We see still more clearly the results of the conventional approach (without any "what ifs" at all) in the attempt of another American historian to divide the history of the Muscovite elite (1450-1700) into three periods. "The first period," Richard Hellie writes,
lasted about a century, with 1556 serving as a suitable terminus. The first service class revolution in Russian history, initiated by mobilizing land (the pomest'e system) to support cavalrymen, gathered momentum in those years. . . . The second period also lasted about a century, from 1556 until the Thirteen Years' War (1654-1667), when the old middle service class cavalry was deemed technologically obsolete and replaced by "new formation regiments" of commoners commanded by foreign mercenaries. . . . The third period followed the Thirteen Years' War . . . and lasted until Peter the Great initiated the "second service class revolution" by again requiring service from everyone."
Let us not go too deeply into Hellie's periodization (which, incidentally, leaves us completely ignorant of why a second "service class revolution" was needed at all, and of what happened to the Russian service elite after this revolution suffered defeat). Let us merely note that Hellie here imprudently does what Crummey avoids—that is, he extends the uniqueness of the Russian elite (or what is, from his point of view, the same thing, its service-based character) to the period before 1556.
To be sure, the free movement of Russian peasants was indeed restricted in the fifteenth century, and the Russian nobles usually served. What is more, the traditional system of dividing inheritances among male heirs made service especially attractive to the latter as a means of maintaining and increasing their wealth. But, after all, the system of dividing inheritances still existed in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after universal service was abolished, and the Russian elite managed to cope with it without so much as giving a thought to returning to obligatory service. Why, then, would it have been impossible for it to have coped with the same problem in the sixteenth century if things had turned out differently? Does this not at least call for explanation?
It does, and the "if" also sheds unexpected light on other phenomena and processes currently regarded as fully understood. For example, it is possible to show (and I will try to do so in chapter six) that what historians have conventionally perceived as a restriction on the free movement of peasants was in actuality a step taken in defense of their right of free movement—indeed, a legal guarantee of such movement in the face of growing feudal encroachments. Further, it is possible to show (as will be attempted in chapters two and ten) that along with the tendencies facilitating the introduction of universal service, another ancient and powerful tendency operated in Muscovite society which promoted the aristocratization of the Russian elite; and that it is the competition between these two tendencies which has in fact determined the course of Russian history for centuries. While the aristocratizing tendency was destined to lose the struggle in the mid-1500s, it again raised its head at the end of the seventeenth century and, though initially defeated, overcame its competitor in the middle of the eighteenth.
On what basis, then, do historians discount the tendencies opposed to serfdom and universality of service? Because they were defeated? In precisely this way the verdict of the historians is transformed into a slavish copy of the verdict of history—an abdication no less sad than "might have been." Conventional history does not judge the victors, and thereby condemns the vanquished for a second time, without so much as having heard their case. Its interest in the past exclusively as something which has forever disappeared from life, and plunged without a trace into Lethe, gives it a perceptible flavor of fatalism and predetermination.
What interests me in history is its bearing on the present—and, above all, on the future. And for this reason I see my task not so much as one of describing the past, which has been done innumerable times, as of reconstructing it in its possible alternative combinations.
CHAPTER I
THE LANGUAGE IN WHICH WE ARGUE
1. Justification of the Chapter
The enigma of Russian history, which I have tried to describe in chapter one, struck me a long time ago, during my school years. When I was a university student, Ivan the Terrible was the idol of Russian historians. Eizenshtein's famous film provoked fierce debates, in which no agreement could be reached. The nucleus and the symbolic axis of these traditional arguments was (just as a century ago) the fateful question: what is Russia—Asia or Europe? The leader of the "East" or the outsider of the "West"? Where do we belong? And consequently, who are we—"Scythians" or "Europeans"? And in a more abstract form: to what class of political structures does the country in which we happen to have been born belong—to "Asiatic despotism" or to "European absolutism"?
Certainly, "Asiatic despotism" was not mentioned in our textbooks. But, on the other hand, in the published works and letters of Marx and Engels, which the student historian was supposed to know backwards and forwards, it was encountered literally at every step. And it had a somber and sinister sound. What did we, ardent and naive debaters of those years, know about this strange topic? That an Asiatic despotism was an Eastern state, which built huge irrigation facilities and governed a society the vast majority of whose members lived in isolated and self-sufficient rural communes? That it was the embodiment of so-called "Asiatic stagnation"? Yes, this was perhaps all that we knew. By European absolutism we understood, correspondingly, a state which did not built irrigation networks and whose inhabitants were not isolated in rural communes. As a consequence of this, they went off to the cities, and in the cities the bourgeoisie grew, entering into competition with the feudal nobility. At the moment when the bourgeoisie became sufficiently strong and the nobility sufficiently weak, absolute monarchy appeared, whose power was based on mediation between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, while at the same time it remained a dictatorship of the feudal class.
It is not hard to see how many holes there were in the language in which we argued. The states which were usually considered despotic, such as Byzantium or Turkey, developed no irrigation facilities whatever. The power of the Chinese emperors, which was certainly despotic, was for some reason not based on the rural commune at all. The obviously Oriental country of Japan for some reason turned out to be by no means a despotism. But the main thing was, how was all this to be related to Russia, where, although there were rural communes, there was no irrigation? And where, on the other hand, until the very end of the nineteenth century there was no bourgeoisie capable of competing with the nobility? It seemed that the Russian autocracy (samoderzhavie), ignorantly repudiating the authoritative conclusions of Marx and Engels, deliberately refused to belong to either Asiatic despotism or European absolutism. And no third alternative was offered us.
True, following Lenin, one could still call it "semi-Asiatic," but what was the concrete meaning of this supposed to be? Which half of it was Asiatic and which European? Which features separated it from despotism, which from absolutism? What part of our past was determined by Asia and what part by Europe? And what was still more important—how did they determine our future? There was no answer to these questions.
On the other hand, a person who a quarter of a century ago secretly read Leonard Schapiro's book The Origins of the Communist Autocracy in the USSR had a completely confused feeling. For "autocracy"—so we had been taught—was primarily tsarist power, and this power had been overthrown in our country in 1917. Since then, Russia had been a republic, with universal, equal, and secret suffrage. How then could Schapiro—and many, many others in his wake—call it an autocracy? Did they perhaps mean that the political nature of autocracy was by no means exhausted by the power of the tsars, which was only one of its transitory forms? But in this case, why did no one, not even our secret teachers, to say nothing of our official ones, bring up this question? Could there perhaps be something wrong with the very language in which we argued?