... Its [the social order's] essence is determined by the character of the socioeconomic relationships. The concentration of the means of production, and primarily landed property, in the hands of a ruling class of feudal lords is decisive" (Kritiha burzhuaznykh kontseptsii istorii Rossii perioda feodalisma, pp. 30, 31). Unfortunately from this it follows "with extreme clarity" only that both despotism and absolutism are equally based on the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a ruling class of feudal lords. Among "feudal lords," the Soviet historians indiscriminately include English barons, Chinese mandarins, Polish pans, and Turkish effendis. But if the "base" was the same, how their "superstructures" come to differ from each other is mysterious. For all these reasons, I have thought it better not to broach this delicate and painful subject here.
[26] It is said that when a French diplomat referred in conversation with a British colleague to the well-known declaration of Louis XIV as to the wealth of kings ("Everything which is within the limits of their state belongs to them . . . both the money in their treasuries . . . and that which they leave in circulation among their subjects"), the Englishman replied haughtily: "Did you study public law in Turkey?"
[27] Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, p. 160.
[28] Ibid., p. 159.
[29] Here and below, when Russian political history is spoken of, reference will be only to its autocratic period—that is, the time following the Oprichnina revolution of 1564.
[30] Under despotism, the state's intervention in the economic process was connected with its primitive condition, with the dispersion of the rural communes, and their subsistence economy, and thus served the goal of integrating the stagnant economic organism. In Russia, on the contrary, the intervention of the state increased and became more active as the economic process became more complex, until, finally, in the twentieth century, in the period of its radical modernization and industrialization, the state took this process under its complete control. But even in the twentieth century, as we know, the intensity of this control continued to vary, now hardening and then relaxing.
[31] This peculiarity of the economic development of Russia was first described by Alexander Gershenkron (in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought; see also his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective). Gershenkron did not, however, connect it with the specific character of the Russian political structure.
[32] The complex character of the "new class" perhaps helps us to understand the stubbornness of the insistence of the Russian new right in general, and Alexander Sol- zhenitsyn in particular, that the October revolution was violently imposed on the Russian nation by foreigners and thus is totally alien to Russian culture and tradition (see Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right). While international adventurers indeed played a conspicuous role in the revolution of 1917, they played a no less distinguished part in the Oprichnina revolution, as well as in the Petrine one. Consequently, the role of international adventurers in the October revolution only confirms its national—one might say traditional—character, and Solzhenitsyn's argument falls apart. True, as distinct from all previous instances, Stalin's "new class" had a brutally nationalistic thrust (because of which, incidentally, some modern right-wingers could not help but sympathize with Stalin). It is perhaps explained by the fact that this time the "new class" was intended to destroy and replace an obviously "internationalistic" elite.
[33] The problem of the aristocratization of the elite in the contemporary Soviet Union is the subject of chapter 1 of my monograph Detente After Brezhnev.
[34] While I was still in the Soviet Union, I devoted to this topic a monograph titled "The History of the Russian Political Opposition," which is still in manuscript; some parts of it are used in this book.