Arbitrary action by the Russian bureaucracy in defiance of the wishes of the population has constituted one of the great themes of Russian history, from the brutalities of Ivan the Terrible and the repressive punishments of Nicholas I to the totalitarian excesses of Stalin and the elitist rule of the post-Khrushchev oligarchy, practitioners of what James H. Billington once called “arteriosclerotic dacha despotism.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his futile appeal to the Soviet leaders for the repudiation of Marxist ideology, admitted the strength of the autocratic political tradition in Russia and the population's concomitant lack of experience in self-government. However, he made what he considered a crucial distinction between well-intentioned, competent authoritarian rule and narrow-minded arbitrariness: