Both sides felt themselves in an unnatural relationship to each other, which they, it seems, had not been aware of while it was developing, and did not know what to do with when they noticed it. . . . Boyardom did not know how to set itself up and to set up the order of the state without the power of the ruler, to which it was accustomed, and the sovereign did not know how to deal with his kingdom in its new boundaries without the help of the boyars. The two sides could neither gel along with each other nor do without each other. Not knowing either how to get along or how to part, they tried to separate, and to live side by side but not together. The Oprichnina was to be a way out of this difficulty.64
But this attempted compromise misfired, because "in the Oprichnina, he [the tsar] felt at home, like a real ancient Russian liege lord among his serf-henchmen, and could without hindrance exercise his personal rule, which was hampered in the Zemshchina by the morally obligatory respect for traditions and customs which were honored by all."[198] The tsar "assigned to the Oprichnina a task for which in the government of that time there was no special institution. The newly created appanage office was supposed to become also the highest institution for protecting the order of the state from sedition, and the detachments of the Oprichnina were to be a corps of gendarmes and also an execution squad in cases of treason."7' As a result, "the Oprichnina, in ridding the country of sedition, introduced anarchy, and in protecting the sovereign, shook the very foundations of the state."[199]A monstrous parody of a German knightly order—but without any conception of the code of chivalry—the Oprichnina simultaneously fulfilled the functions of a political party and a political police. Called into being, according to Kliuchevskii,
by a collision the cause of which was the system, and not persons, it was directed against persons, and not against the system. The Oprichniki were put, not in the place of the boyars, but against the boyars; by their very role, they could not be the rulers, but only the executioners of the country. . . . This means that for the direction which the tsar gave to the political encounter, his personal character is greatly to blame, and therefore it takes on certain significance in the history of our state.[200]
Thus, the premise for all of Kliuchevskii's reasoning is that "absolute power" and the boyardom "could not get along with each other." From this it follows that the Oprichnina, being incapable of resolving this conflict, takes on the aspect of a savage and bloody, but nevertheless historically accidental, episode in Russian history, due primarily to the personal character of Tsar Ivan. It is this, properly speaking, which constitutes the "accidental" thrust of Kliuchevskii's conception.
8. An Impossible Combination?
It seems to me that Kliuchevskii's error arises out of the fact that he does not attempt to analyze the category of "absolute power" (which in turn prevented him from distinguishing absolutism from despotism). Authoritarianism presented itself to him—and to his contemporaries as well—as a single, undifferentiated phenomenon. "Absolute power" is a synonym for "unlimited power." He conceived of limitations on power, as was customary for the "state school," exclusively as political (juridical) limitations. The category of latent limitations on power, which was the paradoxical core of the "limited/ unlimited" structure of absolutism, did not exist for him. And here a riddle arose: how and by what means could there nevertheless be in pre-Oprichnina Russia "absolute power . . . with an aristocratic administration," if from the very beginning, even under Ivan III, "the character of this power did not correspond to the nature of the governmental tools through which it had to act?"7,1
Kliuchevskii sees the answer to this question as twofold: first, this impossible combination was possible only as long as its impossibility was not recognized, and as long as the conflict between the two political forces had not come out into the open; secondly, the "personal character of Tsar Ivan" comes into play here. It turns out that,
Having acquired an extremely exclusive and impatient, purely abstract idea of supreme power, he decided that he could not rule the state as his father and grandfather had done, with the collaboration of the boyars . . . and he incautiously raised the old question of the relationship between the sovereign and the boyardom—a question which he was not in a position to answer and which, therefore, he should not have raised.7"'
Kliuchevskii admits that until Tsar Ivan "raised the question," the collaboration of the single leadership ("absolute power") with the boyar Duma (the "aristocratic personnel") proceeded relatively smoothly, and the disagreements which arose between the tsar and the Duma were smoothed over without reaching the level of political confrontation.
Its [the Duma's] structure, authority, and customary order of business seemed to be based on the assumption of an unshakable mutual confidence between its chairman and the counsellors, and bore witness to the fact that between the sovereign and his boyars there could not be a conflict of interest, and that these political forces had grown together, and become accustomed to acting in concert, hand in hand, and could not—did not know how to—proceed otherwise. There were collisions . . . and arguments, but about business, not about power; opinions about business came into conflict, but not political claims.™
And even the development of "bureaucratic governmental personnel," which was natural as the state grew and became more complex, could not destroy this order of things: being directly subject to the tsar, the bureaucracy in the government departments was transformed into an apparatus of executive power, which did not claim to take part in legislation and the adoption of political decisions. Thus, both the aristocratic and the bureaucratic personnel in this system of absolute monarchy had their own separate and nonintersecting functions, which did not contradict each other.
But all this was true only so long as the conflict was not discerned.
Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia (2nd ed.), vol. 2, pp. 180-81.
Ibid., p. 197.
Ibid., p. 348.
Once having arisen, it had to grow into a confrontation to the death, a war of annihilation, what is now called a zero-sum game. This had to be, because the organic incompatibility was, as Kliuchevskii liked to say, a political fact. There was no getting away from it. Had it not been Tsar Ivan, some other tsar would have detonated this delayed- action bomb built into the Muscovite political mechanism.
Muscovite political practice and theory compel us in equal degree to doubt Kliuchevskii's premise. In the first place, the conflict in the Muscovite absolute monarchy arose long before the birth of Tsar Ivan. As early as the 1520s, his father, Vasilii, had tried to establish a personal dictatorship by contrasting executive power to the boyar Duma. But, contrary to Kliuchevskii's supposition, this conflict did not lead to a fatal confrontation. Quite the contrary: under the Government of Compromise, boyardom, revealing an indubitable capacity to learn, responded with Article 98 of the law code and the calling of an Assembly of the Land. In other words, the Muscovite political machine turned out to be sufficiently adroit to leave room for political maneuvering. This was still an open system, on its way to achieving new political forms.
True, the attainment of these new forms ran counter to the interests of important social groups (in the first place, the church hierarchy). The political base of the government appeared to be divided, and the entire Muscovite political machine started to skid. And it was precisely because of this unstable equilibrium of forces—and not because of the "impossible combination" of absolute power with the aristocratic administration, as Kliuchevskii had it—that the character of the tsar emerged into the foreground. History, it seems, created three possible roles for this man. He could join the government in its efforts to crush the resistance of the church hierarchy, thus leading and actualizing the absolutist coalition of Non-Acquirers, boyardom, and the proto-bourgeoisie; in this role he could speed up the Euro- peanization of Russia. Or he could maneuver between the opposing forces in the Muscovite establishment, acting in the role of arbiter, and thus giving the system time to grow naturally in the same direction. Or, finally, he could go for a coup d'etat, creating his own political base in the shape of a "new class," and thereby putting an end to the process of Europeanization. For the reasons discussed above, he chose the third role.