Выбор Пушкина
REVIEW ARTICLE
THE KREMLIN AND THE NATURE OF POWER IN RUSSIA
"Power tends to corrupt;
absolute power corrupts absolutely. "
LORD ACTON
Reflections on the book: Власть и Судьба. Личные судьбы правителей Кремля от его основания до наших дней, by Sol Shulman (Москва: Остожье,1998.37.5 a.л., 360 илл.)
Rated as a most significant publication by some of literary critics' this book has acquired instant popularity in Russia and has been promptly translated and published in China2, while translations into German, Italian, and Japanese are in progress.
Sol Shulman purports to give an insight into the lives of those princes, tsars and false tsars, and Soviet leaders whose resi-dence was the Kremlin, that is those whose fate became involved with the center of absolute political power over Rus-Russia-So-viet Union-Russia. In accordance with this concept, while Shul-man touches on the leaders of the country from Ivan Kalita to Boris Yeltsin, he leaves out the emperors of the St. Petersburg period. Thus Peter the Great is almost directly followed by Lenin. The tsar-worker, who planted ”the seeds of westernisation break-ing the backbone of the country, is immediately followed by the man who enthusiastically reaped the harvest of violence using Western social doctrine and handed it down to the iron embrace of his best pupil Joseph Stalin.
This concentration of attention on the personalities rather than on events produces an unusual and somewhat compli-cated impression. First, the author deliberately refrains from mentioning the great historical events - the reader will not find, for example, facts such as the annexation of the khanates of Ka-zan and Astrakhan during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, or the siege of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity during the Time of Troubles; even the October revolution of 1917 rates only a men-tion. Second, the reader's attention is particularly focused on per-sonalities, people possessing or manifesting power without dis-crimination whether they be real rulers or nominal figures, since the main characters are presented strictly in accordance with the chosen principle that they be the titular supreme ruler of the country. With this formula the reader encounters an intelligible but a fairly strange series of people - the sinister Ivan the Terri-ble followed by feeble-minded devout tsar Fyodor, the crafty and tireless master builder of his own status Andropov followed by the dull-witted clerk Chemenko, and so on. Some, like Peter the Great and Lenin, were natural leaders, others, like Brezhnev and Chemenko, happened to be at the top of the ladder by some bi-zarre twist of fate.
And with this we encounter the problem of the nature of absolute power, because it is precisely during the periods when Moscow was the capital of Russia that we find the most cruel dictatorships. It was no accident that Stalin should have com-pared himself not with the tsars of the St. Petersburg period, for instance with Nicholas 1, but particularly with Ivan the Terrible.
This article examines a problem in relation to the nature of absolute power, in particular why the figure of a supposedly democratic leader, for example, the secretary general of the Party's Central Committee, happened to be so close to being an autocratic tsar.
I would like to start with the question - what is under-stood by the 'Kremlin'? The Kremlin is definitely more than just the residence of Russian tsars. When imperial administration was transferred to the banks of the Neva, Moscow remained the
second capital city. Paradoxically tsars could be buried in St. Petersburg, but the coronation of Russian emperors was always held at the cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin. In such a complex situation, we cannot equate the Kremlin with political power. We cannot equate the Kremlin with religious and spiritual power either, even though it was the residence of the Moscow Patriarch. That place is occupied by the Monastery of the Trinity (Troitse-Sergieva Lavra) which Pavel Florensky called 'the cultural capital of Russia'. More cautiously the Monastery could be named the capital of 'Russian holiness', the spiritual center of Holy Russia. When the Kremlin was taken by the Polish troops during the Time of Troubles and the Russian boyars swore their allegiance to Wladyslaw it was the Monastery of the Holy Trinity that became the centre of popular opposition. So. if the Kremlin is not directly linked with administrative political power as such and not with spiritual power, the question remains: what is its meaning for Russia? Let us consider the fact that Ivan IV left the Kremlin with his 'oprichnina' to break the tradition. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, restored the tradition when they moved back to the Kremlin from St. Petersburg. The Kremlin ap-pears intimately linked with the tradition of power, which is different from being a power in itself. Shulman is correct when he states that the Kremlin was a symbol of the legality of power over Russia. Another symbol of this legality was, and in some significant respect still is, represented by the Romanov family:
the Bolsheviks in order to legalize their power had to move administration from the new imperial capital to the old one.
However, as a prerequisite of legality the Kremlin is necessary but not sufficient. Godunov and False Dmitry experienced this in full. People had to acknowledge the ruler as a legitimate one. This recognition had to follow the coronation in the Cathedral of the Assumption. The problem is, and Shulman demonstrates it, that this recognition did not depend at all on the personal qualities of the ruler. The tragic fortunes of Boris Godunov's family and of False Dmitry prove this thesis. The personal characteristics of Boris and False Dmitry as rulers were outstanding. This is well known in the case of Boris Godunov who was a virtual tsar during the reign of Fyodor, arranged the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchy as the fifth ecumenical patriarchy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and later became himself a Tsar of Russia. It is less known that False Dmitry was remarkably approachable, that he doubled the wages for state service, and so on. The biographical sketch of False Dmitry is definitely Shulman's special contribution to the understanding of the problems of Russian history. In both Boris and False Dmitry we encounter the complicated issue of the relations between supreme power and people's consciousness. All Godunov's exceptional and worthy deeds were seen to be nothing in comparison with the shadow of the murdered prince Dmitry who was the legitimate inheritor of Ivan the Terrible. And again we face similar problems with False Dmitry: when his legitimacy came into question all his qualities as a ruler turned out to be nothing in comparison.
The meaning of the Kremlin, in the cases of Ivan the Terrible's and Stalin's reigns, or regimes, or dictatorships, is strange - it is a symbol of the legality of absolute power. However, this is contrudictio in objecto. The atmosphere of the Kremlin with all its power and blood seems to be attractive and at the same time disturbing and dangerous: and the established rulers have been eager to avoid this atmosphere. Ivan the Fourth moved to Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, Peter the First moved to St. Petersburg; Stalin, and later Brezhnev, used to live at their dachas rather than at the Kremlin; Khrushchev traveled around the country most of the time. They longed for a change; the Kremlin oppressed them.
Yet there is a widespread belief that the nature of these Moscow and Soviet regimes was somehow rooted in the nature of the Russian people and to a' considerable degree was of the same origin. In this respect Russia is usually presented as an Eastern country inhabited by people inclined by nature to despotic rule.
Berdyaev, the most famous proponent of this view, ex-plained this characteristic peculiarity of the Russian people as a self-contradictory combination of western and eastern elements: primordial paganism, the spontaneity of the limitless Russian plains, and Orthodox asceticism borrowed from Byzantium. Given the people's hunt for unlimited freedom, the state had to exceed its power; and given their asceticism, the people were prepared to recognize excessive power as a necessary attribute of power itself. Understandable and plausible as this view might be, it does not work in relation to some particular cases. First, we do not observe dictatorship during the St. Petersburg period (the reign of Peter the Great is a special case. presenting a transition from the Moscow period to that of St. Petersburg). Therefore, it seems strange to have a tradition which has been successfully interrupted for about two centuries and suddenly reappears alive and vibrant. Second, the common belief in the ultimate right of the people's decision in relation to supreme power (manifested during the Time of Troubles, and with the election of Mikhail Romanov, in particular) is in contradiction to the unquestioning readiness to submit to any power. The recognition of such a right is most unusual for a nation which demonstrates an inclination to dictatorship. Third, 1 do not think that the nature of the Russian people has remained untouched since the 15th century, and if it has not, the ground for dictatorship was different in different cases.
Shulman claims (p. 15) that from the time of Alexander Nevsky (d. 1263) Russian princes adopted the most rigid form of an autocracy from the Mongols. If this statement is correct, autocracy, denning the destiny of this country for all the years onwards, remained unshaken from the second half of 13th cen-tury. However, there are some indications that known Mongol administrative institutions are different from absolute dictatorship the reader could observe in Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, and in the spiritual sphere in particular. For instance, Shulman mentions (p. 14) that Mongols did not suppress the Russian church; moreover, according to their laws any cases of blasphemy in relation to Orthodox church invoked the death penalty. If it had not been the case, Russia would not have experienced the so-called Golden period of Russian holiness while under the Mongol yoke. The Mongols' main goal was to levy tribute from the subordi-nated people. They did not aspire to convert them to their faith, that is they did not intend to oppress them spiritually. And this is a crucial point when compared with other forms of despotism which strive to suppress people ideologically as well as politi-cally. This does not mean that there was no severe 'yoke' as such, the point is that it was different both from the rule of Ivan the Terrible and from the Bolshevik's regime.
According to the latest historical research, Moscow Grand princes and tsars borrowed the administrative structure from Mongols and not from Byzantium, they augmented it with Christian ideology and as a result there appeared a unique politi-cal and ideological model. For instance, Ivan the Terrible more than willingly accepted the idea of the divine origin of supreme power and transformed it into the syllogism that anybody op-posing him, the Tsar of Russia, opposed God. However, he did not accept the title 'saint' which always formed the necessary part of Byzantine emperor's title. I do not think that we can find the reason for this in Ivan's asceticism (though in his lucid mo-ments he thought of himself as of a great sinner). The main rea-son should be found in interrelations between state, church, and people - it is significant that not a single Russian 'Tsar' was can-onized.
Probably, the specifics of Moscow Rus' in this respect could be found in the attitude to the form of legitimacy of power. The interrelation between church and state in Russia was with some reservations the same as in Byzantium: the tsar (emperor) maintained power over the church, and the church could put up only spiritual opposition, being a{ the same time an owner of land and other possessions. Ceremoniously the Byzantine emperor was recognized as 'Head of all Christians'. Although a layman he had some special rights, allowing him in some cases to enter the altar, and so on. Nonetheless, the people's attitude to such a ruler depended entirely on the real power the emperor possessed at that particular moment. The common opinion was that people should remain loyal to the 'saint' emperor as long as it was to their ad-vantage. This means that there was a notable gap between official ideology and the reality. People could recognize as emperor any-body who acquired supreme power. As we can see this differed from the Russian situation. Therefore, we cannot with certainty ascribe the forms of dictatorship known in Rus'-Russia to either Mongol, or Byzantine influence.
The inclination to dictatorship thus seems to be a spe-cific characteristic of Russian people. I would, however, argue against this conclusion. Shulman quotes Alexei K. Tolstoy, who was shocked not by the fact that there was such a beast as Ivan the Fourth but by the fact that there existed a society which could live under his rule watching him without indignation. Nonethe-less, it remains unexplained why Ivan needed to kill thousands and thousands of people. Metropolitan Philip, deposed and mur-dered, is only one example. The same can be asked about the Bolshevik rule. If they imprisoned or killed up to 60 million peo-ple it is not easy to blame the rest of the population for being no more than submissive slaves.
But there is a two-century gap between the Moscow Rus' and Soviet Russia. Is it possible to equate these periods on the ground their governments were antihuman? I think, the nature of these regimes is different, even though in details the peculiar-ity of the Russian character should be taken into account. The difference can be seen in the very origin of the two regimes. In the case of medieval Moscow there was no problem with the le-gitimacy of the ruler as the Orthodox tsar of the country. This at-titude was strengthened by the annexation of the Muslim 'infidel' Kazan and Astrakhan by the Christian monarch. Ivan completed the process of consolidating and strengthening the power ac-quired by his forefathers, especially by his grandfather Ivan the Third. The Soviet regime on the other hand had to prove its right to govern, being illegal from the start. Second, in the case of Ivan the/same Orthodox views were shared by the majority of the population. Soviet power had to inculcate a Marxist ideology, ab-solutely foreign to the majority of the people; moreover, it had to force the society to accept at various stages all the changes to this ideology. Third, we have to bear in mind that Russian peasants at the time of Ivan the Fourth could easily leave their masters and go to the other places. Besides, at that time there existed on a East-Southern border of the Moscow state a semi-formed Cos-sack state where people could find refuge. (Later during the Time of Troubles this Cossack state demonstrated its destructive power over the parent state.) Thus compared with the Soviet period, the Moscow State did not totally control the territory and the popula-tion. There is a fourth argument against the statement that Sta-lin's regime was rooted in the particular character of the Russian people: the appearance of dictatorships connected with commu-nist ideology all around the world.
The difference between the Moscow and the Soviet peri-ods can be observed in the depersonalization of power in the case of the latter. The Soviet system, in order to keep the fragile bal-ance between different power groups (only the majority of the population being excluded), ^provides us with an example of an administrative institution in which almost absolute power is con-centrated in the hands of one person formally presented as 'democratic leader' (thus differentiating him from the tsars). Yet this person is for long periods of time unable to exercise this power at all. the Chemenko case, for instance (this is a very good chapter of the book; 1 would only add the fact that Chemenko was married twice). Here is a paradox: the country with the tra-dition of personal attitude to power generates a system of power without a person. Unfortunately, this contradictory tradition of the Kremlin survives to this day: a tradition, which is brightly colored by the symbolical rather than true legitimacy.
Thus, even though there have been since the Mongol pe-riod some recognizable features of the Russian national character (including the search for ultimate truths and an ambivalently per-sonal attitude to the supreme ruler), this does not mean that the power symbolized by the Kremlin was of the same nature during the Moscow and the Soviet periods of Russian; history. I think that the most distinctive aspect of the Russian character is its attitude to the law. The Russians have never respected any juridical) institutions, any forms of bureaucracy, and, therefore, the appeal to the power and its representatives was always more personal compared with Western models, molded after a Roman arche-type. And so the very simple historical lesson which can be taken from this is that since there are no perfect rulers in the world it is all the more important that their activities be limited by recognized law rather than by public opinion or by interests of differ-ent groups.
To sum up, I would say that Shulman invokes these com-plex considerations in regard to the nature of power linked with the Kremlin. With this we touch on the key point which makes the book so attractive to Russian readers: who were they, the people who possessed supreme power in one of the greatest countries in the world? How did they deal with this power, and how did this power corrupt them? How did power define their destiny? These are the questions which arise from the back-ground of the problem of power. To some degree the book re-minds us of the classical Suetonius' Lives of the 12 Caesars, where Roman potentates are presented as good in the first stage of their career and appalling in the later stage. Khrushchev's memorial in Novodevich'e - a brilliant piece of sculpture with its sharply contrasting black and white surfaces might serve as a symbolic illustration of this truth. It looks as if the "brass horns" of power have a quality to develop the worst characteristics of people even if they are predominantly good by nature. However, only a few of the book's heroes are consistent with this model, though it is worth mentioning that Sol Shulman has done his best to provide us with objective pictures of the rulers. Even the ex-tremely contradictory figure of Mikhail Gorbachev has been drawn by the author in such a way that Gorbachev himself agreed that it is one of the most objective sketches of his life. Indeed, probably only Chemenko, the grayest imaginable figure in the role of ruler, failed to develop any bad (or good) features due to his age and complete absence of any features at all. The book demonstrates that supreme power in Rus'-Russia could develop predominantly the evil part of human nature, and this is not due to the Russianness of the personages. (I do not think that we can ascribe this at least to Stalin.)
The book also hints at an odd idea which does not relate directly to any of foregoing: in the hypothetical case that the Russian rulers were to move from the Kremlin to another place, the very character of power would change dramatically.
The book is written in an easy, readable style and is bril-liantly illustrated with hundreds of skillfully chosen photos and pictures, supplying the reader with bright visual images.
0. Donskikh
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1. See under the section 'Biography' (Izvestiya 29 May 1998), also: Obshchaya Gazeta, 13-19 August 1998; Novosti St. Peterburga, .N° 40, October 1998; Profil', .N" 48, 19 October 1998; Globus .(Israel) .N° 13, 11-18 October 1998.
2. Beifan Publishing House, Harbin, February 1999.
ASEES,Vol. 13, No. 1 (1999): 239-248
1.2.100 0:48
Сергей Абаканов
Москва, Россия.
