Thus, because of his incorrect premise, Kliuchevskii was destined to become a prisoner of the artificial dichotomy of his opposite, Belov: either the aristocracy established the order of the state without leadership being vested in any one person (oligarchy), or the leader ruled without the collaboration of the boyars (autocracy). In this view, there was no third alternative, inasmuch as the latent conflict between "absolute power" and aristocracy had been dragged to the surface and exposed.
But there was a third alternative. The entire history of medieval Europe is a proof of this. It was precisely this conflict, now hidden and now open, which was the norm, the law of existence, and, we may say, the natural condition of all absolutist states. What was unnatural was the liquidation of the struggle, and the autocratic metamorphosis experienced by Russia in the course of the Oprichnina—the creation of the "new class" and the ensuing establishment of universal service.
We reach the same results in considering Kliuchevskii's premise from a theoretical point of view. The establishment of absolute monarchy did not by any means signify, as Belov thought, the mere substitution of the bureaucracy for the aristocracy as governmental personnel. It did not signify this, since absolute monarchy was an incomparably more complex system than the conglomerate of feudal princedoms which preceded it. And the complexity of the system demanded not simplification, but corresponding complication of administration. Therefore, absolute monarchy—whose specific character consists precisely in the heterogeneity of its political elite—is constructed of two elements which differ in their significance and in their origin: of bureaucratic and aristocratic personnel, of the combination of these in the most various proportions, and of political compromise between them.
Of course, the setting up of an aristocracy within an absolute monarchy is a painful and contradictory historical process, inevitably fraught with numerous conflicts. Certainly, in the course of these conflicts, the single leadership—as the Scandinavian experience, for example, shows—could base itself not only on the bureaucracy, but also on the city dwellers, the service landholders, and even on the peasantry. The aristocracy in its turn could seek political allies in various social strata. The compromise between them could take various forms. However, what is important for us here is that both the single leadership and the aristocratic personnel were elements in a single system of absolute monarchy, and as a rule set themselves the goal not of destroying each other, but merely of finding an advantageous form of compromise. I say "as a rule," because when in the France of the late Bourbons, the kings in fact tried to rid themselves of the political interference of the aristocracy, the absolute monarchy, as Montesquieu noted, began to degenerate into despotism. But, I repeat, as a rule the argument between absolute monarchy and aristocracy concerned the form of coexistence and not life or death—this is the essence of the matter. Nowhere in medieval Europe, except in Russia, had a "new class" replaced the old elite, thus creating, instead of absolutism, a political structure which was unique at that time, the autocracy.
In other words, contrary to Kliuchevskii's premise, absolute monarchy was in principle compatible with aristocracy as a guarantor of the social limitations on power. And it was not absolutism but autocracy, therefore, which required the total replacement of an aristocratic governmental class by a system of universal service.
But if Kliuchevskii's premise was incorrect, his conclusions also became dubious. This applies to the idea that "the life of the Muscovite state even without Ivan would have been set up in the same way in which it was set up before him and after him,"[201] and that the Oprichnina was a random and arbitrary historical accident, connected with the personal character of Tsar Ivan.
The connection of the Oprichnina with the Russian political tradition is demonstrated very easily by Kliuchevskii's own analysis— which, alas, entirely contradicts his own conclusions. Does he not assert that "the sovereign, remaining faithful to the views of an appanage prince holding patrimonial properties, according to the ancient Russian law, treated them [the boyars] as his household servants with the title of bondsmen of the sovereign"? Does he not quite clearly formulate the historical character of the Oprichnina, saying: "In the Oprichnina, he [the tsar] felt at home—a real ancient Russian liege lord among his serf- henchmen"? Therefore, not the tsar's personal character was the essence of the matter, but rather the ancient "tradition of the appanage prince holding patrimonial estates," which Ivan the Terrible in the course of the Oprichnina made universal.
It is another matter entirely—contrary to the opinion of the despotists, who see nothing but this tradition of the patrimonial appanage prince in Russian political history—that it not only did not dominate in sixteenth-century Muscovy, but hewed a path for itself only at enormous cost and with a great many victims. The Oprichnina itself is proof of this. If the Muscovite kingdom of the sixteenth century in fact merely reproduced the characteristic features of the Eastern Roman Empire, as Toynbee postulates, why, for example, did the despot need a coup d'etat, renunciation of the throne, manifestos to the people, a division of the country into two parts, an agreement with the boyars and the clergy, mass terror, a second capital, and a parallel apparatus of administration? According to the account of contemporaries, the tsar returned to Moscow after the revolution quite grey at thirty-five years of age. A Byzantine autocrator would simply have compiled lists of proscriptions, and one fine night, as the saying goes, have taken his opponents from their beds with his bare hands. Why did Tsar Ivan behave differently? Why did he need a revolution in place of a "night of the long knives," if not in order to break up the existing order of the state, created by a different, competing absolutist tendency?
Here, it might seem, is just the place to catch me up. For, objecting to Toynbee, I assert that Byzantinism—if by this we mean autocracy—was a fundamentally new phenomenon in sixteenth-century Russia; and, objecting to Kliuchevskii, I assert the reverse—that it was a traditional phenomenon. This is not a logical contradiction, however, but an ontological one. It reflects the fundamental dualism of Russian political culture itself, which already existed in Kievan Rus'. Before Ivan the Terrible—even despite the Tatar influence—absolutist (European) tendencies predominated; after him they passed over into the opposition, yielding the historical proscenium to the victorious autocracy.
does not intend to continue the autocratic policy of Ivan the Terrible. On the contrary, he publicly and solemnly renounces it. Physical safety, an end to terror, the introduction of the category of "political death"—this is what he promises in his declaration, which is a medieval analog to the famous secret speech of Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. But Shuiskii goes further: in the memorandum which he distributed to all the cities in the Russian land, we read,