The dream of "preeminent rule"—to implement which it was found necessary to lop off all the heads in Moscow capable of thought—led, in complete accordance with the historical logic of autocracy, to the opposite result. It was obvious, even to a foreign observer, only four years after the death of Ivan the Terrible (the tsar died in 1584) that something terrible lay in store for this country. "And this wicked policy and tyrannous practice, though now it be ceased, hath so troubled that country and filled it so full of grudge and mortal hatred ever since that it will not be quenched, as it seemeth now, till it burn again into a civil flame," prophesied Giles Fletcher.[132] Thus ended the unfortunate, forgotten, and by now almost unbelievable, absolutist century in Russia.
CHAPTER VII
THE DAWN
1. Methodological Problems
Intellectual history has its stereotypes. When we begin an analysis of the evolution of ideas, we are primarily seeking forms of classification by which we can most comfortably locate the proponents and opponents of various historical stratagems. For exarnple, it is convenient to divide them into "right-wingers" and "left-wingers," or into "conservatives" and "liberals," or into "ideologists" and "scholars." The special and unprecedented difficulty of Ivaniana consists in the fact that in this case not one of these conventional classifications works. The Decembrist Ryleev, a "left-wing" dissident of the early nineteenth century, and the historian Pogodin, a "right-wing" reactionary, fight on the same side of the barricades of Ivaniana; Ilovaiskii, a member of the "Union of the Russian People," or Black Hundreds, and Ravelin, a liberal of the first water, offer their hands to each other across the decades; Bestuzhev-Riumin and Belov, declared in all the Soviet texts on the subject to be representatives of "reactionary bour- geois-and-nobility historiography," merrily run in tandem with the authors of the very works in which they are denounced, Bakhrushin and Smirnov. How are we to explain these incongruities? Historians often tried to avoid this difficulty by simply declaring the writing of their predecessors, both of the left and of the right, to be unscientific. In some cases this has meant that the opinions of the predecessors were dictated more by emotions and prejudice than by analysis of primary sources. In others, so the pious Marxists think, the predecessors were infected with the ideology of obsolete classes, and therefore by definition incapable of having any communion with "genuine science."
Nowadays it is impossible, for example, to read K. D. Ravelin's review of M. P. Pogodin's article "On the Character of Ivan the Terrible" without smiling. Ravelin haughtily, not to say abusively, elucidates the "unscientific nature" of the writings of his predecessor:
Anyone who is at all acquainted with the course of our historical literature knows how much material has now been printed which was unknown and unavailable at that time [that is, in 1825, when Pogodin's article was written; Ravelin's review was published in 1846]. There were incomparably more prejudices. ... In addition, at that time Karam- zin's authority was still unlimited; he, for all his great and never-to-be- forgotten services to Russian historical scholarship, introduced into it completely unnatural views.'
From this it followed, naturally, that the more "material" was printed, and the fewer "prejudices" there were, and the faster "unnatural views" were replaced by "natural" ones, the closer we would be to the truth. An analogous point of view was held by Ravelin's contemporary and cothinker, S. M. Solov'ev, who explained the disagreements among historians in terms of the "immaturity of historical scholarship, and the common failure to pay attention to the correlation and sequence of phenomena. Ivan IV was not understood because he was separated from his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather." A half century later N. K. Mikhailovskii sarcastically noted that: "Solov'ev carried out this task, and connected the activity oflvan with the activity of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and pursued this connection even further into the depths of time, but the disagreements have not been terminated."2
After another half century, perhaps the most brilliant of the Soviet historians, S. B. Veselovskii, lamented: "The maturing of historical scholarship is proceeding so slowly that it may shake our faith in the strength of human reasoning altogether, and not only in the question of Tsar Ivan and his time."3
In the interim between these two pessimistic statements, all this did not, however, by any means prevent S. F. Platonov from presenting Ivaniana in 1923 as a triumph of "the maturing of historical scholarship":
In order to survey in detail everything which has been written about [Ivan] the Terrible by historians and poets, one would need an entire book. From the History of Russia of Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov (1789) to R. Iu. Vipper's work Ivan the Terrible (1922), the understanding of Ivan the Terrible and his time has passed through a number of phases, and has attained significant success. It can be said that this success is one of the most brilliant stages in the history of our science—one of the most decisive victories of scientific method.[133]
However, after Platonov died in exile, and the "appearance and dissemination of Marxism"—in the words of A. A. Zimin—"created a revolution in historical science,"5 and "guided by the brilliant works of the founders of scientific socialism, Soviet historians received the broadest opportunities to make a new approach to the solution of basic questions of the history of Russia,"6 everything became decidedly cloudy and got into a condition of even greater "immaturity" than was the case before Solov'ev. Whereas the latter had looked on Karamzin as a naive representative of "unnatural views" and a slave of idealistic "prejudices," the first leader of Soviet historiography thought even worse of Solov'ev than Solov'ev did of Karamzin: "So- lov'ev's views were those of an idealist-historian,7 who looks on the historical process from above, on the side of the ruling classes, and not from below, the side of the oppressed."8
Whereas Solov'ev, looking at the historical process from above, discovered that Ivan the Terrible "was indisputably the most gifted sovereign whom Russian history offers us before Peter the Great, and the most brilliant personality of all the Riurikids,"9 for Pokrovskii, examining it from below, Ivan the Terrible represented a type of "hysterical and tyrannical person, who understood only his ego and did not wish to know anything except this precious ego—no political principles or societal obligations."10
But what happened later could not have been foreseen either by Solov'ev or by Pokrovskii: these mutually exclusive views were suddenly amalgamated, forming a monstrous explosive mixture, which haughtily continued to call itself "genuine science."
To begin with, the Soviet historian I. I. Polosin, from the prescribed perspective of "the oppressed classes," discovered that the social meaning of the Oprichnina consisted "in the enserfment of the peasants, in the enclosure of the communal lands characteristic of serfdom, and in the liquidation of St. George's Day."" But, not being able to resist the temptation of looking at matters "from the side of
A. A. Zimin, Reform)i . . . , p. 31.
A. A. Zimin, Oprichnina . . . , p. 33.
The word "idealist" carries in Marxist discourse the special pejorative sense of a viewpoint or theory based on the assumption of the primacy of ideas or nonmaterial elements, rather than material factors, in the historical process and the formation of reality generally.
M. N. Pokrovskii, Izbrannyeproizvedeniia, bk. 3, p. 239.