This was a kind of order of hermits, who like monks separated themselves from the world and struggled ... as monks do with the temptations of the world. The very ceremony of induction into the Oprichnina army was surrounded with solemnity, both monastic and conspiratorial. Prince Kurbskii . . . writes that the tsar gathered in to himself from the whole Russian land "evil men, filled with all vices," and compelled them by frightful oaths to have no commerce, not only with their friends and brothers, but even with their parents, and to serve only him, and in token of this, compelled them to kiss the cross.
Thus there arose among the thick forests . . . the capital of the Oprichnina, with its palace surrounded by a moat and a redoubt, and with checkpoints on the roads. In this lair the tsar set up a weird parody of a monastery . . . clothed these official robbers with monastic skullcaps and black veils, wrote for them a monastic rule, and himself climbed the belltower along with the princes in the morning to ring for matins, read psalms and sang in the choir of the church, and performed so many prostrations that his forehead was always bruised. . . . After dinner he liked to speak of the law, dozed, or went into the dungeon to be present at the torturing of suspects.
Tsar Ivan himself considered the Oprichnina which he had founded as his own private estate, a special farm or appanage which he had separated out of the rest of the state. . . . Ivan seemed to recognize that all the rest of the Russian land was under the jurisdiction of the Council, consisting of the descendants of its former rulers . . . who made up the Muscovite boyardom, sitting in the Duma of the Land.[38]
The non-Oprichnina portion of Russia, which was administered, as before, by the aristocratic Boyar Duma, was, however, completely removed from participation in political decisions and occupied, as it were, the position of an absolutist island in the stormy ocean of the Oprichnina surrounding it. I say "absolutist" because the latent limitations on power continued to function on the territory of the Zemshchina (at least until the Oprichniki intruded into it), while they had ceased to exist on the territory of the Oprichnina. At its very beginning, in the short period of the "revolution from above" from 1565 to 1572, the Oprichnina was in practical terms a monstrous form of coexistence of despotism and absolutism in one country.
From this point of view, the revolution of Tsar Ivan was an attempt to transform an absolutist political structure into a despotism copied from Byzantine and Tatar-Turkish models. This attempt both succeeded and failed. It failed because, by virtue of the resistance of the absolutist tradition, the Russian structure did not become a despotism. But it also succeeded, in the sense that the absolutist structure was deformed to the point of unrecognizability, and was transformed into something else, unheard of up to that point. Therefore, we may say that when two powerful cultural traditions, absolutist and autocratic, collided and intertwined with each other in the heart of one country for a brief historical instant, the result of this fateful embrace was the destruction of Russian absolutism and the creation of Russian autocracy. Inasmuch as the Oprichnina proved to be not only the starting-point, but also the nucleus of autocracy which determined, or so it seems to me, the entire subsequent historical process in Russia, it makes sense to consider it more closely.
The Oprichniki were the storm troopers of Ivan the Terrible. As soon as they had done their job, the tsar dealt with them the way Hitler dealt with his own Oprichniki on the Night of the Long Knives 370 years later. But terror alone was insufficient to carry out a radical transformation of the political structure. Something more was needed. And the fact that the Oprichnina was this "something" has been noted by the Soviet historians P. A. Sadikov and I. I. Polosin, both of them ardent apologists for Tsar Ivan. Here is how R. Iu. Vip- per summarizes their "happy discovery":
[The Oprichnina was] a separation from the rest of the state of a very important group of lands in order that here, the head of the state, without being constrained by traditional methods of administration, might develop in extenso new, more flexible, and broader forms of government, and might apply new methods of organization of the military and fiscal systems; the system worked out [in the Oprichnina] was supposed to serve, according to the reformer's plan, as a model and school for the Zem- shchina, which only by this means could be brought into the new and complex economy of the state.32
According to Vipper, the division of the country was justified by the fact that, as a result of it, a kind of laboratory model for the total mobilization of all the resources of the system was created—a model which required the abolition of all limitations on power. It required that the ordinary administration of the country (in this case the boyar government of the Zemshchina) be totally deprived of its political mandate and functions. It required, in short, the separation of the political apparatus of government from the administration, and the setting up, above the ordinary administrative structure, of a special institution, concentrating in its hands political control over the system being administered. It required the creation of a two-tiered structure of administration based on two parallel hierarchies of power. And for this the tsar needed the Oprichnina. While in the capacity of a proto- political police it was necessary for the establishment of total terror, in the capacity of a proto-political party it was necessary for the institutionalization of the division of functions between the political and the administrative powers (in modern parlance, between the Party and the state).
If Charles de Montesquieu invented the separation of powers, then Ivan the Terrible invented the separation of functions between powers. The separation of powers leads, as history has shown, to democracy. The separation of functions leads to autocracy. This was the true political significance of the Oprichnina, as I see it. The fact that it began as a direct territorial division of the country relates only to its historical form, and not to its political essence. This was simply a means for maximization of political control with a minimum of administration, given the medieval social structure.
Peter I, who set up his own Oprichnina 150 years later, no longer had any need to divide the country and split the government into administrative and political segments, since he created a centralized apparatus of political control in the form of his own guard. The embodiment of the Petrine Oprichnina was no longer the pseudochivalric order set up by Ivan the Terrible over the Boyar Duma, which continued to enjoy its "traditional methods of administration," but the autonomy of a guard set up over the senate. The role of Ivan the Ter- rible's Oprichnina capital—Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda—was played
32. Vipper, p. 125.
under Peter by St. Petersburg, the capital of the guard and the bureaucracy.
There was still less need for dividing the country under Lenin, who placed the Party over the Soviets, providing Russian autocracy with its Communist incarnation. And this was even more true under Stalin, who advanced the dual hierarchy of political control, placing the political police over the Party. Stalin's Moscow united in itself both Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda and St. Petersburg. Tsar Ivan's monstrous invention has thus dominated the entire course of Russian history.
CHAPTER II
THE SERF HISTORIANS: IN BONDAGE TO "STATEMENTS"
1. The Struggle With Elementary Logic
The unprejudiced reader, in familiarizing himself with the work of Soviet historians, must first of all be somewhat indulgent. Even when they have something to say, they do not as a rule have the opportunity to express it, let alone to interpret it, in an adequate way—at least in the field of theory. They are phenomenally strong and have gained worldwide reputations in source study, in the investigation of archives and in the analysis of documents—that is, in everything which is depoliticized and without current ideological meaning. But as soon as it becomes a matter of interpreting such documents—not to speak of making judgments about the historical process—they find themselves tightly encircled by inviolable canons, the infraction of which is equivalent to breaking the law in a modern society. These canons are the so-called "vyskazyvaniia" (statements) of the classical Marxist authors—Marx, Engels, and Lenin (until 1953 Generalissimo Stalin also had this rank, but he has now been demoted to private).