The Political Mythology of Autocracy: Scenarios of Power and the Role of the Autocrat

The Political Mythology of Autocracy:

Scenarios of Power and the Role of the Autocrat

Translated by Susan Zayer Rupp

The history of the Russian autocracy is one of those areas of current Russian historiography strongly influenced by non-scholarly factors, among them commercial demand, popular sentiment, and sometimes the political and ideological situation. It is not hard to understand why this tendency is especially evident in the literature on the 19th and early 20th centuries. The cult of the imperial dynasty and family, typified by the "masculine" autocracy of that period, above all else meets the explicit or latent striving of the reading public to "recognize" its own characteristics in depictions of the family and private life of the Romanovs, and in this way to confirm its participation and, in some cases, identity with an appealing historical tradition.

One may distinguish two major categories among the works published in recent years by scholars on the late autocracy – political biographies of the monarchs and the publication of the personal correspondence and diaries of members of the imperial family. The authors of the biographies have summarized a significant amount of empirical data. But they have not demonstrated a noticeable interest in methodological innovations regarding the study of the exercise of power. While they disagree among themselves (at times fundamentally so) in their assessment of the Russian monarchy's historical significance, these historians are united in their view of the late autocracy as a static structure of authority frozen in specific forms.¹

Undoubtedly, the publication of the personal papers of the emperors and their relatives represents a very promising trend in research. The archival collections of members of the dynasty contain an incalculable volume of documents (granted, many of them in foreign languages, which makes work with them rather complicated) allowing us to penetrate the psychology of the rulers and assess the sophistication of their thinking about government. However, it is difficult to do so successfully without the application of current interpretive methods for reading epistolary and memoir materials. Moreover, the majority of dynastic documents recently published in Russia lack any sort of interpretive commentary or critical interpretation.² The publishers appear to operate on the belief that the historical value of "the tsar's word" as extracted from the archives derives precisely from the fact that it emanates from the tsar, was once a family secret, and has now become the possession of the reading public as a whole.

The history of the autocratic regime as a process of rule has been markedly less well developed. The bases of the autocracy's legitimacy, the bureaucratic regimentation of the "supreme authority's" operations, and the means of inculcating subordination and loyalty into subjects remain peripheral for scholars. I would suggest that the study of the late monarchy from this perspective has thus far been hindered by the historiographic idol of "absolutism." Many historians today are beginning to recognize that our historiographical understanding of absolutism, of the absolute personal power of the monarch, is nothing other than the result of the uncritical absorption of ideologies and beliefs that the rulers and their...