It is possible that, for this reason, the pseudodespotic phase is followed after the death of each tyrant by a "Time of Troubles" characterized by:
The rehabilitation of the victims of the terror;
The rebirth of the political opposition;
The search for alternative models of political organization;
The—at least partial—recognition of latent limitations on power;
Attempts to work out guarantees against the restoration of the ancien regime—that is, to change the political structure itself.
In any case, these were precisely the functions of the Time of Troubles which followed the death of Ivan the Terrible (1584-1613) and also of the period after the death of Joseph Stalin (1953-64). They characterized the analogous phases after the deaths of Peter I,[36]Paul I, and Nicholas I as well.
However, the phase of the Time of Troubles, although it in principle opens up the possibility of breaking the spiral, has always until now ended in failure in Russian history. Its basic goal—the transformation of latent limitations on power into political limitations—has proved unattainable. The opposition, having just risen out of nothingness, and having by a miracle survived the total terror, has not been able to reconcile the hopes of the various elites of the country and the expectations of the masses. It suddenly turns out that the society which looked so simple and unified under the iron hand of the tyrant is in fact unbelievably complex. And each of its strata has its own interests, its own expectations, its secret dreams. The administrative-political elite, maddened by permanent "purges," thirsts for the stabilization of its position, and, in the final analysis, for the guaranteeing of its privileges to the point of aristocratic status. The reborn "third estate"—the economic elite, sickened by the irrational economic system of pseudodespotism, longs for independence and radical reforms. The intellectual elite yearns for liberalization—that is, the introduction of elementary civil rights and the reining-in of the censorship. The masses expect the standard of living to be raised. Sometimes a Russian, too, wants not only to drink but also to have a bite to eat, and even a shirt on his back.
In other words, some people need "order" and stabilization, while others need changes and reform. How is all this to be combined? How is a strategy for reconciling the administration and the system to be worked out, when the system itself has suddenly demonstrated such irreconcilable contradictions? And without a strategy, how is it to be transformed? How are guarantees against the restoration of the an- cien regime to be worked out?
But there has never been a strategy.
Whether we take Boris Godunov at the end of the sixteenth century, Vasilii Shuiskii at the beginning of the seventeenth century or Vasilii Golitsyn at the end of it, Dmitrii Golitsyn in the eighteenth century, Dmitrii Miliutin in the nineteenth, or Pavel Miliukov and Aleksandr Kerensky—or even Nikolai Bukharin and Nikita Khrushchev—in the twentieth century, we see the same picture everywhere. An enormous desire to correct the mistakes, to rehabilitate the victims of terror, and to restore justice; activism and energy in the introduction of reforms; a leap toward freedom; and sometimes even tactical inventiveness. But at the same time we see an enormous degree of political incompetence, entirely contradictory actions, and an inability to consider the mistakes of one's predecessors. In a word, we see a lack of preparation for the basic sociopolitical transformation of the country which amounts, one might say, to intellectual bankruptcy. Alas, the Russian reformers never relied on a competent social analysis of the society which they were attempting to transform, and never had any experience in setting up workable political coalitions, or any clear-cut idea of what could actually be accomplished, in what order, with the aid of what social forces and political blocs. Trying to formulate this, I would say that in hoping to reshuffle the cards and deal them again, the Russian reformers had not previously gone through the school of absolutism, which alone could have given them the necessary experience. But is this really so surprising? Can pseudodespo- tism actually serve as a school of political thinking? Can total censorship further the accumulation of social knowledge? Where was this experience, this knowledge, this thinking to be found in Rus'?
Here is the reason why this phase—the most vivid and dramatic, filled with heretical new ideas and plans, brilliant insights, and bitter mistakes—a phase which has sustained intellectual flights, given Russian literary geniuses, and raised whole generations of oppositionists, is followed by the longest, most colorless, dullest segment of the Russian cycle—what one might dub the "Brezhnevist" phase.
The slogan of this third phase is Order, and its function is stabilization. The system has been balanced too long and too dangerously on the historical precipice. The terror of pseudodespotism has led it to the brink of self-destruction. The unbridled play of reformist and liberal ideas during the Time of Troubles, having on the one hand proved incapable of breaking the historical spiral and reconciling the administration with the system, has on the other transformed the country into something unknown and frightening to the graduates of the academy of tyranny, administering it into what they perceive as total "disorder." In the first Time of Troubles, after Ivan the Terrible, the country found itself on the threshold of national disintegration; during the second, after Peter, more than a dozen draft constitutions competed with each other in the Russian political arena; before the Polish uprising of 1863, the administration was apparently unable to resist liberal tendencies, and the political emigre Herzen, with his journal Kolokol [The Bell], was perceived in Russia literally as a second government; the NEP threatened the "dictatorship of the proletariat" with the irreversible creation of a strong agrarian bourgeoisie, while Khrushchev's reforms of the Party bylaws threatened the complete transformation of the elite and raised the spectre of the creation of a two-party system within the one Party.
This slide into "disorder" has to be stopped. And the third phase stops it. Being eclectic in nature, it attempts to combine the contradictory parameters of both of its predecessors, to mix incompatible elements, to reconcile the terrorist heritage of pseudodespotism with the reformist heritage of the Time of Troubles.
At first the maneuver seems simple: to separate reformism from liberalism. One is reminded of a chess player playing simultaneously on two boards. On the first board, the regime is fighting the liberal heritage of the Time of Troubles. On the second, it is trying to exploit this reformist heritage in order to stabilize the system. This phase permitted the Assemblies of the Land after the first Time of Troubles in the seventeenth century. It created the "second aristocracy" in the eighteenth. It thought out and executed reforms under Alexander I and Alexander II in the nineteenth. It conceived and began to execute a land reform under Nicholas II. Finally, it tried to extend the NEP after the death of Lenin, and to sustain economic reform after the overthrow of Khrushchev.
Just as in its rigid phases the Russian political structure comes to resemble despotism (thereby seducing the "despotist" historians), so in its relaxed phases it comes to resemble absolutism (thereby seducing the "absolutist" historians). However, its real secret, it seems to me, consists in the fact that, just as it is not fated to become despotism, neither is it fated to become absolutism. The third phase of the cycle can therefore more suitably be called pseudoabsolutism.
I add "pseudo" because, as will be remembered, the social and economic limitations on power are indissolubly connected with ideological ones, and constitute their obverse side. When you suppress one, you cannot retain the others. The attempt to do so expresses the basic contradiction of pseudoabsolutism, and the seed of its destruction. As the intelligentsia of the country comes of age and matures, acquiring the experience lacking during the Time of Troubles, the administration more and more sees in it a mortal danger.