Blood spurted everywhere in fountains, and Russian cities and villages gave voice to groans. . . . With a trembling hand we turn the pages of the famous Sinodik, and pause with a particularly heavy feeling at the short and eloquent notations: let the Lord remember the soul of thy slave So-and-so—"with his mother, and his wife, and his son, and his daughter."[177]
S. B. Veselovskii, apparently a religious man, was shaken for his entire life by another aspect of the matter:
The physical cruelty of the torturers and executioners seemed to Tsar Ivan insufficient, and he . . . resorted to extreme measures. . . . which, for the victims and their contemporaries, were more terrible than physical pain or even death, since they struck the soul for all eternity. So that the person would not have time to repent and make his final arrangements, he was killed suddenly. So that his body would not receive the benefits of Christian burial, it was chopped into pieces, pushed under the ice, or thrown out to be eaten by dogs, birds of prey, or wild beasts, the relatives and strangers being forbidden to bury it. In order to deprive the person of hope for the salvation of his soul, he was deprived of memorialization."
Not only to kill, but to exterminate your posterity to the last person, so that there should be no one to pray for your soul; not only to torment you here in this world, but to condemn you to eternal torment beyond the grave: such was the everyday practice of Ravelin's hero. And even with the all-saving "necessity of state," it was difficult to justify it, at least in the eyes of a person with a spark of humane instinct. Solov'ev simply could not keep consistently to Ravelin's abstract logic. "It is strange, to say the least, to see the historical explanation of phenomena confused with moral justification of them," he exclaimed.
Ivan cannot be justified. ... A person of flesh and blood, he was not aware of the moral and spiritual means for establishing law and order . . . instead of healing he intensified the disease, and accustomed us still more to tortures, the stake, the gallows. He sowed terrible seeds, and the harvest was terrible—the murder of his older son by his own hand, the killing of the younger one at Uglich, and the horrors of the Time of Troubles! Let not the historian pronounce a word in justification of such a person.[178]
It is all the more sickening, after this, to read the cold, mechanical reasoning of our contemporary I.I. Smirnov about the "inevitability of the Oprichnina terror," and the "objective necessity for physical extermination of the most prominent representatives of the hostile princely and boyar clans."[179] Unlike Solov'ev, Smirnov shows no awareness of the moral indecency of a policy which has the goal of physically exterminating people holding dissident opinions. Nonetheless, the idea of the "objective necessity" of the Oprichnina was introduced into Smirnov's mind by Solov'ev himself. By this logic, if the Oprichnina actually was the sole possible means of shaping the Russian state in the face of the treachery and rabid opposition of the forces of reaction surrounding the tsar, then the question is essentially solved, and one is left to argue only about the means. Solov'ev does not like terror as a means, but Smirnov does: it is just that he is not sentimental. On the same analogy, a historian who argued that Soviet Russia in the 1930s was indeed saturated with treason, that all the higher personnel of the country were conspiring against the state, and that the enserfment of the peasantry in the course of collectivization and the attachment of blue- and white-collar workers to their jobs was "historically necessary" to the survival of the state would be compelled to "justify morally" total terror and the GULAG. It seems that Veselovskii was right when he observed ironically that "all of Solov'ev's conclusions are reducible to the following reasoning: on the one hand, we cannot help recognizing, and on the other, we cannot help admitting."[180]
4. The Capitulation of Slavophilism
After Ravelin and Solov'ev, the second epoch of Ivaniana proceeded in three directions, the revisionist, the apologetic, and the "accidental." The first tried to offer resistance to the "myth of the state," which had suddenly evolved to the point of fetishism. The second directly developed the apologetic tendency of Ravelin, while decisively ridding itself of Solov'ev's tormenting moral doubts. The third tried to reduce the Oprichnina to a detail which, though monstrous, was random and nonessential. For our purposes, the most interesting figure in the first tendency was Ronstantin Aksakov; in the second, Evgenii Belov; and in the third, Vasilii Rliuchevskii. The rest of this chapter will deal basically with them.
The revisionist tendency of Ivaniana was represented by the Moscow Slavophiles of the nineteenth century. Much has been written about them. Nevertheless, their political position seems strange, not to say exotic. How is one to react to people who saw the greatest evil in any kind of constitution, and, generally, in any attempt at juridical limitation on state power, and at the same time fought valiantly for unlimited freedom? "Unlimited power to the tsar; unlimited freedom of life and spirit to the people; freedom of action and law to the tsar, freedom of opinion and expression to the people."[181]
In fact, Slavophilism is not, in the broadest sense, a specifically Russian phenomenon, let alone one belonging exclusively to the nineteenth century. Wherever autocracy prevails, or autocratic tendencies predominate—whether France in the 1770s or Iran in the 1970s, ancient China or contemporary Russia—at the opposite pole there arises something like Slavophilism. And the power of this "Slavophilism" is directly proportionate to the power of the autocratic tendencies. Superficially, "Slavophilism" (in this broader sense) is a desperate attempt to organize a political structure in accordance with religious dogma, whether this be Russian Orthodoxy, Confucianism, or Islam. However, its true nucleus is not so much the Gospels, the
Koran, or some other religious revelation, as a completely secular tradition which presupposes that an ideal society existed at some time in the past and was then deformed by an autocratic catastrophe analogous to the Biblical flood. Thus, the essence of "Slavophilism" is a romantic belief that, having stripped away the false upper stratum of modern political reality, we will find the eternal and immutable core of Absolute Good—free from the corrupt politicians with their artificial laws and stupid constitutions, free in short from all the "cunnings of reason," as Hegel had it. We can see this belief equally clearly in Confucius and Baudeau, in Homeini and Solzhenitsyn.
Let us remember that at approximately the same time—around 500 в.с.—there evolved at the opposite ends of the known world two opposed world-views. The culture of the ancient Greek polis developed the classical concept of the law as a political limitation on power—a means of control by the system over the administration. The culture of the ancient Chinese city-states developed the concept of Fa— of the law as a means of legalization of the arbitrary conduct of the government, or, in other words, of control by the administration over the system. Only by understanding this fundamental difference can we appreciate the revulsion which Confucius felt for Fa, in contrasting to it Li—the traditional system of moral and cultural values. Paradoxical as it may sound, the first historical variety of "Slavophilism" was thus, from my point of view, early Confucianism.