As for the Tatars, in this direction as well Moscow was so strong under Ivan III that in the East it placed its own candidates as khans on the throne of Kazan', and was at the same time clever enough to channel the Crimean raids into southern Lithuania. If Sigismund Herberstein had visited Moscow under Vasilii Ill's father, he would probably have gotten an entirely different impression. For the wars which Russia waged during this period (Ivan III reigned for forty- three years) were none of them defensive. Not only were Ivan Ill's wars all offensive, they were rare for that time. After him, Muscovy passed over to direct attacks on the Tatars. Conquest of the Volga khanates eliminated the threat from the East, and a war was begun against the Crimea which could have eradicated the nest of slave raiders in the South (or, at least, have made it as uncomfortable for them to raid Muscovy as it had been during Ivan Ill's reign), if Ivan the Terrible had not suddenly "turned on the Germans."
This miscalculation cost Muscovy very dear, and not only in terms of human and material resources: it changed Russia's entire history. As I am trying to show, it actually did face the country with the problem of national survival. But this was a strategic error, and not a "frighteningly real necessity" following inevitably from the geopolitical position of Russia, as Szamuely tries to persuade us.
On the contrary, in the middle of the sixteenth century (that is, at the moment of the "explosion") Russia's geopolitical position was unusually favorable. It is not impossible that, if she had left the West, from which no one threatened her, in peace, and had concentrated on the liquidation of the threat from the Crimea, she could have established herself on the shores of the Black Sea within two or three generations, and put an end once and for all to Tatar control over her fertile South, and to the predatory raids of the slavers. These are not my speculations. This was the conviction, reflected in documents, of the leaders of the Muscovite government of that time, who, we must assume, knew at least as well what they were talking about as subsequent historians.
It may be objected that war is war, whether it is aggressive or defensive, and that it strains a nation to the limit, and in any case does not exert a favorable influence on its political structure. And this is true. But if wars in and of themselves can be the cause of the establishment of despotism, then the Hundred Years' War between England and France, which consumed four generations of the young people of those countries, should have given rise in the heart of Europe to despotic rigors of which not even Shah Abbas would have dreamed. At the worst, such wars produced tyranny—as was eventually the case in England and France—but not despotism.
Like China's influence on Japan, it did not seriously alter the conditions of power, class, and property. Ottoman Turkey's influence on 16th century Russia stimulated a regime that was already Orientally despotic, but it did not bring it into being. Tatar rule alone among the three major Oriental influences affecting Russia was decisive both in destroying the non-Oriental Kievan society and in laying the foundations for the despotic state of Muscovite and post-Muscovite Russia.1'2
Though Wittfogel proved unable to demonstrate this thesis, I see nothing illegitimate, let alone offensive, in it. Nonetheless, it seems to be this which, for some reason, annoys the experts most. In any case, in arguing with him, they emphasize primarily that Russia was certainly formed, for the most part, precisely under Byzantine (that is, non-Tatar) influence. Wittfogel himself felt this annoyance. "Let us for the sake of argument assume that the political institutions of tsarist Russia not only resembled those of Byzantium but were actually derived from them," he responded.
What follows with regard to the overall interpretation of Russia? If the Byzantine Empire was a variant of a multicentered society of the medieval Western type, then, of course, this would be very basic to our argument—but also very puzzling, since tsarist Russia, in contrast to the West, constituted (as generally agreed) a single-centered society. And if the Byzantine Empire was a variant of an Oriental despotism (as comparative institutional analysis suggests), then the establishment of Byzantium as Muscovy's "high model" only replaces an ugly Tatar picture by a culturally attractive picture of an Orientally despotic ancestor.14
Indeed, does our conception of the Russian political process change in essence if we dress up its origins in a Byzantine brocade coat rather than a Tatar beshmet? Is it easier for us to explain the riddles of Russian history if we replace Wittfogel's arguments with those of Toynbee? Let us see. In his essay "Russia's Byzantine Heritage," Toynbee writes:
For nearly a thousand years past, the Russians have . . . been members, not of our Western civilization, but of the Byzantine. ... In thus assuming the Byzantine heritage deliberately and self-consciously, the Russians were taking over . . . the traditional Byzantine attitude towards the West; and this has had a profound effect on Russia's own attitude towards the West, not only before the Revolution of 1917 but after it. . . . In this long and grim struggle to preserve their independence [from the West], the Russians have sought salvation in the political institution that was the bane of the medieval Byzantine world. Feeling that their one hope of survival lay in a ruthless concentration of political power, they worked out for themselves a Russian version of the Byzantine totalitarian state. . . . This Muscovite political edifice has twice been given a new facade—first by Peter the Great, and then again by Lenin—but the essence of the structure has remained unaltered, and the Soviet Union of today, like the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the fourteenth century, reproduces the salient features of the medieval East Roman Empire. . . . Under the Hammer and Sickle, as under the Cross, Russia is still "Holy Russia," and Moscow still "The Third Rome."11
Toynbee despises such workaday topics as irrigation facilities. You will not find in his work mention of the managerial class as a distinguishing feature of despotism. He does not even mention the term "despotism." He is a historian, not of material, but of spiritual culture. And it is natural that he is chiefly interested in such aspects of this history as the millennial hostility between the Romans and the Greeks, each of whom considered themselves a chosen people; as the fortunate failure of Charlemagne to restore the Western empire, and the fatal success of Leo the Syrian in restoring the empire of the East; as the schism between Western and Eastern Christianity, which was only the material embodiment of the same old Greco-Roman cultural hostility; and other similar topics. Even by the word "totalitarianism," he means essentially only the subordination of the church to the state[62]—that is, in terms of our conception, the denial of ideological limitations on power, of which Montesquieu had written some two centuries before him. In other words, for Toynbee, as for Solzhenitsyn thirty years later, economic peculiarities, social differences, and political structures are by-products of ideology, which—as a cultural tradition—is all-powerful and stands alone in determining the direction of the historical process.
But this quite legitimate attempt (even though it is no more valid than Wittfogel's) to explain the Russian political process on the basis of an implacable hatred between Greeks and Romans has its vulnerable points. Toynbee asserts that "In this Byzantine totalitarian State, the church may be Christian or Marxian, so long as it submits to being the secular government's tool.'"6 But by no means every specialist will agree with him that the "Marxian church" is merely a department of the Soviet state; others might assert the precise opposite—namely that the Soviet state is, as yet, a department of the Marxian church. At any rate, which is subordinate to which is not obvious, as it appears to Toynbee, but on the contrary a difficult and debatable point. For example, the followers of Solzhenitsyn in the Russian dissident movement are struggling, it seems, not so much for the separation of the church from the state, as for the separation of the state from the church.