This is how Troitskii turns Avrekh's conception upside-down: it was not, in his opinion, despotism which grew into absolutism, but absolutism which grew into despotism. However, what is the category of "despotism" supposed to mean in this context? "The suppression of freedom"—when preliminary censorship was abolished, the peasantry was liberated, urban self-government was introduced, and the rapid economic modernization of the country was begun? That is, despotism is supposed to have increased precisely at the time when the outlines of what Shapiro would call "de facto limitations" on power began to emerge most clearly for the first time after the Oprichnina revolution of Ivan the Terrible?
The "valuable indications" have thus actually helped Troitskii, in complete agreement with Lenin, to erase any difference whatever between "absolutism," "autocracy," and "unlimited power." Avrekh began his attack with the rejection of Lenin's "vyskazyvanie." The punitive expedition of the witch-hunters, attempting to save Russian absolutism at any price, has returned to the starting-point of the discussion without even suspecting that all its efforts have been spent in confirming this offensive and unpatriotic "vyskazyvanie" of classical author No. 3.
When the chief "hunter," A. Sakharov, finally appeared on the scene with the job of, as it were, giving marks to the participants in the discussion, all that remained for him was to rubber stamp this result. Avrekh gets a D + (the plus is for having, at any rate, noted the "combination of feudal and bourgeois elements in the nature and policies of absolutism").[56] Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia gets a D — (the minus is for having heretically, "following Avrekh, discovered the fertile ground in which a typical Oriental despotism grew, which had been born somewhere in the period of formation of the Russian centralized state"). Shapiro gets a D for considering "serfdom the major and decisive feature for the evaluation of Russian absolutism."4' On the other hand, Troitskii, who "unlike the authors just mentioned, sees the basic socioeconomic tendency which brought Russia to absolutism in the birth of bourgeois relationships in the feudal base," gets an A. Davidovich and Pokrovskii, who see "a significant influence on the entire policy of the feudal state" in "the action of the class struggle of the working people,"4<i get an A + .
Sakharov himself goes further than all the other witch-hunters. He is not allowed to maintain a shamefaced silence about the terror of Ivan the Terrible, in speaking of the epoch of "the estate-representative monarchy," as Troitskii does. Nor is he, like Shapiro, going to distract the reader's attention by such insignificant details of the Russian political process as serfdom or the eradication of all representative institutions. He intends not to defend, but to attack—by making a devastating critique of the Oriental despotism of Western Europe. For this purpose, of course, one cannot make do with "vyskazyvaniia" alone. Here there is required the strong tradition, developed to a virtuoso level by generations of housewives raised in the communal apartments of Moscow, who have fought for their place in the kitchen under the age-old slogan "You damn idiot!"
Do the opponents criticize the Assemblies of the Land? But after all, "such a system is very reminiscent of the alliance of the Tudor regime with Parliament, [which] was assembled only in order to sanction the acts of an unconscionable tyranny." Is this not "Oriental despotism in its English variant?" Sakharov asks triumphantly. Do the opponents see despotism in the actions of Ivan IV? But why do they not also see it in the actions of Elizabeth I of England?
Between the "Oriental despotism" of Ivan IV and the equally "Oriental despotism" of Elizabeth I of England, the difference is not all that great. . . . Between these two forms of "autocracy" with all their "Eastern" accompaniments, in the form of secret police, brutal suppression of the mutinous nobility in England and Scotland, the colonial plundering of Ireland, the bloody legislation of Henry VII and Edward VI, by which tens of thousands of people were hanged and enslaved, with the approximately identical functions of the estate-representative system, there was no fundamental difference. The centralization of the state in France, particularly under Louis XI, was also marked by features of "Oriental despotism." The merciless executions carried out by Louis XI, the severe persecution of separatists, the destruction of the estate- representative institutions under Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Frangois I, the establishment of an extremely brutal punitive impressment, the plundering of the peasantry, the beginning of a broad expansion in terms of foreign policy—all this fits very well into the framework which our authors have outlined for the "Asiatic form of administration" in its autocratic phase. The centralizing French monarchs, Elizabeth I of England, and Ivan IV solved approximately the same historical tasks in the interests of the feudal class, and the methods of solution of these tasks were approximately identical. The Western European feudal monarchies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had not gone very far in the direction of democracy, relative to the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible. . . . The chambers of the Bastille and the Tower of London were just as strong as the cells of the Schliisselburg and the Alekseevskii fortress, the beheadings on the Place de Greve were no less merciful [лгс] than those on the battlements of the Petropavlovskii fortress or on the Execution Square in Moscow. . . . The absolutist monarchs of Europe, who were ahead of Russian absolutism in point of time, taught the Russian autocrats impressive lessons as to how to struggle with one's own people. These lessons had everything—police terror, barbaric methods of extracting goods from the people, cruelty, medieval repressions: in a word, all that "Asiatic style," which for some reason is stubbornly attached only to Russian absolutism."
All of the arguments of the Soviet "absolutists" are concentrated in this quotation, as in a lens. But doesn't the reader get the impression that, as Shakespeare has it, "the lady doth protest too much"? Certainly, if all the evil, all the cruelty and injustice visited on humanity by authoritarian regimes is to be attributed to absolutism, as Sakharov does, then Russian "absolutists" are no worse than others; in this
47. A. N. Sakharov, pp. 114, 115, 119. This argument on the part of the most aggressive Russian Marxist is followed without deviation by the most aggressive Russian anti-Marxist. Cf.: "There are two names which are repeated from book to book and article to article with a mindless persistence by all the scholars and essayists of this [anti- Russian] tendency: Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, to whom—implicitly or explicitly—they reduce the whole sense of Russian history. But one could just as easily find two or three kings no whit less cruel in the histories of England, France or Spain, or indeed of any country, and yet no one thinks of reducing the complexity of historical meaning to such figures alone" (A. Solzhenitsyn, "Misconceptions about Russia Are Threat to America," p. 802). For both A. N. Sakharov and A. I. Solzhenitsyn, the argument seems to begin and end with the personal cruelty of tyrants, never entering the field of political analysis.
abysmal authoritarian darkness, all cats are gray. Even there, however, we were gray in a somewhat different way. For there is no avoiding it, the countries of classical absolutism did not, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, know the fundamental facts of serfdom and universal service, which Sakharov carefully avoids when he so heart- rendingly describes the horrors of Asiatic despotism in Europe; nor did they experience recurring restorations of the ancien regime, again and again bringing terror—sometimes total—directed neither against those who struggled with the king nor against aliens or heretics, but against everyone who was merely fated to be born in that time and in that country. There is no more mournful reading than the description of the devastation wrought by the Oprichnina, in the official documents of Ivan the Terrible's time, which continue to revolve mechanically like millstones, describing what no longer exists. "In the village of Kiuleksha," we read in one of these documents,