4. The Punitive Expedition
But this was not to be its destiny. The signal for the beginning of the witch-hunt had already been given. The military enforcers were preparing a punitive expedition to Prague. And the literary enforcers— knights of the "class struggle" and mercenaries of the "vyskazyvaniia"—had already saddled their horses.
At the very beginning of 1969, A. Davidovich and S. Pokrovskii let loose a devastating salvo against Avrekh, accusing him of "an attempt to counterpose the historical process in the West . . . and in Russia."[52]In point of fact, they asserted, there is no "fundamental difference between Russian absolutism and the classical type."[53] For every sort of absolutism is the product of the struggle of exploited classes against exploiters. "The rebellions in the cities in the mid-seventeenth century and the peasant war of 1670-71 showed the ruling class of feudal lords the need to sacrifice some of their medieval privileges in favor of the unlimited power of the tsar for a successful struggle with a mutinous people."34
In the fury of the hunt, the rout of Avrekh seemed inevitable; whole pages of "vyskazyvaniia" whistled around his head. But the hunters somehow failed to notice that they had fallen into their own trap. In fact, they say, "Lenin defined Russian absolutism as 'the landlord state' [Complete Works, vol. 17, p. 309], 'the serf-owning autocracy' [ibid., p. 310], 'the dictatorship of the serf-owning landlords' [ibid., p. 325], 'the land-owner government of the autocratic tsar' [ibid., vol. 20, p. 329]." "So what?" the unsophisticated reader may ask. So, "in the light of all these statements by the classical authors of Marxism- Leninism, it is abundantly clear that the conclusions of A. Avrekh concerning absolutism . . . are an obvious distortion of historical reality." (As we see, it is not historical reality which verifies the "vyskazyvaniia," but the "vyskazyvaniia" which verify historical reality.) It follows indisputably, the hunters think, that "absolutism [the autocracy] ... is the personification of the dictatorship of the serf-owning service nobility."35 Here the trap shuts. For what do we do then with classical French or British absolutism, where there is no trace of a "serf-owning service nobility"? How did a nonexistent class carry out its dictatorship there? And if it did not carry it out, then what becomes of absolutism?
Having barely indicted Avrekh for a terrible heresy and solemnly declared that "it is incorrect to counterpose Russian absolutism to Western European,"36 the hunters thus immediately fell into a still more terrible heresy, making it ultimately impossible to compare Western absolutism and Russian autocracy in any way.
The next disputant, S. Troitskii, as we might expect, struck at Avrekh from another angle, accusing him of separating the "superstructure" from the "base," and of "trying to explain the origin of absolutism in Russia without connecting it with the genesis of bourgeois relationships."37 Following this, by all the rules for an accusation of political unreliability, comes a long passage about the suspicious closeness of Avrekh's views (and likewise those of A. Chistozvonov) to the view taken by the bourgeois historian P. N. Miliukov. No, Troitskii personally does not see any particular problem in the fact that "here there is an echo of the views of a bourgeois historian." But still, any normal person will understand that "in the works of the classical authors of Marxism-Leninism [and not in any clouded bourgeois source], there are valuable indications which help us to clear up what historical causes called for the transition to absolute monarchy in Russia."38
We see at once what these "valuable indications" help Troitskii to clear up. Here is his line of reasoning. "The Russian bourgeoisie was in fact weak and few in number at the initial stage of its development."39 But in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was also weak
Ibid., pp. 60-61.
Ibid., p. 62.
S. M. Troitskii, "O nekotorykh spornykh voprosakh istorii absoliutizma v Rossii," p. 135.
Ibid., p. 139.
Ibid., p. 142.
in France and Holland. "And since this was so, it needed the support of the royal power."4" And the royal power helped it, just as the royal power did in Russia. Thus, carefully avoiding the "equilibrium" compromised by Avrekh, Troitskii still tries to create the impression that absolutism in Russia was nevertheless formed under the influence of the "demands of the bourgeoisie," and that the bourgeoisie "struggled for their implementation against the ruling class of feudal lords."[54] Having driven the long-suffering "equilibrium" out of the door, he attempts to drag it back through the window. Unfortunately, the "valuable indications" once again work against their adept. For in speaking of an equilibrium, Engels had in mind by no means the weakness of the bourgeoisie and the help given it by the state, but precisely the reverse—the weakness of the nobility, which made possible the independence of the state from both of these social groups. And the nobility in Russia, as distinct from the bourgeoisie, did not grow weak, but rather grew strong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If we are to believe the allies of Troitskii, Davidovich, and Pokrovskii, this nobility was even implementing a serf-holding dictatorship in Russia at this time. How, then, does the dictatorship of the serf-owners mesh with the independence of the absolutist state?
In conclusion, Troitskii goes after Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia's concept of despotism as the starting-point of the Russian political process. And, to tell the truth, the destruction of this concept presents no great difficulties, since it is based not so much on concrete analysis, as on those same "vyskazyvaniia." But this is precisely what annoys Troitskii. How are we to drive back this genie, incautiously released from the bottle? How are we to neutralize the unequivocal sound of Lenin's "vyskazyvaniia"—for example, about the "Asiatic virginity of Russian despotism"?[55] And here in a desperate attempt to combine reality with "vyskazyvaniia," Troitskii ventures on an extraordinary action: he turns Avrekh's conception upside-down, and proposes his own "reversed" periodization of Russian history.
According to this periodization, the epoch of the estate-representative monarchy lasted in Russia from the fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century (would not Troitskii's head be taken off by Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina for such a heresy!); from the middle of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century there was the epoch of absolutism (here Troitskii would have to answer to the Oprichniki of Peter and Paul); the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (of course, before 1917) were the epoch of the gradual formation of despotism (!):
The intensification of the features of despotism and of the "Asiatic style" in the internal and foreign policies of Russian absolutism took place at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries, when, as a result of the victory of bourgeois revolutions, capitalism, the parliamentary system, and bourgeois freedoms had taken hold in a considerable number of Western European states. In Russia, on the other hand, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the serf order was preserved, reaction was intensified in internal policy, and tsarism became the main force of the "Holy Alliance" and the suppressor of freedom. It is precisely of this period, in our opinion, that we may speak of the growth of features of "despotism" and "Asiatic style" in the policy of Russian absolutism. V. I. Lenin in 1905 wrote about "the Russian autocracy, which lags behind history by a whole century."1:1