Thus the liberal Iurii Krizhanich was exiled to Siberia in the seventeenth century. For Catherine II, Aleksandr Radishchev, author of A Journey From Petersburg to Moscow, was, in her own words, "more dangerous than Pugachev" (the leader of a mass peasant uprising which shook Russia in the eighteenth century). The liberal Aleksandr Herzen seemed in the second half of the nineteenth century more dangerous than a foreign invasion. The liberal Pavel Miliukov was perceived at the beginning of the twentieth century as public enemy No. 1. The contemporary government of Russia struggles with the liberal Andrei Sakharov as with a foreign power. It may even seem that it does not understand its own interests. For in what do the interests of this aristocracy (or aristocratizing elite) which dominates the phase of pseudoabsolutism always consist, if not in the firming up of social limitations on power? And who but the intelligentsia of the country, focused in the opposition (open and latent), are capable of working out a strategy which will guarantee the limitations on power against the restoration of the ancien regime?
This gradual growth of conservatism explains the evolution of pseudoabsolutist regimes in the second half of the reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century (accompanied by the seemingly organic dying away of the Assemblies of the Land); in the second half of the reign of Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century (marked by the end of a flirtation with "enlightened absolutism"); in the second half of the reign of Alexander I in the nineteenth (with its abandonment of constitutional plans and its routing of the universities); and, finally, in our own day, in the second half of the Brezhnev administration. This growth of conservatism is reflected also in the gradual abandonment by the administration of internal reforms, focusing instead on foreign adventures. This was the case in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and it is the case now.
In short, in this late part of the third cycle, the system enters an age of political stagnation, accompanied by economic and spiritual decline. And this is a clear signal that a new cataclysm, a new restoration of the ancien regime is at the door. The drama which England experienced only once, at the end of the Middle Ages (in 1660-89), which France experienced for an even briefer time (1815—30), Russia has been experiencing all the way through its tortuous history. One might say that it is developing through and by historic cataclysms. And for this reason, perhaps, it is even now, at the end of the twentieth century, still a medieval political system—an autocracy, as it was under Ivan the Terrible at the end of the sixteenth.
Let me try to describe the mechanism of these repeated restorations, as I see it. The removal of the liberal wing of the opposition by no means signifies the elimination of the opposition as such. It is precisely the increased conservatism of pseudoabsolutist regimes, precisely their obvious inability to solve the vital problems of the country which catalyzes and brings to the surface the dual nature of the opposition. The annihilation of the left "Europeanist" wing means, in reality, not a victory but a defeat for the "gray consensus" of the ruling center. For, by routing the left, they activate the right, transforming it into a real political force.
The rigid phase of the system has, chameleonlike, variously adopted the coloring of Westernism, as under Peter; of Russification, as under Alexander III; of open tyranny, as under Paul; of ideological isolationism, as under Nicholas I; and of Gulag-style industrialization, as under Stalin; but its essence does not change. What it aims at is the elimination (or the greatest possible reduction given the historical context) of the latent limitations on power, and removal from political circulation (often by the method of simple physical annihilation) of both the gray centrist elite and its liberal opponents. And this is when the cataclysm comes.[37]
8. An Explanation to the Reader
I am aware of the extreme vulnerability of my historical modelling. Some readers may find it an impermissible oversimplification, and others an arbitrary manipulation of entire historical periods, each of which, as we know, had its own inimitable individual aspect. I understand how difficult it is to believe that a historical process can properly be described geometrically. It is apparent that neither will I avoid the charges of having artificially organized my material and of being inclined to the same historical fatalism with which I reproach the conventional historians. However, instead of going into a complex philosophical discussion on this score, I will confine myself to a few comments.
In the first place, I do not in the least wish to imply that the analogous phases in different historical cycles were photographic copies of one another, not only by reason of the constantly increasing complexity of the autocratic system (to which I am always trying to draw the reader's attention) but also because of the infinite variety of historical circumstances and characters involved. Therefore, when I speak of models and analogies, I have in mind only and exclusively the identity of functions of the analogous phases of the cycle. In fact, the problem here lies only in whether the variety of historical circumstances and characters excludes the identification which I have mentioned. I think that it is difficult for the historian to avoid it in comparing, say, the periods of Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, as we have done. It would also not be easy to ignore the strange fact that the death of each successive tyrant, and not only of Ivan the Terrible, was accompanied in Russian history by a kind of reformist and liberal thaw.
Do not the strangely repetitive "eccentricities" of Russian history at least prompt reflection, even knowing that Nicholas I did not resemble Peter (although he tried to), nor Peter Ivan the Terrible (although he also tried)? The passion which Stalin felt for Ivan the Terrible is known to everyone in Russia who is able to read (and it will be discussed in detail below). Let us add to this the penetrating observations of Aleksandr Gershenkron as to the periodicity of economic cycles in Russian history and the constant alternation of feverish explosions of modernization with long periods of prostration. May we not assume that these economic cycles are somehow correlated with the phases of the Russian political cycles which are suggested here?
The other comment which I would like to make is that the cyclical character of Russian autocracy does not, in my opinion, contain even a grain of fatalism. Precisely the contrary: in its second and third phases, each cycle remains open to radical transformation and Euro- peanization. The Russian opposition has brought the country to the very edge of such a transformation many times. It is sufficient to recall its major reforms and plans for reforms in the 1550s, the 1600s, the 1660s, the 1720s, the 1760s, the 1810s, the 1860s, the 1920s, and the 1950s. If such a transformation had actually taken place, the Russian political structure would have lost its medieval character—which might have happened in the 1860s as well as in the 1960s, but unfortunately did not.
9. The Oprichnina
Tsar Ivan IV carved Russia into two parts—the Land (the Zemshchina) and the Oprichnina—each with its own government, its own capital, its own treasury and its own army. There is no more lively and vivid description of the sinister phenomenon known as the Oprichnina than that given by the remarkable Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii: