The debate over Ivan IV's reign is not over miniscule details—there is no agreement on the meaning of the whole period. Lack of source material is hardly to be blamed for this. Even a cursory examination of Karamzin's, Solov'ev's and, for example, A. A. Zimin's and I. I. Smir- nov's writing on Ivan will reveal that the most essential sources were already available and known to Karamzin, and that Zimin and Smirnov have but a slight edge over Solov'ev.24
But if all the documents necessary for a rational formulation of the "meaning of the whole period" are to hand, why has this question not been formulated rationally? It seems to me that the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible was not only a political revolution which doomed Russia to a strange cyclical reproduction of its history, and an economic revolution which condemned it to the alternation of periods of feverish modernization with long periods of stagnation (repeated attempts to "overtake and pass Europe" always ending in dependence on Europe), it was also a cultural revolution which imposed the stereotype of autocracy, and an inability to escape from its limits, on many of the best minds of Russia, including those of her historians.
"Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine," wrote Mark Twain. "Any kind of royalty, howsoever modified, any kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you."[14] You will not believe it precisely because the angle from which you observe your own political status, and the criteria by which you evaluate it, are firmly introjected into your consciousness by the social milieu in which you were born and brought up, because it is programmed into you by the political culture of your nation, which you took in with your mother's milk.
Ivaniana is not only a sad story from the distant past, but bears on modern Russia too, and, most important of all, on the future of my country. That is the major hypothesis of this book, and what makes my task such a personal, complex, and dramatic one.
7. Scholarship and Expertise
We know what a miserable place hypotheses occupy in history, but we do not see any reason to discard without consideration everything that seems probable to us. . . . We by no means acknowledge a fatalism which sees in events their absolute inevitability: this is an abstract idea, a cloudy theory, introduced from speculative philosophy into history and natural science. What has occurred, of course, had reason to occur, but this by no means signifies that all other combinations were impossible: they became so only thanks to the realization of the most probable of them—that is all we can assume. The course of history is by no means so predetermined as is usually thought.
ALEKSANDR HERZEN*'
Why are historians so afraid of naive questions, of diachronic speculation, of historical generalizations, and fundamentally new approaches? Longing, evidently, for the days when "dreams of historical generalizations were followed, but not replaced by the assiduous collection of historical sources," Erwin ChargofF of Columbia University remarked not long ago on the fact that the rise and institutionalization of the expert have driven out what was once called scholarship. "In other words, where expertise prevails wisdom vanishes," he concludes.92
Conventional history avoids diachronic enquiry that overleaps the bounds of established specialization—comparing sixteenth-century situations with modern ones, for example. But to me such speculation seems not only necessary, but natural, for my aim is to analyze not artificially separated events in Russian history, but Russian history as a whole—a totality in which all events are not only interconnected, but also influence each other in the most fundamental way—whether they happened in the sixteenth or in the twentieth century.
This book makes no claims to be the result of the "assiduous collection of historical sources," fashionable cliometrics, or fresh archival discoveries. Rather, it is a new interpretation of well-known facts, replete with hypotheses and speculation. As such, it is an open acknowledgment that the past has something to teach us. It is impossible to write history once and for all—to canonize theory like a medieval saint, or tie it to the land like a medieval peasant—and to rethink old facts can be equivalent to rediscovering them. In any case, I am concerned here primarily with what might have happened; not so much with results as with possibilities.
"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'" John Greenleaf Whittier proclaimed sententiously, and I am all too aware of how open I leave myself to such dismissal. But though the question "And what if . . . ?" may sound childish to the academic ear, it nonetheless transforms the historian from a mere clerk of the court of history, dispassionately registering verdicts handed down by higher judges, whose decisions are forever beyond appeal, into a participant in the historical process. History, too, becomes a living school of human experience rather than a compendium of diverse information, useful, if at all, for training the memories of students.
If an anti-Tatar strategy had been implemented in the 1550s, Russian history would undoubtedly have taken on an entirely different guise. More than this, however, recognition of an alternative, European source of Russian political culture enables us to explain many things which are otherwise inexplicable: the constant rebirth, in a somber "garrison state," of drafts for constitutions and plans for reform and the indestructibility of the political opposition.
This is no mere scholastic exercise. For the Russian opposition it is a matter of life and death. The conundrum of Russia's absolutist century is bound up with the problems of its present: do the current oppositionists have national roots, for example, or are their ideas imported into this garrison state from the West along with Coca Cola and modern technology? Is it possible for this country to have a decent European future?
"The Muscovite high nobility or service elite occupied the highest positions in a society and an administrative system that shared characteristics with many contemporary polities and societies but was, in the final analysis, unique," writes Robert Crummey, a modern American historian. On the one hand, this was a patrimonial, aristocratic elite, whose representatives, "like their counterparts to the West . . . derived the core of their income from ownership of land and power over the peasants who lived on it." On the other hand, they were "imprisoned in a system of universal service to an absolute ruler like the
Ottoman. It was precisely this combination of land ownership, family solidarity, and compulsory state service that made the Muscovite high nobility unique."[15]
I am in full agreement with this perceptive conclusion. It is exactly because of this uniqueness that I call the Russian political structure an autocracy, differing both from absolutism (where there was no obligatory service) and from despotism (where the elite was never in a position to transform itself into an aristocracy). The only thing which disturbs me in Crummey's schema is the chronology. In fact, up to the middle of the sixteenth century, refusal to perform service was not regarded as a crime in Russia (at least according to law), and two centuries later it again ceased to be regarded as such. If we employ Crummey's criteria, it transpires that the Russian elite (and the Russian political structure) was "unique" only during these two centuries. And before this? And afterwards? Was it then perhaps similar to its Western counterparts? Or to the elite of the Ottoman Empire? Why was it that the Ottoman elite appears to have been incapable of overcoming the bondage of universal service, while the Russian elite succeeded?