In any case, it may seem that the final hour of the Russian aristocracy had struck, and that from this moment on it was to be irretrievably submerged in compulsory universal service. And here one of the most remarkable paradoxes of Russian history occurred: not only did the "new class" fail to fulfill its task and totally destroy the social limitations on power, it itself immediately began to be transformed into what I call the "new new class," a stratum suspiciously reminiscent of the old aristocracy. The destructive process of transformation of the traditional votchiny into pomest'ia in fact coincided and intertwined with a reverse process of transformation of the pomest'ia into votchiny. In the law code of 1649, less than a century after the Oprichnina revolution, it is already practically impossible to distinguish landed estates from votchiny. For the first time in Russian history, this episode proved that the aristocratization of the elite is an organic and natural process in the Russian political system, one which, like the differentiation of the peasantry, develops immediately and unavoidably whenever the tyrant does not halt it by terror.
For the most part, the terrorization has been carried out by a kind of "new class" comprising the same elements as the Oprichnina elite of Ivan the Terrible: people from the lower strata of the society, "experts" from the old elite, and international adventurers. At least, such was the case with Petrine shliakhta, a militant "new class" created by the tyrant in the 1700s. And the same paradox occurred again after the tyrant's demise: in the first half of the eighteenth century, the Petrine "new class" again underwent a transformation into a "new new class" which appeared to be a transitional form on its way to aris- tocratization. Moreover, this time it eventually triumphed. The siege it laid to the administration was so persistent and fierce that the series of women who succeeded one another on the Russian throne, from Anna to Catherine, proved unable to stabilize the system until they granted the "new class" the status of an aristocracy.
Unfortunately, this born-again Russian aristocracy happened to be a slave-holding stratum, which immeasurably weakened its political potential. Having won social emancipation from the government, it proved unable to achieve political emancipation, at least on a scale comparable with Russian boyardom before the Oprichnina revolution. In other words, while their estates were turned into votchiny, the new landowners did not become boyars.
As distinct from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the two dictatorships of the nineteenth century (Nicholas I's and Alexander Ill's) did not try to create their own "new classes," leaning instead on the conservative and Russophile segments of the existing elites. This made the two tyrannies in question significantly milder than their predecessors, but did not preserve the entrenched aristocracy from eventual extermination and replacement by the savage "new class" created by Lenin after the revolution of 1917 (again comprising the same three elements: people "from below," "bourgeois experts," and international adventurers).[32]
In any case, it seemed that this time the Russian aristocracy had been dealt a deathblow. But again the paradox of aristocratization occurred. Lenin's "new class" thirsted for privileges and independence, just as in the seventeenth century, and sought in turn to transform itself into a "new new class"—always the first step on the ladder of aristocratization. And, again as in the seventeenth century, this aristo- cratizing elite was crushed by a still newer class of Party apparatchiki. Joseph Stalin, systematically liberating himself from the control of the modern analog of the Assembly of the Land, the Central Committee of the Party, and the modern analog of the Boyar Duma, the Politburo, physically exterminated Lenin's elite.
This new catastrophe for the Russian elite, like the preceding ones, was, however, unable to halt aristocratization. Indeed, after the tyrant's demise, transformation of the Stalinist "new class" into a "new new class" began—a process which is taking place right now, this time before our eyes, in "modern" Brezhnevist Russia.[33]
Thus, in addition to a peculiar alternating pattern of economic, political, and social processes, Russian autocracy developed a unique alternating pattern in the formation of its elites. This pattern involves new and challenging phenomena unexplained (and perhaps inexplicable) by current political science: the periodic destruction of the elite, subsequent rearistocratization, and particularly the "new class" whose emergence we have had occasion to observe briefly in such absolutely different historical circumstances.
While the peculiarities of the Russian political structure consist in the fact that it has at times rejected and at others recognized social and economic limitations on power, its attitude toward ideological limitations has always been more or less hostile. But, once again, only "more or less." And here we can again see the connection between economic and ideological limitations. It has usually been the periods when the economic limitations were violated with the greatest intensity which proved catastrophic for the Russian intellect as well, and the periods of "relaxation" (or, in contemporary parlance, liberalization) of the regime, which coincided with tolerance of economic limitations, also relaxed ideological control. The number of depoliticized areas increased. The punishment for ideological heresy became more or less consonant with the degree of the heresy. The category of "political death" was repeatedly revived in Russia—under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, under Elizaveta Petrovna in the eighteenth, under Alexander I in the nineteenth, and under Nikita Khrushchev in the twentieth.
The political opposition, like a multitude of other phenomena in
Russian history (the catastrophic decline of the cities, serfdom, political trials and terror, universal service, the denial of latent limitations on power, and political emigration) has its beginnings in the time of Ivan the Terrible. Russian tyrants destroyed this opposition, sometimes in a literal, physical sense. Each time it was reborn as from the ashes after the death of the tyrant, however, following the same alternating pattern as the Russian political process itself. This fact alone indicates that resistance to tyranny is as organic a component of this process as is tyranny itself.
The function of this opposition (or what I understand by this term) differs just as profoundly from that of the opposition in modern democratic systems as autocracy itself differs from such systems. It does not by any means necessarily oppose the existing government or regime. On the contrary, it has frequently been at the helm of the country, as was the case with Dmitrii Golitsyn after the death of Peter, or with Nikita Khrushchev after the death of Stalin. And, in the eighteenth century as in the twentieth, the function of the Russian opposition has never been to amend the policy of the existing system, but to overturn it. In this sense, Russia's revolutionary potential has proved to be practically inextinguishable (if by revolution we do not necessarily mean a mass uprising).
Nevertheless, although the Russian political opposition has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to generate a process of political transformation of the system in the direction of Europeanization, it has never been able to stabilize this process. Even its most notable successes, such as the rebirth of the aristocracy in the eighteenth century, the abolition of serfdom in the nineteenth, and the overthrow of the monarchy in the twentieth, have always led to a reverse result—that is, to a new "rigidification" of the system. The only political alternatives to the existing regimes which have really worked so far have been those which have come from the left-wing radicals or from radicals of the Russian right, as I call it. These sections of the opposition thus helped to bring Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Paul I, Nicholas I, Alexander III, Lenin, and Stalin to power.[34]