Alas, this is one of those sensitive areas, where there are not enough suitable and sufficiently patriotic "vyskazyvaniia." Ivan the Ter- rible's Oprichnina is another. No classical author (other than the demoted Stalin) took the trouble to leave a precise and unambiguous "vyskazyvanie" as to whether the Oprichnina was progressive or not. On the one hand, it must have served as the starting point of Russian absolutism, and to establish the presence of absolutism in Russia is not so much a scientific as a patriotic duty for Soviet historiography. Everywhere in Europe the establishment of absolutism meant the end of feudal disintegration and the formation of centralized states of the modern type. Why must things have been different with us? Russian absolutism serves as evidence of national respectability, as a certificate of Russia's affiliation with the European family—proof that (despite all the insulting conjectures of "bourgeois" historians) Russia has nothing in common with Oriental despotism. Inability to demonstrate the presence of absolutism in Russia is equivalent not only to capitulation to bourgeois historiography but, far worse, is an admission of the Asiatic character of the Russian historical heritage. And this is fraught with undesirable political and ideological consequences. Therefore, the Oprichnina simply must be progressive.
But on the other hand, it was precisely the Oprichnina which laid the foundations for the establishment in Rus' of serfdom, the most bestial, unproductive, and reactionary mode of exploitation of the people's labor, which subsequently fatally penetrated into all the pores of the Russian political organism. Who could call serfdom progressive? Especially taking into account the development of productive forces (not to speak of the relationships of production). There is a clear contradiction, and some way out of it has to be found. Soviet historians try with all their might to do so.
Discussing the epoch of Ivan the Terrible, one of the most eminent Soviet scholars, Academician D. S. Likhachev, uncompromisingly asserts, for example, that
of the two contending factions within the feudal class, the service nobility was undoubtedly progressive. . . . What Marx and Engels said about a progressive class can be applied, in a certain degree, to the service nobility. . . . The boyardom tried to preserve the old ways. . . . Kurbskii's ideal is the division of power between the tsar and the boyardom. This was a clear compromise between the old and the new—a compromise to which the most reactionary circles of the boyardom were compelled to resort under the all-conquering pressure of the progressive movement of history.
Sil'vestr, the ideologist of the "Government of compromise" (preceding the Oprichnina), is charged with treacherous and hypocritical machinations, in that "even when addressing the tsar, Sil'vestr speaks in a veiled form of the need to limit the sovereign's power.""
I do not know why a convinced Marxist is so terrified by "limitations on the sovereign's power," or why he treats them as a vice and as treason on the part of the "most reactionary circles of the boyardom." Neither is it part of the task of this section to dispute the depiction of the sixteenth century "new class" which helped Ivan the Terrible to destroy these limitations on power as a "progressive class" and the personification of "the all-conquering pressure of the progressive movement of history." What interests us at the moment is something else, namely that the "progressive class" was opposed not only by "the most reactionary circles of the boyardom." It was also opposed by the peasantry, which was being driven into slavery. The peasants resisted by raising mighty revolts, paying with their blood for the victory of the "progressive class" which Likhachev exalts. Then why does he not also call this still more terrible and bloody resistance to the "progressive movement of history" reactionary? This is required by elementary logic: if the "new class" indeed represented progress, then the forces resisting it—regardless of whether from above (the boyardom) or from below (the peasantry)—must have represented regression or, what is the same thing, reaction.
But Likhachev does not do this. The law forbids it: peasant wars, according to all the "vyskazyvaniia," represent class struggles—that is, precisely the above mentioned "progressive historical development." Thus, the "statements" mercilessly drive the poor historian into a logical trap, and compel him to the absurdity of cursing the struggle of the boyardom against the "progressive class" while at the same time blessing the peasantry's struggle against it. He is compelled to sing hymns to enserfers (the "new class") and enserfed (the peasantry) with identical inspiration.
Such tricks are not the exception, but the rule, and what we may call the routine, of "genuine science." Some years later, a no less distinguished scholar, Academician L. V. Cherepnin, reported to a Soviet-Italian congress that "in the peasant war [of the early seventeenth century] we can see one of the causes of the fact that the transition to absolutism in Russia was delayed by more than half a century."[43] But this is open heresy. It turns out that the class struggle, instead of speeding up the "progressive movement of history," slowed it down. This has to be Cherepnin's conclusion if he is to remain within the limits of elementary logic. However, such a conclusion would be not only heresy but public suicide. Cherepnin, of course, does not opt for this, not only because the "vyskazyvaniia" stand guard over class struggle and he has no taste for self-sacrifice, but also, to paraphrase Aristotle, because though the peasantry is his friend, absolutism is dearer. And absolutism, grievously involved in a mortal tangle with the Oprichnina and serfdom, must be rehabilitated at any price.
Once again, before the eyes of an astonished public, the scholar is suddenly replaced on the podium by a clown. Recognizing that "the attempts to establish absolutism, connected with the policy of Ivan the Terrible and expressed in the institution of the Oprichnina, resulted in an open dictatorship of the serfholders, which took on the most monstrous forms of despotism," Cherepnin goes on to assert, without drawing breath, that "by weakening the boyar aristocracy and supporting the centralization of the state, the Oprichnina to a certain degree cleared the path for absolutism."[44] In other words, the bloody enthronement of serfdom, connected with the "most monstrous forms of despotism," having successfully overcome the hindrance of class struggle, once again performed its service to the "progressive movement of history"!
Has Cherepnin really moved very far from the hymns to the slave- holding "progressive class" which we heard a decade earlier from Likhachev? And does not the formula of Istoriia SSSR [The History of the i/SS/?] (officially adopted in 1966 as a textbook for institutions of higher learning), which simple-mindedly asserts that since the Oprichnina was directed against the aristocracy, "it had a progressive character,"[45] sound natural in this context?
2. The Lost Paradise of "Equilibrium"
From the outset I must make the qualification that I intend to analyze only the philosophical aspect of the Soviet discussion on Russian absolutism (1968-1971), and not by any means the scholastic squabbling concerning the "relationship of the feudal and bourgeois elements in the nature and policy of the absolute monarchy" which has absorbed much of the energy of its participants. This squabbling seems to me the more scholastic in that the essential fact of Russian history during the period under study is unquestionably the routing of the Russian proto-bourgeoisie by the Oprichnina, and the blocking by serfdom of the formation of a middle class. After this, what could be the role of "bourgeois elements" in the Russian political process, and what is there actually to dispute? The uniqueness of the Russian autocracy during the first centuries of its existence consisted precisely in the absence of a middle class. And it is precisely this uniqueness which I would have discussed in the debate, had I been its initiator. But the initiator was the well-known Soviet historian, A. Avrekh, who began in a quite different way, with a brave reinterpretation of the famous "vyskazyvanie" by Lenin to the effect that the concepts of "absolutism," "autocracy," and "unlimited monarchy" are entirely identical. This statement cuts off completely any possibility of separating a definition of "absolutism" out of the general mass of "unlimited monarchies," and essentially excludes any discussion at all. And for this reason Avrekh tactfully attacks it. "In the second edition of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia," he writes,