What did the similar nature of their "tendencies" consist of, in practical terms? Ravelin explains: Ivan the Terrible
wished to do away completely with the high nobility and to surround himself with commoners, and even people of low birth, who were devoted, and willing to serve him and the state with no ulterior motives or personal calculations whatever. In 1565 he established the Oprichnina. This institution, slandered by its contemporaries and not understood by posterity, . . . was the first attempt to create a service elite and to substitute it for the hereditary nobility—to put the element of personal dignity in place of the element of blood and kinship in the administration of the state: a thought which later was carried out by Peter the Great in other forms.[167]
All of the three whales on which Ravelin's universe rests are revealed in this quotation with remarkable clarity. In the first place, the interests of the state are identified with the interests of the tsar (this, according to Aristotle, is the definition of tyranny). In the second place, the hereditary nobility is looked upon as the basic hindrance to the triumph of the "idea of the state," and as a barrier in the path of progress (and progress is therefore impossible without liquidation of the social limitations on power). In the third place, the interests of the "people" are identified with the interests of the tsar-state and the "new class" is presented as a bearer of "personal dignity." Speaking in my terms, the general direction of Russian history, according to Ravelin, is the transformation of absolutism into despotism, which is supposed to be the decisive condition for progress.
Remember that Ravelin wrote in 1846, at the height of the Nikolai- an phase of "pseudodespotism," when the results of the work of both "extremely great leaders" were evident. The Slavophiles summarized the state of the nation as follows:
The current condition of Russia presents a picture of internal disarray covered by a conscienceless lie. . . . Everyone lies to each other, sees this, continues to lie, and no one knows how it will end . . . And on this internal disarray . . . there has grown up a conscienceless flattery, which assures people of its well being . . . the universal corruption and weakening of the morals in society has reached huge proportions . . . here we see the immorality of the entire internal structure. . . . The entire evil proceeds from the oppressive system of our government . . . the yoke of the state has been established over the land . . . the governmental system . . . which makes a slave of its subjects [has created in Russia] a type of police state.13
Let us add to this that the "people" was truly oppressed by serfdom, which had reached the stage of slavery, and in addition to everything else, there was no trace left of the "service elite," for the sake of whose establishment the "extremely great leaders" had so cruelly terrorized the country. It had been transformed in some way, inexplicable at least to Kavelin, into a "hereditary nobility," as if neither Ivan the Terrible nor Peter the Great had existed. Furthermore, it now took a form considerably worse than the Muscovite boyardom—that of a slave-holding aristocracy. In other words, if the path to progress and to the triumph of the personality lay precisely in the destruction of the "great lords," then by the mid-nineteenth century even a blind man must have seen that this path had ended in a cul-de-sac.
Indeed, Kavelin writes as though he were living not in a real police state, but in an imaginary country where there is neither slavery nor a new "hereditary nobility" and a boorish uprooting of the "personality," and as if the power of the Russian state redeemed and justified all of this. How does this differ from the position of Lomonosov and Tatishchev, which led to the first "historiographic nightmare"? The forerunners of the "state school" wrote all of this openly, nakedly. Ravelin's conception was intended to put rouge and powder on the ugly mug of autocracy and to hide it under the civilized wig of "the element of the personality," to make it acceptable to the progressives and liberals of the mid-nineteenth century. In spite of all its arrogance, the scholarship of the time did not demand comparison, analysis, and evaluation of the "state structure" of Ivan the Terrible according to its real results in the surrounding world. It was content with abstract analogies and symbolic parallels.14 Between it and reality there lay an abyss.
Teoriia gosudarstva и slavianofilov, pp. 38, 39, 37, 9.
Otherwise how are we to explain the fact that Kavelin, guided by such a criterion of progress as "the complete destruction of the nobility," equally glorifies Ivan the
This permits us to make an approach to answering the question of how Kavelin was able to convince almost the entire Russian historiography of his time that he was right. In part, as we have seen, this is certainly explained by his opposition to Slavophilism. Kavelin introduced into Russian historiography the category of progress, and, to use his own words, represented "Russian history as a developing organism, a living whole, penetrated by a single spirit."[168] He was the only one who was, so to speak, able to contrast the Slavophile theory of the absolute uniqueness of Russia to a theory of its relative uniqueness. He introduced, too, a new and tragic dimension into the evaluation of Tsar Ivan's epoch. Whereas before Kavelin this epoch seemed the tragedy of the country, under his pen it appeared as the tsar's tragedy. From the "villain and beast with the mind of a petty bureaucrat," he was transformed into the lonely hero of classical antiquity, fearlessly throwing down a challenge to inescapable fate. Let us see how Kavelin does this.
Ancient, pre-Ivanian Rus' is presented as immersed in a way of life based on kinship. "There were no profound demands for another order of things, and where were they to come from? The personality, which is the sole fruitful soil for any moral development, had not yet emerged; it was suppressed by relationships of blood.'"[169] Tsar Ivan strove to arouse the country from the dangerous slumber which condemned it to eternal stagnation. What did he not do toward this end! He "destroyed the local rulers and placed the entire local administration under the complete control of the communes themselves.'"[170] This did no good. The boyars, excluded from local administration, concentrated themselves in the center, in Moscow. "The Duma was in their hands; they alone were its members.'"[171] The tsar tried to exclude them from the center. "The goal [of his reforms] was the same: to break the power of the great lords, and to give power and great scope to the state alone."19 For this purpose, "All the major branches of the administration were entrusted to secretaries: they headed the government departments; the great lords were almost completely excluded from civil affairs.'"20 Later, the tsar went after them in the Duma itself, "and introduced into it the new element of personal dignity."21 Again nothing happens: the tsar cannot appoint whomever he wants to whatever post he likes; the boyar tradition blocks his path, binds his hands, and nullifies all his efforts. There is no one who understands the tsar's grand design. There are no institutions: "The communes, however much Ivan tried to revive them for their own good, were dead; there was no public spirit in them because the former quasi-patriarchal way of life was continuing there."22 Alas, the great tsar lived in an "unhappy time when no reform was capable of improving our way of life."23 "Ivan sought for organs to implement his thoughts and did not find them; there was nowhere to take them from. . . . The elements for a better order of things did not yet exist in society itself."24 How did this struggle end?