the farm of Ignatka Luk'ianov was laid waste by the Oprichnina: the Oprichniki stole his goods, slaughtered his cattle, and he himself died; his children ran off to an unknown place . . . the farm of Eremeika Afanasov was laid waste by the Oprichnina: the Oprichniki stole his goods, and killed him, and he has no children . . . the farm of Melen- teika was laid waste by the Oprichnina: the Oprichniki stole his goods and slaughtered his cattle, and he ran off to an unknown place.'"
They go on and on, endlessly, like Russia herself—miles upon paper miles of this census of human suffering. Once again, a farm is laid waste; once again, goods are stolen; once again, the man has disappeared. And these are not at all "mutinous nobles," or Huguenots, or "separatists," but simple, peaceful peasants, who have made no attempt against the sovereign's power, and whose entire fault lay in the fact that they had goods which could be plundered, wives and daughters who could be raped, land which could be taken away. In England at that time, peasants were also driven from the land, and the violence practiced against them become proverbial ("The sheep ate the people"). But whereas in England the violence was committed by individual landlords, in Russia it was practiced on a massive, total statewide scale by the government itself and its terrorist police, before which the nation was entirely defenseless. Whereas in England this violence was the work of a strong, rising class of new landowners, which at its next step would stretch out its hands for power and carry
48. I. I. Smirnov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 99.
out a political revolution, in Russia it was directed toward the liquidation of the proto-bourgeoisie, and thus toward the establishment of brutal autocracy. Whereas in England this violence was the instrument by which feudalism was destroyed, opening up the path of progress, in Russia it shut it off like a blank wall. England paid this terrible price for its historical development, and Russia for its enserfment.
Theoretically, Sakharov proposed criteria for the description of absolutism which come down essentially to the practice of violence by the government against the people (or, in my terms, to divergence between the goals of the administration and those of the system). According to Sakharov, the regimes of Elizabeth in England, Ivan the Terrible in Moscow, Shah Abbas in Persia, and Sultan Mekhmet in Turkey, all equally "do not go very far in the direction of democracy," for all of them committed violence against the people. But does this help us to separate out the category of "absolutism" from the general mass of "unlimited monarchies"? Does it help to explain why Montesquieu regards the sliding of "moderate government" toward despotism as a historical catastrophe? Does Sakharov's criterion help to explain the "vyskazyvaniia" of his own classical writers? Why, for example, does Engels assert that the Russian autocracy is supported by an Asiatic despotism of which we in the West cannot even have any conception? Why did Lenin call Russian autocracy "Asiatically savage" {Complete Works, vol. 12, p. 10), "Asiatically virgin" (ibid., vol. 9, p. 381), "saturated with Asiatic barbarism" (ibid., vol. 20, p. 387)?
Thus, the more deeply we penetrate the laboratory of "genuine science," the more convinced we become that, behind the facade of haughty pretensions to absolute truth, there lies hidden a heap of paradoxes, confusion, and helplessness, a chaos of definitions. In it, absolutism grows out of despotism, as Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia would have it, and despotism out of absolutism, as Troitskii says. We discover from Likhachev that the "progressive class" brings serfdom with it, while the "most monstrous form of despotism" turns out to be progressive according to Cherepnin. And so on and so forth—and there is no end to it.
Not only is "genuine science" incapable of adequately describing the nature of the Russian political process; it simply has nothing with which to do so—neither theoretical prerequisites, nor working hypotheses, nor even accurate definitions. Any attempt to create so much as a preliminary conceptual base for the study of political structures is suffocated, as we have just seen, at the embryonic stage.
The enserfed peasants of Russia waited three hundred years for the Great Reform of 1861 to liberate them. They rebelled against serfdom, and these rebellions did bring them freedom—at least for a while. The enserfed historians of Russia rebel, too, against their miserable medieval "science." Let us hope that these scholars will not have to wait another two hundred years for their 1861.
CHAPTER III
THE "DESPOTISTS": CAPTIVES OF THE BIPOLAR MODEL
1. The Three Faces of "Russian Despotism"
The nature and origin of the Russian political structure is obviously not the most urgent question in the Western literature on the philosophy of history. At least, it was difficult for me to find as representative a debate among the "despotists" as the one among the "absolutists" which I have just analyzed. For this reason, I prefer to take another route in this chapter. I have chosen three well-known names, which from my point of view symbolize three main tendencies in the interpretation of "Russian despotism"—the "Tatar," the "Byzantine," and the "Patrimonial." They are, respectively, Karl Wittfogel, Arnold Toynbee, and Richard Pipes (I consider Tibor Szamuely's book The Russian Tradition here only as a supplementary argument to Witt- fogel's "Tatar" interpretation).
I am proceeding from the assumption that these authors represent more or less fully the spectrum of arguments in the Western literature dealing with the nature and origin of the Russian political structure. I respect their hypotheses, although I cannot agree with them. As distinct from the "vyskazyvaniia'' which we considered in the last chapter, they are interesting to argue with, not to speak of the fact that this permits us to throw some additional light on the problem which concerns us. Nevertheless, I cannot help saying in advance that it was difficult for me to find in these fluently, and sometimes even brilliantly, expressed conceptions, very much of relevance to the actual historical process in Russia. It may be that the reason for this (at least, this feeling never left me) is that the authors mentioned have reached their conclusions not so much as a result of studying its historical development as through an a priori resolve to prove that Russia belongs to the despotic family of nations.
However this may be, in passing from the absolutists to the despotists, the unprejudiced reader will be easily persuaded that only the direction of the emotional thrust—only its sign (plus for minus)—is changed. The despotists are obviously not too friendly to Russia, but the picture remains the same: black-and-white. The spectrum of concepts is limited to the bipolar model, to the fateful contrast between "multicentered" and "single-centered" civilizations (Wittfogel), or "Western" and "totalitarian" (Toynbee), or "monarchy" and "patrimonial state" (Pipes). In short, we are dealing with the same absolutism and despotism, under different pseudonyms. This fact, to say the least, seriously complicates the analysis of the Russian historical process for our authors—to the degree that it proves difficult to explain many aspects of this process, not to speak of its origin and nature, with the aid of their hypotheses. This is precisely what I will now try to show.