Let us assume for a moment, however, that our Yankee had visited not the kingdom of King Arthur, but the land of Pharaoh Rameses or Sultan Bajazet. Far from waxing indignant over what the "irreplaceable six" would reply to a proposal that "the form of government be changed," he would be struck by the fact that the thought would not enter anyone's mind. To drown the sultan is an excellent idea, and to strangle the tax-collector or the wazir is still better. But to change the form of government? Unthinkable!
In order for this to become not only conceivable, but necessary, a cultural tradition, independent means of subsistence, sophisticated political thought, inherited aristocratic privileges, and a political opposition are all needed—in short, everything which gives rise to latent limitations on power. And this is the essence of the political culture generated by absolutism.
Of course, the presence of these limitations is not sufficient in itself immediately to bring about a new deal. The constitution which determines the Connecticut Yankee's Weltanschauung did not fall from heaven. It was won in the mud and blood of revolution and reaction, religious revolts, terror and desperation, trade, slavery, and wars. As such, it is a certificate of the maturity of the political culture of its creators—testimony to successful completion of the elementary school of political history and their ability to transform latent limitations on power into open political control of the system over the administration.
Just as an individual becomes a personality only when he is able to choose his own fate autonomously, so a human collectivity becomes a people only when it learns to limit the authority of the administration and thereby to affect the fate of its country. From this moment, the people may begin to realize that not only the sultan or the pharaoh, but the "form of government" itself does not suit them particularly well. And does this not mean, perhaps, that neither pharaohs nor sultans nor chairmen of people's republics nor general secretaries of parties are needed?
It is precisely in this—the gradual accumulation of limitations on power transformed into a cultural tradition—that political progress consists, in my opinion. And political progress itself, from the viewpoint being offered here, can be interpreted as the history of the birth, maturation, and stabilization of latent limitations on power— of their transformation into political limitations. It was the historical function of absolutism to be the cultural school of mankind. Only by passing through this school was humanity capable of producing a Yankee who, although he might completely forget the path traversed by his ancestors, would be able, in case of need, to reshuffle the cards and deal them again.
6. Russian Autocracy
Let us now see whether either of our "ideal constructions" describes Russian political history.[29]
In the first place, was the political organization of Russia based on supreme sovereignty of the state over the entire national product? The Russian state intervened in the economic process and attempted to regulate it. However, it did so in a very uneven way. Whereas in the epoch of Peter I or Stalin this intervention was maximal, and sometimes total, at other times it was reduced as far as the historical context permitted. In any case, it lost its total character. It is sufficient to recall the difference between the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible (the outstanding Soviet historian I.I. Polosin called it "the war communism of the Muscovite tsar") and the reign of Mikhail Fedorovich, when decisions on new taxes were not taken without the agreement of the Assemblies of the Land, which sometimes remained in session continuously for months. Recall, too, the differences between the "war communism" of the twentieth century and Lenin's NEP.[30]
This alternation prevented the permanent stagnation of the economy characteristic of despotism. But it also excluded the more or less consistent development of the economy characteristic of absolutism. In place of this, Russia evolved a third type of economic development, which combined short phases of feverish modernization with long periods of prostration,[31]
Similarly, it is impossible to describe Russian political development as the simple political reproduction characteristic of despotism. But, on the other hand, neither did Russia develop consistently in the direction of growth of latent limitations on power into political limitations, as was characteristic of absolutism. Instead it evolved a third type of political development, combining radical change in the institutional structure with the preservation of the basic parameters of its political construction.
It is sufficient to compare pre-Petrine Russia with post-Petrine; prereform and postreform; prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary, in order to grasp this unique characteristic of its political process, which may be described as the dominance of political heredity over institutional variability.
The reduction of the social structure to two polar classes—governors and governed—was never a constant phenomenon in Russian political history. Whereas Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Stalin had some success with this, subsequent epochs destroyed their achievements without trace, and the Russian social structure gave birth anew to variety and inequality. In other words, the social process in Russia had the same alternating character as its economic and political processes.
Perhaps the most dramatic difference which distinguishes the Russian political structure from both absolutism and despotism lies, however, in the peculiarities in the formation of the Russian elites. In some periods, the administration in Russia, in order to achieve complete independence from the "upper" classes, strove to undermine the existing elites, sometimes to the point of their destruction. For example, the "revolution from above" carried out by Ivan the Terrible not only liquidated the political significance of the Boyar Duma (the basic institution through which the traditional corporate aristocracy influenced the political decision-making process), but also sought to destroy the very basis of its existence—its hereditary property, the votchiny. There began a rapid process of transformation of the vot- chiny into pomest'ia (holdings conditional on state service, analogous to the despotic model). A new phenomenon, previously unheard of, emerged from this attempt to abolish the social limitations on power. No stratum of the existing establishment was politically interested in the system's "deviating" so far toward tyranny, all the more so in that such a "deviation" was fraught with total terror and indiscriminate plundering of the entire country. Hence the tyrant had to create a political base unknown in both European and Asian experience—a special stratum or "new class," as it were. The tsar had to invent this practically out of nothing—"out of stone," as Kurbskii expressed it. It comprised people from all walks of life, the dregs of all strata of society, the lowest as well as the highest, with a significant inclusion of international adventurers.
This first "new class" in Russian history, a savage elite that was both ignorant and servile, is known to historians as the dvorianstvo (nobility). Somehow it has escaped notice that this creation of the tyrant was not at all reminiscent of the haughty and refined dvorianstvo of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a nobility which educated its children in special schools, spoke only French, and had forgotten how to write its native language. The dvorianstvo of the time of Ivan the Terrible, or what passed by that name, could not write Russian either. But for quite a different reason: they could not write at all.