It made no difference that the "progress" in question, for which such an immoderate price had been paid, turned out to be the impenetrable darkness of the same "reaction and stagnation" of which it was supposed to free the country. It made no difference that besides serfdom and permanent backwardness, the Oprichnina also established a serflike cultural tradition, of which Smirnov himself—together with his opponents, unfortunately—was a victim.
For Dubrovskii, like Kliuchevskii before him, did not reflect on the content of the concept of "absolute monarchy," which beat him over the head like a club. He was unable, therefore, to object that absolutism and despotism and autocracy are all of them forms of "absolute monarchy," and that what is important in Ivaniana is not so much their similarity as their differences.
In 1956, after all of the triumphs of "genuine science," Dubrovskii found himself in the same position in which the primeval and "pre- scientific" Karamzin had found himself in 1821. And, just like Karamzin, he had nothing with which to respond to his opponents but emotional protest and wounded moral feelings. His defeat was built into his methodology. Of course, this by no means diminishes what he had done: on the contrary, we must pay tribute to his courage. The apparently indestructible ice of the "militarist apologia" had indeed been cracked. By the end of the 1950s, there was no trace of it left. And if, in 1963, A. A. Zimin was able to write, in his Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, that "in the works of a number of [Soviet] historians, an idyllic image of Ivan IV and a prettied up representation of the Oprichnina have been given," this is indisputably to the credit of Dubrovskii. And if Zimin added: "This was facilitated to no small degree by the statements of I. V. Stalin, who praised Ivan the Terrible without restraint, forgetting about those innumerable calamities which the spread of serfdom in the sixteenth century brought to the people,"[229] this sounded like a mere echo of Dubrovskii, who was the first to draw attention to this strange—or so it seemed at the time—emotional attraction of one tyrant to another.
But on closer examination, it is not hard to see that Dubrovskii's opponents had not retreated very far. They had withdrawn, as the military expression has it, to previously prepared positions—and, furthermore, to ones established a long time ago and with no help whatever from Marxism. They had retreated to Solov'ev's position: moral condemnation was the only price which they would agree to pay for the political rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible. Hardening their hearts, they agreed that the moral qualities of the tyrant did not deserve to be "idealized"; on the other hand, they came unanimously to the defense of Ivan's terror as a means of "centralization." This is immediately apparent in the commentaries to volume six of Solov'ev's History of Russia published in 1960 under the editorship of Academician L. V. Cherepnin, which, as it were, summarize the discussion called forth by the mutiny of Dubrovskii. Here, among other things, it is said that "no matter how great the actual cruelties by which Ivan IV implemented his policy, they cannot conceal the fact that the struggle against the princely and boyar elite was historically conditioned, inevitable, and progressive." Furthermore, the authors of the commentaries say, "the government of Ivan IV was compelled by the objective situation to act primarily by violent methods in the struggle to centralize the power in the state." As regards the critique of the "rebels" of 1956, Dubrovskii and Sheviakov, the commentary says, with implacable bureaucratic haughtiness: "Having correctly noted the inadmissibility of the idealization of Ivan IV, the authors of these articles were unable to argue for their proposed reconsideration of the policy of Ivan IV in the direction of regarding it as reactionary and even historically meaningless."[230]
The de-Stalinization of Ivaniana did not take place. After the thunderous explosion of the militarist apologia and a Kavelinist outburst of "idealization," genuine science had peaceably returned to the accustomed, cozy swamp of Solov'evian "centralization"—of course, with the obligatory addition of Platonov's "agrarian revolution." The place of the solemn hymns of Vipper-Bakhrushin is taken by the grey consensus of Cherepnin-Likhachev. Whereas before the revolt of Dubrovskii, the position of genuine science in Ivaniana was an eclectic blend of Platonov and Kavelin, after that revolt, it was transformed into a cocktail mixed from the ideas of Platonov and Solov'ev. It remained essentially what it had been before—a symbiosis of the "agrarian" and "state" schools of Ivaniana. Thus, out of a mixture of two "bourgeois" ideas, we get Marxism-Leninism as the sum. Alas, despite its revolutionary promises, Marxism has not saved "genuine science" from enslavement to the "myth of the state."
Even if we did not have any other indicators of this slavery, one— and the most important—still remains: its attitude towards the political opposition. In the year in which Dubrovskii rebelled, his colleague Likhachev repeated literally what had been written in 1856 by Solov'ev's pupil Gorskii. At the risk of exhausting the reader's patience,
I will again double up the quotations. Try to separate the revelations of the 1956-model Marxist from those of the 1856-model monarchist. Here is what they wrote:
In arguing for the old tradition, Kurbskii was led not by the interests of the fatherland, but only by purely selfish considerations. . . . His ideal was not in the future, but in the past. In the person of Kurbskii, the reactionary boyars and princes had found themselves a bard and a philosopher. ... To this reactionary ideology, Ivan the Terrible counter- posed . . . the principle of the construction of a new state . . . branding Kurbskii as a criminal and a traitor to his fatherland. . . . He [Kurbskii] in vain spent his efforts in the struggle against the innovations. . . . Before this severe judgment of posterity he is the defender of the immobility and stagnation, which went counter to history and counter to the development of the society.37
9. The Sacred Formula
"The centralization of the state" thus proves to be the last word of genuine science. The formula does not rest on any characterization of the state, whether social or political. It is completely amorphous, and, therefore, fruitless, since a democratic state can be no less centralized than an autocratic one. If sacrifices to this heathen idol are forgivable in the "bourgeois" Solov'ev, who reasons in abstract terms about the struggle between the "state" and the "votchina" elements, how are they to be explained in the works of historians who call themselves Marxists? However, the abstract nature of the sacred formula is only half the trouble. The other half is that for the sixteenth-century Russia of Ivan the Terrible and the Government of Compromise, to which they apply it, it is simply false.
It is false because centralization—to the degree to which this was possible in a medieval state, and in the sense in which Soviet historians use this formula, i.e., the administration of all the regions of the country from a single center—had already been completed in the fifteenth century. The publication of the law code of 1497, which signalized the juridical unification of the country, was the concluding accord of this centralization. For two centuries, the House of Rurik, like the French Capetians, had been gathering together northeastern Rus' piece by piece, through intrigues and flattery, threats and violence. Their will had become law from one frontier to another. They could