Only one thing remained incomprehensible: What was one to do with the subsequent four centuries of Russian history? How was one to explain why all these wonders somehow did not take place? More than this, that precisely the reverse occurred: Russia was thrown down into "the darkness of nonexistence," and the "progressive service-landowner" suddenly became the organizer of feudal slavery.
Pokrovskii was a scholar first and then a Marxist: apparently the bourgeois leavening was still too strong in him. In any case, he did not even try to distract the reader's attention from the metamorphosis of the service landowner, which made nonsense of his whole conception. This metamorphosis always remained mysterious and inexplicable for Pokrovskii:
His [the service landowner's] victory should have signified a major economic success—the final triumph of the "monetary" system over the "subsistence" one. In fact, we see something quite different. Obligations in kind, crystallized into a complex whole known under the name of "serfdom," again take center stage and are maintained, this time firmly and for a long interval. . . . Having suppressed the feudal votchina owner in the name of economic progress, the service landowner very swiftly himself becomes a backward type: this is the paradox with which the history of the Russian economy of the epoch of [Ivan] the Terrible concludes.2"
However, this paradox did not compel Pokrovskii to review the economic apologia for the Oprichnina or to doubt the Marxist understanding of history. He doubted himself; he doubted the possibilities of the scholarship of that time, pinning his hopes on the idea that the "followers in the cause of applying the materialist method to the data of the Russian past will be more fortunate."2' Such was the testament of the patriarch of Soviet historical scholarship.
5. The Political Meaning of "Collectivization"
On the ruins of Platonov's "misunderstanding through and through" and Pokrovskii's "paradox," there developed—and it is functioning prosperously to this day—the so-called "agrarian school" of Soviet historians. By the authoritative testimony of N. E. Nosov, "it is precisely this point of view which is brought forward in the works of B. D. Grekov, I. I. Polosin, I. I. Smirnov, A. A. Zimin, R. G. Skrynnikov, Iu. G. Alekseev, and it is perhaps the most widespread up to the present time." [209] Almost all of the luminaries of Soviet historiography are mentioned in this list.
This looks all the more paradoxical inasmuch as the Soviet historians themselves showed that there was no "paradox" in the economic results of the "revolution from above." In the first place, large-scale landholding in medieval Russia by no means corresponded to large- scale farming. Quite the contrary: the former was only an organizational form, the protective envelope within which the truly progressive process of peasant differentiation took place. Here, as Nosov says, "development proceeds along a new, bourgeois, and nonfeudal path. We have in mind the social differentiation of the countryside, the buying up of land by the rich . . . the development of commercial and industrial capital by peasants. But it was precisely this process that was sharply slowed down, and then totally stopped, on service landholdings."[210] Academician S. D. Skazkin describes the metamorphosis of the "votchina" farm into a service farm in precisely the same way: "The landlord's land is transformed into a large-scale, purely entrepreneurial operation. In connection with this, the significance of the peasant farm also changes. . . . The peasant farm becomes a source of unpaid labor power, and for the peasant himself, his allotment and farm become, as Lenin expressed it, 'wages in kind.'"[211]
One would have to be very incurious not to wonder what Skazkin and Nosov are actually describing—the economic results of the "Oprichnina of Ivan" in the 1570s, or those of Stalin's "collectivization" in the 1930s. Did not the real meaning of this "collectivization" consist in the same "change in the significance of the peasant farm" of which Skazkin is speaking? In the same transformation of the household plot, left in the possession of the peasant as his "wages in kind," of which Lenin spoke? In the same transformation of the peasants' labor into "unpaid labor power" for the working of the "landlord's land" of the collective farms? Is it not true that the economic significance of "collectivization" consisted in the violent arrest of the process of peasant differentiation, and in the scattering and robbing of the "best people" of the Russian countryside (which in Stalin's time was called "dekulakization"), of which Nosov speaks?
The analogy between the "collectivization" which destroyed Russian agriculture in the 1930s and the "agrarian revolution" of the 1570s is inescapable. In both cases, the economic result of the Oprichnina was autocratic reaction, which put an end to the process of bourgeois differentiation of the peasantry, and thereby destroyed not only the fruits of previous development, but also the potential it embodied. The Oprichnina rises before us as a monstrous embodiment of reaction, in both the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, in the economic sense no less than in the political. And this is the real answer to "Pokrovskii's paradox"—one delivered not by the logic of the historians but by the logic of history itself.
6. The Militarist Apologia for the Oprichnina
In the 1930s, the so-called "Pokrovskii school" collapsed. The maturing regime no longer needed a "revolutionary" historiography. It thirsted rather for stabilization and national roots. It needed a historiography which would unify it with the Russian historical tradition, not one which cut it off from that tradition. And, for this purpose, it was willing to make sacrifices, and prepared to prefer old professors to new revolutionaries. R. Iu. Vipper, for example, who first published his book on Ivan the Terrible in 1922, when there was no smell of Marxism about him (in fact, Vipper, along with Platonov and Ia- rosh, belonged to the right wing), was able twenty years later to write proudly in the preface to the second edition of this book: "I am glad of the fact that the basic positions of my first work have remained unshaken and, it seems to me, have been confirmed once more by the studies of highly authoritative scholars in the past two decades."" Vipper was entitled to be triumphant: the Marxists had come to him, and not he to the Marxists. And once again, like Kavelin in the 1840s and Platonov in the 1920s, he advanced the standard and invincible justification of "the studies of the past two decades."
But even taking all this into account, it is difficult to explain the solemn manifestations of loyalty to Ivan the Terrible—the new coronation of him in Russian historiography—which occurred in the 1940s. It would probably have been unimaginable if Russia had not, during the previous decade, entered the most severe phase of pseudodespotism in its history, with all the traditionally characteristic attributes: a "new class," an explosion of modernization, total terror, a militarist-nationalist delirium, and, of course, a new Ivan the Terrible. Once again, its traitorous boyars and the opposition (who were now called "the Right-Trotskyist bloc") were eliminated on a national scale. Once again, its Kurbskiis fled the country (having, incidentally, no notion of their medieval predecessors), and some of them (for example, Fedor Raskol'nikov)2" wrote desperate letters to the tsar from abroad. Once again, serfdom was introduced, and once again, the Baltic had to be conquered.