Unquestionably, the civil society in Russia (that is, social groups and institutions with their own structure and autonomous functions) appeared comparatively late and was quite weak at the beginning of our century. It is important to note the paradox of Russian history: the civil society was in part a creation of the state (the reforms of Peter I and Alexander II) and therefore its development was partly artificial and slow.13
We have already seen, and will see further, that the Russian aristocracy grew hand in hand with the Russian state, that the peasant commune was much older than the state, and that the Orthodox church was stronger than the state (at least in the time of Ivan III, i.e., centuries before Peter I and Alexander II). Thus, the artificial creation of Russian civil society by the state seems more than questionable. Speaking in the crude terms of the stereotype, it would seem that the state rather destroyed civil society in the course of Ivan the Terrible's "revolution from above." Moreover, it demolished this society again and again in the course of almost each new autocratic revolution.
But to say only this is still to say very little. The real question is how the state achieved these spectacular results. And here, instead of dolefully masticating obsolete wisdom, we are compelled to note the fateful role of the Russian right of the sixteenth century, the Josephites. They were the ones who succeeded in halting reform. They provided the messianic theory of the Third Rome. They supplied all the ideological ammunition for the autocratic dream of Ivan the Terrible, thus initiating the process leading to his "revolution from above." This is, moreover, what their spiritual descendants have been doing ever since. For centuries the Russian right has been virtually collaborating in the destruction of civil society. This has been the ultimate result of its ideas, its intolerance and hatred, its insistence on the extermination of its opponents. The Josephites deserved their punishment. What was unfair was that along with them the entire nation had to go to its Golgotha.
But if this is where the Pyrrhic victories of the Russian right have invariably brought the nation, should it not be one of the basic lessons which the Russian establishment—again and again faced with the same choice between West and East, between reform and stagnation—needs to learn from the historians? Is it not here that their part in the historical drama begins—especially inasmuch as the spiritual descendants and intellectual heirs of the Josephites are once again trying to push the nation in the same direction?44
44. See, in this respect, Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right.
CHAPTER VI
THE END OF RUSSIAN ABSOLUTISM
1. The Heritage of the Absolutist Century
The age of Russian absolutism was short, its end tragic. But did it in fact disappear without a trace? Was it simply an accidental episode in Russian history—a liberal intermezzo in the autocratic symphony, a vague dream, dissipated forever?
Let us assume that the Great Reform of the 1550s—the legislative introduction of local self-government on a national scale, accompanied by trial by jury and income tax—was not rescinded "in the stormy years of Ivan the Terrible's long wars ... by the voevodal form of vicegerency."[111] Let us assume that the Assembly of the Land called in 1549 was able to transform itself into a representative body, and the Boyar Duma into the House of Lords (or Senate) of this Russian parliament. Let us assume that Article 98 of the law code of 1550, stating that all new enactments (that is to say, those not provided for in the law code itself) were to be adopted only "on the report of the sovereign and by the verdict of all the boyars," actually played its intended role as a constitutional limitation on power.[112] Let us assume that the church lands were secularized at the assembly in 1551. Let us assume that the replacement of the amateur cavalry made up of landowners by a regular army (the creation of which began in 1550) was not dragged out for a whole century more, and that the military monopoly of service landholders was therefore undermined as early as the sixteenth century. Let us assume, arising out of this, that the total expropriation of peasant lands was avoided. Let us assume that service did not become universal in the Russian state. (It may perhaps be that the quarter-century Livonian War, which was doomed to end in defeat, and led to a national catastrophe, would not have taken place given such a turn of events.)
What, in fact, is fantastic in these assumptions? Even under the conditions of autocracy, all of this, without exception, was eventually carried out (or revived) for a longer or shorter period of time, as a result of reforms or revolutions. A regular army was created (at the beginning of the eighteenth century). Service ceased to be universal in the Russian state (in the second half of the eighteenth century). The church lands were secularized (at the same time). The institution of local self-government, with trial by jury and income tax, was reborn (in the second half of the nineteenth century). The Assemblies of the Land did become a form of national representative body (under the name of the State Duma) beginning in May 1906. The first attempt to realize Article 98 was undertaken as early as half a century after the publication of the code of laws, during the first Russian Time of Troubles, when Vasilii Shuiskii was elevated to the throne on May 17, 1606. As Kliuchevskii says:
The elevation of Prince Vasilii to the throne marked an epoch in our political history. On ascending the throne, he limited his power, and set forth the conditions of this limitation officially in a document which he sent out to the provinces, and for which he kissed the Cross on ascending the throne.[113]
The next attempt was made four years later, on February 4, 1610, in the so-called constitution of Mikhail Saltykov. Kliuchevskii thinks that "this is a fundamental law for a constitutional monarchy, establishing both the structure of the supreme power and the basic rights of the subjects."[114] And even so venomous a critic of the Russian political heritage as B. N. Chicherin (whom all of the "despotists" put together might have envied) is compelled to admit that this document "contains significant limitations on the power of the tsar; if it had been put into effect, the Russian state would have taken on an entirely different form."[115] One more attempt to realize Article 98 was undertaken by the supreme privy council in the so-called constitution of Di- mitrii Golitsyn (January 23, 1730). Finally, this article was once again "put into effect," 356 years after its adoption and 300 years after the first attempt to realize it, on May 6, 1906—only to be once more violated by the tsar the very next year, and finally abolished on October 25, 1917. But even after the 1917 revolution, the Bolshevik autocracy was compelled, although temporarily, to give back to the peasantry the land taken from it by the first Oprichnina revolution in the sixteenth century.
It is true that the autocracy distorted and mystified all of these developments, and deprived them of the integrated absolutist character in which they were conceived in the sixteenth century. It dragged out their implementation for hundreds of years, tried to use them in its own interests, and, when this proved impossible, destroyed them again. But does this change the simple fact that even the autocracy proved unable to ignore them, and was sooner or later compelled to return to them in one form or another? This apparently means that we are dealing not with something accidental or ephemeral which has disappeared once and for all from Russia's political heritage, but, on the contrary, with something fundamental and organic, which could not be destroyed even by total terror, and which, when driven out of the door, stubbornly returned through the window. In brief, we are dealing with an absolutist tradition, and with an absolutist alternative to autocracy.