Russia Before The 'Radiant Future': Essays in Modern History, Culture, and Society 9781845459932

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RUSSIA BEFORE THE “RADIANT FUTURE”

Russia before the “Radiant Future” Essays in Modern History, Culture, and Society

d

e Michael Confino

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

First published in 2011 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2011 Michael Confino

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-1-84545-761-7 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-84545-993-2 (ebook)

MYRIADS OF . . . DIVERSE AND COMPLEX CAUSES. —Lev Tolstoy, War and Peace

d Contents

e

Foreword

ix

A Note on Transliteration and Dates

xii

Acknowledgments

xiii

INTRODUCTION

The Discipline and I

1 PART ONE

The Fate of Ideas in History CHAPTER 1

Alexander Herzen and Isaiah Berlin on Russia’s Elusive Counter-Enlightenment

23

CHAPTER 2

Russian and Western European Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism

42

CHAPTER 3

Traditions, Old and New: Aspects of Protest and Dissent in Modern Russia

55

PART TWO

Social Groups in Comparative Perspective CHAPTER 4

On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Russia

83

CHAPTER 5

The Nobility in Russia and Western Europe: Contrasts and Similarities

119

CHAPTER 6

Comparing Russian Serfdom and American Slavery

141

viii • Contents CHAPTER 7

Agrarian Crisis, Urbanization, and the Russian Peasants at the End of the Old Regime, 1880s–1920s

161

PART THREE

Approaches to the History of Russia CHAPTER 8

Reinventing the Enlightenment: Western Images of Eastern Realities in the Eighteenth Century

187

CHAPTER 9

Political Murder in Russian Culture: Comparisons and Counterfactuals

206

CHAPTER 10

Current Events and the Representation of the Past: Issues in Russian Historical Writing

235

Afterword

272

Selected Bibliography

277

Index

288

d Foreword

e

This book is a collection of essays written over a number of years. Some of these essays have been published; others appear here for the first time. They examine major themes in the history of imperial Russia and in historical writing, such as ideas and their role in historical change; the intelligentsia, the nobility, and peasant society; and finally, how history is being written and why. Of the eleven texts included in the book, one was published in 1972, one in 1984, and one in 1987. The others and the introduction were written between 1994 and 2009. Six of them are published here for the first time; those published before have been revised and updated without altering their composition and main arguments. Divided into two parts, the introductory essay, entitled “The Discipline and I,” is an analysis of past and present issues in Russian historiography, and my views and feelings about some of them. It also presents an evaluation of current trends in history writing and examines the influence of historical fiction movies, documentary films, and television docudramas on the historians and on the public. The introduction outlines hypotheses concerning the future development of the discipline and examines the factors that shape the public’s historical consciousness in contemporary culture and society. It describes also the historiographical background of the themes discussed in the essays, and some of the cultural and intellectual conditions under which the historian’s craft is carried on today. It deals, so to speak, with the present cultural ecosystem in the developed societies and its effects on the historian and on the general public. The collection is divided, like Caesar’s Gaul, into three parts. The first, “The Fate of Ideas in History,” includes articles on the changing role and function of ideas and ideologies in Russia’s historical development. The second, “Social Groups in Comparative Perspective,” deals with various strata of Russian society and their collective psychology, and draws comparisons between these groups and their counterparts in other European countries. The third, “On Historians and History Writing,” examines how historians think and why they write the way they do. The afterword out-

ix

x • Foreword lines some of my assumptions regarding Russia’s historical development and on historical writing. Rereading essays written between the 1970s and the present is like navigating between ego-history and a sea of memories. Every essay has its own biography and its own story—why it was written, when, and where; in which library the main work was done; where I found the most significant documents; and during which air flight or delayed departure in airports some good ideas came to my mind. Reading these essays was a kind of sentimental journey and a source of renewed memories. For that reason, the most difficult moment came when I had to decide which essays to include in this volume and which to leave aside. My original draft listed some thirty pieces: twenty essays and ten review articles. A brief calculation indicated that it amounted to about one million two hundred thousand words. It was clear at once that no publisher would ever embark on such an encyclopedic venture even if the present times were characterized by plenty and abundance, rather than stringency and scarce resources. So I began, willy-nilly, to eliminate. The research for so many articles and different subjects led me during the years to numerous libraries and archives, and required the use of a great number of secondary sources, most of them listed and quoted below. With regard to the books and articles written by friends and colleagues of mine, I wish to state from the outset that, even when I do not agree with their view, I have for them the greatest esteem and respect. Criticism is only one side of the perpetual dialogue we are conducting, first, each of us with himself or herself, then with our fellow historians, and finally with the reader and the general public. For me, criticizing the others is like criticizing myself. Of the many libraries where I worked, I have fond memories and a special debt of gratitude for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Widener Library at Harvard, the old Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) now in Nanterre, which once upon a time was located on rue AugusteVacquerie, a small and quiet street in Paris not far from the Arc de Triomphe and the attraction of the Champs Elysées. Some of the articles were written during my two fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C., or at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. I wish to thank again these institutions and their staff for their hospitality, generosity, the inspiring scholarly environment they provided, and the many good memories I keep from the time spent in their midst. As no historian works alone in an ivory tower, and most of us live our work not only in the profession and in the wider society but first of

Foreword • xi

all in our small families and among our closest relatives, their observations, jokes, encouragement, and inspiration are always the unspoken and unwritten background of every one of our writings. I feel special gratitude toward my wife, Irene Eynat-Confino, and my son, Alon Confino, for their unswerving faith in the feasibility and usefulness of this book, their vast knowledge and support, and their optimism that this collection could be done and published. Theirs was a contagious optimism that kept me going as I planned this collection. Alon, a fellow historian whose good advice is always helpful both in questions of substance and in practical matters, recommended Berghahn Books, and as usual he was right in his choice. Marion Berghahn’s critical enthusiasm in receiving the manuscript and bringing it out to its present book form was invaluable in many ways, as was Ann Przyzycki’s competent professional advice in editorial matters. Irene’s sharp eye and good taste found superfluous digressions in some of my writings. As a theater historian, she has a particular flair for the human drama that is the real stuff of history. She was the first reader of several articles, and without her critical look the book would have been much thicker or not published at all. I thank warmly both Irene and Alon for their perceptive and wise advice, and their help in bringing this project to fruition. It goes without saying that all the small and big blemishes and infelicities that remain in the book are of my own doing and I am exclusively responsible for them. Herzlia, September 2009

Michael Confino passed away on June 16, 2010. Two days earlier he received the copyedited manuscript of this book. In the months following his death I took care to bring the book to publication. I am grateful to Marion Berghahn and Melissa Spinelli for their generous support. Alon Confino, Charlottesville, VA

d A Note on Transliteration and Dates

e

Transliteration follows a modified version of the Library of Congress rules. In the case of names that have a well-established spelling in English, that form has been used here (e.g. Peter, not Petr or Piotr; Alexander, not Aleksandr; Potemkin, not Patiomkin; Dostoevsky, not Dostoevskii; Berdyaev, not Berdiaev; Trotsky, not Trotskii). The same applies for certain terms and names of geographical locations or historical events. In quotations, the spelling in the original text has been respected throughout. With regard to Russian chronology, dates until February 1918 follow the Julian or Old Style (O.S.) calendar, which in the eighteenth century was eleven days behind the Gregorian (New Style), twelve days behind in the nineteenth century, and thirteen days behind it in the twentieth century.

xii

d Acknowledgments

e

I thank very much the following editors and publishers for the permission to reproduce earlier versions of six of the essays. “On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth and NineteenthCentury Russia,” in Intellectuals and Tradition, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Stephen R. Graubard (Jerusalem: The Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation, 1973), pp. 117–149. “Russian and Western European Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism,” in Totalitarian Democracy and After, ed. Nathan Rotenstreich and Yeoshua Arieli (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Magnes Press, 1984), pp. 104–117. “Traditions, Old and New: Aspects of Protest and Dissent in Modern Russia,” in Patterns of Modernity, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (London: Frances Pinter, 1987), vol. 2, pp. 12–36. “Re-inventing the Enlightenment: Western Images of Eastern Realities in the Eighteenth Century,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 36, nos. 3–4 (1994): 505–522. “Current Events and the Representation of the Past: Issues in Russian Historical Writing,” Cahiers du monde russe [edited by Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris] 35, no. 4 (1994): 839–868. “Isaiah Berlin, Alexander Herzen, and Russia’s Elusive Counter-Enlightenment,” in Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, ed. Joseph Mali and Robert Wockler (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 2003), pp. 177–192.

xiii

d The Discipline and I INTRODUCTION

e

Around 1900 many Russians believed that a radiant future would begin after an epoch-making change in Old Russia’s life, a change that would bring an end to the “accursed Russian reality,” in Vissarion Belinskii’s memorable words.1 For some thinkers and observers this change should have happened after a populist, or a socialist, or a democratic revolution. As Chekhov’s characters in The Cherry Orchard mused, this new beginning could happen in the near future or in a very distant one. In the fourth and last act of Three Sisters, Alexander Vershinin says: “Life is difficult. It presents itself to many of us as blank and hopeless, and yet, one must admit, it gets always clearer and easier, and the day in not far off, apparently, when it will be wholly bright.”2 There was hope for a radiant future, though the hoped-for future of Chekhov’s gentry liberals differed from that of Lenin and his associates, and from the generous dreams of the anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin. The change finally occurred after the failed February Revolution and the successful takeover in October 1917 by the Bolsheviks, who had always used “the radiant future” as a propaganda device. Old Russia did come to an end. The radiant future became a fading dream, and later on a nightmare. This collection of essays is about Old Russia’s life and fate before the great upheavals in 1917. The collection is devoted to some of the major subjects in the history of imperial Russia and of historical writing, such as ideas and their role in historical change; agrarian history; the intelligentsia, the nobility, and peasant society; and the historiography of these topics. The essays raise questions that I have tried to elucidate at various times during a long career as a professional historian. The collection is divided into three parts. Part One includes essays on the role of ideas and ideologies in Russian history; Part Two deals with social groups, collective mentalities, and the uses of the comparative approach in history; and Part Three investigates why historians write history the way they do. The motives for enquiring into these subjects and the essays’ contexts will become clear from the texts themselves, and I do not intend here to justify interpretations of mine (which may or may not have stood the test of time): they will have to be judged for 1

2 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” what they say and for what they mean without post festum explanations that can always be given in hindsight. This introduction is divided into two distinct but closely related sections. The first describes the main topics that define the collection; the second analyzes some of the major difficulties that the historian encounters today in his tasks as researcher and teacher.

Aspects of Russia’s Past History of Ideas and Ideas in History Part One of the volume explores several major ideas in the course of Russian history and their interplay: Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment; ideas that generated protest, dissent, or conformism; and ideologies that informed autocratic and totalitarian political regimes. The underlying assumption in this inquiry is that ideas, great and small, matter in history to the extent that they have an influence on its course and are related to concrete historical contexts, cultural trends, and political forces in specific historical settings. Abstract, “pure” ideas, moving in the rarefied air of a suprahistorical sphere are considered as metaphysical constructions, sometimes interesting, sometimes not; but if described with no connection to the historical processes and events of their time, they belong to the domain of the philosopher, the theologian, or the prophet. Without subscribing to the Marxian metaphysical scheme of material basis and ideological superstructure (Überbau), in which the former produces the ideas in the realm of the latter, the link between ideas and their historical context is an essential differentia of the discipline when compared to philosophy, political science, or theology. As history is above all the science of men and women in a given time and place, it follows that ideas, intellectual movements, and ideologies can circulate and find their expression only in and through the minds of living people, historical actors, or agents, be their name Descartes, Catherine the Great, Bismarck, Trotsky, Menocchio, or the “masses.” This standpoint is an essential element of the historical discipline because it suggests that ideas are not only embedded in a context of time and place but are also closely related to frames of mind, psychology, mentalités, representations of individuals and of human groups of various sizes, denominations, and allegiances—be they social, religious, ethnic, or geographic. The task of the historian’s inquiry is not only to uncover the dialectic link between ideas and social reality but also to establish which ideas matter to whom and why. Consequently, ideas (and at times one and the same idea) can have completely different meanings and functions in different historical settings. Ultimately, when trans-

Introduction • 3

posed from one place to another, one and the same idea is never the same; it can be comprehended in multiple ways and bring about completely different outcomes. Thus, for instance, whoever holds that the Enlightenment was the progenitor of twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies should be ready to admit that the Enlightenment could have engendered their opposite and non-totalitarian polities, too. In Russian history, this paramount importance of timing and place has been rendered by a colloquial aphorism apropos the Soviet regime, according to which “More than Marxism has changed Russia, Russia has changed Marxism.” The intrinsic nature of ideas is to make people think, but not to think the same thoughts when starting from “one and the same idea.” Other approaches to ideas in history usually lead not only to one-sidedness but also to a fatal reductionism and the oversight of the multiple mutations of the ideas over time and during their transmission through various frontiers. This relative (not relativistic) essence of ideas and of other social and cultural phenomena, which the historical approach teaches and requires, reveals that history is a science of change, while it also acknowledges the possibility of periods of stagnation. This perception of the historical approach is a golden key to understanding bygone times and the world that we live in. There are no absolutes; everything is relative but has a fixed and clear meaning or function during a certain span of time and in a given place. This key uncovers the fallacies of nationalist myths and historiographies, the quasi-religious adherence to grand narratives, and the dead ends of all teleological and deterministic theories, as it uncovers anachronisms, prejudices, preconceptions, ignorance, and superficiality.

Agrarian and Social History: The Psychological Dimension My initial research field was agrarian history of Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This agrarian period lasted mainly from 1957 through 1969. The choice of this subject was the fortuitous result of the meeting of two circumstances: first, a personal longtime interest in agriculture and an attraction for the open spaces of the countryside; second, the availability in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris of the entire collection of the first Russian periodical sponsored by the Free Economic Imperial Society created by Catherine II in 1765, its main topics being agriculture, management of landed estates, peasant society, agronomic innovations, serfdom, and attitudes and views of the landed nobility. The members of the society and the contributors to its periodical were literati, agronomists, noblemen, and grandees—most of them owners of estates and serfs. This seemingly arid research field had its high points, scholarly debates, and intellectual rewards. Such was, for instance, the finding that although

4 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” the noble estates (even the big ones with thousands of “souls”) were large landholdings, they were exploited like small farming properties because the peasants’ agricultural system and tools imposed their ways on the seigniorial land that they were farming, as upon their own small strips, which were inextricably intertwined with the seigniorial fields. It appeared also that the landlords lacked the notion of “production costs” and of “investment” (designated in France as avances by the Physiocrates, their contemporaries.) Gradually, my research evolved into a study of the Russian gentry’s social structure and economic representations, its views and attitudes toward the serfs, the organization of noble estates, and the activity of the peasant community, which in Great Russia existed in almost every village. In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars studying underdeveloped societies tended to stress the dynamic elements that encourage growth. By contrast, the forces of tradition and inertia usually received short shrift, whereas the analysis of these forces, summarily dismissed as peasant routine, is of paramount importance for the understanding of rural Russia. For that reason, J. L. H. Keep wrote that in my study of the manorial system in its heyday, “the problems of socio-economic change are examined in the round, and … due attention is paid to the human element as well as to impersonal ‘market forces’. It is made clear that noble and peasant alike were victims of their milieu. With both the dominant influence upon their thinking was not reasoned calculation of economic interest in the modern sense but largely irrational prejudices, fears and aspirations.”3 Nevertheless, in spite of rural conflicts and flare-ups of peasant unrest, this agrarian system showed a great resilience that I defined as a state of “relative rural equilibrium.” Alexander Gerschenkron, a great scholar and dear colleague, disagreed with this finding and considered it a metaphor. Other scholars found the concept appropriate and stressed the importance of the rural symbiosis that made it possible to describe the Russian village—fields, commune, peasants, landlords and their mentalities—as a totality. Thus, for instance, Peter C. Perdue endorsed the concept of rural “equilibrium system,” terming it as a most appropriate approach in terms of the final result of the interplay of “interacting forces” and the strongly integrated ensemble of agricultural technology and rural society; it led to a view “of the totality of a society, incorporating geographic environment, technological base, social structure, and mentality in a unified whole.”4 Part Two deals with Russian society and culture examined in a comparative perspective. Throughout its existence, the Russian Empire was an overwhelmingly agrarian country. By the 1880s, more than four-fifths of its population lived in rural areas and were peasants. And although the term “agrarian history” usually invites associations of impersonal economic

Introduction • 5

processes such as price fluctuations and the annual cycle of agricultural work, it is examined here first and foremost as a cultural activity of human beings, and their economic and non-economic behavior and mindset. In a word, this approach encompasses the psychology and the economic mentalities of the people involved in this cultural and economic activity. The research on agrarian Russia led to the investigation of the world of the Russian peasant, of the serfs, and of the nobility—the poor provincial gentry, like the characters depicted by Gogol, and the grands seigneurs, owners of thousands of serfs. This psychological dimension extends also to the intellectuals and the Enlighteners who addressed the peasant question in their thinking and writings. Thus, agrarian history has been for me not mainly economic history but also a cultural and psychological history of living, acting, and feeling human beings—first as individuals, then as human groups belonging to distinct communities, Freemason lodges, literary salons, or social circles. My work on peasants and seigniors has been primarily concerned with mentalities, and as Jerome Blum has remarked, it “could well be described as a study in psychological history.”5

The Intelligentsia Another essay in Part Two is devoted to the famed Russian intelligentsia, the object of numerous studies, divergent opinions, and many historiographic myths that have been hampering scholarship on the history of Russian society. Among these myths is the view that there is a generational, social, or moral link between the intelligentsia and the nobility. Other widely believed myths include the notion of an alienated intelligentsia; of a nobility estranged and isolated from Russian society; and of a peasantry considered as an amorphous and cloudy mass, divorced from the realities of Russian life. Similar social disabilities allegedly affected the bureaucracy, the army, and the political parties. If such a situation did indeed exist, one could rightly ask where, then, were to be found the realities of Russia’s social life? Only in drinking vodka and brawls in the taverns? Only in Rasputin’s bedrooms? For if such an amorphous and disjoined situation did really exist, the question is whether there was at all a society in imperial Russia. The accepted three-generational evolution of the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century (fathers, sons, grandsons) is another myth, first hinted at by Ivan Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons, then given a sociological definition by the theoretician Nikolai Mikhailovskii to justify the existence of the populist movement, and finally canonized by Lenin, whose didactic purpose was to rewrite the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia. This “three-generational” view is not very helpful in historical research, and in any case not more helpful than the description of the intel-

6 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” ligentsia according to decades: shestidesiatniki, semidesiatniki (“men of the sixties,” “men of the seventies”). Actually these taxonomies are not valid paradigms but idées reçues dating from the late nineteenth century whose origin and use we should question. Instead of the traditional views, we need a new interpretation of the evolution, social structure, and collective mindset of the Russian intellectuals. Similarly, it is doubtful that the Russian intellectuals were uprooted from Russian realities and inexorably driven to radical politics. A different approach opens the way for new avenues of research and indicates that in the Russian social realities of the time, for each “alienated” intelligent there were scores of well-integrated and professionally skilled intellectuals, active in all spheres of society and all along the political spectrum. Suffice it to recall the role of the intelligentsia in the local governments (zemstva) to illustrate this fact. A closer look at a particular offshoot of the intelligentsia, the nihilists of the 1860s, who are usually considered as forming a political movement, uncovers a different story. The inquiry starts by asking: who were the people involved, and what did they do? What was their mindset? How did they behave? What did they hate, and what did they like? Finally, what exactly did they want? This exploration reveals that the nihilists, who appeared on the historical stage in 1858–60, were an age group, most of them born around 1840–42.6 When they gathered at the universities they were approximately of the same age, and they vanished as nihilists five to six years later. Why? They matured, finished their studies or dropped out of the universities, and their age group dissolved as a social, countercultural, and mobilizing factor. In this context, it becomes clear that the overwhelming majority were sons and daughters of noble families, and that theirs was a revolt above all against the social mores of the gentry, against the hypocrisy (in their words) of the grown-ups, against the exploitation of the peasants, and for the emancipation of women. Theirs was an existential rebellion against their biological fathers, not a theoretical protest against “ideological fathers” of the 1840s, whom most of the nihilists had not heard about. In opposition to the current radical (mainly populist-oriented) ideologies of their time, the nihilists had a scientific and individualist attitude toward the great existential problems of (their) life and of the universe. They worshipped learning and favored not agrarian socialism and pastoral romanticism but enlightened capitalism and technological progress. They did not “bow down mystically before the peasant’s sheepskin coat,”—as Ivan Turgenev reproachfully wrote to Alexander Herzen in October 1862—but on the contrary, they despised, like Bazarov, the peasants’ ignorance and superstitions. The next question in this social context concerns the role of the raznochintsy, the commoners, and their assumed radicalizing lead. A myth hov-

Introduction • 7

ers over this issue too; invented in the nineteenth century, it became the mandatory view in Soviet historiography and was adopted also by some Western scholars. The serial mythmaker Nikolai Mikhailovskii announced: “Raznochinets prishel.” That is, “The commoner appeared on the stage” with radical ideas, free of guilt feelings (like the young noblemen), and coming from the midst of the people. This belief gave a popular and democratizing flavor to the (mostly gentry) populist groups. The commoners appeared? When? Where? How many were they? In fact, in the 1860s their number in the educated circles and in the universities decreased. But even hard statistical data—such as the tables of student enrollment at the universities according to estates (sosloviia) and social origin—did not convince some historians that the “rise of the commoners” thesis was erroneous, and they stuck to this progressive legend. In 1991, the French scholar Jean-Louis van Regemorter wrote in this respect that my intuitive assessment on this issue, done in 1972, “has been entirely confirmed by all quantitative studies in historical sociology.”7 And in 1994, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter observed that my study “correctly challenge[d] the view that the presence of significant numbers of raznochintsy underlay the radicalization of the educated elite in the 1860s.”8 Part Two also comprises several essays in comparative history. One of them is a comparison between the Russian and the Western European nobilities; another, between serfdom in Russia and slavery in North America. When applied to Russian history, the comparative approach usually raises several difficult questions stemming from the view of Russia’s exceptionalism; but since the history of each and every country and nation is unique in one way or another, this view amounts to asking: “Is Russian history more unique than that of the others?” (This sounds like an Orwellian question begging a non-Orwellian answer.) In terms of methodology, this subject is also linked to the view that Russia’s history is sui generis, but if this were so then it would have been non-comparable to other states, nations, or empires. This topic often leads to the perennial and worn-out query “Is Russia part of Europe?”—a query that reminds me of Franco Venturi’s impatient repartee to a politician who was belaboring this point: “Se la Russia non è un paese europeo, che cosa diavolo potrebbe essere?” (If Russia is not a European country, then what the devil is it?).9

History Writing Part Three, devoted to historiography, includes a book review on an attempt to use Edward Said’s Orientalism approach to “orientalize” the history of Russia and Eastern Europe. Another essay is a comparative examination of the views on political assassination in Russia and the West and an explora-

8 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” tion of the question “What if … ?” What would have happened if certain failed attempts at political murder had been successful and some successful ones had failed? A third essay analyzes the trends that appeared in Russian historiography in the West after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the “1917 paradigm.” Historiography is a singular branch of the historical discipline: its subject matter is not historic personalities and events but, in a sense, the history of history, and it invites historians to look at how they write history and why. It makes them think about their own thinking, and in this respect it reminds of Charles Peguy’s saying “Un intellectuel est celui qui réfléchit sur la réflection” (An intellectual is a person who thinks about thinking.) In their writings, historians usually answer the question “what?” whereas historiography raises the question “why?” This description is, of course, schematic; in reality there is no such clear-cut division of labor. There are specialists in historiography of great repute—like Arnaldo Momigliano, George Gooch, and Georg Iggers—who are excellent historians, and on the other hand, every historian writes occasionally historiographic essays, or does so at least in the opening pages of articles or books. Either way it is a subdiscipline strewn with many difficulties that stem from the very nature of the genre. Ideally, research in historiography should require addressing two additional topics of inquiry. The first examines the relationship between the historical environment (often subsumed under the catchword “background”) and the process of historical writing that takes place against this background. What is the influence of this environment? How, in the same environment, do different schools of thought emerge? The second is the need to grasp how the historian’s mind works, how mindsets and psychological dimensions shape and interfere in every interpretation. In a sense, the mind’s function appears as a mysterious and perplexing process, but because of this difficulty we cannot proceed as if it does not exist, nor can we assume that it does not concern the explanation of the course of historical writing. Historiography is a thankless and delicate task. Since neither the historiographer nor his fellow historians about whom he writes are faultless or endowed with perfect objectivity (even in the very limited sense that Peter Novick has allowed10), it is an open field for errors and misunderstandings. Every professional historian is simultaneously conducting several dialogues in his or her work. One is a dialogue with the self; another, with the people in the past about whom he or she is writing; a third goes on (consciously or not) with the general public, the laypersons, and the history amateurs. The last dialogue is carried on with fellow historians, most often in historiographic essays and book reviews. I hope that the essays included in Part

Introduction • 9

Three of this volume (as well as all the others) have been written in a spirit of fairness and equanimity. Their sole purpose was to get nearer to truth and to greater accuracy. My criticism and alternative interpretations have never been intended to diminish the value of other scholars’ findings, but to open new ways of seeing and thinking about the nature, purpose, and calling of history.

Aspects of the Present Cultural Ecosystem The History of History Before I proceed to the current conditions of the historian’s work, a brief reminder of history’s writing past may contribute to a better understanding of the present state of the art. Four major revolutions have marked the history of historical thought in modern Europe. The first occurred in the seventeenth century under the influence of the principles of Biblical criticism. The second took place in the nineteenth century as a result of the methods of classical philology. The third revolution, generated by Marxist theories and Max Weber’s sociology began in the early twentieth century. The fourth started around the middle of the twentieth century and had several complex and variegated sources: structural anthropology, quantitative methods of inquiry, psychology (and in particular psychoanalysis), and the remarkable development of linguistics and of new techniques of critique de texte. Among the achievements and breakthroughs of this fourth revolution a signal role was performed by the Annales school with its innovative approaches, imaginative use of primary sources, and refinement of the tools and methods of the historian’s craft. I had the good luck to study at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, cradle and bastion of the Annales, in 1957–59, and to teach there in 1974–76, the best years of its creativity and intellectual fermentation. The fourth revolution is now over, and the Annales school, too, belongs to the past, but it contributed several novelties and insights to historical thinking that had lasting effects. First, it enhanced the interest in the history of culture (though not in the sense of Kulturgeschichte or the practice of “cultural studies”). For better or worse, its approach to culture was “more anthropological” than historical, and it strove to uncover—in the wider society and within discrete groups—the relationships (and their meaning) between beliefs and representations, on the one hand, and behavior, on the other, between norms and attitudes. Similarly, this direction of inquiry aspired to establish the nature of the correlations (if any) between subjective and declared views and intentions (of an individual or of a group), and actual actions undertaken by them; it had also a keen interest

10 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” in the psychological and the epistemological interplay between intentions and consequences. The second contribution of the Annales school consisted in that it strengthened the interest in the study of various aspects of collective consciousness in past societies and of various subgroups in them, a study that also encompasses an inquiry into the historical consciousness of these societies and subgroups. I say deliberately that this revolution “strengthened” (and not “created”) this interest, for there were in the past historians and thinkers who addressed in various ways the topic of historical consciousness in times past. Such were, for instance, Vico, Herder, Michelet, and Dilthey (but not Ranke, Lord Acton, or Seignobos). The great difference between the thinking on this topic in their times and in ours lies, of course, in the dissimilarity of approaches and methods of inquiry (sociological, psychological, and philosophical), which from the 1950s onward allowed not only new answers to old questions, but also new questions that were unconceivable in the past.

Russian Historiography Current Russian historiography seems to be in a protracted transitional period. In Russia and in the West there are, paradoxically, at one and the same time many schools of thought and no schools at all. To be sure, in history (and in historiography) every period is transitional, but apparently some are more transitional than others, and we seem to be in the midst of such a one. Thus, the observations of David Shearer that this situation is one of “creative disorder,” and of Laura Engelstein that it is one of “creative uncertainty,” made respectively in 1998 and 2001, seem to apply to these days too.11 The common denominator of both views is the creativity that characterizes historical writing on Russia. And “disorder” and “uncertainty” are not symptoms of a crisis in history or of a lack of interest in the Russian past, but signs of growth and revitalization. They may be also the remote results of the great turning point in contemporary Russian historiography, which resulted from the fall of the Soviet Union and the concomitant collapse of the “1917 paradigm.” It was certainly so for the Soviet/Russian historians, and for those in the West who adhered to the thesis of the central role of 1917 and the deterministic and teleological approach it entailed. Suddenly, since “1917” was no longer what it had been thought to be, and all the events and processes that preceded it for almost a century were not necessarily leading to the radiant future it was supposed to inaugurate, these events and processes had to be rethought and reexamined.12 For those historians who did not share the view of the 1917 preeminence, matters stood differently; their views and writings are in no

Introduction • 11

need of reappraisal, and they are spared this difficulty and self-examination. But there are other difficulties in store for all historians.

The Study of the Past in an Age of Televisual History The historian’s craft encounters many hardships in today’s culture and society, and some of them deserve to be clearly formulated and brought to the attention of the reader of a history book. The knowledge and understanding of history among the wider public nowadays are not shaped mainly by the study of history in high schools or by the works of professional historians, including the best-sellers they write like Montaillou, The Cheese and the Worms, or The Return of Martin Guerre. Recently, even within the historians’ ranks, there is a certain malaise that some authors have called a “crisis of history,”13 although it seems to me that this sense of crisis is a permanent fixture among academic historians. Thus, for instance, J. H. Plumb diagnosed such a crisis as early as the 1960s, when the discipline was flourishing and achieved thereafter some spectacular advances and successes.14 Paradoxically, this malaise occurs at a time when history has become very popular in the wider public thanks to its diffusion by the media of mass communication. In our competitive, image-focused culture and in present-day societies increasingly dominated by images rather than words, the visual culture and the cult of celebrities, strongly promoted by the effects of television and its capacities of media magnification, tend to create a spectator-generation in the public at large and a conviction among common men and women that they know history and understand all its springs and secrets. History lessons today are dispensed by television in many different ways. Is this superficial and always hurried “television history” a substitute for the discipline of history? Does it undermine the research and teaching of specialist history? Will the reenactment of past events in period costumes and scenery in televisual history be, for the mass audiences, a substitute for the traditional classroom history lesson? With all its possible benefits, are such reenactments useful or detrimental to a genuine understanding of history’s course and to the formation of a historical consciousness in the present? These are questions that historians are pondering today in order to better understand their role as teachers and authors. We do not know the answers yet, but we sense the many difficulties that these cultural developments create. One difficulty stems from teaching and learning history in an environment of mediated reality that encompasses the question of the meaning of reality as conveyed by television. This process of teaching and learning includes not only historical movies, documentaries, and docudramas, but also

12 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” the making of the news, often presented as “instant history.” Today wide segments of society receive most of their information about the world that they live in through television and its various programs, and not only from the evening news. Thus, contemporary events—from those in one’s immediate neighborhood to those in the wider world—become “history in the making.” The mode in which television operators (from the field reporter and cameraman to the anchor in the studio) present this instant history to the viewers has a definite influence, albeit subconscious and not yet well understood, in shaping their notions of the “event,” of its causes and connections with antecedents, of its links with other synchronic events, and of its possible consequences. Briefly put, this influence has a major role in shaping the public’s historical consciousness. But what exactly is this influence? What are its forms and effects? Is it a sort of teaching of history through examples, in which the example is the social, national, and world history as it is happening here and now, that is, in the latest news? One mitigating factor of this influence may be the skepticism and even distrust of large circles in society toward what is being said and staged on the small screen. One of the generic aspects and basic mechanisms of human thought is to proceed by way of comparison and analogy. What is the effect of television’s way of presenting current events on the public’s understanding of the past, when this past is constantly remodeled by examples and historical references supplied by visual images? Television is redefining the scale of priorities, that is, the relative importance of events in the life of a society and a nation. Television is becoming a supplier of lessons from contemporary history, according to rules that are basically ahistorical and, in any case, different from those established by the traditions of historical thought. Moreover, television is not only a passive transmitter of images, but often creates happenings that in the public’s mind compete with truly momentous events, past and present, for a share of reality and historicity. This function invites the historian to take a closer look at these happenings, their nature, and their effect on the shaping of historical consciousness. Among these happenings we also find media events, described as “the high holidays of mass communication.” But are they also, as one expert put it, “the live broadcast of history,” or rather a make-believe substitute? Does such “live” history foster an understanding of the past, or rather the opposite? To a similar but more insidious category belong the so-called pseudoevents and non-events, in which fact and fiction are hopelessly garbled. In a perceptive defense of media events, the noted scholar Elihu Katz summarized the objections raised by “the critics of media events” and presented those formulated by Walter Benjamin, Daniel Boorstin, and me:

Introduction • 13

[T]here appear to be three arguments against media events. One argument, Boorstin’s, holds that these events would not have happened if it were not for the active collusion, or at least the proximity, of the camera and the microphone. A second argument, Benjamin’s, is that media events can be manipulated to whip masses into a frenzy of chauvinism. Finally, Confino’s argument is that “historic” events, especially media events, divert us from a true consciousness of history. ”If a tree fell in the forest and the media were not there, did the tree really fall?” Boorstin would say yes. Confino would say that single trees are irrelevant: it’s what’s happening to the forest that matters … and you can’t see the forest for the tree. … And Benjamin would say that the event of the felling of the tree is a message about the unrelenting power of the authorities and their use of fearsome technologies.15

One thing seems beyond dispute: television teaches today much more, and more powerfully, than do parents and schoolteachers. Infused with this teaching and bred by the images, children and students at schools and universities meet history teachers and professors who try to overcome these invisible barriers in their attempt to teach history as they think it should be taught. The role of historical festivals and commemorations, whether staged or not, in shaping a collective historical consciousness is also of momentous importance, particularly because of the special emphasis put on these occasions by the media. The way television casts the form and content of these festivals is of great significance. These commemorations acquire new characteristics when relayed, edited, and commented on by the media. Television shapes the perceptions of what is and what is not important in the commemorated historical saga or event. Three pertinent examples may illustrate this point: respectively the commemorations of the bicentennials of the United States Constitution and of the French Revolution, and the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which provide numerous instances of how television frames, so to say, various festivities. Television gives a new dimension to the past and makes it come alive, but there are also examples of how a trivial but colorful historical detail is presented as more important than truly significant and decisive turns of history.16 Television plays, often involuntarily, the role of censor, and at times it rewrites history. Thus, to a great extent, the language of visual images ceases to be the language of historical accuracy. The teaching and learning of history in schools and universities has become, then, an intriguing and difficult undertaking. This seems to be so because—unlike physics, mathematics, and even literature—history as a curriculum subject is never taught in isolation from strong external cultural and political influences that interfere with the educational process, adding

14 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” their share of information and misconceptions to the knowledge that the teacher and the textbook bring to the students’ attention in the classroom. Whether as “history in the making” on the television screen or as historical commemorations and festivals, documentary films, and the constant reference to the past (used and abused at will) in public discourse and political speeches, these extracurricular lessons in history participate in one way or another in the shaping of children’s and adults’ knowledge, perceptions, and representations of history in the past and its relevance for explaining the present.

Historical Consciousness and the Study of History History lessons, however imperfect, are part and parcel of everyday culture, and this fact creates a specific problem for the history teacher and author. But we still do not know exactly what happens during the educational process when these two sources of historical knowledge—the formal one in school and the random one at large—meet and mix together in the individual’s mind. In addition, another important aspect of the study of history is rendered by the old saying: “History is the teaching of morals by examples.”17 The grain of truth in this saying is that history is not an abstract and remote subject of study, unconnected with the norms and perceptions—cultural, political, and ethical—of the student as citizen. History is and has always been (even when one tries to avoid it) a source of lessons in good or bad judgment, codes of conduct, moral and social values, examples for our time, and not only information on the past. For that same reason the study of history may enlighten also teachers, educators, and professional historians about the psychology of learning and the content of knowledge received from different (and sometimes contradictory) sources of information. The study of history may also enhance the educated public’s awareness of some unnoticed effects of contemporary cultural trends and their influence on image formation and perceptions of the world that we live in. For the historian, such a study has even greater importance because it will also indicate the factors that participate in the formation of the historical consciousness of readers and students. The development of historical consciousness leads to a kind of catharsis, to a liberation of our collective subconscious, comparable to the one aimed at by psychoanalysis in the sphere of individual psychology. In both cases, “the very awareness of a cause in the past changes its effect in the present”; in both cases, man frees himself from what Gabriel Garcia Márquez has called “the crushing weight of so much past.”18 Yet one frees himself or herself not by forgetting the past but by integrating it into one’s knowledge and consciousness. It is in this sense that—as has often been

Introduction • 15

said, from Goethe to Benedetto Croce—historical knowledge frees man from the burden of the past. Paradoxically, it is equally true that “the dimension of the historical alone prevents us from being crushed by the weight of the present.”19 This essential role of history in our society should not be overlooked in view of the ahistorical and anti-historical tendencies fostered by certain styles of life, current types of mass entertainment, and theories that implicitly or explicitly negate the raison d’être of the study of history. In a hundred direct and indirect ways, modern and postmodern impulses to escape from history work to erode the sense of the temporal dimension in our lives. There is always a heavy price to be paid for believing that “history is dead,” as well as a much heavier one (usually paid by others) for acting according to the fallacious assumption that history does not exist. In the intellectual sphere the most flagrant example, indeed the symbol, of this anti-historical tendency was and still is the demand that historical subjects be relevant, an embellished corollary of the hollow request that history be “useful,” that it “justify its cost” and not be a waste of money. In fact, this demand is a dangerous anachronism that means submitting the past to present needs or instant moods—a variant of the well-known totalitarian precept according to which those who want to be masters of the future must first control the past. These anti-historical tendencies are also exemplified by young and grown-up nihilists and managerial wizards who think that since the world can be remade today or tomorrow, time spent on studying the past and history is time wasted. Strangely enough, an almost identical view is held by certain so-called practical people and pragmatic politicians who assert that it is more important to know about the present than to inquire into the past. This is a false dichotomy, for it is hard to believe that too much knowledge of the past has ever prevented these people from properly understanding the present, and it is certainly not an excessive knowledge of history that has been the cause of the most pernicious political errors in our time.

In Defense of History The great historian Marc Bloch addressed a topic that is not very popular among historians, and his most famous book opens with his son’s simple and immense question: “Tell me Daddy. What is the use of history?” The book’s original title, Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien, was rendered in English as The Historian’s Craft, thereby losing in translation the idea of the praise of history. The book was written in the midst of war and adversity and remained unfinished, as Bloch did not manage to complete the two last chapters before he was arrested and executed by the Gestapo

16 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” in June 1944 for his activity in the Résistance.20 His son’s simple question encompasses many complex historical and philosophical issues, and Bloch cautiously adds, “I wish I could say of this book that it is my answer. I can conceive no higher praise for a writer than to be able to speak in the same tone to savants and schoolboys alike, but so noble a simplicity is the privilege of the select few.” Bloch was among these select few, and he knew that people often ask themselves what is the use of history, and by extension, of the humanities in general. They do so in time of crisis and hardship as well as in years of prosperity and hedonistic mood. His answer was directed also at those who may have thought that history was useless or treacherous, like the young French military officer whom he had heard uttering in dismay on the day when he saw the German army marching into Paris: “Did history betray us again?” The question about the use of history has never been a welcome one for historians. For many of them the answer is unclear, and the traditional and proud response given in the past to the tune of “art for art’s sake,” which once upon a time was satisfying, seems today insufficient and inadequate. Can it be that some historians too are asking themselves what the use of history is? The answers to this question are many and diverse. Some people hold that it is an idle question and that there is no point in looking for answers since history and the humanities stand in no need of external justification. Others think that there will never be a satisfactory answer anyway. Still others assume that this whole area of study—history as well as the humanities—is an exercise in futility and a waste of money, and the diffusion of this view among laypersons and academics seems closely related to the financial difficulties of colleges and universities, and the adoption of a business management approach among institutions of higher learning. Unlike Marc Bloch, I do not hope to give, in this short introduction, answers to the complex cultural and existential questions raised by this vast issue. I will make here only a few cursory remarks on some points concerning the present state of history, its broader importance and cultural role. The basic function of history, like that of the humanities, is to recover, preserve, and interpret the cultural heritage of mankind, and also to integrate it as a real and active force into contemporary life. However, history adds a specific and essential element to this function: the constant evocation of the immediacy of the time dimension and its integration into contemporary culture and our vision of the past and the present. Historians have asked themselves, “Is history an art or a science?” Today many would agree with the eclectic view that history is an art that uses scientific methods. This is not an ideal formulation, but it reflects a great deal of history’s nature and modes of work. It has been argued that far from being a science,

Introduction • 17

history is no more than an “aesthetic contemplation of singularities,”21 but even if that were so, history would not be without a cultural function. On the contrary, this aesthetic aspect points to the links and analogies between historical subjects—the plots, the characters, the situations—and those in literary works, whether tragic, dramatic, epic, or comic. From this point of view history may be seen as a magnificent accumulation of “stories,” psychodramas, and comedies, and as such it is certainly a valuable contribution to culture. But this proximity between certain features of history and literature is only one aspect of the matter. From another angle, it is surprising to find out to what extent historical knowledge has in its turn nourished great literature from Homer to Shakespeare to Tolstoy and many others. The knowledge of history deepens our understanding of the human being, of men and women in society, of their multiform reality and endless potentialities. We write and read history as we enjoy reading good literature, and also as we seek in real life to meet people, to know and understand them in order to learn what we would not have known without meeting this or that man or woman, scholar or scientist. Thus, history, by one of its essential humanistic functions, enriches our inner universe as well with cultural values derived from the past. About fifty years ago, the contrast between the progress of the sciences and technology and the crisis in history was a fashionable topic of discussion. In 1964, a collection of essays was published entitled Crisis in the Humanities. Its editor, J. H. Plumb, contributed a chapter on “The Historian’s Dilemma” in which he expressed the view that “ninety per cent, perhaps [among professional historians]” consider “that the subject they practice is meaningless in any ultimate sense.” As an illustration, Plumb cited Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in which the wife is the symbol of life while the husband, a professional historian, incarnates history’s crisis, its impotence, sterility, and ultimate meaninglessness. “His wife, who possesses all the force, the violence, the passion of an instinctively living woman, hates his failure, his verbosity, his confusion, his inadequacy.” The great success of the play indicated that the public shared this view. “History and life are doomed to live it out in hate, in distrust, in mutual failure,” Plumb commented. “They are lost in timeless falsehood, bound by dreams of the past that may not have existed, and enslaved by their own lies about the future. And this, as the audience streamed out into the flashing neon lights of Broadway, seemed to have the force of truth. History is without meaning, without power, without hope. Is it?”22 In retrospect, Plumb’s pessimistic assessment appears to have been greatly exaggerated. The crisis of the 1960s (if there was a crisis at all) gave way to remarkable achievements in history research. History has contin-

18 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” ued to play its role as the unifying principle among all the areas of study of the past. By absorbing critically the methodological progress achieved in other disciplines—sociology, economics, linguistics, semiotics, and psychology—it provides a meaningful link among them and integrates their achievements, and it remains a significant factor in contemporary culture and society.

Notes 1. “The Discipline and I” is an unqualified plagiarism of the title of Alexander Gerschenkron’s Presidential Address at the Economic History Association’s Convention, published in the Journal of Economic History 27, no. 4 (December 1967): 443–459. 2. Best Plays by Chekhov, transl. with Introduction by Stark Young (New York, 1950), pp. 218–219. 3. Review of my Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1963) in History: The Journal of the Historical Association 49, no. 167 (October 1964): 373. 4. Peter C. Perdue, “Technological Determinism in Agrarian Societies,” in Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merrit Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1994), p. 187. 5. Jerome Blum, “Michael Confino’s Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole,” Journal of Modern History 43, no. 3 (September 1971): 495. 6. Michael Confino, “Révolte juvénile et contre-culture: Les nihilistes russes des ‘années soixante,’” Cahiers du monde russe 31, no. 4 (1990): 1119–1141. 7. Revue des Etudes Slaves 43 (1991): 876. 8. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Structures of Society: Imperial Russia’s “People of Various Ranks” (De Kalb, 1994), pp. 127–128. 9. Franco Venturi to Aldo Garosci, 17 January 1948, in Franco Venturi e la Russia: Con documenti inediti, ed. Antonello Venturi (Milan, 2006), p. 94. Franco Venturi made this remark apropos Altiero Spinelli’s view that Russia is not a part of Europe. 10. See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988). 11. David Shearer, “From Divided Consensus to Creative Disorder: Soviet History in Britain and North America,” Cahiers du monde russe 39, no. 4 (October– December 1998): 559–591; Laura Engelstein, “New Thinking about the Old Empire: Post Soviet Reflections,” The Russian Review 60, no. 4 (October 2001): 488. 12. See chapter 10 in this volume, “Current Events and the Representation of the Past: Issues in Russian Historical Writing.” 13. See Theodore S. Hamerow, Reflections on History and Historians (Madison, 1987). 14. See J. H. Plumb, ed., Crisis in the Humanities (Baltimore, 1964). 15. Elihu Katz with Daniel Dayan and Pierre Motyl, “Communications in the 21st Century: In Defense of Media Events,” Organizational Dynamics 10, no. 2 (Au-

Introduction • 19

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

tumn 1981): 75. Katz is referring to an essay of mine, “Historical Consciousness in Contemporary Culture and Society,” published in 1980 in Hebrew by the School of History at Tel Aviv University. See Ian Kershaw, “Behind the Screen: How Television Trumpets and Trivializes History,” Times Literary Supplement, 14 March 2003, p. 16–17. See for instance John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, 1989). Gabriel Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (London, 1972), p. 381. Page Smith, The Historian and History (New York, 1966), p. 239. The posthumous edition of the book appeared in Paris in 1949, edited from Marc Bloch’s notes and manuscripts by Lucien Febvre. The best and most complete edition is Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien, édition critique préparée par Etienne Bloch (Paris, 1993); the quotation appears on p. 69; Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York, 1953), p. 3. Max Beloff, “On Thinking about the Past,” Encounter 33, no.4 (October 1969): 44. J. H. Plumb, “The Historian’s Dilemma,” in Plumb, Crisis in the Humanities, p. 24.

d The Fate of Ideas PART ONE

in History

e

d Alexander Herzen and CHAPTER 1

Isaiah Berlin on Russia’s Elusive Counter-Enlightenment

e

The Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment were complex phenomena that left their mark on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European thought and culture. They become even more intricate subjects of study when linked to the context of intellectual life in Russia at the time. On the surface, it might seem that there is little scope for such a topic, given the major differences between Western Europe and Russia and given the latter’s seeming lack of concepts and ideas normally associated with these two great constellations of European thought.

Russian Peculiarities? Why such an impression? With regard to Western Europe, scholars, whatever their approaches and interpretations, are more or less in agreement on the terminus a quo of the Enlightenment and on the main tenets of its beliefs and theories. There is, to say the least, a common ground, a shared understanding of the essentials, regardless of the non-negligible differences of opinion as to, for instance, whether the Enlightenment was “a movement,” as Isaiah Berlin assumed, or an assemblage of a wide range of ideas lumped together and called “Enlightenment” for convenience’s sake. Similarly, most scholars assume that the Counter-Enlightenment was a counterideology, or a counter-movement; in either case they succeed in outlining its basic ideas within certain agreed-upon temporal and theoretical limits. Finally, this conceptual unity would prevail (although it might be seriously shaken) if one considers, as I do, that the term “Counter-Enlightenment” is essentially a convenient and elegant metaphor signifying a loosely connected, and sometimes even opposed, set of thinkers and ideas; or, on the contrary, if one believes that this is a powerful paradigm that imposes order and hierarchy on the intricate taxonomy of the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Western world of ideas and ideologies.1 23

24 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” But when we turn to the Russian scene, the answers to these preliminary questions suggest that there is no sufficient basis for an examination of the “Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment” problematic in view of what we know about the parameters of intellectual life in Russia and the course of its history of ideas. This is not to say, of course, that Russia is and has always been sui generis. That attractive but worn-out notion has been disproved by extensive historical research and empirical evidence. By definition, sui generis entities—being discrete, unique, and unrepeated—are not comparable to any other, yet we know that in all areas of historical development and scholarly enquiry Russia stands the test of comparability with the other European countries. In this regard Berlin’s writings on Russia brilliantly demonstrate time and again that it is not sui generis, but rather belongs to Europe and participated in, and responded to, the events, the currents of ideas, and “the spirit of the times” that reigned in Europe at any given moment. In his view Russia was not “a world apart” (as Michael Ignatieff interprets Berlin’s opinion),2 nor a different species vis-à-vis the other European countries. On the contrary, Russia shared a basic unity and commonality with other European countries and at the same time, like them, had its own national and religious peculiarities and differences. On this subject, there is nowadays a puzzling revival of the metaphysical stereotype of the “Russian soul”—l’âme russe of old—now often referred to with trendy terms such as the “Russian cultural heritage,” the “Russian mentality,” or the “burden of history.” It is the “Russian soul” that supposedly explains why “Russia is so different.” It is the root cause of why, for instance, Russia cannot have a market economy, a democratic regime, or a civil society. “Russian culture,” like “culture” tout court, is one of many concepts, increasingly used and badly misused, that explain too much and nothing at all. They should be treated with caution, for they are often used in lieu of specious notions like “race,” “genes,” “national character,” and the like. This usage marks a cultural U-turn that, paradoxically, is leading back to such utterly discredited and reactionary pseudo-explanations. “L’âme russe et ses mystères”: in a kind of parody of eternal return, finde-siècle fashions are repeating themselves after a hundred-year interval, this time with no Ballets Russes or Rasputins around to serve as alibis. But even if some aspects of the post-Soviet state of Russia’s economy and society are more reminiscent of Al Capone’s times than of John Maynard Keynes’s theory, it was not the Russians, after all, who invented the Mafia system (although they borrowed the word) or jungle capitalism (i.e., capitalism without a human face). True, Russia’s economic development—whether inspired by Harvard business management wizards or not—reminds one at times of the raw, early capitalism described by Karl Marx, and bolstered by the current globalization. But there is nothing peculiarly Russian in

Herzen and Berlin on Russia’s Counter-Enlightenment • 25

this: other countries have trodden this path before, and as an explanatory hypothesis the “Russian soul” cliché is less than adequate.

An Eighteenth-Century Russian Enlightenment? In the eighteenth century Russia was not “a world apart,” but it was indeed different, as the relations between the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment show. No matter how one defines the Enlightenment, no such phenomenon appeared in Russia.3 To be sure, in the eighteenth century there were a handful of enlightened people, among them Catherine II, Nikolai Novikov, Alexander Radishchev, Alexander Betskoi, and some others, but there was no “movement” in the sense that Berlin used this term. Logically, then, one might be inclined to say: no Enlightenment, hence no CounterEnlightenment. Yet this is not necessarily the case. Indeed, there is one possibility that explains how this could not have been so, and how a Russian Counter-Enlightenment could have existed, namely, that it developed as a reaction to the Enlightenment in Western Europe. This is neither an idle hypothesis nor counterfactual fancy: in Russia, as elsewhere, exogenous events and ideas have often generated indigenous movements, schools of thought, and ideologies. Thus, it is not impossible that there might have been a Russian Counter-Enlightenment without a Russian Enlightenment. The late Alexander Gerschenkron, a good friend and admirer of Isaiah Berlin, would perhaps have attributed such a development to the “advantages (or disadvantages) of backwardness,” a concept he magisterially elaborated.4 But this did not occur in the eighteenth century. At that time, Russian educated society’s interest in the ideas of the philosophes created lively conversations and a certain demand for foreign books and publications (thus generating a flow of import dues for Catherine’s customs), but in practical terms, in “real life,” this interest came to naught and led nowhere. The main reason for the impracticality of the Enlightenment in Russia was the widespread conviction that its otherwise lofty and admirable ideas were not applicable in that country (at least—as the cliché goes—not “for the time being”), and that they had no practical role in the “cursed Russian reality” epitomized by autocracy and serfdom. This point is well illustrated in Berlin’s description of Herzen’s father: Shrewd, honorable, and neither unfeeling nor unjust, a “difficult” character like old Prince Bolkonsky in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Ivan Yakovlev emerges from his son’s recollections a self-lacerating, grim, shut-in, half frozen human being, who terrorized his household with his whims and his sarcasm. He kept all doors and windows locked, the blinds permanently drawn, and, apart from a few old friends and his own brothers, saw

26 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” virtually nobody. In later years his son described him as the product of the “encounter of two such incompatible things as the [western] eighteenth century and Russian life” – a collision of cultures that had destroyed a good many among the more sensitive members of the Russian gentry in the reigns of Catherine II and her successors.5

In addition, the philosophes’ advocacy of “enlightened despotism” had in Russia a rather paradoxical effect, condoning despotism, which was very palpable anyway, and postponing enlightenment to some distant future. Additional circumstances that seemed to endorse this state of affairs included, for instance, Diderot’s visit to St. Petersburg and his long (and well publicized) conversations with Catherine II; the latter’s assiduous correspondence with Voltaire, whose letters to her are a model of obsequiousness; and Catherine’s public “confession” to having “plagiarized shamelessly” (j’ai pillé sans vergogne) Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois in writing her new Code of Laws, the Nakaz of 1767 (which in any case was never put into practice).6 These and other public relations moves were quite successful; Catherine had a flair for public relations management and for make-believe (whether the philosophes really believed her or not is an open question, but they behaved “as if”), and her success in this respect greatly mitigated in Russia the radical, humanistic, and revolutionary elements of the Enlightenment. After 1789 Catherine—together with most of Russian educated society—repudiated the French Revolution, that “monstrous child of perverse and subversive teachings,” but while she energetically encouraged the kings of Prussia and Austria to wipe out the “Jacobin pest” in Paris, she herself, taking advantage of the fact that these kings’ armies were positioned against France, swallowed up large chunks of Polish territory while pretending that she was routing Jacobinism in Warsaw (!), thus orchestrating the Second and Third Partitions of Poland and diverting Prussia’s and Austria’s attention from the battle against France to the spoils in Poland. Russia’s expansion was more important than fighting French revolutionaries. Thus, Finis Poloniae and the eradication of Polish independence became a fact of life for 125 years, and Jacobinism (to a certain extent because of Catherine’s strategy) was to haunt Europe for the next two hundred years, until François Furet announced, to everybody’s relief: “la Révolution Française est terminée,” and Mikhail Gorbachev brought about one more tangible proof of it.

The Decembrists The following stage of intellectual development came in the early nineteenth century and represented a strengthening of the reaction against

Herzen and Berlin on Russia’s Counter-Enlightenment • 27

what were perceived as results of Enlightenment ideas: the Revolution’s excesses, the execution of Louis XVI, the abolition of the monarchy, the persecution of the nobility, and finally the rise of “Buonaparte.” The court historian Nikolai Karamzin was the epitome of this change of mood: once a sympathizer of the Parisian sans culottes, he became a kind of Russian Chateaubriand, le talent en moins. The opposition to these developments was moral (because of the Jacobin Terror), social (because educated society in Russia was almost exclusively of noble rank and had a sense of solidarity with the French aristocracy), and finally, political and nationalistic (because of the strong anti-French sentiments born during the wars against Napoleon). In a way, this intellectual and psychological phenomenon was a sort of bastard Counter-Enlightenment, but one that obviously bears no relation to that usually discussed under this heading. A qualitatively new political and ideological development occurred with the formation of the Decembrists’ secret societies from 1814 up until their unsuccessful rebellion against Nicholas I in December 1825, when he ascended the throne upon the death of Alexander I. Strictly speaking, however, the Decembrists were not disciples of the philosophes. They disagreed with many of their conceptions and theories, and they rejected the political and ideological path that led to Napoleon’s rise to power and “despotic regime.” Several Western scholars and the official line of Soviet historiography held that most of the Decembrists were followers of the Encyclopedists, and that they were influenced by the revolutionary movement in France and in other countries. The Decembrists did indeed acquire some enlightened ideas from their foreign tutors (mainly Frenchmen) and from foreign books, but the authors who caught their attention were Adam Smith, Condorcet, Benjamin Constant, Beccaria, Benjamin Franklin, JeanBaptiste Say, Jeremy Bentham, Byron—not exactly proponents of the Jacobin type of catechism.7 Like other young Russian noblemen, the Decembrists had traveled abroad and studied in foreign universities where they were exposed to the latest Western European intellectual fashions. But their universities of choice—Leipzig, Heidelberg, Göttingen, Strassburg, Berlin, and Königsberg—were not hotbeds of radical thought. It is typical that in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin the protagonist Lensky returns to his estate after a course of studies at Göttingen and, inspired by the enlightened ideas acquired there, decides to alleviate the burden on his serfs—not by freeing them, as one might expect, but by treating them less harshly and more humanely. Much more influential than these studies abroad (which were in a sense part of the customary “grand tour”) were the Russian army’s campaigns abroad. Many Decembrists had served as officers during the Napoleonic wars, and the military campaigns across Europe during these long and tense

28 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” years brought them to Austerlitz, Friedland, the Berezina, Leipzig, and to the heart of Paris, where they made camp on the Champ de Mars (the wide park that extends today from the Ecole Militaire to the Eiffel Tower). Victorious, they then returned all the way home through Europe. That long march brought these army officers in contact with foreign peoples and wider strata of society, quite different from their closed nobility milieu in Russia and in Göttingen. This upset many of their notions and led them to discover new ways of life, of behavior, and of managing public affairs. At the same time, the ethos of war, the ordeals of battle, and hatred of the enemy, Napoleon, created a strong national, even nationalistic, attitude. At the end of it all, the Decembrists returned home as “national liberals,” for lack of a better term. It is this existential mindset that characterizes them collectively, and not some vague link to the Enlightenment. In the Decembrists’ intellectual formation and mentality the existential dimension was of much more consequence than were abstract ideas and philosophical theories. Their “grand tour” in Europe as Russian soldiers was different from that usually undertaken by young noblemen as part of the traditional éducation sentimentale. At the end of the journey their return home was ecstatic. Here is how Pushkin, who had several close friends among them, describes their homecoming, in the “Snowstorm”: Meanwhile the war had been gloriously ended. Our regiments were returning from abroad. The people were running to meet them. The bands were playing songs of victory: “Vive Henri Quatre,” Tyrolean waltzes, airs from “Joconda”… . The soldiers talked gaily among themselves, continually mingling German and French words in their conversation. A neverto-be-forgotten time.

Russian soldiers and officers had seen in Europe more civility, more justice, more freedom. This is what many of them hoped that Russia would adopt after these glorious wars. When this did not transpire, their hopes turned to disappointment, then to frustration and anger, and finally to the uprising against the regime on 14 December 1825. But their rebellion was first and foremost an existential one, a rebellion of men of action, not of thinkers. Certainly, it had philosophical undertones (everything had “philosophical undertones” in that début de siècle) and some disparate enlightened ideas, but essentially it was more psychological than ideological. The Decembrists were rebels, as Albert Camus conceived this notion, not revolutionaries. They thought of reforms, and they wanted change. As one of them wrote in 1826 from his jail to Nicholas I: After the end of the Napoleonic wars we were all hoping that the Emperor would give his attention to questions of home government. We were im-

Herzen and Berlin on Russia’s Counter-Enlightenment • 29

patiently expecting a constitution and a reform of the law courts. What have we seen? Twelve years have passed and nothing has been changed except the color of our uniforms.

They then attempted change through insurrection. They failed, but their legacy endured. The Decembrists were not, as some historians think, a “proto-intelligentsia,” heralding the imminent rise of the famed and turbulent Russian intelligentsia.8 They were army officers, not intellectuals; they were not intelligenty, nor were they hommes de lettres, with the exception of poets like Ryleev and dreamers like Küchelbecker. The remaining hundred-plus men sentenced by Nicholas’s (unreformed) courts—five of whom were hanged and the rest exiled to Siberia—were primarily soldiers, although some of them were well educated and well versed in philosophy, history, and literature. Nevertheless, they were professional soldiers, not intellectuals, not “pupils of the Enlightenment.” If so, what makes them relevant to the search for the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment in Russia?

The Next Stage: Herzen and Friends In his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, a young Alexander Herzen writes that his political awakening dated from the events surrounding the Decembrists’ uprising and its aftermath, which left a deep imprint on him and on his lifelong friend Nikolai Ogarev.9 This holds true for other eminent people of Herzen’s generation and leads to the third intellectual development relevant to the search for a Russian Enlightenment and CounterEnlightenment. It took place in the 1830s and 1840s, which include the well known “remarkable decade,”10 when there appeared on center stage Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev, Vissarion Belinskii, Mikhail Bakunin, Nikolai Stankevich, Ogarev, Timofei Granovskii, as well as the influential and not less original group, the Slavophiles. In fact, in spite of the impression that one gets from history books, the Slavophiles (who should not be confused with the Panslavists) included an array of powerful personalities and scholars of philosophy, ethnography, history, and theology: Aleksei Khomiakov, the brothers Ivan and Konstantin Aksakov, Ivan Kireevskii, Iurii Samarin, Alexander Koshelev, and others.11 Logically, the most likely participants in a Counter-Enlightenment movement in Russia should have been the Slavophiles: bred by German Romanticism, they were an ensemble of organicists, conservatives, and evolutionists who explicitly rejected the rationalism and universalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. But what may seem logically sound turns

30 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” out to be historically wrong, for in spite of these similarities, the Slavophiles did not espouse the main ideas usually attributed to the Counter-Enlightenment and were even strongly opposed to the core of its Weltanschauung. They were not representatives of a Russian Counter-Enlightenment, and in fact they represented no one but themselves, for, as Walicki aptly points out, “Slavophile doctrine … is particularly intractable to classifications by … traditional intellectual taxonomy.”12 This being the case, one must ask whether there were other possible representatives of Counter-Enlightenment in Russia. Is Herzen, as some scholars imply, the missing Russian candidate for a Counter-Enlightenment thinker? One commentator on Berlin’s conception of Counter-Enlightenment writes: Berlin’s intellectual heroes are those thinkers who formulated a pluralist Weltanschauung from within the Enlightenment movement and against it: Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamman or Alexander Herzen… . In spite of the considerable differences between them, these thinkers and others, whom Berlin defines as belonging to the “Counter-Enlightenment,” were united in the assumption that the sciences of man are different in their essence from the natural sciences, for the object of their enquiry—man—is not one more atom acting according to fixed physical attributes of its nature and the material needs that ensue from them, but also, and above all, acting out of spiritual yearnings and cultural traditions.13

This interesting interpretation invites two remarks. Firstly, Berlin’s assumption that the sciences of man are different from the natural sciences, although basically correct, seems insufficient as a basis for defining the CounterEnlightenment, or for that matter any other coherent set of ideas bound by more than a few general propositions. Secondly, I would hesitate to include Herzen in this company of thinkers, for he did not belong to the Enlightenment and therefore could not have been against it “from within.” Before explaining this proposition, let me add that Isaiah Berlin, so it seems, never defined Herzen as “belonging to the Counter-Enlightenment,” and I have found only one instance in Berlin’s writings where Herzen is mentioned in the company of Vico and Herder. It appears in the essay “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” and it reads as follows: If the old perennial belief in the possibility of realizing ultimate harmony is a fallacy, and the positions of the thinkers I have appealed to—Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Herzen—are valid, then, if we allow that Great Goods can collide, that some of them cannot live together, even though others can—in short, that one cannot have everything, in principle as well as in practice—and if human creativity may depend upon a variety of mutually exclusive choices: then, as Chernyshevsky and Lenin once asked,

Herzen and Berlin on Russia’s Counter-Enlightenment • 31

“What is to be done?” How do we choose between possibilities? What and how much must we sacrifice to what? There is, it seems to me, no clear reply.14

What can we learn from this quotation, its context, and for that matter, the whole corpus of Berlin’s writings on Russia and on Herzen? I believe that Herzen—whom Isaiah Berlin admired and with whom he identified more than any other thinker he wrote about—stood high in Berlin’s esteem on account of four major positions that Herzen gradually adhered to: the notion of individual liberty; the refusal to sacrifice the present for the future; the rejection of great magnificent abstractions and a skepticism about the meaning and value of abstract ideas as such;15 and, finally, Herzen’s sense of reality.16 I will examine below their role in defining Herzen’s place on the ideological spectrum of the age, after a few remarks on the historical and intellectual background of the formation of ideas in Herzen’s time. In terms of both temperament and theoretical works, Herzen was a thinker who came close to the kind of radical pluralism that Isaiah Berlin has expounded—explicitly or implicitly—in most of his writings. As with all the members of the Moscow Circles and the Slavophiles too, the chief philosophical source of Herzen’s intellectual formation was Hegel.17 His theories were debated at length in meetings both private and public, for instance at Mme Elagina’s salon littéraire, the headquarters of the Slavophiles. Among the many episodes recounted by Herzen’s friends was the story of how hard Bakunin toiled in translating and annotating Hegel’s texts for Belinskii, who did not read German. Incidentally, his critique de texte is maybe one of the reasons for Bakunin’s mastery of Hegel’s ideas, and on that account Marx is said to have thought that the only redeeming quality of Bakunin (whom he deeply hated) was that he was one of the few people in the nineteenth century who really understood Hegel. (Notwithstanding the compliment, Bakunin’s hatred of Marx remained a constant fixture in his Weltanschauung; unfortunately, it also engendered—by a sort of chain reaction—a persistent and deplorable anti-Germanism and anti-Semitism). In spite of having such a gifted teacher, Belinskii (unlike Herzen) got Hegel’s dialectics muddled, and at a certain point he conceived the (erroneous) idea that everything ideal is real, and that everything real is ideal. This confusion led to his notorious—but short-lived—”crisis of conscience” (in 1840–42), since Hegel’s tenet, as he interpreted it, meant that all the miseries, oppression, “political orgies” (as he put it later in a letter to Bakunin) and corruption of Nicholas I’s autocratic political regime and the serfdom of the peasantry were a “rational and ideal reality.”18 For Herzen this was dangerous nonsense, and he had some harsh words for both Bakunin and Belinskii. The latter, after painful soul-searching, recanted, an-

32 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” nounced his “reconciliation with reality,” distanced himself from Hegel’s theories—which he now called “the German book”—and ceased spinning “the German web.” Thereafter, his attention was increasingly drawn to revolutionary thought, and he embarked, like Herzen, on a study of Proudhon, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Louis Blanc. However, Herzen himself was at no time an orthodox Hegelian, neither of the serious (Marx and Bakunin) brand, nor of Belinskii’s tragicomic variety. As with all the ideas he came across in the course of his life, he transformed Hegel’s doctrines into something peculiarly his own, mixing them with other (different and often contradictory) views to form his particular Weltanschauung blend. As Isaiah Berlin aptly remarked, Herzen took from thinkers such as Hegel, George Sand, Fourier, Proudhon, and the others just “what he needed, and poured it into the vehement torrent of his own experience.”19 In any case, adds Berlin, by the time Herzen eventually wrote his memoirs, “almost all traces of Hegelian influence [were] gone.”20 The important point in Berlin’s analysis is that out of the philosophical Tower of Babel of his time Herzen picked and chose what suited him. Life experience was thus paramount in the formation of Herzen’s ideas, for they were always intimately connected to existential issues. The centrality of existential factors in the formation of Herzen’s ideas explains also, to a certain extent, the changes and fluctuations in his views over time and from one period to the next in connection with his personal and political life-experiences. There is a concrete example of this point in Isaiah Berlin’s explanation of Herzen’s attitude toward the Russian peasant commune (formulated in Herzen’s open letter to Jules Michelet, and usually attributed to the influence of Herder, to the Romantic Zeitgeist, or to CounterEnlightenment tenets): [While in exile, Herzen] lived the life of an affluent, well-born man of letters, a member of the Russian, and more specifically Moscow, gentry, uprooted from his native soil, unable to achieve a settled existence or even the semblance of inward or outward peace, a life filled with occasional moments of hope and even exultation, followed by long periods of misery, corrosive self-criticism and most of all overwhelming, omnivorous, bitter nostalgia. It may be this, as much as objective reasons, that caused him to idealize the Russian peasant, and to dream that the answer to the central “social” question of his time—that of growing inequality, exploitation, dehumanization of both the oppressor and the oppressed—lay in the preservation of the Russian peasant commune. He perceived in it the seeds of the development of a non-industrial, semi-anarchist socialism.21

In other words, in the formation of this major aspect of Herzen’s worldview—the peasant commune, which earned him the title of “father of Russian socialism,” that is, “populism,” which Isaiah Berlin described so bril-

Herzen and Berlin on Russia’s Counter-Enlightenment • 33

liantly in his introduction to Franco Venturi’s Il populismo russo 22—the role played by personal circumstances was much greater than any supposed influence of Herder and Romanticism. This close connection between Herzen’s life and ideas is what makes him so original and different, and renders his “particular blend of Weltanschauung” so intractable for classification purposes. He was not sui generis, but he was unique; he was not individualistic, but he had an anarchistic streak, which led him to say that he felt good only when he found himself in a minority of one—another expression of the feature of uniqueness. For this reason Herzen’s Weltanschauung cannot be classified as either an offshoot of the Enlightenment or as a representative of the Counter-Enlightenment. A la limite it was both and neither. Given this paradox Isaiah Berlin was right in saying that “Herzen is neither consistent nor systematic.”23 Sir Isaiah did not mean it as a reproach, and he may have seen in it a trait common to Herzen and himself, a point to which I will return below. The question of whether Herzen belonged to the Enlightenment or to the Counter-Enlightenment bears some similarity to another vexed issue, namely, who Berlin was really describing when writing about Herzen? One has the impression that very often in writing about Herzen Berlin is speaking about himself, or at least indicating how he would like to be perceived by others: [H]e was a brilliant and irrepressible talker … always in an overwhelming flow of ideas and images; the waste, from the point of view of posterity … is probably immense: he had no Boswell and no Eckermann to record his conversation, nor was he a man who would have suffered such a relationship. His prose is essentially a form of talk, with the vices and virtues of talk: eloquent, spontaneous, liable to the heightened tones and exaggerations of the born story-teller, unable to resist long digressions which themselves carry him into a network of intersecting tributaries of memory or speculation, but always returning to the main stream of the story or the argument; but above all, his prose has the vitality of spoken words.24

The above citation is not a description of Sir Isaiah, as those who knew him might immediately assume, but rather an excerpt from his portrait of Herzen. Similar passages abound in Berlin’s writings, and I wonder if in some of them Sir Isaiah was providing food for the thought that he, perhaps unconsciously, was depicting himself.

Three Stages in the Formation of Herzen’s Worldview As I have already noted, it is no easy task to give a rigorous definition of Herzen’s Weltanschauung, which shifted more than once in his lifetime. Fol-

34 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” lowing Berlin, we may say that there were grosso modo three main stages in the evolution of Herzen’s ideas and worldview.25 At the beginning—in the Moscow Circles and during the years of the “marvelous decade”—he had an ideal vision of human life and ignored the chasm that divided it from the present, whether it be the Russia of Nicholas I or the corrupt constitutionalism in the West. At that time he glorified enlightened radicalism and condemned its opponents in Russia—and especially the tendency toward blind conservatism, Slavophile nostalgia, and the cautious gradualism of his friends, the Westernizers Granovskii and Turgenev, as well as Hegelian appeals to patience and rational conformity to the inescapable rhythms of history, which seemed to him designed to ensure the triumph of the new bourgeois class. The second stage began around 1847, when Herzen left Russia for Western Europe, and at first tended toward a more critical outlook. All genuine change, he began to think, is necessarily slow; the power of tradition is very great; men are less malleable than had been believed in the eighteenth century, nor do they truly seek liberty, only security and contentment; communism is but tsarism in different garb, the replacement of one yoke by another. At this stage (notwithstanding his faith in the Russian peasant commune as the prototype of the future society), he no longer felt certain that the gap between the enlightened élite and the masses could be bridged (a view that becomes an obsession in later Russian thought under the label “intelligentsiia i narod,” the intelligentsia and the people), since the awakened people may, for unalterable psychological and sociological reasons, despise and reject the gifts of a civilization that will never have enough meaning for them. (In this regard Herzen’s fears were shared even by such radical populists as Chernyshevskii and Mikhailovskii) Later on, he spoke of something even more disquieting, a haunting sense of the ever widening and unbridgeable gulf between the human values of the relatively free and civilized élites (to which he knew himself to belong) and the actual needs, desires, and tastes of the vast voiceless masses of mankind.26 Finally, in the third stage, Herzen asked himself: If these doubts are justified, is radical transformation either practicable or desirable? From this followed his growing sense of obstacles that might be insurmountable, limits that may be impassable, leading him to empiricism, skepticism, and a latent pessimism and despair in the mid 1860s. The most eloquent documents conveying this way of thought are his open letters To an Old Comrade, addressed to Bakunin, who proclaimed that the act of destruction is also an act of creation. In these letters, written in 1869, one year before his death, Herzen expressed his admiration for Peter the Great and the Jacobins because they dared to do something instead of nothing. Yet he says also that Petrograndism, the behavior of Attila, and the policy of the Com-

Herzen and Berlin on Russia’s Counter-Enlightenment • 35

mittee of Public Safety in 1793—in a word, any method that presupposes the feasibility of simple and radical solutions—in the end always leads to oppression, bloodshed, and collapse. But this three-stage intellectual development presented by Berlin invites some remarks and qualifications. Firstly, it indicates (again) how difficult it is to associate Herzen with the Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment, and in any case begs the question of when and to what extent he shared this or that idea attributed to one of these two movements. Secondly, this three-stage development, even if it provides some order for Herzen’s intellectual evolution, does not explain the numerous contradictions, inconsistencies, and paradoxes that, in my view, existed in Herzen’s thought at each and every given moment. Thirdly, it illustrates Berlin’s deep insights, which are reflected on two levels: his capacity to present at times a very complex and intricate picture of Herzen’s personality and thought, and at other times to do the opposite, namely, single out one subject (for instance, Herzen’s views on “liberty”) and, by a tour de force of extreme reductionism, present the core of Herzen’s stand in complete isolation from important aspects of his whole mindset, thereby ignoring these contradictions.

Conclusion By way of conclusion to these brief remarks on these complex and elusive topics and personalities one should perhaps recall the four main elements in Herzen’s thought and mindset, which help explain the tortuous path of his intellectual development, and which Berlin described time and again, stressing that Herzen was “neither consistent nor systematic” and therefore—like the Slavophiles, in Walicki’s words—“intractable to classification by traditional intellectual taxonomy.” Hence his equal distance from Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment alike, a position reinforced by each of these four elements. The first element was Herzen’s opposition to all kind of abstractions. Although he believed in reason, scientific methods, individual action, and empirically discovered truths, he tended to suspect that faith in general formulas, and prescription in human affairs, was an attempt, sometimes catastrophic, to escape from the uncertainty and unpredictable variety of life. Like Isaiah Berlin and Ivan Turgenev, Herzen believed that human problems are too complex to demand simple solutions or to receive ready-made answers from abstract principles and recipes. On the contrary, he held that in principle there could be no simple or final answer to any genuine human problem, and that if a question was serious, the answer could not be clear and neat. Above all, answers could never consist of some symmetrical set

36 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” of conclusions, drawn by deductive means from a collection of self-evident axioms. Central to Herzen’s thought was the notion that the basic problems are perhaps not resolvable at all.27 The second idea concerned the absolute value of life. Although Herzen believed in human progress, he rejected the view that a generation, a social group, or an individual should be sacrificed today for the sake of progress and happiness tomorrow. His skepticism about the meaning of abstract ideals as such was in tune with the value he began to attach to the concrete, short-term, immediate goals of living individuals—specific freedoms, reward for the day’s work, immediate acts of justice. In Berlin’s words, He believed that the ultimate goal of life was life itself; that the day and the hour were ends in themselves, not a means to another day or another experience. He believed that remote ends were a dream, that faith in them was a fatal illusion; that to sacrifice the present or the immediate and foreseeable future to these distant ends must always lead to cruel and futile forms of human sacrifice.28

This meant that Herzen disagreed fundamentally with revolutionary doctrines that required the sacrifice of one or more generations for the hypothetical benefit of humankind in the future. He distrusted those who asked for sacrifices now and promised radiant futures, des lendemains qui chantent, a singing tomorrow, for he knew that almost always the day after tomorrow is a day of mourning.29 The third element consists in Herzen’s idea of liberty, a topic to which Berlin reverts time and again that also is closely linked to Herzen’s life experience: [Herzen’s] moods alternate sharply [writes Isaiah Berlin]. Sometimes he believes in a great, cleansing, revolutionary storm, even were it to take the form of a barbarian invasion likely to destroy all the values that he himself holds dear. At other times he reproaches his old friend Bakunin … for wanting to make the revolution too soon; for not understanding that dwellings for free men cannot be constructed out of the stones of a prison … History has her own tempo. Patience and gradualism – not the haste and violence of a Peter the Great – can alone bring about a permanent transformation. At such moments he wonders whether the future belongs to the free, anarchistic peasant, or to the bold and ruthless planner [whether capitalist or communist]. Then again he returns to his early moods of disillusionment and wonders whether men in general really desire freedom; perhaps only a few do so in each generation, while most human beings only want good government, no matter at whose hands; and he echoes de Maistre’s bitter epigram about Rousseau: “Monsieur Rousseau has asked why it is that men who are born free are nevertheless everywhere in chains; it is as if one were to ask why sheep, who are born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibble grass.” Herzen develops this

Herzen and Berlin on Russia’s Counter-Enlightenment • 37

theme. Men desire freedom no more than fish desire to fly. The fact that a few flying fish exist does not demonstrate that fish in general were created to fly, or are not fundamentally quite content to stay below the surface of the water, forever away from the sun and the light. Then he returns to his earlier optimism and the thought that somewhere – in Russia – there lives the unbroken human being, the peasant with his faculties intact, untainted by the corruption and sophistication of the West.30

The “West” in this case means also the insidious and constant growth of the middle classes and of the petit bourgeois character of society, whose main feature is what Vladimir Nabokov made known in the West as poshlost’: philistinism, vulgarity, kitsch and nouveau-riche arrogance and bad taste. The petit bourgeois, writes Herzen, “has two talents, prudence and punctuality. The life of the middle class is full of petty defects and petty virtues; it is self-restrained, often niggardly, and shuns what is extreme, what is superfluous … a life self-satisfied with its narrow mediocrity [and] vulgarity.”31 The middle classes and the petit bourgeois are neither fighters for liberty nor its guarantors. Neither fighters for liberty nor bearers of culture, the middle classes and the petit bourgeois are in Herzen’s aristocratic eyes the scourge and the curse of the new world. In a memorable passage, reminiscent of our age, he summarizes this new face of the West: All trade, especially in England, is based now on quantity and cheapness, and not at all on quality, as old-fashioned Russians imagine when they reverently buy Tula pen-knives with an English trademark on them. Everything has a wholesale, ready-made, conventional character, everything is within the reach of almost every one, but does not allow of aesthetic distinction or personal taste. Everywhere the hundred-thousand-headed hydra [the petit bourgeoisie] lies in wait close at hand round a corner, ready to listen to everything, to look at everything indiscriminately, to be dressed in anything, to be fed on anything—this is the all-powerful crowd of “conglomerated mediocrity” (to use Stuart Mill’s expression) which purchases everything, and so dominates everything. The crowd is without ignorance, but also without culture.

The zenith of the crowd’s cultural creation is the café chantant, “an amphibious product, half way between the beer-cellar and the boulevard theatre.”32 The fourth key element of Herzen’s thought is his sense of reality. His initial Rousseau-inspired faith in the innate goodness of man becomes less and less secure as he grows older, because of both the tragedies in his family life33 and his acute sense of reality: His sense of reality [writes Isaiah Berlin] is too strong. For all his efforts, and the efforts of his socialist friends, he cannot deceive himself entirely. He oscillates between pessimism and optimism, skepticism, and suspicion

38 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” of his own skepticism, and is kept morally alive only by his hatred of all injustice, all arbitrariness, all mediocrity as such—in particular by his inability to compromise in any degree with either the brutality of reactionaries or the hypocrisy of bourgeois liberals. He is preserved by this, buoyed up by his belief that such evils will destroy themselves, and by his love for his children and his devoted friends, and his unquenchable delight in the variety of life and the comedy of human character.34

At least twice in his writings Berlin underlines Herzen’s “sense of reality,” a quality he finds so commendable that he confers on it the status of a philosophical notion, and proposes it as the criterion that should guide people faced with conflicting values and irreconcilable goals. In the above quotation Berlin emphasizes Herzen’s strong sense of reality; in another one he writes: “Herzen’s sense of reality … is unique in his own [age], and perhaps in any age.”35 Given the importance that Berlin attributed to the sense of reality in individual decisions and in the life of society, one can fully understand the high praise contained in this one short sentence on Herzen. Armed with his sense of reality in a period of turmoil, revolution, and reaction, but neither a disciple of the Enlightenment nor a proponent of the Counter-Enlightenment (notions that were of little substance in the Russian setting), Alexander Herzen anticipated Berlin’s central idea that there are conflicts involving values and goals that are irreconcilable, and that in states and society there should be structures and processes that allow these conflicting interests to coexist in peace. Herzen did not express this idea in these words, but of all his contemporaries—and compared to later thinkers—he was the one closest to the spirit and content of this quintessential vision of Isaiah Berlin

Notes 1. Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment” and “Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, introduction by Roger Hausheer (New York, 1980). 2. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York, 1998). 3. With the exception of Soviet historiography (which held that there was a fullfledged Western- style “progressive” Enlightenment in Russia), most historians tend to qualify in various degrees the existence or the character of the “Russian Enlightenment” (in many cases using this expression as a metaphor rather than as a well-defined concept). See Marc Raeff, “The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment,” in The Eighteenth Century in Russia, ed. J. G. Garrard (Oxford, 1973), pp. 25–47; James F. Brennan, Enlightened Despotism in Russia: The Reign of Elisabeth, 1741–1762 (New York, 1987); D. Griffiths, “Catherine II: The Republican Empress,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte

Herzen and Berlin on Russia’s Counter-Enlightenment • 39

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Osteuropas 21 (1973): 323–334; Gary Marker, “The Age of Enlightenment, 1740–1801,” in Russia: A History, ed. Gregory L. Freeze (Oxford and New York, 1997), pp. 114–142. See also the books on Catherine II by Isabel de Madariaga and by John T. Alexander indicated in note 6 below. See Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1962). Isaiah Berlin, “Herzen and His Memoirs,” in I. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 191; emphasis added. Grandly entitled “The Great Instruction” (Bol’shoi nakaz), it consisted of twenty-two chapters and 655 articles; 294 of them were pillaged from Montesquieu (most of them misrepresented). Others were plagiarized from Beccaria, Jacob Bielfeld, Johann Justi, and Diderot’s Encyclopédie; Voltaire proclaimed it “the finest monument of the age,” while Diderot wrote on it a rather acerbic commentary. See Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven and London, 1981), pp. 151–163. John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (New York and Oxford, 1989), pp. 100–102, writes that the Great Instruction “signified [Catherine’s] first bid for the title of philosopher-sovereign.” For a sample of views on the Decembrist movement, see Anatole G. Mazour, The First Russian Revolution—the Decembrist Movement: Its Origins, Development and Significance (Stanford, 1962); Hans Lemberg, Die nationale Gedankenwelt der Dekabristen (Cologne-Graz, 1963); George Luciani, La Société des Slaves Unis, 1823–1825 (Bordeaux, 1963); Marc Raeff, ed., The Decembrist Movement (Englewood Cliffs, 1966) (documents); Glynn Barratt, Voices in Exile: The Decembrist Memoirs (Montreal and London, 1974). The Soviet orthodox version was Militsa V. Nechkina, Dvizhenie Dekabristov [The Decembrist Movement], 2 vols. (Moscow, 1955); see J. Gooding, “The Decembrists in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies 40 (1988); 196–209. For a post-Soviet and critical reevaluation, see Nathan Eidelman, 14 dekabria 1825 i ego istolkovateli [The 14th December 1825 and Its Interpreters] (Moscow, 1994); Valerii Senderov, “Razoblachenie mifa: Dekabrizm v svete sovremennykh diskussii” [Unmasking a Myth: Decembrism in the Light of Contemporary Discussions], Russkaia mysl—mysl’ [Paris], 12–18 October 1995, p. 3. Leonard Schapiro, for instance, defined the Decembrists as “intellectuals in uniform”: “The Pre-Revolutionary Intelligentsia and the Legal Order,” in The Russian Intelligentsia, ed. Richard Pipes (New York, 1961), p. 461. Several events greatly affected Herzen’s family. First came the shock at the news that General Nikolai Miloradovich, an old regiment comrade of Herzen’s father, was killed on the Senate Square in the insurrection. During the following months, Herzen’s family shared the anguish and sorrow of the Moscow nobility upon the arrest of sons of respected families. Among them were the brothers Obolenskii, relatives of Herzen’s aunt, Princess Khovanskaia. For more details, see Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 (Cambridge, MA, 1961), pp. 31–32. This book remains the best one on the early years of Herzen’s life. “A Remarkable Decade (1838–1848)”: originally the title of an essay published in 1880 by the literary critic Pavel Annenkov (Zamechatelnoe desiatiletie,

40 • Russia before the “Radiant Future”

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

1838–1848); it contains his reminiscences on the intellectual movement in those years and on its participants, whom Annenkov knew well. Isaiah Berlin borrowed this title for four essays that appeared seriatim in Encounter in 1955– 1956 (then entitled “A Marvelous Decade”) and are now included in Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly with an introduction by A. Kelly (New York, 1978): “The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia”; “German Romanticism in Petersburg and Moscow”; “Vissarion Belinskii”; and “Alexander Herzen.” On pp. 114–115 Sir Isaiah explains why he chose this title. A good book on the subject is Andrzej Walicki’s The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford, 1975). Ibid, p. 3. Joseph Mali, review of the Hebrew translation of Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, trans. A. Ophir (Tel Aviv, 1995), in Yediot Aharonot, 31 March 1995 (in Hebrew). Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York, 1992), p. 17. Berlin, “Herzen and His Memoirs,” p. 196. Ibid., p. 207. Isaiah Berlin writes: “The chief influence on Herzen as a young man in Moscow University, as upon all the young Russian intellectuals of his time, was of course that of Hegel.” “Alexander Herzen,” in Russian Thinkers, pp.140–142, 145–146); see also Malia, Herzen, chap 10, “Realism in Philosphy: Hegel,” pp. 218–256; A. I. Volodin, “Gertsen i Gegel’ (Problema edinstva bytiia i myshleniia v ‘Pis’ma ob izuchenii prirody’), in Problemy izucheniia Gertsena [Problems in the Study of Herzen], ed. Ju. G. Oksman (Moscow, 1963) pp. 82–121. For more details on this episode, see E. Lampert, Studies in Rebellion (London, 1957), pp. 67–81. Berlin, “Herzen and His Memoirs,” p. 198. Ibid, p. 206 (the memoirs were written in the late 1850s and 1860s). See also Zh. El’sberg, A.I. Gertsen i “Byloe i dumy” [A.I. Herzen and “My Past and Thoughts”] (Moscow, 1930). In a recent publication, written in a literary-psychological mode, Irina Paperno has adopted the view that Herzen’s memoirs were based on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit and influenced by Hegelian historicism. Irina Paperno, “Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience,” Kritika 3, no. 4 (2002): 577–610. Berlin, “Herzen and His Memoirs,” pp. 205–206; for Herzen’s open letter to Michelet, written originally in French and published in 1852, see “Le peuple russe et le socialisme (Lettre à Jules Michelet),” in A. Herzen, Textes philosophiques choisis (Moscow, 1948), pp. 501–539; English version: The Russian People and Socialism, trans. R. Wollheim, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin (London, 1956). Franco Venturi, Il populismo russo, 2 vols. (Turin, 1952); English translation: Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, trans. F. Haskell (New York and London, 1960). See also Malia, Herzen, quoted above. Berlin, “Herzen and His Memoirs,” p. 206.

Herzen and Berlin on Russia’s Counter-Enlightenment • 41

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

Ibid, p. 188. I will add below some qualifications to this analysis of Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, “Herzen and His Memoirs,” p. 196. Berlin, “Alexander Herzen,” in Russian Thinkers, pp. 202, 205. Ibid., p. 194–195. “Des lendemains qui chantent” was a major slogan of the French Communist Party’s propaganda in the 1950s and 1960s. The irony of the message, then and now, will not be lost to the discriminating reader. Berlin, “Herzen and His Memoirs,” pp. 206–207; see also Berlin, “Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty,” in Russian Thinkers, pp. 82–113. [A. I. Herzen], My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin, vol. 4 (New York, 1968), p. 10 (an essay written on 10 June 1862 in the Isle of Wight). Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, pp. 15–16. Similar indictments of the petty bourgeoisie can be found in Herzen’s Letters from the Avenue Marigny (1847) and Letters from Via del Corso (1847–48), writings known from 1854 on as Letters from France and Italy. Herzen’s memoirs are an arresting testimony of the many misfortunes that struck him and his family. See also Edward Hallet Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (London, 1933), a portrait painted with more irony than empathy, and without the benefit of most source material published even before the 1930s; subsequent editions of the book were not updated in the light of the abundant documentary evidence available since its first edition. See also Michael Confino, Daughter of a Revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the Bakunin-Nechaev Circle (London and New York, 1974), which includes also the diary of “Tata,” found and published for the first time by the author in 1969 in Michael Confino, “Un document inédit: Le Journal de Natalie Herzen, 1869–1870,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 10, no.1 (1969): 52–149 (Russian original with a French translation and an introduction). Recently, Herzen’s family drama has attracted attention both on the stage, with Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia, and in publications by Svetlana Grenier, Irina Paperno, Holland Kate, Victor Zhivov, and Lina Steiner. Berlin, “Herzen and His Memoirs,” p. 207. Berlin, “Alexander Herzen,” p. 207.

d Russian and Western European CHAPTER 2

Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism

e

A discussion of the Russian and Western European roots of Soviet totalitarianism belongs simultaneously to several wider and overlapping areas of thought and historical research. One of these areas concerns the features and components of the Soviet regime; another, the remote causes or the antecedents of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917; yet another is an extension of the classic and perennial topic “Russia and the West” with its concomitant—and no less important—meaning of “the West in Russia.” This essay cannot explore these numerous and multifaceted issues; its more limited and circumscribed purpose is to analyze and summarize the main features of the historical conditions obtaining in Russia before 1917 that may have had—or are believed to have had—some influence upon, or connection with, the subsequent evolution of Russia and the shaping of the Soviet regime. The conventional and widespread treatment of the Russian and Western historical roots of this regime would usually proceed, with minor variations, along the following line of argument.

Russian Roots The native elements that participated in the emergence and shaping of Soviet totalitarianism are said to relate to a set of political, ideological, and psychological features. Among the most important of these native elements, the first cited is often Russian messianism, which begins with the belief in “Moscow, the Third Rome” and continues through the more modern vision of the redeeming role of Russian Orthodoxy and the Panslavist idea of empire. The second, sobornost’, is an expression of Russia’s unique cohesive spirit and probably comes closest to the spirit of the “general will.” This untranslatable term, sobornost’, means at one and the same time “unity in multiplicity” in the ecclesiastical sense (in this sense, a deeply ambivalent

42

Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism • 43

notion), and also communalism, which encompasses gregariousness and togetherness; and finally, the organic unity of all “in love and freedom.”1 The third Russian element is autocracy as a principle of government, which in this case represents an element of continuity in the political regimes before and after 1917. A proponent of this line of reasoning is Alexander Yanov, according to whom “the basic features of the present Russian political system … date not from October 1917, but from January 1565 when, in a bloody ‘revolution from above’ and a subsequent reign of terror, Ivan set at naught his country’s European heritage and fundamentally altered its future.”2 The fourth element is the Russian submissiveness to the powers and state authorities as expressed in a traditional way of behavior of the Russian people. (This “feature,” which may seem discredited, impressionistic, and reminiscent of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century meditations on the “Russian soul,” has become fashionable again under more respectable labels provided by “psycho-history.”) The fifth and last main element often cited is the lack, in Russia’s political history, of a Rechtsstaat tradition, and this missing feature facilitated, as it were, the implantation of the later Soviet totalitarianism. Several critical observations are usually called forth by this analysis and should be mentioned at this early point. One of hem is that the idea of “Moscow, the Third Rome” represents not a political myth in the Russian political tradition, but rather a historiographical myth stemming from some historians’ imagination or misinterpretation. Further, in a search for totalitarian roots, sobornost’, as the representation of an organic unity of all in “love and freedom,” is to be understood in a dialectical way, and thus as an imposed unity of all in hate and slavery. It should also be remembered that autocracy, although presented as a native Russian element, is regarded by some thinkers and scholars as a Western-type political regime The Slavophiles are obvious representatives of this mode of thought; another is Mikhail Bakunin, who defined the Russian state as a “knuto-Germanic empire,” the “knut” being the Russian ingredient and the autocracy the German. Finally, the absence of a Rechtsstaat tradition may be questioned as having played a role in the issue under discussion, since the existence of such a tradition in other states and nations did not prevent them from establishing totalitarian regimes of their own. Before I proceed to the presentation of the Western roots of Soviet totalitarianism, a preliminary remark is warranted. An important, albeit heterogeneous, group of thinkers and scholars regard the “Western European roots” hypothesis as a fallacy that is useless in explaining the course of modern Russian history. In their view, Soviet totalitarianism stems “natu-

44 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” rally” from Russian roots, and from Russian roots only. Probably the first, and most outspoken, thinker to have elaborated on this thesis (in the 1920s and 1930s) is Nikolai Berdyaev. In his seminal and controversial essay The Origin of Russian Communism, he argued: “Russians are always inclined to take things in a totalitarian sense; the skeptical criticism of Western peoples is alien to them. This is a weakness which leads to confusion of thought and the substitution of one thing for another, but it is also a merit and indicates the religious integration of the Russian soul.”3 And in another of his essays: In accordance with the Russian spiritual turn of mind the revolution could only be totalitarian. All Russian ideology has always been totalitarian, theocratic or socialist. The Russians are maximalists and it is precisely that which looks like a utopia, which in Russia is more realistic.4

And further: Communism is a Russian phenomenon in spite of its Marxist ideology. Communism is the Russian destiny; it is a moment in the inner destiny of the Russian people and it must be lived through by the inward strength of the Russian people. Communism must be surmounted but not destroyed, and into the highest stage which will come after communism there must enter the truth of communism also but freed from its element of falsehood. The Russian Revolution awakened and unfettered the enormous powers of the Russian people. In this lies its principal meaning.5

Berdyaev’s vision assumes, therefore, the existence of an entity variously referred to as the Russian soul, the Russian spirit, and at times the Russian ideological mentality (whatever that may mean); the Russian spirit is at once deeply religious and forcefully totalitarian, hence the shaping of a profoundly Russian secular religion under the form of “Soviet Marxism.” Finally, another feature of the Russian mind is its propensity to debase, to distort everything coming from the West (an idea reminiscent of Peter Chaadaev’s forebodings about Russia’s future and her inability to assimilate on local soil the achievements of the West). Thus, Soviet totalitarianism is seen as a purely Russian phenomenon, deeply rooted in Russia’s past and owing almost nothing to Western influences. Interestingly enough, several ideas from Berdyaev’s grand thesis have been voiced again by some Soviet dissidents, although this time as a criticism of Russia and using terminologies different from Berdyaev’s. Alexander Yanov, quoted above, is one example; Alexander Zinoviev and Pavel Litvinov are others. The latter wrote: Under the czars we had an authoritarian state and now we have a totalitarian state but it still comes from the roots of the Russian past. You should understand that the leaders and the ordinary people have the same authoritarian frame of mind. Brezhnev and the simple person both think

Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism • 45

that might is right. That’s all. It is not a question of ideology. It’s simply power. Solzhenitsyn acts as if he thinks this has all come down from the sky because of Communism. But he is not so different himself. He does not want democracy. He wants to go from the totalitarian state back to the authoritarian one.6

As hinted in this passage, Alexander Solzhenitsyn rejects entirely all the possible variants of this thesis. In his view, the October Revolution was deeply anti-Russian and opposed to the Russian national spirit and tradition. This “upheaval of titanic proportions” took place only thanks to foreign (Western) forces: a foreign ideology—Marxism; foreign money—German funds funneled to the Bolsheviks; and foreign revolutionaries—Poles, Jews, Georgians, Latvians, Hungarians, Chinese; Lenin himself was not a Russian, for only one-quarter of the blood in his veins was Russian. Similarly, in Solzhenitsyn’s view Soviet totalitarianism was a result of Western political devices and institutions. It was not an outgrowth of the tsarist autocracy but of the chaos generated by the democracy of the liberals and socialists who came to power after the February Revolution. Never, and at no time in human history, says Solzhenitsyn, has an authoritarian regime led to a totalitarian one; all the totalitarian regimes have emerged from the moral and political chaos created by liberalism, democracy, and the multiparty system—this most unfortunate and immoral political regime shaped in the West from the Enlightenment on to our own days.7 Thus, according to Solzhenitsyn, it is not tsarist autocracy and the Russian national spirit but Western liberalism and democracy that lie at the roots of Soviet totalitarianism. Interestingly enough, although Solzhenitsyn is widely regarded as reviving today some of Berdyaev’s basic ideas, it appears that on the fundamental issue of the roots of Soviet totalitarianism he holds a diametrically different view. To pursue the comparison in another direction, it appears that with regard to the role Solzhenitsyn attributed to the Enlightenment in the emergence of totalitarianism, he comes close (although for quite different reasons) to one of the major ideas in Jacob L. Talmon’s interpretation of the course of modern European history.

Western European Origins Solzhenitsyn’s rather curious interpretation closes the preliminary remarks, and we can now turn to a more traditional view of the Western European roots of Soviet totalitarianism. These are usually summarized under two main headings: Western techniques and technology, and Western ideas. Under the first heading comes the whole range of social, economic, and political developments usually described within the process of moderniza-

46 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” tion (often called Westernization). It seems important to underline that this encompasses also techniques of government borrowed from the West and transplanted in Russia, such as the structure of scientific institutions, the legal system, the political police, or the army. An obvious question that could be raised in this regard is, of course: why should Western technology be an element of totalitarianism? After all, technology is neither conservative, nor liberal, nor totalitarian; as such, it is (like television and nuclear power) neither “good” nor “bad.” One of the answers is that historically, from Peter the Great onward, Western, advanced technology in Russia has often served to strengthen autocracy and repression. Better techniques (of organization and of communication, for instance) contributed to rationalizing the state apparatus and making it more efficient and ruthless. Technology, of course, is indeed “neutral,” but only when seen in vacuo (that is, only as an exercise of the mind). In real life, which is the usual “habitat” of technology, it becomes clear that the same technological change, device, or innovation may have completely different social functions (and produce very diverse results) within different societies. (And my contention is that this applies to ideas too, a subject to be discussed later.) Incidentally, the point can be made that, even before sociologists and historians had formulated this differential social function of technology, certain contemporaries, some eighty years ago, were dimly aware of it. This is one of the meanings, for instance, of Lenin’s oft-quoted statement that “Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” On the other end of the ideological spectrum, the same implied assumption can be found in Peter Kropotkin’s view that Bolshevik rule is the worst tyranny in human history because it means “Genghis Khan plus the telegraph.” Kropotkin correctly perceived that in terms of a dictatorship’s efficiency and ruthlessness, it makes an enormous difference whether it has at its disposal a modern tool (a “technology”) like the telegraph, or not. The telegraph, of course, is neutral, neither good nor evil, and it can be used for sending birthday greetings or execution orders. Its main feature (which is neutral, too, in a way) is that both messages will be transmitted swiftly. In different societies this would bring about quite different results. Lenin’s “electricity” and Kropotkin’s “telegraph” stand as symbols of modern technology and reveal also the understanding that these two historic figures had of the social and political role of technology. Of course, as implied above, technology may also have the completely opposite effect, acting as a factor that does not strengthen the autocracy but rather disrupts it. Let us take two examples from the realm of Western techniques of government. Thus, the Russian Secret Political Police (the Okhrana) was created and reformed according to the French model, and it used Western-style operational techniques. There is no doubt that the

Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism • 47

Okhrana was a powerful instrument in strengthening the autocracy internally and influencing the regime’s most important political features. Quite different was the role of the judicial system in Russia, which in the second half of the nineteenth century underwent reforms according to Western models; in addition, surprising as that may seem in the light of conventional wisdom, Russia had during that period, and until 1917, an independent judicial system by Western European standards. What was the result of this modernization of the judicial branch of government and the adoption of Western judicial institutions and processes? “The result was,” in the words of a well-informed scholar in this field, “a state at war with its own court system, a total rift between the traditional and the legal bases of the autocrat’s authority.”8 He explains: Legal modernization did not bring an element of stability to Russia. Imbued with a consciousness of its own worth and mission, the new legal profession had impugned the autocrat’s claim to be the source and protector of legality. It represented an alien system that did not share the preoccupations and fears of the ruler and his entourage. As such, it only added to the inimical forces the government found beyond its power to direct or curb. The independent courts defended standards of legality that the autocrat, in the midst of bitter political struggle, could not observe. The tsarist government resorted to increasingly brutal and extralegal methods to deal with the revolutionary movement at the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In such circumstances, it was difficult for the ruler to maintain his former image as champion of the law. Shedding the guise of absolute ruler, guardian of the rights and welfare of the population, the last two tsars tried instead to resume the role of patriarch, personal and religious leader of the nation. They appealed to national feeling and tried to appear close to the common people. But these products of the international culture of royalty were poor candidates for personal or charismatic leadership. Rather, their reactions to threats were defensive and retaliatory. Embattled, the Russian autocracy in sure and fatal steps took leave of its legal system and relied increasingly on force. Elevating itself beyond legality, it subverted the claims to obedience upon which its power ultimately rested.9

In this case the Western European judicial “implant” in the body of the Russian political regime—an “implant” that could be neither entirely rejected nor fully adopted—evolved into a disruptive element for autocracy.10 The second rubric of Western influences that led Russia toward totalitarianism includes Western ideas in general and Marxism in particular. The main thrust of this well-researched topic seems so clear that it needs no further elaboration here. However, for the sake of fairness toward most of the proponents of this view, one of this argument’s features should be explicitly mentioned. For these scholars and thinkers, it is not the specific

48 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” content of one or another set of “Western ideas” that had crucial influence on Russia’s evolution once these ideas penetrated into intellectual and social life there. The true importance of the ideas stems from the very fact of their being non-Russian, alien to this particular national, intellectual, and social environment. Voltaire, Rousseau, Fourier, Blanqui, Louis Blanc, Darwin, Marx, or Comte—their ideas as such (and the differences between them) did not matter so much; what mattered was their being alien, which was also their common denominator in Russia. This common denominator led to the main social function that these ideas (or system of ideas) performed there, namely a deep alienation of the intelligentsia, the “natural” recipient of this kind of Western “commodity,” and alienation from Russian realities, from the state and from society. (Once this alienation occurred, it was immaterial, for all practical purposes, whether it had happened in the name of “social Darwinism,” of Marxistlike determinism, or of Blanquist-type voluntarism.) As a result, the Russian intelligentsia was living in the abstract world of Western ideas instead of in the concrete world of Russian affairs, which it chose to ignore; as a scholar put it long ago, “they [the members of the intelligentsia] had no other life than ideas,” and theirs was a “most sweeping, abstract, and intransigent denial of the real in the name of the ideal.”11 Under the tsars this led them to revolution; after the revolution, it led to totalitarianism. For the sake of completeness, I should also add that this interpretation appears to me to be maybe one of the most hard dying myths in Russian history, and certainly the most popular and worn-out stereotype in Russian historiography. Following this first critical remark, we may pursue and raise now a more general question: What are the limits and limitations of the explanation based on “Russian” and “Western” roots? One of its deficiencies lies in the frequent lack of a clear dividing line between what is Russian and what is Western. And the question above all others is: When? Such a dividing line is indeed often difficult to draw because of the fact that around 1900, Westernization, that is, modernization, was a process that had been going on in Russia for more than two hundred years. In this case the question to be addressed is: For how long does a Western device (technique or idea) remain “Western” after its introduction into a nation’s life and into a society’s activity? In fact, we face here the same problematic (and mechanism) as in the classic historical topic of innovations and the dissemination of innovations. To put it in a very simplified way: in this process (whatever the innovation), after an initial opposition to its adoption, the usual pattern is that yesterday’s innovation becomes today’s routine and tomorrow’s obsolete tool (device or idea). In the same way, yesterday’s Western borrowings are today’s Russian habits, and yesteryear’s Western techniques and ideas become, within ten, twenty, or fifty years, part and parcel of Russian cul-

Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism • 49

ture, politics, and know-how. Heavy industry and chemistry may serve as one example, military craft and futurism in art as another. At bottom, the process in Russia was not essentially different from the pattern of innovation, absorption, and rejection that obtained in other European countries. The issue of Western borrowings and of the influx of Western elements in Russia has to be seen as a dynamic process of assimilation (which includes also partial rejection or shifts), and not as a short-lived and mechanical transfer: the story does not end when a Western technique or idea reaches Russia; it then only begins. Another great limitation of the “Western cum Russian roots” explanation lies in its being deeply ahistorical, in the sense that it does not integrate or account for the historical circumstances in which these (Russian and Western) elements could eventually mix in such a way as to create the “totalitarian” phenomenon. Further, as this view does not take into consideration the time element, it does not (and cannot) distinguish between sufficient and necessary conditions. And finally, this explanation does not provide even a hint on the crucial issue of how the parts (the “roots”) relate to the whole. Historiographically, this explanation in toto reminds me very much of the tale of Prince Charming and the Sleeping Beauty. We are presented with a series of elements—Russian messianism, sobornost’, and autocracy, together with Western techniques and ideas—but we do not know when and how they will move and be activated (which is, after all, the heart of the matter in history and in historical writing). They lie dormant, so to speak, waiting for some external factor to bring them to life, or rather to awaken them. If I may pursue this metaphor, it seems that this complex of “Russian” and “Western” roots can be compared to the Sleeping Beauty: like her, they are there, asleep, waiting for some kind of prince to awake them and set them in motion. In fact, this kind of historical explanation not only bears comparison to, but indeed follows the general pattern of the tale of the Sleeping Beauty. As we well know, in the version by Charles Perrault (I am leaving aside here, for the sake of brevity, the extremely interesting versions by Basile and the Brothers Grimm) the story falls into two parts: the first part “ends with the prince’s awakening Sleeping Beauty and marrying her,” “followed by a second part in which we are suddenly told that the mother of the Prince Charming is really a child-devouring ogress who wishes to eat her own grandchildren.”12 Hence our historiographic fairy tale mirrors Russia, with all her attributes, native and Western alike: the prince who awakes her is Lenin; later on, his ideology (playing the mother’s role) will lead to a child-devouring totalitarian regime. In fact, most historical interpretations of Russia’s evolution toward a totalitarian regime follow precisely

50 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” this pattern; so also do the interpretations based on a rigid deterministic approach, foremost among them the official Soviet historiography. This brings me back from the world of enchantment to that of more tangible realities, namely, the specific social and political features at the root of Soviet totalitarianism.

The Historical Setting Among these features, and particularly prominent during the twenty-five years or so preceding 1917, are several that should be singled out in view of their importance (without implying, however, that they were some sort of causa finalis, although they certainly had a role as causa efficiens).13 First, Russia was not simply, as usually described, an overwhelmingly rural country with an acute agrarian problem (meaning high rates of rural overpopulation plus low rates of agricultural modernization, leading to a severe shortage of land in spite of emigration abroad and internal migration to the urban centers and Siberia). In fact, it seems possible to assume (particularly in the light of recent research) that Russia’s agrarian problem was of such magnitude that it had no institutional or economic solution, in the sense that the regime lacked the institutional tools and the economic means to solve the problem.14 Peter Stolypin’s land reforms in 1907–1911, the tsarist government’s boldest attempt in this field, fell short of its own relatively modest goals. It would not have progressed much farther, even had Stolypin not been assassinated in September 1911 or war broken out in 1914, unless the government had chosen to resort to some sort of quasi-terroristic expropriation of hundreds of thousands of peasants.15 It should also be pointed out, though, that quite ironically (and tragically) none of the political parties in Russia at that time, including the opposition parties, had a realistic or applicable policy for achieving any real progress in the condition of the peasantry. Real progress could certainly not be expected from such grand “agrarian programs” as nationalization (of the land), communalization, socialization, or privatization. Nor would it result from implementing the slogan “confiscation of gentry lands,” for the sad and simple reason that, even if all the gentry lands had been confiscated, there would not have been enough of them to satisfy the needs of the peasantry. Second, Russia was a country undergoing a rapid process of industrialization, with all the strains and burdens that such a process brings upon the population. These burdens included not only economic and fiscal hardships but also psychological stress resulting from abrupt changes in lifestyle, habitat, work, and family relationships.

Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism • 51

Third, it was a country in which a deep state of tension had developed between the ruling powers and the existing political structure, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the new social groups and strata (the new professions, the technical intelligentsia, the managerial class, the workers, engineers, businessmen) and new centers of political power. These new centers included also the whole spectrum of political parties, movements, and ideologies, from the extreme right (the Black Hundred and the Union of the Russian People) to the extreme left (the anarchists), through the many shades of conservative, conservative-liberal, plain liberal, moderate socialist, neopopulist, and radical socialist currents. In this respect the Russian political scene fits perfectly well within the European pattern. To think of it merely in terms of a merciless struggle between the so-called forces of revolution and the “reactionary autocracy” is, to say the least, an oversimplification of the political realities in Russia in the last quarter-century before 1917.16 Moreover, within the political process and orientations there existed also strong pressures toward various kinds of representative rule: first, on the level of local self-government, bodies of the zemstvos; second, on the national level, as expressed in the Duma. To be sure, these pressures generated conflicts: between the central government and the zemstvos; between the autocracy and the political parties on issues like the scope of the Duma’s powers and competence; and also, as already mentioned, conflicts like the one between the regime and its own appointed judicial system. However, these conflicts cannot serve as an indicator of a weakness of the forces striving toward representative rule, but, on the contrary, are an illustration of their strength and vitality. These were, very schematically, the main social, economic, and political features of Russia when it was entering what has been usually described as an era of mass society and of the “politicization” of the masses: rapid communications and transportation, technological revolutions brought about by the application of a wide scale of scientific discoveries and inventions, the widening of the European state system into the global world, and finally, an era deeply marked by the Great War. Historically speaking, the critical factors in Russia’s development, and the decisive ones for the understanding of its eventual evolution toward a totalitarian regime, operated at the juncture of two sets of constellations: the Russian sociopolitical conditions, and the dynamics of change in the wider European and global sphere.17 The historical situation obtaining in Russia by the merger of these two constellations of processes and events has been differently viewed by students of this period, but their views fall mainly into two schools of thought in Russian historiography.

52 • Russia before the “Radiant Future”

Russia’s Future and Beyond One school of thought assumes that had there been no world war, a constitutional regime of the Western type would have emerged in Russia from the inevitable collapse of autocracy. The other school holds that liberalism and constitutionalism did not have (and autocracy had no longer) a base solid enough to withstand the combined strains of industrialization, the agrarian problem, and three years of war and military defeats.18 The corollary is, obviously, that if there was no chance for a liberal-constitutional regime, then some form of dictatorship was bound to succeed autocracy: a fascist one or a Soviet-totalitarian one. It should be pointed out, indeed, that as a matter of historical fact, the idea of dictatorship was not completely alien to that time and place. Thus in 1905 Sergei Witte offered the tsar, as a way out of the crisis, the alternative of an elected Duma within a constitutional-type monarchy or a military dictatorship. Another example gives a glimpse of the public mood: in August 1917 General Kornilov’s differences with Kerensky and the Provisional Government gave way to widespread rumors of an imminent military dictatorship. Finally, October of that same year saw the successful coup that was intended to bring about the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (not of the party, or of the general secretary), although debate is still ongoing as to whether the Soviet totalitarian regime began in 1917, in 1924, or later. To conclude: in this author’s contention, deterministic approaches are inadequate for helping us to understand these historic events and processes, whether the approach is defined as “historical laws,” “destiny,” or “the will of God.” Neither are they adequate if, for instance, they are offered under the guise of the crude socioeconomic determinism of Soviet historians or the more subtle ethnopsychological determinism of Berdyaev. Russia could have taken one road or another toward a liberal-constitutional regime or a dictatorial-totalitarian one. To the great misfortune and suffering of her people, Russia took the way of a totalitarian “dictatorship of the proletariat.” However, when this happened, the turn had the form and essence of a specific historical event and evolution occurring in a specific nation, at a specific time, and in specific historical circumstances. The modest lesson that may be drawn from the Russian experience is not one of the inevitability of evil. It rather provides an example of the many variations of the pattern toward totalitarianism. Totalitarianism has emerged among different peoples by quite different ways; it can happen anywhere, and no nation is immune to or protected against it, whatever this nation’s past, historical experience, cultural values, and political traditions. And whatever its illusions and beliefs.

Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism • 53

Notes 1. See, for instance, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “Khomiakov on sobornost’,” in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, ed. Ernest J Simmons (Cambridge, MA, 1955), pp. 183–196. 2. Alexander Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History (Berkeley, 1981); the quotation appears on the dust jacket of the book; see also pp. 13–14 and passim. 3. N. Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor, 1960), p. 21; the book was written in 1933 and published first in English in 1937, the Russian original subsequently appearing in 1955 in Paris (YMCA Press). 4. N. Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (Boston, 1962), p. 249. 5. Ibid., p. 250. 6. Quoted from Sewerin Bialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, 1980), p. 146. 7. See A. Solzhenitsyn, “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” in A. Solzhenitsyn, From Under the Rubble (Chicago, 1981), pp. 105–143; Solzhenitsyn, “Misconceptions about Russia are a Threat to America,” Foreign Affairs (Spring 1980): 797–834; Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich (New York, 1976), pp.103–104; and, for a more detailed treatment of this topic, see my “Solzhenitsyn: The Artist as Historian,” Zmanim: A Quarterly of Historical Studies 2, no. 5 (Winter 1981): 4–27 (in Hebrew). 8. Richard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976), p. 284. 9. Wortman, The Development, pp. 288–289. Another odd phenomenon that obtained from this state of things was the following: The inability to deal with the judicial process cost the government dearly not only in the political arena. The government, indeed, was defenceless in confronting the courts on their terrain, as Valuev suggested, though not merely because of the court statutes. The state proved clumsy and incompetent in the defence of its interests in civil cases against the treasury as well. The plaintiffs would hire the best lawyers, while the fiscal interests received at best perfunctory and weak defence. Nor did the government appear concerned to protect its legal position. Rather, it held to the old conceptions of power, even when they no longer worked. Thus the form of official contracts and agreements, often of enormous length, did little to secure the state’s interest, but the officials of the treasury administration retained the old view. They regarded themselves not as contracting parties, obliged to observe the conditions of agreements, but an authority [vlast’] whose commands must be obediently accepted. (p. 284)

10. In this respect the experiences of Prussia and Japan were completely different; see Wortman, The Development, p. 284, n. 8. 11. Martin Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” Daedalus (Summer 1960): 441-458, here p. 451; this is one example of many, and the opinion is uniformly shared by most scholars in the field. For a detailed discussion of this issue see my “On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia” in this volume. 12. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York, 1977), p. 229.

54 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” 13. As defined from the outset, it is not the purpose of this essay to deal with the effects of the February Revolution and the Bolshevik coup of October 1917 in the shaping of the Soviet totalitarian regime. 14. This situation of “no solution” can be compared to the agrarian conditions existing in countries like India and Egypt. 15. This interpretation of mine should not be understood in any way as a sort of justification of Soviet collectivization and its inhumane methods and results. 16. It is the contention of several scholars that in this political spectrum the liberal-constitutional forces were relatively weak (having no roots in the Russian political tradition nor any chance of furthering a liberal-constitutional regime), while the revolutionary forces were much stronger and had greater vitality. This contention, even if it were correct, does not invalidate our analysis concerning the European pattern followed by the political spectrum. In addition, the view of these scholars is at best a speculation that rests mainly on hindsight derived from logical (but ahistorical) reasoning according to which the liberals were weaker because they lost, and the Bolsheviks stronger because they won (in 1917). Note also that in this reasoning the “revolutionary forces” are subtly replaced by the “Bolsheviks,” to the exclusion of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists, and other historical (and historiographical) “losers.” 17. Conventional historical wisdom has it that, anyway, these two constellations are usually concomitant and synchronic; consequently, the analysis offered here is almost an exercise in tautology—but this is not so. Thus, industrialization is not necessarily synchronic or linked with the advent of, for instance, mass society and rapid communications. Enclosures à la Stolypin and industrialization à la Witte occurred in England long before the emergence of mass society. In France, industrialization took place without enclosures, without an agrarian crisis, and even without a massive and painful rural exodus. These synchronizations or lack of them make a great difference, and underline the historical specificity of the Russian case. 18. Note also the existence of a “doomed even without war” thesis in Western historiography and its Soviet twin, according to which a revolutionary situation was already ripe in July 1914 (and even in 1912, according to some scholars), and the effects of the war were not to cause the revolution, but to delay it. No solid historical evidence has been given yet to substantiate either interpretation.

d Traditions, Old and New CHAPTER 3

Aspects of Protest and Dissent in Modern Russia

e

Protest and dissent seem to have been perennial fellow-travelers in the history of Imperial Russia. The wealth and diversity of this subject, the length of the period under consideration (nearly two hundred years), and space limitations are the reasons for the frequent use of broad generalizations in this essay, and for the loss of some useful but not critical nuances. However, an effort has been made throughout to avoid reductionism, and to mitigate the schematic and “inventorial” character of some sections of the essay. Finally, several fundamental assumptions are implied; these are clarified below. The essay is divided into three parts. The first presents some of the general assumptions; the second discusses a number of major political and ideological traditions in Russia; the third focuses on some of the major forms of protest and dissent. This third part would seem to be relatively short: the main reason for this apparent imbalance is the fact that several important aspects of protest and dissent are touched upon—explicitly or implicitly—in the second part and, in order to avoid redundancy, have not been restated again in the third.

Some General Assumptions Parallels and Comparisons The subject of protest and dissent distracts the student with a strong temptation to try and explain the present in the light of the past, or at least to draw a straight line between the supposedly analogous phenomena “then” and “now.” Although never explicitly stated, the “philosophy” that obtains, in fact, from succumbing to this temptation is the well-known “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” “Dissenters in Soviet Russia=rebellious intelligentsia under the tsars”: this seems so obvious as to be viewed as ax55

56 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” iomatic, in no need of proof or supporting evidence. This kind of amalgam and would-be filiation (and similar ones as well) is not postulated here, nor taken for granted as is often the case; instead, this view is considered as pertaining to a kind of worthy hypothesis that should be inquired into in order to establish the degree of its validity and consistency. Similarly, it is not claimed, as several scholars in this field have done, that “historical perspective” would necessarily illuminate events related to protest and dissent in our time.1 In fact, just the opposite may be true, for there are many cases in which the “historical perspective” supplies fallacious parallels and misleading analogies. A plus forte raison, the view that remote events in the past necessarily influence comparable events in the present is not posited ab initio, unless such an influence can be positively established by means of historical proof. “Influences” from bygone times, mysteriously reaching present events and acting, as it were, through nebulous “underlying dynamics” that operate in unfathomable ways, are seen as speculations (sometimes brilliant ones) whose explanatory value is almost nonexistent, and whose misleading potential too great. Finally, stretched over long periods of time, filiations of ideas, of social characteristics, or of collective psychological makeup, inferred from a small number of external similarities or impressions of closeness, are not taken as reflecting historical realities if they are not supported by factual evidence and analyzed in historical context for structural and functional similarities and possible connections over time.

Models and Metaphors In this subject it is essential not to confuse a metaphor with the real thing, and not to assume that the use of formulas like “long-term historical forces” creates ipso facto historical facts in the past, while in reality the entities referred to may be nonexistent. In fact, it appears that in many cases the notion of “long-term historical forces” is as imprecise as historical laws, destiny, or the will of God. With all due respect to these categories, it is assumed that they belong to the realm of the individual’s faith and beliefs, not to the tools of historical analysis. The attempt to establish typologies and classifications and suggest models is not equated here with giving answers and explanations to historical issues; rather, it is seen as a way to find problems and formulate questions. Models, like metaphors, should not be confused with the real thing—an error committed quite often by fellow historians who, after having finally decided to use models, then take them for what they are not. The use of models has always had its pitfalls, but when woven into a historical descriptive narrative they are still more insidious and misleading

Traditions, Old and New • 57

because it becomes more difficult to detect and to be aware of them. Historians should make a clear choice in their work: there might be several good reasons for not using models, as there might be sound ones for using them. But one cannot have it both ways, that is, to reject models as a tool of research, and then use them buried in the narrative.

Exit England There is no need to stress the centrality of the question “to what degree and in what ways do different contemporary, modern societies move in the same direction (or directions), become more similar—and how is it possible to explain crucial differences in their ideological premises and institutional contours and dynamics?”2 Graphically speaking, the answer (or answers) could be represented in the form of several concentric circles: the smallest circle nearest to the center encompasses the societies with the greatest number of similarities and the highest degree of closeness between the directions of their respective development—social, economic, cultural, and political. Each consecutive wider circle contains an additional number of societies: the wider the circle becomes, the smaller the degree of similarity, and the greater the differences between the trajectories of development. Russia being at the center of our examination, the question is raised here as to what its closest group of societies is, and with which of them it shares the greatest number of similarities and the nearest paths of development. One basic assumption in this treatment is that during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, Russian society was moving in the same directions as, and through stages and patterns similar to, those of the Western European Continental societies, that is, Western Europe with the exception of England. Viewed within this Continental framework— which was both unified and diversified—Russia fits perfectly well with regard to the major areas pertaining to modernization and stages of modernity. In this perspective, Russia’s development was not sui generis within the context of Continental Europe’s history, with which it shared most of the essential traits of development. As for England, the basic peculiarities of its development—the English way of modernization—were not repeated in other European countries. This applies to such important features as social stratification and mobility, patterns of industrialization (the Industrial Revolution), financing industrialization, formation of the labor force, political structures, and ideologies—to mention only a few of the many dimensions of its development. England is, therefore, a case sui generis; it stands apart as a historical case and cannot be usefully taken as a model or yardstick for the analysis of social, institutional, and economic developments on the Continent or, for that

58 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” matter, anywhere else. By some kind of irony that abounds in history (and in historiography), the fate of this country, whose most striking characteristic is its uniqueness, has been and still is to serve as a model and ideal type, a standard against which to measure development, progress, change, and modernization. Some of Marx’s major errors and unfulfilled predictions stemmed from his conviction that England’s way “to capitalism” (i.e., to modernization) would be everybody else’s way. Although proved wrong time and again, this proposition impregnates the thought of many modern scholars. To this day, even our high school history textbooks (in the West as in the former Soviet Union and Russia) unswervingly teach—as an example with “universal validity”—England’s Industrial Revolution and the “rise of liberalism.” (One wonders: In how many other countries in the world was industrialization, as a socioeconomic phenomenon, coupled with liberalism as a policy and ideology? There was always some kind of ideology, but almost never liberalism.)

Russia and the tarde venientibus The question of Russia’s experience and that of developing countries should be addressed too. With regard to the debate as to whether Russia, China, or the West may serve as models of development and modernization, the following assumptions seem appropriate.3 Russia in 1917 (that is, on the eve of the Bolshevik takeover) had several peculiarities vis-à-vis most of the Third World countries before their independence and during the decolonization process. The most important of these peculiarities were as follows. First, Russia had experienced two hundred years of slow, uneven, and jerky but nevertheless continuous industrial development. Although its role in the economy was relatively limited until the 1880s, its social and psychological consequences had an enduring effect on several urban and rural groups of the population. Second, although there existed a persistent trend toward “ruralization” of industry (about which more will be said below), and particularly during the great spurt from the 1880s to 1914, there existed also, ipso facto, a long-term, close familiarity and relations between large segments of the Russian peasantry and the industrial phenomenon and its by-products. Third, by 1900 Russia had a well-shaped ruling elite and a political class with traditions established over more than two hundred years. The bureaucratic ladder was manned by relatively well-trained officials, most of them Russians or second-, third-, or fourth-generation Russian-born foreigners. In the modernization of Russia’s ruling elite and bureaucratic apparatus, the period of massive participation of foreigners, begun under Peter the Great, came to an end in the 1760s, never to be repeated again.

Traditions, Old and New • 59

In spite of political science theory, the widespread recourse to bribes kept the bureaucratic machine in motion, sustained the chinovniks’ morale, and acted as a mitigating factor on the autocratic regime. Notwithstanding Soviet and neo-Marxist interpretations to the contrary, in 1900 Russia was not a “semi-colony of Western capital and imperialism,” had none of the political limitations of a semi-colony, and lacked completely the psychological makeup, movements, and ideologies that obtain in colonies and semi-colonies. Fourth and finally, during its most intensive period of industrialization, the 1890s–1914, Russia did not experience a massive rural exodus to the cities with subsequent “over-urbanization” and breakdown in the cities’ management. Similarly, for several complex reasons, there was no disruption of the peasant family or the concomitant social and psychological consequences usually provoked by such a disruption. As I have tried to show elsewhere, all in all, Russian society before the Great War was a relatively stable one, and not of the kind currently described in textbooks.4 The curious reader may wonder why, if this was so, there occurred three revolutions (in fact: two revolutions, one putsch, and a civil war) during the short period of time between 1900 and 1920. It is probably because revolutions may occur in stable societies too, and not necessarily (maybe even not mainly) in societies in a state of disintegration. Similarly, while revolutions are certainly a destabilizing factor, they do not necessarily occur in destabilized societies. Russia’s was not a society in a state of disintegration and fragmentation, in which all the social, political, and professional groups shared a mental isolation and estrangement, a common “alienation from the state and society.” As yet, this interpretation has not received the support of conclusive evidence, although it was defended by Soviet scholars (in terms of class conflicts and antagonisms) and by Western ones (in terms of conventional wisdom or of psychohistory). In fact, this interpretation is an old idée reçue whose existence stems from underestimation of the cohesion and tradition in Russian society and demonstrates the strength of tradition in modern historiography. One of the main sources of this interpretation is the fixation on revolutionary movements and terrorist acts in Imperial Russia; a second source is the need to make intelligible the revolutions of 1917. But the existence of revolutionary and terrorist groups is by no means an indicator of the disintegration of a society. To be sure, such groups have a disruptive potential, which should be inquired into and assessed, but in Russia (as we shall see later), its political impact was limited and its effects on society imperceptible. As to the understandable urge to understand “1917 and all that,” it should not lead to projecting backward causes like the nonexistent fragmentation and breakdown of Russian society. The more these causes are deemed to fit subsequent “events of cosmic proportion” (Solzhenitsyn),

60 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” the greater the probability of their being a figment of the imagination. They explain much more the psychological makeup of their authors than the social realities in old Russia. The examination of some aspects of protest and dissent in Russia will be carried out while bearing in mind the peculiarities of these sociopolitical factors in Russia, and their relevance vis-à-vis the realities of Third World countries.

Traditions: The Background For the purpose of this enquiry we shall examine a nexus of traditions (or the tradition from which stemmed other traditions and patterns of thought and behavior) of the three main sociopolitical factors in Russia: the government, the intellectuals, and the peasants.

The Government and the Tradition of Modernity In Russia, from Peter the Great onward, modernization sprang from the center to the periphery, and descended from above to the subordinate echelons of the state and the lower strata of society (losing on its way some of the initial impetus). The drive to modernize, begun around 1700 as the wish of a ruler, became by 1750–60 the cornerstone of the government’s policies, an important ingredient of the political class’s ethos, and finally a tradition of government. (This contention does not invalidate the characterization of the regime as absolutist or autocratic; neither does it supersede the use of customary dividing lines such as conservative, liberal-conservative, reformist, etc.: it simply makes them secondary or marginal for the subject under examination.) Change as such was not considered as a threat or as the enemy, as may have happened in tradition-bound societies or despotic polities, whether oriental or not. In Imperial Russia, the main subject of debate in policymaking (with the exception of very short periods) was not whether to modernize or not, but how to do it and when, so as to avoid acute internal destabilization (“controlled modernization” may be, at least in part, a useful term here). This applies also to the most sensitive social issues on the modernization agenda, such as serfdom, for instance. The latter’s abolition was considered necessary from the late eighteenth century on, examined, and prepared by the government (for instance, several successive committees appointed by the tsar dealt with it under Nicholas I, 1825–55) but postponed on grounds of state security, fear of peasant unrest, or ongoing wars and foreign conflicts. It was finally implemented in 1861, on Alexan-

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der II’s initiative, with the support of a sizeable segment of the political class and educated society. (Six to seven decades is probably a long period for deciding to emancipate millions of peasants; it is comparable, though, to the time it took the British and French political classes to grant voting rights to women [in France in 1945]—certainly a less thorny issue involving fewer vested interests.) The paradox of the government’s position in Russia was that a conservative political regime acted as an agent of change and modernization. Its field of action included, over time, in addition to the emancipation of the serfs (against the wishes of most of the serf owners—the landed gentry), a fundamental reform of the judicial system (1864), a thorough modernization of the army (1860s–74), the granting of relatively wide autonomy to organs of local government, the zemstva (1864), expansion of the railway system, a speed-up of industrialization and a sustained high rate of growth, legislation establishing labor laws and factory inspection (against the will of most factory owners), and so forth.5 The change indicated from above stopped short of a reform of the political regime, and it took a massive revolution in 1905, after a major military defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, to bring about the government’s reluctant consent to a semi-constitutional, semi-parliamentary system. Even after this change, the government, headed by Peter A. Stolypin, initiated and began forcefully to carry on an extensive agrarian reform, which, although basically ill-conceived (in this author’s view), represented a major effort at modernizing the rural economy and the structure of peasant society. During the period under examination, the government’s tradition of modernization led it to take action in a variety of fields, such as advancing science, technology, and institutions of higher learning; spreading literacy; rationalizing the state administration, agencies, and bureaucratic apparatus; influencing fashions of dress, housing, furniture, manners, and leisure; reorganizing the army and navy; and boosting industrial growth and urban development. The Russian government saw its role as encompassing the duty to take initiatives for social and economic change (substituting “regulation” for “change”—which may seem less controversial—would not alter significantly the main thrust of this argument), and the political class (including the opposition) and most of the public at large considered the government entitled and bound to take such initiatives. Did the government initiate the right changes, at the proper time, and were there enough of them? These are certainly interesting questions worthy of serious examination. However, they cannot detract from the importance of the government’s role and tradition as a major modernizing agency—on the contrary, for these questions, after all, are meaningful only because the government was, indeed, such an agency. Moreover, many aspects of

62 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” this drive for modernization (and not only the government’s reactionary policies) elicited or exacerbated attitudes of protest and dissent among the intellectual elite (on the right as well as on the left), and among the narod, the people—rural and urban alike.

The Intellectuals and the Tradition of the Leap Forward The intellectual traditions and the traditions of the intellectuals in Russia, as may be expected, comprise a rich and multifaceted world of ideas and myths, beliefs and convictions, attitudes and behavior.6 Any attempt to single out one tradition as more important than others would certainly have a degree of arbitrariness. My intention is not to point out to one tradition presumably “more important” than others in vacuo, but to describe one nexus of traditions that in the Russian historical setting has had an extensive range of effects and repercussions much wider than these traditions’ intellectual content itself. From this perspective, such an attempt would be much less arbitrary than it might appear. Since the very inception of the modern Russian intellectual stratum in the early eighteenth century, two views—representing a peculiar blend of ideas and feelings—have haunted the minds and hearts of intellectuals. One is the knowledge (mixed with resentment and a sense of inferiority) that Russia lagged behind Western Europe in her social, economic, and cultural development; the other is the conviction (arising from a sense of pride and strengthened self-assertion) that Russia could catch up and overtake the Western European countries: that it could also move in the same direction and reach the same goals without taking the same path and stages trodden by the West or, alternatively, that it did not need to follow in Europe’s footsteps at all. In the eyes of the overwhelming majority of Russia’s intellectuals, whether Slavophiles or Westernizers (to use this perennial dichotomy), this backwardness gave Russia an invaluable advantage over the West, either because it represented the springboard for jumping forward faster and farther, or because this backwardness had preserved in the people the most precious spiritual values, lost forever in the West. For the intellectuals as a whole, the populist ideologist Nikolai K. Mikhailovskii’s definition of the peasant commune represented, mutatis mutandis, an apt evaluation of Russia’s place in the family of nations: it was a higher type of human society and polity at a low stage of development. The West, in that view, was a lower type of human organization at a very high point of development; from this point on, there could be, in the West, only decline, decomposition, disintegration, and putrefaction. This type of reasoning is to be found from the eighteenth century on, first—implicitly—in the deeds of Peter the Great and his successors. After

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seven decades of praxis, it was explicitly articulated for the first time by Denis I. Fonvizin, an outspoken representative of the intellectuals. He observed, in a letter written to I. Bulgakov during a journey in Western Europe dated Montpellier, 25 January 1778: I shall not tire you with a description of our voyage. I shall only say that it proved to me how true the proverb is—the grass is greener beyond the hills. True, sensible people are everywhere rare. If they [the West European peoples] began to live here before us, then at least we, beginning to live, can give ourselves such form as we wish and escape those defects and evils which have taken root here. Nous commençons et ils finissent. I believe that he who has just been born is happier than he who is about to die.7

Nous commençons et ils finissent. Russia is just beginning her universal journey, whereas the West is reaching the end of the road. One hundred years later or so, addressing himself to the West, Dostoevsky would utter his famous diatribe: “We shall walk on your graves in the huge cemetery that Europe will soon be.” He was not alone in this feeling; Westernizers and semi-Westernizers shared it too. Alexander Herzen (also addressing himself to the West) wrote: Nothing in Russia … bears the stamp of routine, stagnation, and finality which we encounter with nations which, through long labors, have created for themselves forms of life which to some extent correspond to their ideas. Do not forget that in addition Russia remained ignorant of the three scourges which retarded the development of the West: Catholicism, Roman law, and the rule of the bourgeoisie (meshchane). This much simplifies the problem. We shall unite with you in the coming revolution. [But] for that we need not pass through those swamps which you have crossed; we need not exhaust our forces in the twilight of [your] political forms. … We have no reason to repeat the epic story of your emancipation, in the course of which your road has become so encumbered by the monuments of the past that you hardly are able to take one single step ahead. Your labors and your sufferings are our lessons. History is very unjust. The latecomers receive instead of gnawed bones the [right of] precedence [at the table] of experience. All development of mankind is nothing else but [an expression of] that chronological ingratitude.8

Even the morose Chaadaev (himself neither a Westernizer nor a Slavophile), who had lost almost all hope in Russia and believed at times that the sole purpose of its existence was to serve to the family of nations as “an example of total failure,” in his moments of faith in the future looked at it through his own prism of a “leap forward,” writing in a letter to N. I. Turgenev in 1833 that in a little while the great ideas, once they have reached Russia, would find it easier to realize themselves there and to incarnate themselves

64 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” in the Russian people than anywhere else, because here they would find no deep-rooted prejudices, no old habits, no obstinate routines to fight. And Nikolai Chernyshevskii (author of the incredibly successful and dull novel What Is To Be Done?) elaborated at length that Russia, because of its very backwardness, could skip the intermediary stages through which the West had passed, and that Russia was ripe and ready for the big leap forward. This type of reasoning is common to Fonvizin, the Decembrists, the Slavophiles, Chaadaev, Herzen, Chernyshevskii, Tkachev, Dostoevsky, the populists, Solov’ev, Lenin, and most of the Russian intellectuals (and not only among the “intelligentsia,” as may be assumed because of its messianic streak). It is of secondary importance for the present discussion whether the decline and disintegration of Western Europe would presumably come because it had lost the true Christian values, as some intellectuals believed, or because capitalism was its own gravedigger, as others argued. The core of the message was, as Chaadaev put it in his Apology of a Madman (1837), that the very barrenness of Russia’s past gave her an immense advantage over all other nations. Russia’s radiant future lay in the low stage of development of her higher type of society, for the lower the stage, the longer the leap forward and the greater the achievement would be. In the intellectuals’ mental mill this was a no-losers game: the lower the stage, the better.9 For this reason, too, this vision stuck tightly and permanently at the center of ideas and ideologies and in the collective psychological makeup of Russian intellectuals for two hundred years or so. Another reason for this permanency may have stemmed from the fact that this vision was not only a projection forward but a reflection of current realities, and particularly of Russia’s “leap-like” way of development.10 We may sum up with Peter Tkachev’s words: the future society could come into existence solely as a result of a break in the historical process—“a jump,” as he put it, that is, a leap forward. He had in mind a coup, others were thinking of revolutions, and still others dreamed of a big bang or vaguely longed for “some change.” What were the main function and importance of this vision? Its central role lies in that it created the necessary basis for, and supplied the ingredients of, the intellectuals’ tradition of the big leap forward and of the concomitant syndrome of plunging into the future. To put it succinctly, this tradition informed the intellectuals that Russia was a country of unlimited possibilities as far as the direction and pace of her development were concerned. Russia need not necessarily develop in a unilinear and predetermined sequence of stages: it could take one way or another, it could skip over phases, it could have the bourgeois revolution without a bourgeoisie and the proletarian revolution without a proletariat. Russia could win the

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race against time, and history is on the move anyway; all that is needed is to give it, from time to time, in the populist Andrei Zheliabov’s words, “a little push” in the right direction. Zheliabov paid with his life for that conviction, for he was hanged for his participation in Alexander II’s assassination, considered by the terrorists of the Narodnaia Volia, too, as a push to history in the “right direction.” Thus, the leap forward generated the theory and the mentality of the little push, that is, of a deep voluntarism that impregnated the thought and mental makeup of Russian intellectuals. It is no small irony that in this country, often maligned (up to our own days) for the “passivity and fatalism” of its people, a most fitting characterization is Herzen’s voluntaristic and indeterministic view that “history has no libretto”: If humanity marched straight toward some result, there would be no history, only logic … human beings possess reason which develops, which doesn’t exist in nature, nor outside nature … one has to arrange life with it as best one can, because there is no libretto. If history followed a set libretto it would lose all interest, become unnecessary, boring, ludicrous … great men would be so many heroes strutting on a stage … history is all improvisation, all will, all extempore—there are no frontiers, no itineraries. Predicaments occur; sacred discontent; the fire of life; and the endless challenge to the fighters to try their strength, to go where they will, where there is a road; and where there is none, genius will blast a path.11

Improvisation, will: this was the cast of mind of most intellectuals, whatever their professed philosophical theories. It was certainly Bakunin’s and Tkachev’s, but it was also Lenin’s, notwithstanding Marx’s historical determinism. In view of a widely shared view to the contrary, the last statement probably needs clarification. From several angles it appears that the orthodox Marxist way of capitalist industrialization and modernization was alien to the Russian intellectuals’ ideological tradition. Lenin departed from this orthodox way (of Marx, Kautsky, and Plekhanov) in two important respects. First, he attributed an insurrectional role to the peasantry as a support (later, as an ally) of the urban worker proletariat. Second, he posited that the “bourgeois democratic revolution” could evolve into a “proletarian socialist revolution” with no intermediate stages, and without waiting for the development of an advanced, fully-fledged capitalist, modernized, industrialized society. In so doing, Lenin stayed firmly within the tradition of the leap forward, and he formulated in Marxist terminology that no stage (including the capitalist one) is a precondition for plunging into the future—in this case, for the proletarian revolution and the socialist society. At the moment of truth, the “little push” to history saved the day and inspired the great putsch of October 1917.

66 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” The little push to history and the voluntaristic mentality led also, as hinted above, to the belief that terror may serve as an efficient means of political struggle (a consequence that Herzen never implied or envisioned: not only books, but ideas too habent sua fata…). The uniform result of the use of terror in Russia was failure, from Alexander II’s assassination to Fanny Kaplan’s attempt on Lenin’s life in August 1918. The rebuttal of this fallacious strategy in fact came from quite an unexpected quarter, in Kropotkin’s clear-cut dismissal of “those idiots who believe that they can change the course of history with a kilogram of dynamite.” Even in the eyes of a revolutionary anarchist, a terror-style leap forward seemed one bomb too far. How did the intellectuals’ tradition of the “leap forward” stand visà-vis the government’s tradition of modernity? On the face of it, it would seem that the striving to skip stages stemmed, among other things, from the desire to avoid the demeaning and dehumanizing consequences of modernization in general and industrialization in particular, and to spare the people the sufferings and social strain entailed in these processes. From this point of view it would appear, then, that a conflict existed between the respective traditions of the government and of the intellectuals, and that the latter’s stand was a form of protest and dissent. On the other hand, the leap forward, devised as a means of escape from ongoing social strains, may be seen as a rejection of actual modernization in the present for an ideal and mythical modernization in the future. This may indeed have been an appealing construction in the intellectuals’ minds, but it did not command their attitude and behavior in real life. What actually happened was something that Peter Tkachev, the forceful representative of Jacobin populism, most feared and warned against: “Life,” he wrote, modern life, was speaking to the intellectuals “in very different tones.” I need you, it says, and I will not feed you if you do nothing. Your “ideal principles” do not correspond to the interests which I have created for you. But this does not matter to me. For the development of my principles, I need agricultural foremen, technicians, industrialists, doctors, lawyers, etc. To each one of them I am prepared to give full freedom in the sphere of his own specialty and nothing more. You must help me. Develop industry and trade, rationalize agriculture, teach the people to read, found banks, hospitals, build railways, etc. And for all this I will give you a good and solid reward, and I will do what I can to make your work not too hard. I will create conditions that correspond to your character, and I will give you a feeling of satisfaction with your work and so do away with your melancholy. Those are my conditions.

“How many would withstand such demands made by the ‘logic of life’?” asks Tkachev rhetorically. Not very many indeed. The great majority, he

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predicted, would adjust themselves to reality and “find a little bridge” to it, built perhaps of indifference, which is “more dangerous than typhoid and cholera,” or of the rationalization of egotism, or of a kind of application of laissez-faire to the sphere of morals, or still worse of an “idealism” able to justify such an attitude.12 Thus, what really happened to the overwhelming majority of the intellectuals (with the exception of the terrorist fringe on the one side and the conformist mass on the other) was that their protest and dissent on this central issue were theoretical and passive; their acquiescence, assent, and adjustment, actual and active: a portent for the future deeds and non-deeds of the intellectuals.

The Peasantry and the Tradition of Anti-Statism The single most important feature of the Russian peasantry’s attitude toward the state during these two hundred years or so of imperial rule was their continuous and relentless opposition to it in all its forms and manifestations. This was an opposition expressed not only during the great peasant rebellions of Bolotnikov (1606–07), Stenka Razin (1670–71), Bulavin (1707–08), and Pugachev (1773–74), but also during periods of relative social calm, always punctuated by flare-ups of peasant unrest. This opposition was not an episodic or conjectural phenomenon. It was permanent and endemic, had deep roots in the peasants’ life and mentality, and expressed a fundamental, naïve but powerful, spontaneous anarchistic attitude. The popular folklore regarding the relationship between the peasantry and the state (and the government) confirms this attitude in many different ways. The state is invariably viewed as evil and alien to the peasant world, a tyranny extorting taxes and imposing military service, impervious to the peasantry’s concepts of right and justice. This entrenched view of the peasants’ was closely entwined with three other views: the myth of the tsar, the peasant commune as an embodiment of the state of “statelessness,” and the “Black Repartition,” the general repartition of the land.

The myth of the tsar “God is high and the tsar is far away”: this popular saying conveys the sense of frustration of the peasants in the face of the state, and their belief that its rules and exactions were against God’s will and without the tsar’s knowledge. This saying may be complemented by another: “The tsar is good, his officials are wicked.” Sayings of this kind can be multiplied. The picture that emerges is one of a naïve monarchism that fairly well parallels the peasants’ spontaneous anarchism. Their concept is one of a direct, non-mediated relationship with a mythical tsar, with no state standing in

68 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” between; in fact, it resembles a familial-type relationship with the tsarbatiushka, the “little father,” as the peasants fondly used to call him. But this mythical tsar had little in common with the real ruler or the state, as the Slavophile Iurii Samarin, a great expert in rural affairs, perceptively wrote in the 1860s: in the peasants’ comprehension, A manifesto, a uniform, an official, an ukaz, a governor, a priest with his cross, an Imperial Order—all this is falsehood, deception and fraud. To all this the narod submits, just as it puts up with cold, blizzards, and drought, but it does not believe in any of it, it does not acknowledge it, it does not yield its convictions. To be sure, before the narod stands the image of a tsar who has been separated from it, but this is not the tsar who lives in St. Petersburg, appoints governors, issues Imperial Orders and directs the army, but some other tsar, a half-mythic impostor, who tomorrow may pop out of the ground in the form of a drunken clerk or a demobilized soldier.13

The half-mythic impostors, like Pugachev (impersonating Peter III), were indeed a corollary of the mythical tsar, as several excellent studies have shown.14 But most important, both the myth of the tsar and the half-mythic rebellious impostors helped sustain the paradoxical peasant attitude of loyalty to the tsar and staunch opposition to the state.

The commune and the state of “statelessness” The tradition of opposition to the state was, in a way, complemented in everyday life by the very existence of the peasant commune, in which the ideal of a state of “statelessness” was kept alive and (from the peasants’ point of view) partly implemented. The commune represented the basic social framework of life and work for the overwhelming majority of the Great Russian peasantry. It enjoyed a substantial autonomy and self-rule (even under serfdom) on a wide range of matters pertaining to the village, the personal and family affairs of the peasants, the seasonal cycle of agricultural work, and above all, the collective use of the land and its periodic redistribution among the households of the commune. Many of these social and economic activities were governed and managed according to the rules of customary law (obychnoe pravo). Even landlords usually chose to abide by these rules in order to maintain the stability of peasant society, upon which the precarious equilibrium of the seigniorial estate depended almost entirely. The commune kept alive the tradition of self-rule and rejection of the state’s interference in the peasant way of life. In the peasants’ worldview the commune represented at one and the same time a tangible remembrance of good times of freedom in the past; a prefiguration of the good life in the future; and, in the present, an incontrovertible proof that peasant

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society should manage its own affairs, since the commune did just that to the satisfaction of its members and without the intrusion of the “wicked state officials and landlords.” In Russia, the abstract notion of the “state” became for the peasants a concrete and tangible reality, and at times (as under Peter the Great) an earthly extension of evil and of Satan. The demonization of the state and its servants, and its corollary—the beatification of the Good and Caring Tsar—became the peasants’ fundamental political belief, tradition, and criterion for the evaluation of current events in the polity. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly after the 1905 revolution, was faith in the tsar seriously shaken, and distrust of the state enhanced accordingly.

The Black Repartition The vision of a state of “statelessness” was strengthened and made urgent by the ideal of the “chernyi peredel” (the Black Repartition), the general repartition of the land among the peasant communes in Russia, in that it was the state (in the peasants’ view) that prevented this just and right repartition from taking place. The roots of the chernyi peredel lay in the perennial peasant belief that the land was both nobody’s property and the exclusive possession of the tillers of the soil. The state and the landlords were sinful usurpers, carrying out the devil’s deeds on earth.15 This deeply rooted popular belief was exacerbated from the second half of the sixteenth century through the end of the eighteenth century, when huge tracts of land, tilled by a free peasantry “from time immemorial,” were given by the state to the service nobility and millions of peasants were pushed into servitude to these new masters. Interestingly enough, the peasants accepted the loss of freedom with less pain than they did the appropriation of the land by the nobility, as witnessed by the peasant saying “Ia tvoi, no zemlia moia” (“I am yours [the landlord’s], but the land is mine,” that is, because I am tilling it.) The peasants’ outrage over this unjust and sinful destitution was bound to have long-lasting effects, and it informed both the endemic peasant protest and unrest, and the rebellions and active participation in great social upheavals like the events in 1917. Does this stance also mean that the peasantry was opposed ipso facto to the government’s tradition of modernization? Not exactly, and not necessarily so. In fact, it appears that peasant attitudes toward the various ingredients of the modernization process differed greatly and had many nuances. Thus scholarly research has shown that, contrary to widely shared views, the peasants were not opposed to the spread of literacy in the countryside and even initiated the setting up of schools and classes for adults.16 But the single most important aspect of the peasants’ reaction to

70 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” modernization was their attitude toward industrialization, for it shows, in this author’s view, the peasantry’s largely successful integration into the process of modernization without a breakdown of rural society.

Urban Peasantism Succinctly stated, Russia had no process of rural exodus, and the great majority of its urban and industrial workforce were peasants who never severed their ties with the village. This represented one of the most interesting features of the Russian processes of industrialization and urbanization. It meant also that by 1917 Russia had not only a land-hungry peasantry, but an industrial workforce whose overwhelming majority were peasantworkers with close personal, family, and communal ties to the countryside. These peasants spent part of the year at the factory or workshop, and the other part in the village. In so doing—and notwithstanding the modernity of the industrialization and urbanization processes—they were following a tradition and an occupational cycle that had lasted for nearly two hundred years, during which peasants (even under serfdom) would temporarily leave the village (and the seigniorial estate) to look for work as carpenters, masons, factory workers, barge haulers, tradesmen, and the like in cities or other distant places. Eighteenth-century annals record the complaints of permanent city dwellers (noblemen and merchants alike) about the unbearable multitudes of peasants swarming around Moscow and St. Petersburg. On the other hand, once back in the village, the peasants who had spent periods of time in an urban environment showed greater militancy and political awareness than their fellow villagers, and they were often the leaders of the rural protest movement. The result of this Russian type of urbanization and industrialization process was an absence of great masses of paupers and uprooted city dwellers compelled to live permanently in an alien environment, with all the psychological strains usually brought about by these processes. (Actually, there was, up to the Great War, a low correlation between urbanization and industrialization, in addition to the fact that by 1912 roughly 60 percent of the entire industrial workforce in Russia were to be found in rural areas.) Further, the fact that an important part of the worker class in Russia kept its ties with the village and its customs, habits, and values, contributed greatly to the relative stability of Russian society, in spite of the social strains and fiscal burdens entailed by modernization, industrial development, and great-power foreign policy. Obviously, the village was fulfilling the role of safety valve for urban tensions. (This does not exclude, and indeed may be complementary to, the possibility that the city served

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as a safety valve for relative rural overpopulation: for instance, in 1912, 90 percent of all rural households in the province of Moscow had members working in outside, non-agricultural jobs—an average of 2.6 persons per household out of 6.5 members.) On arriving in the city, the peasant did not feel a stranger in it: the path to the city and back was a customary and well-trodden one, part of peasants’ tradition since the time of their ancestors. Similarly, following another old tradition, the peasant-workers would organize in various frameworks such as zemliachestva, arteli, and kruzhki. The artel’ and the zemliachestvo contributed greatly to keeping peasants from the same village together, engaged in similar occupations or in the same factory, and to preserving relationships and customs of mutual aid and moral support as they had always existed in the commune. For all these reasons the peasant in the city did not lose his social identity, and this was facilitated by the characteristic of Russian cities that I would call “urban peasantism.” In other words, to a large extent what was happening was that, instead of the urban peasants being absorbed by the cities, the peasants were absorbing urban Russia.

Protest and Dissent The main forms of protest and dissent in modern Russian history fall into two main categories: popular protest, and political and intellectual dissent. The history of both has been written in numerous books and from different points of view. There is no need to retell this story here; all that is needed is to look at it briefly from a new perspective and against the background of the traditions described above.

The Mainstream of Popular Protest The single most important statistic in the history of rural Russia and of popular protest is that, in the 1920s, 95.5 percent of all peasant land was held in communal tenure.17 This figure epitomizes several closely related developments. First, it represents a critical point in the trajectory of two hundred years of popular protest, culminating in the peasant revolution of 1917–18. Its driving force comprised peasants, peasant-workers, urban peasants and workers, and soldiers (that is, peasants in uniform), and its result was the seizure and repartition of all the land, communal, private, and otherwise. Second, it means that Stolypin’s failure in 1907–11 to break down the commune—as a step toward faster modernization—was even

72 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” greater than it appears from the familiar statistics of peasants who left the commune to settle on individual farms.18 Third, it signifies that under circumstances permitting the exercise of their free choice (circumstances that obtained after the revolution of February 1917 because of the general chaos and anarchy), the Russian peasants chose massively and unequivocally the commune and the communal tenure of the land as socioeconomic forms of life and work. The specific method by which the peasants implemented this choice was the general repartition of the land, which occurred in 1917–18; it was a clear-cut and wholesale chernyi peredel, almost by the book, that is, according to the peasants’ secular hopes and expectations. It represented the quintessence of the peasant revolution and lasted twelve years or so, from 1917 to 1929– 30; for that reason alone (and there are more), this peasant ideology—the chernyi peredel—should not be seen as a historically hopeless utopia: its end came, not by a natural death or a gradual withering away, but through Stalin’s collectivization, a massive and ruthless destruction (which was, at bottom, a counter-revolution) that in vast areas took the form of sheer physical annihilation. It was hardly, then, utopian, if such a degree of force and coercion had to be used in order to “remove it from circulation.” The historical course of events from 1917 to 1929, indeed, gives a clear answer to the question as to whether the chernyi peredel was a utopia or not. In fact, it represented a reality and a “present that worked,” one that worked much better and with immeasurably less suffering than “the future that worked,” which Western European intellectuals (much more naïve than the naïve Russian peasant) believed they saw in the Soviet system at that very moment. The Bolsheviks never tested, let alone implemented, their prerevolutionary agrarian program. After they seized power, and under the pressure of the peasantry, they adopted first the Socialist Revolutionaries’ agrarian program (which they had for years derided at length), then the peasants’ spontaneous and thorough reform, the chernyi peredel, and later a hybrid land legislation, rich in bombastic phraseology and poor in substance, that suited above all the contradictory views of different members of the party’s Central Committee. Finally, under Stalin’s absolute leadership, they applied a wholesale statization of the land and the peasant, which had never been proclaimed as their program, although Kropotkin and the anarchists had persistently predicted since the early 1900s that this was precisely what the Bolsheviks would do if they ever seized power. Yet the ruthless collectivization of agriculture and the destruction of peasant society meant not only the end of the peasant land commune but also the crushing of the backbone of popular protest in Russia—an event that had momentous repercussions on the subsequent course of modern Russian history.

Traditions, Old and New • 73

Political and Intellectual Dissent Twice in the course of modern history intellectuals (and groups of intellectuals) found themselves on the eve of great events of protest and opposition, and on both occasions this happened when they merged with, or surfaced on top of, powerful movements of popular protest: in 1905 and again in February 1917.19 In other respects, the intellectuals’ dissent was by and large politically ineffective, in spite of acts that required moral courage or self-sacrifice, from Radishchev and the Moscow Circles in the 1830s through the various communist oppositions to Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s to the latter-day protesters and dissenters.20 The great change that occurred from the 1930s onward was that the destruction of the basis of popular protest movements by Stalin left the intellectuals with no prospect, for the foreseeable future, of potential popular waves of protests with which to merge and unite forces. No 1905 or February 1917 seemed likely to happen again. This represented a profound change between the Imperial and the Soviet periods; however, continuities may appear in some respects. In Imperial Russia, intellectual dissent encompassed five main groups or types. (a) Activist protest and dissent, mainly including groups and parties (Narodnaia Volia, the Socialist Revolutionaries’ Battle Organization, the anarchists) that advocated terror as a means for political struggle. To use a lapidary formula, their stand may be summarized as: “Give a push to history here and now, and keep trying relentlessly.” As mentioned above, this kind of protest brought no substantial political results and was at times counterproductive. From the early 1930s on there was no counterpart to this kind of protest in the Soviet Union. (b) Protest by those groups and parties (Mensheviks, Bolsheviks) that advocated building up a small, disciplined force and waiting for a revolutionary situation to occur in order to activate it. Their stand may be rendered by the formula: “Give a push to history, but only when the moment seems ripe.” This is how Lenin and Trotsky used the peasant revolution in 1917–18 to seize power. No such form of protest was known to exist in the Soviet Union,21 although an internal crisis or sudden upheaval (of national or political character) was always possible. (c) The political protest of those parties—Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), and other groupings of liberals—that tried to form a parliamentary-type opposition and an alternative to the autocratic government. They believed in a continuing process of legal political

74 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” confrontation and gradual change. They may have had chances of succeeding—they won some battles between 1906 and 1916—but they finally lost the political war, in part because of their own (and their allies’) mistakes when in power in 1917. This type of open political opposition was ruled out by the very nature of the Soviet system. (d) Protest (and at times withdrawal) based on moral grounds and, sometimes, on religious conviction. This conscientious objector– type of protest was overt and loud, and it often implied a refusal to share in the benefits of the regime and the society that were the targets of protest and criticism. An obvious and well-known example of this type of protest is that of Lev Tolstoy; and one of its most important aspects is the conviction that it is morally imperative to implement in one’s actions and way of life the principles in which one believes. There were a few cases of this type of dissent in the Soviet Union too. (e) The vast majority of the dissenting intellectuals (themselves a minority of the intellectuals in toto), which included men and women in the arts and the professions. They disapproved of what they saw in the polity yet did nothing to change it. All were under the immense pressure of a ruthless dictatorship and a constant fear of persecution. Some of them chose inner freedom with no action, internal emigration, or some other form of bodily presence cum soul absence. This type of dissent had three main characteristics: it permitted social adjustment, it was safe, and it did not exclude some occasional and ephemeral frondeur-like posturing and gesticulations. This last stance can be defined as “dissenting assent.”22 The term is clear from the above analysis and needs no further elaboration. If we look for historical continuities between Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, it appears that essentially this type of dissent existed in Soviet Russia (although it was by no means an exclusively Russian phenomenon and might have been found in every authoritarian or totalitarian regime). Its political impact was almost nonexistent; its moral content, ambiguous.23 In addition, even the absence of popular movements of protest—crushed by the Soviet regime—might have been of no great importance for today’s assenting dissidents, since if there were such movements one may doubt whether these dissidents would have joined forces with them. The Soviet regime had succeeded (much more than any “class society ridden with antagonisms”) in estranging the intellectuals, including dissidents, from the mass of the people. One perceptive observer found de visu what historians and

Traditions, Old and New • 75

sociologists had suspected for some time: “the intelligentsia,” wrote David K. Shipler in 1983, “is gripped by a powerful contempt for the workers and the peasantry; the peasantry and the workers look back sardonically.” And he added: Simultaneously, the distaste for the vast sea of narod, the common people of Russia, has blocked most dissidents who have been exiled to Siberian villages from using the opportunity to probe provincial life and write about it. Andrei Amalrik was an exception in his Involuntary Journey to Siberia, but did not write with much respect; the narod earned mostly a disparaging tone. And in conversations with a few exiles who returned to Moscow, I was never able to elicit anything very perceptive about the people of those rural spots; the well-schooled political offenders were just not very interested. The snobbery cuts away at any prospective Soviet alliance, along Polish lines, of workers and intellectual who might struggle jointly to improve job conditions and political liberties simultaneously. It always struck me as unlikely that issues with mass appeal, such as the autocratic boss, the empty meat shelf, and the crumbling apartment, could be absorbed into the mechanism of Soviet political dissent as they were in Poland. In at least one instance, dissidents of the educated Soviet elite rebuffed workers’ efforts to gain support in forming a free trade union.24

The revival of dissent in the Soviet Union was, no doubt, an important phenomenon, though confined to a small number of courageous men and women, while the great majority of the intelligentsia kept its age-old tradition of conformism and submission to authority. Whether intellectual, religious, or national, this open dissent served as an example within Russia that people can stand up for their convictions, and in our post-Soviet times these dissidents deserve praise and recognition. However, the scope of the phenomenon in the past should not be overstated, as has recently been done by Solzhenitsyn, among others. The great number of people in the Gulag is not an indicator of the extent of dissent and protest. Unfortunately, the macabre joke narrated by Solzhenitsyn himself in the Gulag Archipelago holds true: “How many years did you get?” an inmate asked the newcomer. “Twenty.” “What did you do?” “Nothing.” “You liar, for nothing they give ten years, not twenty.” There were, indeed, millions of innocent people in the camps and in the prisons who had done nothing, that is, people who had never challenged the Soviet regime, had never protested, were not dissidents. There were even, as we know, staunch communists who believed until their last day of detention that they were in the Gulag “by mistake,” and that if only Stalin knew about it, all things would have been different. (The old myth of

76 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” the good batiushka was still alive.) Even a highly intelligent and cultivated man like Osip Mandelstam could believe in this nonsense, without the excuse of being a naïve peasant. The cynics and the conformists knew better and fared better. They set the example for the pattern of survival that had become the norm for the overwhelming majority of Soviet intellectuals. Cynical conformism reigned supreme. Against this background, even the dissenting assent of the few may appear to some as a virtue.

A Post-Soviet post scriptum A discriminating anonymous scholar observed after reading this essay that its conclusion is that dissent in Soviet Russia could have little effect, and that, since the text was first published in 1987, it should provide some kind of explanation of how perestroika and what followed thereafter could occur, if this were so. I think that the explanation is quite clear. With all the admiration they deserve, dissenters did not bring about perestroika. Whatever the reasons Mikhail Gorbachev had to embark on glasnost and perestroika (the knowledge that Russia was lagging economically behind the West, the Soviet economy’s difficulties maintaining its military complex during an intensified arms race, and the discrepancies between consumption levels of the population in Soviet Russia and the West), the basic fact is that perestroika was initiated from above, by the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and by the government, out of their own conviction and their way of seeing the national and international developments and sootnoshenie sil. It was not done under the pressure or influence of dissenters, but for the sake of the Soviet Union’s greatness, strength, and superpower status. Sadly, great moral courage, integrity, and suffering could not bring about a result that the exercise of power achieved in a relatively short time and with ease, thus giving also an answer to the perennial question of Sovietologists, “Is Soviet Russia reformable?” It was—by ceasing to exist.

Notes 1. See, for instance, M. S. Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1980). The author’s thesis is that “Soviet dissent is a product not only of the immediate pressures of contemporary circumstances but of long-term historical forces, and only by tracing its roots deep into the Russian past can we fully understand its genesis and development” (p. 2). These “longterm historical forces” go as far back as the eighteenth century. The author also believes that the Soviet dissidents, and chiefly Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Roy Medvedev, are in many ways the “spiritual heirs” of what he calls the “historic intelligentsia,” particularly Radishchev, Herzen, Chernyshevskii,

Traditions, Old and New • 77

2. 3.

4. 5.

Kropotkin, and Gorky. I failed to find sufficient historical proof of this thesis in the author’s arguments. S. N. Eisenstadt, Historical Traditions, Modernization and Development: A Position Paper (Jerusalem, 1984), p. 1. The comparison is made here with Imperial Russia’s development from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The Soviet way of development in the 1920s and the 1930s, with its centerpieces of collectivization, massive physical annihilation of peasants, disruption of rural society, and Gulag, lost its appeal and relevance as a model even among the Soviet Union’s closest followers and supporters. Ever since Tito’s rejection of this model, those interested in economic and industrial developments have looked for other ways. As for those interested in ways of sheer physical annihilation, they found their own original systems to that end, such as Pol Pot’s genocide in Kampuchea. See in this volume “Agrarian Crisis, Urbanization, and the Russian Peasants at the End of the Old Regime, 1880s–1920s.” It is true, as two scholars have pointed out, that within the Russian government there was opposition to such enterprises. They write, for example: “[I]n the early part of the nineteenth century, Minister of Finance Egor Kankrin went so far as to oppose government support for railroads on the grounds that they would promote physical mobility of the population and thus had the potential of threatening the social underpinnings of the imperial system.” F. V. Carstensen and G. Guroff, “Economic Innovation in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union: Observations,” in Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. F. V. Carstensen and G. Guroff (Princeton, 1983), 347–360, here p. 354. Kankrin’s opposition to the railroads may appear grotesque, and it is similar to the opposition to the railroads in the West on the grounds that a speed of more than 30 kilometers per hour would be a threat to the passengers’ life (France), or the belief that the great potato crop failures were due to the railways (Ireland, England), or, to turn to another form of transport, the opinion (stemming from a concern similar to Kankrin’s) that the automobile might carry socialism to the United States (Woodrow Wilson in 1906). Kankrin is in good company, after all. The overall thesis of Carstensen and Guroff is that the “modernizers [were] the weakest group” in the Russian government (p. 354), and that “Russia failed to modernize even though it industrialized” (p. 353). They assert that all in all, from the sixteenth through to the late twentieth century, owing to political, institutional, and economic reasons, Russia’s modernization—unlike the West’s—was sluggish and lacking in the basic prerequisites for such a modernization. In fact, throughout their treatment, Guroff and Carstensen fail to compare Russia to “the West”: their parallels and comparisons are between Russia and “especially England and America” (p. 352), or with “the more varied purposes of Western, especially Anglo-American institutions” (p. 356), or with the virtues of “a congenial legal environment, especially in England and America, which explains the strength of Western economic development” (p. 352). How these institutions and environment “in England and America” explain the strength (or the weakness) of the economic development of France, Spain and Portugal, Italy and Greece, Serbia and Romania, Prussia and the

78 • Russia before the “Radiant Future”

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

Austro-Hungarian Empire, is a matter which is not made clear logically and historically. The authors have fallen into the traditional trap of using England’s development as a model (and a would-be equivalent of “the West”); they have also fallen into a less traditional trap of using another non-model to their analysis: the development of the United States. What kind of “West” is it, into which most of Continental Western Europe does not fit in? And if it does not fit, why should we expect that Russia should? See chapter 4 in this volume, “On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia.” D. I. Fonvizin, Pervoe polnoe sobranie sochinenii D.I. Fonvizina, 1761–1792 [The First Complete Writings of D.I. Fonvizin, 1761–1792] (Moscow, 1888), p. 914; quoted in Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1960), p. 84. Alexandre Herzen, “Le peuple russe et le socialisme. (Lettre à Jules Michelet)” (1852), in Textes philosophiques choisis (Moscow, 1948), p. 512. (The original was written in French.) Sir Isaiah Berlin writes that one of the sources of this genre of attitude was German romantic rhetoric about the unexhausted forces of the young German nation and the decay of the “Latinized, decadent western nations.” “The Russians [in the 1830s and 1840s] merely took this process of reasoning one step further. They rightly judged that if youth, barbarism, and lack of education were criteria of a glorious future, they had an even more powerful hope of it than the Germans.” I. Berlin, “The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia,” in Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York, 1978), p.120. On the “leap-like” development of Russia, see J. A. Armstrong, “Socializing for Modernization in a Multiethnic Elite,” in Carstensen and Guroff, Entrepreneurship, p. 84. Herzen,”De l’autre rive” (Russian title: “S togo berega”), in Textes philosophiques, pp. 388–399. (The original was published in French.) Peter Tkachev, Izbrannye sochineniia na sotsial’no-politicheskie temy [Selected Works on Social and Political Topics], vol. 1 (Moscow, 1922), pp. 348–349; quoted from Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution. A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (London and New York, 1960) p. 411. [Iurii F. Samarin], Perepiska Iu. F. Samarina s baronessoiu E. F. Rahden, 1861– 1876 [Correspondence between Iu. F. Samarin and the Baroness E. F. Rahden, 1861–1876] (Moscow, 1893), p. 123. See Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston, 1989); Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels, 1600-1800 (New York, 1972). For a detailed treatment of this subject, see “Agrarian Crisis, Urbanization, and the Russian Peasants at the End of the Old Regime, 1880s–1920s,” in this volume. See Joseph Bradley, “Patterns of Peasant Migration to Late Nineteenth-Century Moscow: How Much Should We Read into Literacy Rates?” Russian History 6, no. 1 (1979): 22–38; Ben Eklof, “Peasant Sloth Reconsidered: Strategies of Education and Learning in Rural Russia before the Revolution,” Journal of Social History 14, no. 3 (1981): 355–385.

Traditions, Old and New • 79

17. Victor P. Danilov, Sovetskaia dokolkhoznaia derevnia: naselenie, zemlepol’zovanie, khoziaistvo [The Soviet Village before the Kolkhoz Era: The Population, the Land, and the Economy] 2 vols. (Moscow, 1977–1979), p. 170. 18. See S. M. Dubrovskii, Stolypinskaia zemel’naia reforma [Stolypin’s Land Reform] (Moscow, 1963); Dorothy Atkinson, “The Statistics of the Russian Land Commune,” Slavic Review 32, no. 4 (December 1973): 773–787. 19. The following treatment does not include the Jewish dissident movement, which represented a case sui generis. While officially declaring that they did not challenge the Soviet system, the Jewish dissidents’ proclaimed goal to emigrate, plus the act of applying for exit visas, was considered by all parties concerned to be a rejection of the Soviet regime. Visa applicants and their families were treated accordingly by the authorities and were denied work and residence permits. In this specific case there was no discrepancy between conviction and action, and Jewish dissidents consciously undertook the risks and predicament entailed by the dissident’s condition. 20. The Decembrists’ two secret societies and their uprising in 1825 (traditionally appearing in this list) are skipped over here because they were a movement of army officers, not of intellectuals. Similarly, the Kronstadt revolt against the Bolshevik regime in 1921 is not mentioned either, since it was a revolt of sailors, workers, and peasants, not of intellectuals. Communist opposition to Stalin included the Workers’ Opposition, the Ukrainian Opposition, the Military Opposition, the Zinoviev Opposition, the Left [Trotsky-Zinoviev] Opposition, and the Right Opposition; see Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1960). 21. One exception was, however, the All-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of the People (Vserossiiskii sotsial-khristianskii soiuz osvobozhdeniia naroda—VSKhSON), a group that had an organization, a program (with strong authoritarian undertones), and a plan for the overthrow of the Soviet regime. Consisting of a small number of people, it was uncovered by the KGB in 1967, and its members were arrested and brought to trial. Most of them served their sentences and returned to Soviet society. See J. B. Dunlop, The New Russian Revolutionaries (Belmont, MA, 1976). The group had also a clear anti-Semitic streak. 22. Used here with a different meaning, this term had been borrowed from A. Shtromas, “Political Change and Social Development: The Case of the Soviet Union,” Europäisches Forum, vol. 1, (Frankfurt/Main and Bern, 1981), chap. 3. 23. A personality who epitomized quite well this type of dissent was Evgenii Evtushenko, who had had compelling success in blending defiance with conformity. Accordingly, “Baby Yar” epitomized Evtushenko’s conduct: he courageously wrote the poem, then made changes in it to alter its original meaning. For a debate on this topic, see “Russian Poets, Between the Lines,” The New York Times (Week in Review), 9 June 1985, and the subsequent letters to the editor from Evtushenko, Maxim Shostakovich, Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina Vishnevskaia, and Richard Sheldon in the NYT of 16 June, 21 July, and 25 August 1985. 24. David K. Shipler, Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (New York, 1983), pp. 202–204; see also pp. 205–208, 348–349.

d Social Groups in PART TWO

Comparative Perspective

e

d On Intellectuals and Intellectual CHAPTER 4

Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia

e

As a genre, this essay stands halfway between an interpretative paper and a program of research. As such, it is therefore ill-defined and probably has the shortcomings of both and the virtues of neither. For a period extending over two hundred years, it is possible to mention only a few of the sources and secondary works used; to do more would result in a bulky volume and bring the essay to a third genre, the bibliographical one, which is not exactly its purpose. I raise questions for which, at the present moment, I have no clear answer, and I doubt at times whether the questions themselves are methodologically justified or worth being explored. This is indeed a discussion paper, intended to invite comments and criticism. It is based on the hope and assumption that in the development of a subject of study, there are junctures where tentative hypotheses, generalizations, and queries may be no less useful than a new monograph giving precise answers on points of detail. This, therefore, is no more than a tentative reconsideration of certain features of intellectuals and intellectual traditions within the Russia context. One of these features is the existence in Russian history and historiography, from the late 1860s on, of the term “intelligentsia.” Created by intellectuals, it conveyed at one and the same time a sociological concept, a psychological characterization, and a moral code. However, none of the definitions given during the past eighty years or so has been found entirely satisfactory, and recent research has clearly shown the vagueness of the term, its many ambiguities, and the strains between the outlook and self-image of those who used it and the social and intellectual reality it is supposed to represent.1 Thus, it is understood that the intelligentsia was a group of sorts—but what sort of group? It is agreed that it cannot be defined in terms of an economic group; it was not a class. It was not an estate. Was it a stratum—and of what kind? It cannot be delineated by the professions of people supposedly within it: some had none, and most profession83

84 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” als were not included. It cannot be defined by level of education: the range covered by its members ran from autodidacts to university professors, but not all autodidacts (of course) or university professors (so much the more) were necessarily considered members of the intelligentsia. It could not be defined by a set of ideas: many were radicals (of different shades), not all were revolutionaries, some liberals were “in,” some others were “out.” In spite of these difficulties, the accumulated research provides a set of features and attitudes that seem to characterize the Russian intelligentsia, and these seem to be accepted by most authorities in this field. Briefly summarized, these features are: (1) a deep concern for problems and issues of public interest—social, economic, cultural, and political; (2) a sense of guilt and personal responsibility for the state and the solution of these problems and issues; (3) a propensity to view political and social questions as moral ones; (4) a sense of obligation to seek ultimate logical conclusions—in thought as well as in life—at whatever cost;2 (5) the conviction that things are not as they should be, and that something should be done.3 On the assumption (in view of point 4) that the intelligentsia not only felt that something should be done but also did something, the aggregate result of these features is the delineation of a group (of sorts) in a state of potential or actual dissent (not necessarily political). In the absence of a better method of classification and definition, these features, then, will identify the intelligentsia and differentiate it from other segments of the society in which it lived. And in this sense the term “intelligentsia” will be used here. I will use the term “intellectuals” in a broad sense, as given, for instance, by Edward Shils and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt in several of their writings,4 and as a stratum including bureaucratic intellectuals and professionals as well as scientists and the teaching staff in institutions of higher learning, religious specialists, teachers, freelancers, and of course artists. I will assume therefore that the terms “intellectuals” and “intelligentsia” are not synonymous,5 and leave the clarification of this assumption to later parts of this essay. Somewhere, sometime in this period of Russian history, “intellectuals” and “intelligentsia” may meet, or overlap, but in the beginning this distinction is necessary in order to avoid confusion.

Intellectuals in an Age of “Revolutionary” Reforms As in the case of several fields of development in the course of Russian history, a major turning point in terms of structure and content of intellectual life occurred during the reign of Peter the Great. The beginning of the eighteenth century represents, therefore, a meaningful starting point and offers a relatively clear dividing line between “Old” and “New” Russia.

Intellectuals and Their Traditions • 85

Until that period the main channels and agents of intellectual accomplishments were ecclesiastical centers and personnel. Largely under church control, intellectual life was undifferentiated institutionally, and qualitatively—it was religious. To be sure, during the seventeenth century there was a noticeable process of secularization of learning and wisdom, but in the main it remained very slow and limited in terms of intellectual growth and the number of individuals whose intellectual aspirations had some effect on the advancement of knowledge, and on altering the traditional pattern of cultural isolation and anti-rationalism. The substantial change in intellectual life that took place under Peter the Great stemmed from several innovations. The government promoted and encouraged the creation of new types of intellectuals and men of learning—laymen, trained in the West, or according to the then prevailing Western standards. It created new institutions and societal centers of intellectual life, rather than attempting to adapt the old ones to new goals and orientations. Peter I nourished a distrust of theological philosophy—which he considered a foe of secular learning and science—and of the clergy’s attitude toward modernity in general and his institutional reforms in particular; accordingly, he chose to circumvent the Church’s institutions of learning and established new ones for the diffusion of knowledge. All were financed by the state and under government control.6 The new trends in intellectual life were secular and non-religious, located in new institutional structures (Academy of Sciences, School of Mathematics and Navigation, Engineering School, Ciphering School). Another innovation was an increased concern with science—above all, applied and practical science. The cultural realm proper remained, at best, a secondary goal; changes in it occurred mostly as a by-product of Peter’s reforms in general (institutional, social, and economic), not necessarily of changes in the structure of intellectual life. The role of intellectuals (a tiny group including, for instance, Antiokh Kantemir and Vasilii Tatishchev) and their attitude toward the old tradition and the new one should be viewed within the context of the overall orientation and ethos of the tsar’s reforms. Under Peter change became institutionalized; rejection of traditional tradition became a policy; creation of a “new” tradition became a major goal.7 All this was done by decree: an Academy of Sciences by decree, a Kunstkamera by decree, a translation of Vlacq’s Tabulae sinuum and of Pufendorf’s works by decree, new manners and the shaving off of beards by decree. The new intellectuals had to be created. They were created by these same reforms. Their assignment, their raison d’être, was to destroy the old tradition and create a new one. They themselves understood it in this sense and fulfilled precisely this role in the “revolution from above” initiated by Peter. On the other hand, Peter con-

86 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” ceived of this revolution almost as permanent (for at least one generation), all-pervading, total,8 with continuous change as one of its basic ingredients, and with its impetus initiated and directed by the state. The role left, therefore, for these “intellectuals by decree” (not because of their small number, but structurally and “genetically”) was to implement and further these politics of change and policy of changing one tradition with another. The corollary of this policy, brought about by a “revolution from above,” was that everything seemed possible. Moreover, everything was legitimate: with the tsar (a “usurper” and “Anti-Christ”), the political power, and the new tradition being, in a way, illegal and illegitimate, everything became legal and legitimate, including the legitimization of the “Anti-Christ’s” authority by the theologian Feofan Prokopovich; there was no possible change or innovation too daring or too wide in scope. Everything was permitted, even recommended, and dissent against tradition was encouraged and rewarded. This was, indeed, a golden age in Russia for crooks and intellectuals, native and international alike. Everything was permitted except conservative attitudes and traditionalism. Strictly speaking, those were the true dissenting attitudes in Petrine Russia. If so, then, according to a recent model,9 the only true intellectuals of the period were the Tsarevich Alexei and a quasi-conspiratorial group from among the conservative Orthodox clergy. Being in conservative-traditionalistic dissent, they got—according to Voltaire, although he himself was a dissenter—the fate they deserved: severe trial and physical liquidation. Thus, for his refusal to serve in the army and to reject tradition, the antirevolutionary religious-minded tsarevich died as a rebelling and dissenting intellectual, this inversion being very much in the vein of Alain Besançon’s Le Tsarévich immolé, symbolizing the inverted Oedipus complex inherent, in his view, in the course of Russian history.10 To the extent that the father killing the son symbolized a generational conflict, this event also shows that in Russian history, resistance to change and defense of tradition were not always the attitudes of the older generation.

Intellectuals in Times of Stabilization and “Enlightened Despotism” Although Peter’s “revolution,” carried on in the style of a “crowned terrorist” and a Jacobin avant la lettre,11 lasted longer than Robespierre’s revolution of reason and rejection of dogmas (both of which came to a dialectical end with the dogmatic Cult of Goddess Reason), it nevertheless subsided and finally died sometime around the sudden death of the tsar himself in 1725. The developments from that moment on, during the rest of the eigh-

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teenth and early nineteenth century, will be sketched under two headings: first, an overview of some general trends; second, an analysis of events at the end of the period. The overall trends are the consolidation of the political regime in the early 1730s, and of the estates system in general and the mechanism of the Table of Ranks in particular, with its important role in elite formation. These trends were parallel to a stabilization in the whole sphere of intellectual activity. Thereafter and throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries changes were small, incremental, and chiefly quantitative. All personnel in intellectual fields and centers were legally and existentially state servants.12 The group as a whole was a tiny one. Scientific pursuits were mainly concentrated in the St. Petersburg Academy and Moscow University (founded in 1755 by Empress Elisabeth). Foreigners represented a large majority of the scientists; among the latter, particularly the Russians, specialization was low, and there existed an overlap between the scientific and aesthetic fields. The classical example was Mikhail Lomonosov—a mathematician and physicist and also a littérateur who wrote odes in a pseudo-classical style. The aesthetic field included essentially literary works, in prose and verse, mainly by representatives of the educated part of the nobility. The members of this last group appeared in all fields as dilettantes; their education was usually informal and oriented toward the arts. Intellectual endeavors within the Church concerned only a few ecclesiastical dignitaries, the rank-and-file clergy being notorious for their appalling ignorance. An important feature of the period was the consolidation of the new tradition—that is, its official establishment as the only acceptable one, and as a social code for the political, bureaucratic, and intellectual elite. The existence of a deep and all-pervading ignorance, rude manners, and superstition among the major part of the nobility, as well as a different, popular way of life and thought among the peasantry—that is, 96 percent of the population—does not belie this assessment, since such behavior was considered by the elite as deviant.13 Theirs was the norm, that is, the “European” behavior and state of mind. A remark concerning the Church is also to the point here. Although the political elite used the Church extensively as a submissive “ally” and instrument, it nevertheless considered scholasticism and religious thought an aberration; it held that the intellectual and spiritual food bestowed by the Church was appropriate only to the simple folk, or, at a higher level, as a device for checking and fighting “dangerous” ideas. The political class gave the Church the external marks and symbols of authority necessary for the performance of that task. Intellectuals displayed a conspicuous continuity in their attitude toward established tradition stemming from Peter’s reform: under Peter they

88 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” served loyally as instruments of change when change was the basic orientation of the powers; they now served loyally as instruments of conservation and consolidation when conservation (of the new tradition) was the chief orientation of those in authority. This latter orientation did not imply a total rejection of Peter’s political and intellectual heritage, but only of his style of action, his “revolutionary” way, and his overt terroristic manners. It was more a matter of form than of content. By discarding unnecessary roughness, Peter’s heirs also opened the way for a reconciliation with the Church (already submitted to tsar and government through an evolution brought to an end by Peter’s reforms) and with the remnants of groups that still dreamed of a return to the ways of pre-Petrine Russia. This reconciliation was arrived at successfully, thus excluding any serious ideological conflict, for a number of reasons. First, Peter succeeded in neutralizing the Church and subordinating it to the state, but it should be remembered that he did not reject any of the cardinal beliefs of Russian Orthodoxy. The reconciliation meant, therefore, giving the Church the role of guardian of morals, thought, and behavior (of the non-educated and the too educated alike) and going a step further by replacing the neutralization of the Church with its mobilization in the service of tsar and state. Second, the political powers and the Church began to discern that borrowing from the West did not in itself determine values, content, and ideologies. There were many different kinds of Europe to be borrowed from and many different ways of Westernizing. There were some things to be taken from the West, but in respect to others, Russia’s borders had to remain closed and its customs officers’ eyes open. The Church, like the customs officers, filled this role of watchdog, as did the Academy of Sciences and the university. For the powers, this stand did not amount to an abandonment of the Westernizing orientation; it meant, rather, a course of selective Westernization, a policy of judicious shopping. It was also, essentially, an instrumental and utilitarian attitude toward knowledge and science, and a close control on the import of ideas. In both cases, Western devices and innovations, and intellectual and scientific pursuits, were tested not primarily as sources of cultural progress, but rather as a means of acquiring for Russia a great-power position on the European scene (which was also the intellectuals’ way of looking at things). For this reason the growth of national consciousness in eighteenth-century Russia did not entail a rejection of Westernization or any serious ideological conflict. Throughout the eighteenth century the powers in Russia were a strong Westernizing force (in their own way), as they were also in the nineteenth century, the basic patterns remaining essentially the same.

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Most of the nobility showed, as a rule, a conspicuous lack of interest in intellectual pursuits, higher learning, or formal education;14 those noblemen who achieved eminence in these fields in the eighteenth century were atypical of the class or had begun their studies as commoners (raznochintsy) who arrived at the status of nobility through state service in the army or in the bureaucracy. University study was also recognized as active government service and taken into account for advancement in the Table of Ranks. While the great majority of the gentry remained appallingly ignorant,15 the elite had a vague interest in general education and the latest intellectual fashions. All in all, the system produced a number of enlightened state servants and heads of families capable of instilling an interest in books and respect for knowledge in their children. The intellectuals’ attitude toward the major problems in Russia at that time reflected their loyalty to those in authority. They were committed to upholding the new tradition and to supporting the political and social status quo, autocracy and serfdom, and imperial Russian foreign policy. Similar to that of the powers, their attitude toward Westernization, modernity, intellectual pursuits, and knowledge was utilitarian and instrumental. This included also—philosophically and existentially—their outlook on man and on the nature of human destiny. They were themselves (and accepted this human condition) instruments in the hands of a higher authority, that is, the powers; they were also (most of them personally and directly) masters of the “souls”—the serfs—using them as instruments for social advancement and a source of income. All of them (whether serf owners or not) were living in a society in which nearly half the population was deprived of all civil and most human rights. Western enlightenment had yet no effect in this respect and did not lead to criticism of existing social institutions. If two of its basic tenets were liberty and property, then well until the end of the eighteenth century the intellectuals did not ask for either of the two to be respected or extended to the whole of society. Using exaggeration for the sake of emphasis, Mikhail Speranskii wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century: “I find in Russia only two classes – serfs of the autocrat and serfs of the landlords… . In Russia there are in reality no free people except beggars and philosophers.”16 Certainly few intellectuals wanted to become beggars; most could not be philosophers. The intellectuals’ loyalty to the powers went beyond state policy and general principles: their commitment to the status quo was also reflected in their specific scholarly subjects, whether scientific or humanistic. Academicians and university professors, often serving as censors, were no exception to this rule, and foreigners were often among the most loyal to the

90 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” policy of the powers. To be sure, quite a number of intellectuals, including Catherine II, were “Voltaireans.” Some understood what this meant while others did not; still others apparently adopted a selective way of reading Voltaire’s works, very much along the lines of the powers’ selective Westernization. Alexander Herzen did not exaggerate much when saying that whereas Voltaire’s philosophy had freed Frenchmen of old prejudices and transformed them into revolutionaries, in Russia it reinforced the slave-like dependence of the people on the whims of the absolute monarch.17 Catherine II, the main symbol of the powers and “enlightened despot,” had a keen interest in Voltaire, in other prestigious Western enlighteners, and in enlightenment in general. It is probably on that account, too, that I. I. Betskoi, an enthusiastic promoter of educational ideas and practices in her time, is said to have remarked that “Peter I created men in Russia, but Catherine II gave them souls.” In so doing, she reserved the supreme prerogative of determining what kind of souls were to be given, then entrusted this task to her intellectuals. They were, therefore, not only masters of the “souls,” but also “engineers of the souls” avant la lettre—an omen that was to go a long way. A series of important trends and events near the end of the century influenced, directly or indirectly, intellectuals and intellectual traditions in Russia: (1) The emergence of a somewhat larger group of educated noblemen and the growth in scope and content of their intellectual interests (namely, in history, philosophy, and belles lettres). (2) Progress in Russian historical writing, being at once a scholarly undertaking (collecting sources), a means of finding new aspects of Russian culture to give historical depth to the new tradition and to the growing feeling of national unity, and, since historiography sided as a rule with serfdom and autocracy, a weapon of official ideology and new traditionalism.18 In the main, historians were either Russian noblemen or foreign scholars, usually from German-speaking countries. (3) An increase in the number of scientists and the diversification of their interests. Science began to be conceived of as a functional component of Russian culture. Meanwhile, most scientists were still foreigners, and those who were Russian were not of noble origin. (4) An overt and aggressive fear of Western ideas on the part of those in authority starting in the mid 1770s, and especially after 1789, leading to tighter control of institutions of learning, more restrictions on imports of books, and a sharp increase in censorship, which was turned into a professional system for implementing the ideological curbs im-

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posed by state and Church. This attack on freedom of thought was enforced by an expanding system of secret police. (5) Attempts at intellectual independence and qualitative dissent, although examples are few. Two cases were significant in their own time and in view of later developments: Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818) and Alexander Radishchev (1749–1802); both were noblemen and government officials. Novikov devoted himself to several fields of intellectual activity—journalism, publishing, education, literature—and worked for the dissemination of enlightenment and the “moral regeneration of the elite.”19 In Catherine’s Russia, he became one of the leaders in the Freemasonry movement. Then he was imprisoned for four years (1792– 1796), and thereafter withdrew gradually from all public and social activity to live on his estate, looking after his serfs and trying “new husbandry.” Mysticism and Freemasonry provided Novikov with inner freedom while he lived in the midst of political and social servitude. Rejecting these in his mind and soul, he opened to himself a rich and boundless world of thought and feeling, while staying politically inoffensive. It was dissent by withdrawal, and intellectual and psychological escapism. Radishchev studied jurisprudence, literature, and medicine at Leipzig University. A critic of Russia’s social and cultural order, he put his thoughts on paper, published them in 1790, stood trial, and was sentenced to death; Catherine commuted the sentence to ten-year exile in Siberia. Among Catherine’s intellectuals, Radishchev stands as a solitary figure, striving for freedom of thought and of man, and against the institution of serfdom, monarchical absolutism, and tyranny, against scholasticism and superstition, and against war as a means of national policy and international relations.20 In the main, mutatis mutandis, the same issues were faced by intellectuals in later generations. But in his own day Radishchev felt alone and frightened, and after his return from exile he apparently could find no way out but suicide. In a sense, there was in this end a common denominator with Novikov’s withdrawal. For some intellectuals at that time, and also in later times, the alternative seemed often to be, in their view, between different kinds of suicide. Radishchev chose this one.21 At his trial Radishchev declared that he had acted alone and had had no accomplices; over the next fifty years there were few successors. Well into the 1840s, most Russian intellectuals, following patterns established in the eighteenth century, remained state servants and maintained a basic identification with the autocracy and its attitude on the major problems of the social and cultural order. Alternatively, they kept their thoughts to

92 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” themselves or preserved them for future generations, sometimes in beautifully written personal diaries. True, there was the uprising of the Decembrists in 1825, which introduced two qualitatively new features: a preestablished program for social and political reforms, and the secret society as a means of structuring dissent and implementing the program. But the Decembrists were army officers, not intellectuals, with the exception of the poet Ryleev and the generous dreamer Küchelbecker. The majority of the remaining one hundred men sentenced by Nicholas’s courts were soldiers, although some of them had received a good education and were familiar with philosophy, history, and literature. Nevertheless, they were professional soldiers, not intellectuals. There might be a mild paradox here. To many a witness the intellectuals’ attitude seemed understandable, whereas that of the Decembrists was puzzling. Said Count Rostopchin: “I can understand why the Parisian rabble would rise in order to obtain rights; I can’t understand why Russian noblemen would rebel in order to lose privileges.” In Rostopchin’s day many Russian intellectuals, although moved by the Decembrists’ trial, could not understand either. Some of them understood about a decade later, partly because of the emotional imprint that this event left in educated society, and partly because of trends and developments within the wider social and intellectual context. The few who found a message and a legacy in the Decembrist uprising22 emerge in traditional historiography as “the first generation of the Russian intelligentsia,” to which I shall now turn.

The Idea of a Free and Autonomous Intellectual Activity There are several features to be accounted for when discussing the phenomenon called “the first generation” of the Russian intelligentsia.23 First, the word “intelligentsia” did not exist in this period; it seems that writers, thinkers, and bureaucrats did not need such a word. Those who supposedly belonged to the “intelligentsia” were designated, by themselves and by others, with the current equivalents of “intellectuals” (“educated men,” “enlightened people”). It appears that nobody felt the need for a term to name them differently from, say, the Slavophiles, or Pushkin and Lermontov (whom, by the way, nobody ever had proposed to see as belonging to the “intelligentsia”). Further, the dozen persons usually mentioned as representing the first generation of the intelligentsia represented only themselves.24 Quantitatively they were the “first generation.” They were not part of a wider group. All evidence and personal testimony show that there were three circles of

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close friends, known as the Moscow Circles: Ogarev’s, Stankevich’s, and the Slavophiles’. “Thirty years ago,” wrote Herzen, recollecting these days, “the Russia of the future existed exclusively among a few boys, hardly more than children, so small and inconspicuous that there was room for them under the heels of the jackboots of the autocracy.”25 On Herzen’s retrospective historical perspective regarding these circles’ roles I shall not comment; the facts indicate that thirty years earlier they consisted of “a few boys.” It is not much to make a “generation,” at least quantitatively. It remains to be seen whether it might have been a “generation” qualitatively. These men, the men of the 1830s and 1840s, were no déclassés, uprooted, rootless, or alienated. They were not going nowhere out of ennui, Weltschmerz, or Byronism; at any rate not more than well-integrated young bureaucrats and army officers, and certainly much less than was fashionable à la Pushkin and Lermontov. They were not ascetics isolated from the world and humanity; they liked good company, good entertainment, good food, good books. They did not sever the ties that bound them to their families, their milieu, their class—the nobility, society in general, or society in Moscow in particular, with all its social conventions and mundane pursuits.26 They were frequent callers at aristocratic parties and literary salons à jours fixes, at Prince Odoevskii’s, at Chaadaev’s, and at Madame Elagina’s, the headquarters of their supposed great enemies, the Slavophiles—a clear indication that attachment to ideas and differences of opinions were not basic determinants in shaping their social and personal relations. True, their circles were bound not only by ties of friendship, but also by ideas. These ideas covered a broad spectrum, with nuances ranging from right-Hegelian liberalism to socialism. Their common features were attachment to liberty of conscience, belief in science and education, and hope for Russia’s integration into liberal, progressive, and enlightened Europe. More specifically, they aspired to freedom of man (meaning, first and foremost, emancipation of the serfs) and freedom of speech (primarily, of the press). On the first point, the main differences between this group of intellectuals and the authorities concerned the timing and manner of carrying out peasant emancipation, with timing gradually becoming the crucial issue. On the second point, the government consistently held a diametrically opposite view on the issue per se and on the underlying assumption of free and autonomous intellectual activity. On that issue the men of the 1840s clashed with autocracy and were therefore considered dangerous elements (as were the Slavophiles, too). Although this widened the gulf between them and the political regime, the men of the Moscow Circles still hoped that progressive reforms and liberal evolution could be initiated and successfully carried out by the powers in general and by an enlightened tsar in particular.

94 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” This is not to belittle, of course, the fact that they rejected, in their minds and souls, established traditions in the political-institutional sphere (autocracy and government by bureaucracy) and in the social-cultural one (serfdom and its by-products), which by now seemed to them a repulsive offspring of Asiatic tyranny and ignorance, and German drill and pedantry. However, while in Russia, they did not form centers for the implementation of their ideas, nor did they try to organize and carry out political action. They did not try to find adepts, to proselytize. Their dissent was and remained their own; it did not spread beyond the small circle bound by ties of friendship and ideas. In Herzen’s words: “There were no secret societies, but the secret agreement of those who understood was immense.”27 True, there was the perennial problem of “thought and action.” But some died young, before they had to consider translating their thoughts into action (Stankevich, and perhaps Belinskii); others faced this dilemma, viewed action (like Pushkin28) as consisting of the spoken and written word, found this freedom negated in Russia, went to the West, and stayed there for the rest of their lives (Herzen, Ogarev, and Bakunin); still others chose the half-way of a veiled emigration (Turgenev); a few (Granovskii) remained in Russia, trying to navigate safely on the narrow path left between voicing discontent and personal safety, or keeping one’s thoughts to oneself and keeping one’s moral integrity—a hard journey in the “dark night [that] fell upon Russia and lasted seven years.”29 In Granovskii’s words: “It was easy for Belinskii, for he died at the right time.”30 But in all that there was no break, no chasm, no major change; there was only an existential choice of a few individuals. It could be argued that emigration was a kind of escapism and of dissent by withdrawal; it could be considered a new feature, a new tradition of Russian intellectuals, because it was prompted by political and ideological reasons. And in a sense it was, though emigration as such (mostly veiled and for different reasons) was a current device in the way of life of the Russian high nobility. In this respect, the “men of the 1840s” set an innovation, a new pattern, although they actually emigrated as Russian aristocrats and remained in the West as political exiles. Later in their lives, they kept much of the psychological makeup of Russian grands seigneurs—a paternalism in relations toward children and wives, coupled with aristocratic permissiveness in their own sentimental affairs; a certain respect for the tsar and the establishment in spite of some verbal abuses; a somewhat sentimental acknowledgment of the historical role of the educated nobility, created and raised by Peter the Great, and a view of themselves as its heirs in general, and as heirs of the immediately preceding generation, the Decembrists, in particular. In this conception

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of their cultural, social, and political antecedents, there was no room for feelings of guilt: these men were not “guilt-stricken noblemen,” a fact that must be stressed in view of later developments. As Isaiah Berlin put it, they represented a phase “neither mystical nor introspective, but on the contrary, rationalist, bold, extroverted, and optimistic.”31 There is, therefore, no sufficient evidence to regard this group of men as “the first generation of the intelligentsia.” They do not represent a generation, and they do not present most of the features usually attributed to the intelligentsia.32 The view that they were a generation of the intelligentsia is apparently a myth created by intellectuals of a later period. Consequently, the first generation has to be looked for at some other time. As Isaiah Berlin aptly remarked, these men were “the first Russian intellectuals, men of ideas, who conceived of intellectual activity as free and autonomous, and consequently, as standing in no need of any external justification.”33 In this respect they were certainly among the first, and they stand out from most intellectuals of their own day, as well as from the later intelligentsia, for it cannot be argued that the intelligentsia conceived of intellectual activity as being in no need of external justification. Quite often it held just the opposite view, although with changing external justifications. There were, no doubt, a number of common ideas shared by the “men of the forties” and the “men of the sixties”—by the “fathers” and the “sons.” It remains to be seen whether these common ideas suffice to create an ideological continuity, a sociological genealogy, and a psychological filiation.

The First Generation of the Russian Intelligentsia The second generation of the Russian intelligentsia, also called the “generation of the sons,” emerged in the late 1850s. Its first phase, in which nihilism was a central phenomenon, lasted during the 1860s, and for that reason the intelligentsia of this phase is also called “the men of the sixties.”34 Two sets of changes leading to a break in intellectual tradition are usually cited in explaining the emergence of nihilism: one, a shift in the social origin and composition of the group, and two, the new ideological trends in the intelligentsia in general, and in this movement in particular. Both changes are said to have led to a wide gap between this generation and the previous one, and to a bitter opposition of the sons against their (ideological) fathers. The first point in this interpretation is the disparity between the two generations with regard to the social origin of their members. The first generation was noble; the second is said to have been characterized by a

96 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” massive influx of commoners, raznochintsy, coming from the ranks of the people—priests, peasants, artisans, merchants.35 This assumption provided a basic explanation of the process under discussion: ideological radicalization was clearly connected with, and even resulted from, a democratization of the social basis of the intelligentsia. The more numerous the commoners, the more radical the ideas. Quantity was thus turning into quality; new ideas were founded on a new social basis and had a sociological explanation. It seems, however, that during the ninety-six years of its existence, this interpretation has not received, as far as I know, the support of convincing and precise data. Rather, available evidence indicates that within the ranks of the so-called intelligentsia the gentry represented quantitatively a large majority during the 1860s and 1870s. Qualitatively, they kept a leading role in all intellectual developments. The nihilists themselves were chiefly young men and women of gentry origin. Finally, from the 1840s through the 1860s the percentage of raznochintsy in institutions of learning seems to have remained steady or fallen slightly.36 “Raznochinets prishel” (the commoner arrived). The author of this famous expression, Nikolai K. Mikhailovskii, was probably the first formulator of the myth it conveyed.37 It contributed to the historical justification of the populist movement and fitted its theory of progress through the extension of culture. This was, indeed, a great idea, bene trovata. It was democratic, it was plebeian, it was egalitarian. But, for the 1860s, it was an anachronism. Most certainly, the raznochintsy, although a minority, had a role in shaping the intellectual and psychological features of this generation, but theirs was not a leading role, and their influence was not the result of a mechanism defined by the simplistic equation: “low social origin radicalization.” If their percentage was more or less steady in the 1860s as compared with the 1830s and 1840s, how is their increased influence in the 1860s to be explained? Why then and not twenty years before? Let us turn now to the other point of this interpretation. Nihilism, first stage of the “second generation” of the intelligentsia, has usually been presented as a new and radical set of ideas, viewed as an ideological movement (say, within a continuum that later on would include populism and Marxism), and discussed in the framework of an ideological and political conflict between the nihilists and the men of the forties.38 Thus, the emergence of nihilism might mean a rejection of political, social, and cultural traditions, including those (or some of them) formulated and established by the previous “generation of the intelligentsia,” and the main cause for this rejection, and for the phenomenon as a whole, would be the new set of ideas taking over and influencing this generation.

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What set of ideas (the ideology) was typical of and specific to nihilism? The central tenets of the nihilistic outlook were a positivist, philosophical materialism fading into scientism; a belief in the intrinsic value as well as the progressive social function of the natural sciences; a somewhat rudimentary aesthetic realism. Some nihilists were populist-minded, standing somewhere between Herzen and Lavrov (and on that account Franco Venturi has called them “the enfants terribles of populism”39); some were not populists and may be viewed as “non-socialist radicals.”40 Some believed in the redemptive role of the peasant commune and in the evil inherent in capitalism and industry. Some, more typical, like Bazarov and Pisarev, despised the peasantry for their ignorance and superstitions and believed in an intellectual elite, enlightened capitalism, and industrial development. All had great faith in education. None can be meaningfully classified along the lines of Westernizers versus non-Westernizers. They all were both and neither. What, then, was basically new in this set of central tenets? What were the elements that created a new tradition? Why and how did this set of ideas (most of which were not new indeed) bring about a conflict between sons and fathers?41 The nihilists did not raise many substantial ideological issues against the “first generation,” and even on points where differences could be seen, they were considered marginal. The main attack leveled at the men of the forties was that they were “men of knowledge without will” (or “idle men” and “superfluous men”), that is, people who refrained from action, an issue on which the nihilists elaborated at length.42 The nihilists’ reproaches stemmed from a certain conception of what one’s behavior ought to be after posing and answering the great questions of existence and the major problems in social, cultural, political, and personal life. The essence of this criticism was that the men of the forties, although knowing the correct answers (and among them that things are not as they should be), did not feel that something ought to be done. They lacked a sense of duty to arrive at ultimate conclusions, a sense of personal responsibility and genuine concern for these problems; they failed to see that these social and political problems were also moral ones. This failure led them to a sort of moral indifference, and since they had the knowledge, this indifference amounted to a lack of personal integrity and intellectual impotence. They behaved as Oblomov in Dobroliubov’s interpretation, or as Chernyshevskii’s Russkii chelovek na rendez-vous.43 More important than the issue of whether this criticism was justified is the question: according to what sort of code and values was this criticism raised? It appears that the code contained precisely the set of attitudes usually attributed to the intelligentsia. If so, these attitudes may have emerged

98 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” and crystallized at this juncture; in such a case, how is this emergence to be explained? One of the common denominators between the men of the forties and the nihilists is that both represent different phases of “the modernist revolt” in Russia.44 They stood in conflict with various aspects of the political, social, and cultural order, a conflict between two sets of dialectically opposed values: on the one hand, hierarchy, tradition, authority; on the other hand, equalitarianism, individualism, secularism, positive rights. This attitude toward man and society fascinated the generation of the sixties and had a great impact on the ethos of subsequent groups of Russian intellectuals. How did it happen that twenty to thirty years before, this same set of values, although advocated by a much more gifted, talented, and intellectually powerful group of men, went almost unnoticed, or at least did not bring about a break, a chasm, a major change? In the sixties, according to agreed interpretations, this same set of values led to an alienation of intelligentsia and students not only from the powers, authority, and tradition, but also from their intellectual and ideological forerunners: the men of the forties. As “types of ideas”45 they remained the same, but the pattern of dissent was suddenly different. Or, if there were no basically new ideas, nor a major change in the social composition of the group, what were the circumstances that gave these old ideas a new function and led to the creation of a new tradition? One answer might be that the nihilists took action, whereas the men of the forties did not. But that, obviously, is a technical and simplistic explanation, even if one believes that “revolution is at the end of a gun.” Even then, it would remain to be explained why some acted while the others did not. Certain relevant features must be considered: (1) A representative sample indicates that a considerable number of the socalled nihilists were born around 1840 in gentry families and formed— when they met in and around the universities from 1857–58 on—a clearly delineated age group. (2) All had followed the same gimnaziia curriculum, shaped and restructured by Tsar Nicholas’s educational reforms after the 1848–49 revolutions in Europe. Behind these reforms was a growing fear of liberal and subversive ideas; they resulted in sharp curtailments in the teaching of history, philosophy, literature, and classical studies (considered a source of dangerous republican thought). The vacuum created by the reduction in the humanities was filled in with a massive dose of natural sciences—zoology, botany, mineralogy, human anatomy, and human physiology, in addition to the more traditional physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Natural sciences and the Orthodox catechism were the

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main training provided to the future nihilists in high school. No wonder they were unable to appraise Pushkin’s poems and Shakespeare’s plays. No wonder they were accused of rejecting facts that could not be proved scientifically and of disparaging things tainted by human subjectivity, above all traditional morals and officially recommended spiritual values. (3) A specific sequence of events that occurred while they were in their late adolescence (1855–60) had a psychological impact that cannot be overemphasized.46 First came the defeat in the Crimean War. There were two sacrosanct pillars of Nicholas’ autocracy and orthodoxy: the army and the bureaucracy. The former was defeated in a war waged on Russian soil; the latter proved appallingly inefficient and corrupted. God took no sides in the conflict, and the Russian Orthodox Church appeared helpless to save Holy Russia from debacle. This happened after twenty-eight years of official praise of state institutions, particularly the army. Near the end of the war a symbolic event took place: Nicholas died. The defeat spread consternation and bewilderment; Nicholas’s death caused an outburst of joy in educated society. Second, the accession of the new tsar, Alexander II, was greeted as the beginning of a new era, full of great hopes and bright promises. The tsar himself encouraged these hopes, and in March 1856 publicly declared in Moscow that serfdom was to be abolished. The future nihilists were by then fifteen to seventeen years old. Serfdom, of course, had to be abolished, but serfdom had always been officially presented as one of the perennial institutions of Russia, her essence, might, and wisdom. If this was wrong, then what was true? Third, freedom was in sight. Expectations grew and public debate began. Soon thereafter the powers let it be understood that the planned emancipation was their exclusive concern, not the public’s, and forbade any allusion to it in the press. It was the first of a series of disappointments ending in sheer consternation when details about the draft law became known in 1859–60. Later, emancipated peasants believed that this was not “the genuine law”; educated people had no choice but to realize it was. Fourth, the manifesto of emancipation of the peasants from the bonds of serfdom (19 February 1861) was written by the Metropolitan Filaret and released through the Church, which exhorted around the country that all men are created in God’s image, and no man shall be the slave of another man. For 150 years the Russian Orthodox Church preached that serfdom had been ordained by God, and that it was a Christian’s duty to accept his earthly fate. What, then, was to be believed? And who was to be blamed for the servitude of the peasants?

100 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” (4) Most of these events were the subject of heated debates in gentry circles. In many families, some of these suddenly obsolete truths had been, over the years, conveyed to the children by the father, himself a serf owner, who usually stood as a staunch defender of autocracy, orthodoxy, and serfdom, and who extolled these principles before or after his often-heard, but always engaging, reminiscences of deeds and adventures in the army in the service of the tsar. This is certainly the most complicated part of these developments, requiring a detailed inquiry into causes and motivations. It seems, however, that in hundreds, perhaps thousands of gentry families, sons and daughters in their late adolescence were in sharp conflict with their parents and rejected the authority of their fathers. Kropotkin writes in his Memoirs that in nearly every wealthy family a bitter struggle was going on between the fathers, who wanted to maintain the old traditions, and the sons and daughters, who defended their right to dispose of their life …. Girls, bred in the most aristocratic families, rushed penniless to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kieff, eager to learn a profession which would free them from the domestic yoke, and someday, perhaps, also from the possible yoke of a husband.47

Remembering these days, the noted mathematician Sophia Kovalevskaia (then herself a mild rebel against her father, General Korvin-Krukovskii) says: “Of whatever gentry family you inquired … you would hear one and the same answer – that the young quarreled with the parents,”48 that they had left home. They usually went to university cities, the boys to study, the girls to fight for the right to study at the university. Quite often they refused financial support from their families, for, as Nekrasov, the only poet they declared respectable, put it in a verse: “It is bitter, the bread that has been made by slaves.” Thus they “refused to eat that bread, and to enjoy the riches that had been accumulated in their fathers’ houses by means of servile labor,”49 lived in distress doing any kind of job, and declared poverty an ideal and work the duty of decent and honest men and women. They gathered in groups, set up kruzhki and kommuny, met there their fellow raznochintsy, shared board and room and books and studies (formal and self-organized), in a spirit of mutual aid, comradeship, and the usual joys, sorrows, and quarrels of young people. The nihilists were on the make. This was, then, a revolt of sons and daughters against their biological fathers, not against vague ideological “fathers of the forties” that these young people often had never heard of before they left home. This was also their first “action.” What were the others? What did they want? What did they

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achieve? Why is this episode important for the traditions of the Russian intellectuals, and for the intellectuals’ attitude toward tradition? Nihilism was not a political movement. It was parallel to political organizing and activity, not identical with them.50 In the words of a nihilist, later a terrorist, Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii: Nihilism was negation in the name of individual liberty, negation of the obligations imposed upon the individual. Nihilism was a powerful and passionate reaction, not against the political despotism, but against the moral despotism that weighs upon the private and inner life of the individual.51

The principal points of the nihilist creed were: (1) Individualism, personal dignity and the importance of the personality, a conviction with a clearly elitist streak. This attitude resulted in a permanent contribution to the slang of Russian intellectuals: Pisarevshchina. Nihilists spoke seldom on behalf of social groups or classes, and mostly on behalf of the individual. (2) A particular interest in questions of moral principles and rejection of a number of conventional morals. Their approach and motivation were existential rather than intellectual, and their starting point was, as a rule, a discrepancy found (or presumed) between established moral imperatives and the actual behavior of people professing them. (3) Rejection of religion. (4) Freedom of the woman (as daughter, wife, and person). (5) Translation of these aspirations into forms of everyday behavior and dress that differed from the current fashion in society in general, and in aristocratic society in particular, and rejection of customary civility and polite speech. The common denominator of all these manifestations was rejection of authority (of the fathers, the Church, the government officials) and rejection of restrictions that made these youths feel underage (some of them were) and under too much supervision, the kind of supervision exercised in gentry families toward grown-up children. This set of attitudes and beliefs satisfied the desire for freedom and independence of a given age group from a definite social milieu. It was also a sort of game that provided simple answers to the intellectual and existential problems of these youths. The simple answers were found as they discovered action as the shortest way to fulfillment. Their ultimatum may be summarized: Smash everything that can be smashed, and do it now; the things that will stand the blows are those worth standing. Those that will crumble to pieces are rubbish; at any rate, hit out right and left—there will and can be no harm from it. Strike

102 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” at tyranny, strike at religion, strike at all the corrupt foundations of official morality.52 For the time being the blows were merely literary and, so to speak, personal and existential, for the core of this attitude was in “everything” and “now.” “Everything” meant the nearest things in these youths’ existence: dependence upon the family and official advisers, submission of the woman, hypocrisy in human relations and family life, parasitism and social idleness. All that was to be destroyed, and it had to be done “now,” that is, in themselves, in their own existence. Therefore it led them, personally, to undertake various attempts: to attain material and intellectual independence (Pisarev’s “critically thinking personality”), to emancipate women and above all to secure their access to higher education, to inject frankness and honesty in human relations, to feel a desire to be useful to society, to reappraise moral rules of behavior (in order to destroy “the gap” between rules and behavior). This, in turn, led them to work out or to adopt more liberal and permissive theories and canons of behavior, much more puritan than was customary in aristocratic milieus (in reality, they rejected one sort of “gap” to adopt another). Last but not least, they wanted all this to be conspicuous and manifest, which accounts for their different external forms of social behavior: a new slang (not necessarily “dirty” words, but “other” words), a different fashion and various distinctive emblems, such as tinted spectacles, capes, round Garibaldian caps, short hair for girls (quicker to comb than curls), and long hair for boys, accompanied by some negligence of personal hygiene, justified by “lack of time needed for studying,” the time spent in the bathroom being “not only wasted, but serving deceit and vanity.”53 The “nihilist revolution” was a personal and individual revolution (and for that reason, the new adepts needed external distinguishing marks). Actually, the nihilists were rebels, not revolutionaries, but their “here and now” created a style of life and a moral code—a kodeks, in their own words54—that represented a sort of counterculture. For that reason, this style and code could become the basis of the ethos, characteristics, and features of the intelligentsia and of intellectuals in this generation and in subsequent ones. These features are similar to the ones usually attributed to the intelligentsia, and which we described at the beginning of this essay. Nihilism proper began to wane around 1866–67. The causes need detailed elaboration, but one seems fairly clear: the nihilists grew older, reached the age of twenty-five to twenty-six,55 whereupon the universities ceased to be their rallying centers and to serve as a means of structuring their dissent—which, in the meantime, began to be incorporated into the traditions of wider circles of educated people.56 In their biographies one

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finds, later on, some of them in the revolutionary movements; others, in some remote Russian village. On the basis of the nihilist ethos of translating one’s thoughts into personal deeds, both lifestyles were possible: that of a terrorist, for a man who believed that the political regime has to be changed but found political activity impossible in autocratic Russia; and that of a village physician, for whoever thought that peasants were in a greater need of medical care than townspeople. By then, all that pertained already to the features of the intelligentsia. The word itself emerged at the end of the 1860s, a time of growing populist influence.57 A brief assessment of the raznochintsy’s possible role and influence may be added now. As mentioned above, in the 1860s the raznochintsy still represented a minority among intellectuals in general and university students in particular; their percentage in the period under discussion remained relatively stable as compared with the 1840s and 1850s. Moreover, during these last two to three decades, as well as in past times, the attitude of the raznochinskie intellectuals (nearly all of them state servants) toward the major problems of culture and society was consistently traditional and loyal to those in authority; they often displayed more conformity than, say, the gentry in the same rank or in similar status groups. The change in the 1860s was not, therefore, a result of quantitative growth, but perhaps partly of a different distribution of raznochinskie intellectuals in various occupations, with more of them in autonomous intellectual activities. The change was not a result of some intellectual feature or political orientation determined by their lower social origin. Historically, conformism, not dissent, was their traditional pattern. The circumstances that gave a role and an influence to a number of young raznochintsy seem to have been, therefore, of another kind. The impact of the series of events from 1855 to 1861 described above led to a weakening of confidence in authority in general, and in the Church in particular. For a number of raznochintsy studying in theological seminaries, a major consequence was loss of religious faith. As a result, they left these institutions and converged around the universities. The encounter of the raznochintsy with the rebelling young gentry gave the raznochintsy the courage to transfer their dissent to non-religious spheres and provided an opportunity for a valorization of several of their existential and psychological features. Until that time, raznochintsy were not proud of their poverty and modest social origin. An eloquent case in this respect is Dobroliubov, who wrote in shame of his poverty.58 The “poor by deliberate choice” gentrynihilists provided a new outlook. Indeed, only rich youths playing at being different could have made poverty an ideal. The raznochintsy took over willingly, washing out at once a wretched fact and adding their own

104 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” nuance: respecting asceticism as a result of their theological education, having experienced it at home and in the seminaries, and living this way anyway through lack of means, they canonized frugality as a virtue and affluence and riches as a sin. Furthermore, they themselves were of modest origin and, “unlike others,” did not have to feel ashamed and guilty for being born rich—an outlook to remain in the intelligentsia’s Weltanschauung for several decades. For the raznochintsy, roughness had been a usual form of behavior. Lack of good manners, which had previously made them feel uncomfortable in polite society, never being quite sure whether they behaved komil-fo (comme il faut), was now justified and made respectable. It was not a regrettable blemish, but a decoration—not a lack of education, but a new style. The gentry-nihilists knew what good manners were and rejected them as part of a game; the raznochintsy added a stress, which made of it a serious matter. (However, this element in the intelligentsia’s ethos was soon refined.59) The raznochintsy brought not only roughness, but also bitterness for the humiliations they had experienced. For that reason too, the nihilists’ talk on individuality, personality, and man’s dignity was a welcome innovation. The raznochintsy also brought a dogmatic manner of thinking inherited from theological studies and the neophyte atheism of men who, not long before, really did believe. In a sense, the encounter between the rebelling gentry sons and the young raznochintsy was a mixing of the structure and dynamics of the natural sciences with the statics of dogmatic thought turned secular and filled in with a poor humanistic culture. In sum and substance, the central phenomenon was not the rise of the raznochinets as a bearer of a new tradition, but rather the revolt of gentry sons and daughters, by means of which the raznochintsy obtained a role and became a part of this social and psychological shift. For the raznochintsy, the rebelling young gentry played the role of a catalyst. For both, the universities provided a means of structuring the “movement.” The importance of the 1860s as a formative period in the history of the intelligentsia (or, simply, of the intellectuals) is not in the relative rise of the raznochintsy, but perhaps in the breakthrough resulting from the absolute increase in numbers of young noblemen in the universities, and later on in the sciences and the professions, and in their willingness to “get their hands dirty,” coupled with the emergence of several new existential and intellectual features. Marc Raeff has observed that, “essentially the values and ‘ethos,’ the mentality and psychology, of the group are worked out and set by the first generation.”60 But in the case of the Russian intelligentsia, this was not done by the men of the 1830s. It was done, I believe, by the “men and

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women of the sixties,” who emerge as the real (and not mythical) “first generation.” They had this influence not because of the specific nature and content of some set of theories, but because, in a sense, they created a counterculture. As a result of specific historical events occurring at a given point in their lives (late adolescence), combined with a generational conflict within families of a given stratum of society—the nobility—new understandings emerged at the level of manners, dress, vocabulary, behavior, and attitudes toward everyday life habits, coupled with a reevaluation of the meaning of life, the aim of man’s travail on earth, and the nature of human bonds.61 It is the creation of this counterculture that has to be seen as the decisive reason for the main characteristics of this phenomenon, namely, that this age group did emerge and crystallize as a new generation, and that its attitudes, psychological makeup, and intellectual orientations could be conveyed to the next generation in spite of the subsequent emergence of new ideas and other philosophies. Their message, frame of reference, and intellectual orientations were a way of life, a vision of the world, and a moral code, a specific way of looking at and questioning the social and cultural order. This was also the basic orientation implying that, in the search for answers, one has to attempt to correlate and conform one’s way of life to one’s way of looking at the problems. This did not necessarily imply a given type of solution; the answer could have been populist, anarchist, liberal, elitist, or anti-elitist.62 It did imply, however, a number of basic trends, attitudes, frames of mind, and behaviors, which were precisely the core of this counterculture and of a new tradition capable of being bequeathed to coming generations. Was it bequeathed? And to what extent? This generation of the intelligentsia that displayed so neatly the classic features of the Russian intelligentsia and emerged as its first generation, was it not also the last?

Intellectuals in an Age of Modernity and Modernism The study of Russian intellectuals as such from the early 1890s through 1917 meets with considerable difficulties because of the intensity and pace of social and intellectual processes, as well as the gaps still left in the research on several aspects of the period. Therefore, I will not venture beyond some cursory remarks. The subject needs, first, a thorough semantic inquiry on the term “intelligentsia,” for there are, quite clearly, important changes in its connotations from the 1870s to the 1890s and after. At the beginning of that period the term seems clear, has positive undertones, and conveys a set of traits

106 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” amounting to what may be called “the nihilist ethos,” plus a subsequent layer of populist attitudes similar to the features of the intelligentsia described at the beginning of this essay. Around the 1890s, these connotations become ambiguous, and the term shifts more and more to the meaning of “intellectuals” in a broad sense. Two examples are in Chekhov’s letters: “Our only topic is Zola and Dreyfus [he writes]. The great majority of the intelligentzia [in France] are on the side of Zola and believe in the innocence of Dreyfus.”63 “Intelligentsia” here clearly stands for “intellectuals”; note also that for Chekhov this is not a unique Russian phenomenon. Even more stressed is the following use: “You ask my opinion of Zola and his trial. I first of all take the obvious into consideration: on the side of Zola is all the European intelligentzia.”64 Further, contemporaneous publicists used the term with an adjective, in which case the context is meaningless if “intelligentsia” is not understood as “intellectuals.” Thus, for instance, Lenin used adjectives such as “advanced,” “liberal,” “democratic,” “bourgeois,” “petty-bourgeois,” “radical,” “conservative”; Orgeiani, the anarchist theoretician, used the term “the toiling intelligentsia” (trudovaia intelligentsia),65 in contradistinction to well-to-do or “exploiting” intelligenty, that is, “intellectuals.” Moreover, “intelligentsia” was now often a word of abuse and denigration, and the group it designated did not fulfill a prestigious historic mission anymore. According to Chekhov: The whole intelligentzia is to blame, all of them, sir. While they are still students they are a good honest sort, they are the future of Russia; but no sooner do they enter on an independent life and become grown up than our hope and the future of Russia turn into smoke, and in the filter there remains only doctors who own villas, hungry officials, and thieving engineers. Remember that Katkov, Pobedonoszev, Vishnegradsky, are nurslings of the universities, that they are our professors, not upstarts, but professors, luminaries… . I do not believe in our intelligentzia; it is hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy; nor do I believe in it even when it suffers and grumbles, since its oppressors come from is own midst.66

“Intelligentsia” was consistently used by Lenin to imply: impotent, inconsistent, compromising, selling itself, weak-willed, disgusting. The features of the intelligentsia were instability, flabbiness, wishy-washiness, opportunism, and anarchist phrase-mongering. For Lenin there was no doubt that the intelligentsia could barely lead itself, let alone the peasants, the workers, or, horribile dictu, the party. The anarchists, displaying more civility and restraint than Lenin, consistently used “intelligentsia” as an equivalent of “intellectuals” and declared that it was “not a socio-economic group, neither a socio-ethical notion.”67 From the other end of the spec-

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trum came the devastating criticism of the Vekhi group (Berdyaev, Frank, Struve, Bulgakov) against those who “gave themselves the name of ‘the intelligentsiia.’”68 Although these critics still saw themselves as “intelligentsia,” there is ample lexicological and ideological evidence that they meant “intellectuals.” Another sign of the increasing ambiguity is the heated debate, from the early 1900s, on the theme “What is the Intelligentsia?” After thirty years of use, it suddenly became clear that the term “intelligentsia” needed definition. In these attempts, only the neopopulists and a few liberals still believed in the intelligentsia’s existence and in its typical moral qualities and historic mission. But in their writings there was more nostalgia and romanticism than hope and sociological analysis, and they stressed the intelligentsia of the 1870s above the stratum of their own day. They were faithfully defending “the purity of its ideas” and its great strength, to which Lenin replied that “the ‘purity’ of its ideas” was exactly why it was, and had always been, impotent.69 He could have argued that it anyway no longer existed, but he did not, because he had in mind the intellectuals, whereas the neopopulists still meant the intelligentsia. An attempt to explain these changes in the term’s meaning between the 1870s and the 1900s would involve a vast inquiry, obviously beyond the scope of this essay. Any such attempt should consider a series of complex background developments: rapid industrialization with its manifold by-products; transformations in the patterns of political action, entailing, after 1905, wider possibilities for political and social organizing, publishing, and structuring autonomous activities in all intellectual fields; the renaissance usually referred to as the Silver Age or the Second Golden Age, with its great creativity, richness, and vitality in all areas of cultural, intellectual, and spiritual life; and a conspicuous quantitative increase in the intellectual stratum, a growing diversification of occupations, and a greater specialization in every field. An important change in comparison to the 1860s and 1870s is the growing number and importance of the non–state service intellectuals and the decreasing influence of the traditional bureaucratic intellectuals. To be sure, their proportion within the intellectual stratum was still relatively high. It seems clear that the following period witnessed a great increase of intellectuals of “pure” cultural specialization—freelance, unattached, independent intellectuals—and the formation of several strong centers conceiving of intellectual activity as free and autonomous, and of spiritual activity as standing in no need of eternal justification. This new intellectual stratum included a large and dynamic group of artists, poets, writers, and painters; a well-organized and effective group of urban professionals—lawyers, engineers, physicians, university professors, scientists; a large group of rural

108 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” professionals—agronomists, statisticians, physicians, teachers. Some of the latter, although working in local government institutions (zemstva), considered themselves to be serving the people, not the state, and used their institutional location not to further central state policy but to limit its hold at the local level. The zemstvo intellectuals were a most active and articulate group in the political and social sphere. Against this background, what were the trends and changes in attitudes toward tradition, toward the intellectuals’ traditions, and toward the powers? Several hypotheses seem possible. Notwithstanding the relatively considerable evidence to the contrary, it is worth exploring whether intellectuals were not the main modernizing force in Russian society. One obvious exception that comes to mind is industrialization, which was carried on by government decision and policy. One might learn, however, that after the initial decision and first stage (which coincided with the weakening of populist influence on intellectuals in matters of economic development), the distribution of roles between the powers and the intellectuals was somewhat different from the customary assessment. The intellectuals’ role and influence were carried on through various centers, channels, institutions, and organizations, rather than through political parties or conventional political action. It might well appear that in parties and political groups (whether oppositional or traditionalistic), intellectuals represented negligible minorities, although the Liberal Party (Kadets) and the Socialist Revolutionaries’ Combat Organization may be exceptions. In spite of the current belief that intellectuals played a leading role in revolutionary parties, those who did were a minority in the intellectual stratum as a whole, as well as in the membership of these parties. A new assessment of their qualitative role is also needed. It seems clear that not every professional revolutionary was necessarily an intellectual, and an elite of professional revolutionaries was not an elite of intellectuals, let alone an intellectual elite. The role of the bureaucratic intellectals in the center should be thoroughly studied. How did they influence the formation and crystallization of the cultural and social forms? What were their responses to conformity as compared to the different kinds of autonomous or critical attitudes developed in other segments of the intellectual stratum, including the zemstvo intellectuals? Different kinds of attitudes among bureaucratic intellectuals in the center are worth noting because changes, innovative trends, criticism, and the breaking of traditions in areas with marginal political relevance were viewed less and less by the powers as fields of resistance and conflict. The three main groups with the greatest influence in shaping the cultural order were: the scientific intellectuals, who displayed high specializa-

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tion coupled with wide humanistic interests and felt that “true scientists combine supreme intellectual endeavor with a profound dedication to humanity”;70 the philosophers and religious thinkers, who reappraised Russia’s tradition, criticized the intellectuals’ traditions, and gave new content to religious thought and experience; and the artists, writers, poets, and composers—decadent, independent, soul-searching, open-minded, apolitical although rebellious and considering it a disgrace to support the powers—who broke taboos in the arts, leading to their wider role in the cultural order. Finally, what were the attitudes of the intellectuals toward the traditions of the intellectuals or, for that matter, of the intelligentsia? This must be studied on two levels, the ideological and the sociopsychological. Authorities agree that with regard to philosophy and general theoretical premises, the orientations of this generation represent a break with the previous one: it rejected the so-called ideological heritage of the intelligentsia, or, to put it more accurately, this heritage ceased to be the main concern of many non-bureaucratic intellectuals. The rejected philosophies and theories were: materialism, positivism, utilitarianism, anti-aestheticism, realism. In this respect the more traditional and conservative groups around 1910 were the neopopulists and the Marxists; the most innovative were the various constellations of men in the arts and religious philosophers. However, this heritage was not totally rejected, even by its critics, and parts of it continued to influence the thought of those who rebelled against it, very much as populist political ideology influenced Lenin’s Marxism, for instance.71 At the sociopsychological level, the subject is much more intricate. In a sense it may be formulated in the following questions: What remained from the nihilist ethos (with its subsequent populist layer of the 1870s)? Do the traditional features of the intelligentsia typify this generation too, or a major part of it? On most points, the fragmentary evidence is contradictory or ambiguous. A few assumptions nevertheless seem plausible. A large segment of the intellectual stratum identified itself neither with the powers nor with the state. This attitude was not a by-product of political opinions; it went deeper and beyond them. It may be seen among many creative intellectuals in the world of art, where dissent was apolitical; it is noticeable also in liberals and in the Vekhi group. (This critical attitude toward the state as such may lead to a reassessment of the scope of Marxist influence, and may uncover some latent anarchist tendencies.) There seems also to be an absence of stress on guilt feelings, as well as a weaker propensity to turn political problems into moral ones. Other aspects need much more additional investigation in order to be assessed. Was there a peculiar immediacy in human relations? An uncompromising stand in

110 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” matters of truth (pravda and istina) and of personal integrity? Neglect and disdain for one’s personal interests? Deep concern? Moral passion? Conforming one’s behavior and way of life to one’s way of looking at the world and society? Among the many variables that should be assessed, one seems fairly clear: Marxism had the effect of disrupting the traditions of the intelligentsia and contributed to the rejection or refraction of several of them. The focus of this kind of influence was its realism and relativism, as opposed to the romanticism of the populists. Marxism helped dismiss the guilt feelings and curtailed the propensity to turn political problems into moral ones. Instead, Marxism preached that there were classes and class struggle, historical inevitability. The guilt was in others—in the exploiters, in the bourgeoisie, in the reactionaries and deviationists. Lenin’s Marxism turned political problems into moral ones only for its adversaries. Marxism helped weaken the sense of obligation to arrive at ultimate conclusions. Ultimate conclusions in life were petty bourgeois attitudes, the weak-willed impatience of people looking for individual salvation instead of fighting the right way for changing the whole fabric of society—utopian Dukhobory setting up equalitarian communities instead of preparing the overthrow of capitalism. Marxism helped to reduce the alienation of intellectuals from society by giving them a clean conscience: henceforth they could live in the rotten bourgeois society, which was doomed anyway, and wait until revolution came. Lenin’s Marxism also slackened the sense of personal deep concern. Lenin’s thought was first and foremost a political strategy, which required pragmatic and opportunistic attitudes. Fighting here and now for higher wages for the sake of wages was an aberration. Economism was a deviation. So was terrorism, and for the same reason: terrorists did not understand that their ultimate conclusion in matters of revolutionary theory and practice was a fallacy. They did not understand the need to postpone. The only valid and moral ultimate conclusions were those emerging from the correct analysis of the situation, coming from the party. “Correct analysis” meant no personal deep concern for general problems of public interest. The humiliated, the offended, the poor, the wretched, and the peasants were problems that could not be solved by philanthropy and good feelings. Were they a reservoir, a useful instrument, an ally, a force? That was what counted—force—not personal deep concern. In Lenin’s words: “Agreement with a force, but the intelligentsia is not a force”72—the “intelligentsia,” that is, the intellectuals. What may have happened, then, to the intelligentsia during this phase, and to the intellectuals toward its end?

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The term “intelligentsia” was probably loosely used from the late 1860s through the 1890s, that is, during a period when, as a result of the reforms of Alexander II and socioeconomic development, a new type of intellectual was emerging. Yet the group was not large, and it had no clearly defined place in the social structure and estates system. There was a gradual formation of new intellectual roles and sporadic attempts at their legitimization, with some new patterns of participation in social and political movements. Thus a vague term, loosely used and never defined, served with no difficulties in the political jargon of publicists and in the everyday slang of university students in the 1870s and 1880s, a time when these groups were imbued with populist beliefs. Thus, the major connotations of the word came from two sources: the nihilist ethos and the populist creed. The intelligentsia itself was emerging within a relatively simple social structure, and for that phase, the “two Russias” theory has a certain validity,73 but it did not last long: twenty to thirty years later there were many more Russias than two. Within three decades the social, economic, and institutional processes mentioned above were well under way. The intellectual stratum became more clearly structured, its roles and functions differentiated, its place in society unquestioned. At that time the word “intelligentsia” was becoming obsolete,74 and the first result of that obsolescence was the emergence of the problem of definition, briefly stated as “What is the intelligentsia?” This marked the end of the intelligentsia, owing mainly to the numerical expansion of the intellectual stratum and its diversification and specialization, and the combined ideological blows of Marxism and the partial rejection of the intelligentsia’s traditions by the Silver Age artists and religious thinkers. Thus, in a sense, the intelligentsia of the 1860s to 1880s was not only the first generation, but also the last. Its heirs were intellectuals, or professional revolutionaries, not another generation of the intelligentsia. It nevertheless created a tradition and bequeathed a heritage, and further research would certainly permit us to assess and evaluate its scope and content during the Silver Age. The dramatic epilogue to this phase argues the need for such research. As the intelligentsia of the 1860s to 1880s was a last generation, so were the intellectuals of the Silver Age. But interest in them should not be motivated by the well-known propensity to inquire mainly into the history of the victors. October 1917 was a victory for neither the intelligentsia nor intellectuals. The Bolshevik party was not “preeminently a party of intellectuals,” as one scholar had it,75 and the Bolshevik government was not “a government of intellectuals,” as Volin and his fellow anarchists believed.76 Rather, intellectuals, like the anarchists themselves, were among the most

112 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” defeated victims. In this respect, too, there was a certain historical and logical continuity between the old nihilist-populist intelligentsia and the new modernist and individualist intellectuals of the Silver Age.

Notes 1. Important contributions on this subject include I. Berlin, “A Marvelous Decade, 1838–1848: The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia,” Encounter 4 (June 1955): 27–39; R. Pipes, ed., “The Russian Intelligentsia.” Daedalus (Summer 1960), and especially the following articles: M. Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” pp. 441–458; L. Schapiro, “The Pre-Revolutionary Intelligentsia and the Legal Order,” pp. 459–471; B. Elkin, “The Russian Intelligentsia on the Eve of the Revolution,” pp. 472–486; R. Pipes, “The Historical Evolution of the Russian Intelligentsia,” 487–502; and L. Labedz, “The Structure of the Soviet Intelligentsia,” pp. 503–519; see also R. Pipes, “Russia’s Exigent Intellectuals,” Encounter 22 (January 1964): 79–84; A. Pollard, “The Russian Intelligentsia: The Mind of Russia,” California Slavic Studies 3 (1964): 1–32; V.C. Nahirny, “The Russian Intelligentsia: From Men of Ideas to Men of Convictions,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 4 (July 1964): 403–435; G. Fischer, Russian Liberalism: From Gentry to Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA, 1958); L. H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA, 1955), chap. 1; M. Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York, 1966). The subject is also touched upon in numerous works dealing with various aspects of Russia’s social and intellectual history; some of them are mentioned below. 2. This feature seems somewhat less typical when one reads descriptions like the following: “Now this polarizing tendency was especially marked in Germany. In Germany there has always existed a tendency to go to extremes in pushing logical arguments to their ultimate conclusions—a tendency which has not existed in such a marked fashion in the European countries outside Germany.” Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” in Karl Mannheim, Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology (London, 1953), p. 79. 3. Important features are stressed in Professor Pipes’s formulation: But for all its diversity, the intelligentsia did share certain common beliefs. (1) Those who considered themselves intelligenty were committed to public affairs, and conceived the emancipation of the individual only in connection with the general emancipation of Russian society and democratization of the Russian State. (2) They were historically-minded, i.e., they regarded history as a meaningful and regular process, whose general course could be scientifically studied and even predicted. (3) They believed in the historic mission of the intelligentsia: they thought of themselves as the vanguard of the forces of freedom, as a group destined to point the way towards a general liberation of society.

(R. Pipes, “Russia’s Exigent Intellectuals,” p. 80.) 4. E. Shils, “Intellectuals,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), vol. 7, pp. 399–415; S. N. Eisenstadt, “Intellectuals and Tradition,” in Intellectuals and Traditions, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Stephen

Intellectuals and Their Traditions • 113

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

R. Graubard (Jerusalem, 1973), pp. 1–19; E. Shils, “Intellectuals, Tradition, and the Traditions of Intellectuals: Some Preliminary Observations,” in the same volume, pp. 21–34. I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Shils and Professor Eisenstadt for their comments and criticism on a preliminary draft of this essay; unfortunately, for lack of time and space, many a good remark of theirs is not reflected in the present version. For an example of discussion on that point, see Edgard Morin, “Intellectuels: critique du mythe et mythe de la critique,” Arguments 4 (October 1960). See Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture: A History to 1860 (Stanford, 1963), a work that I found extremely valuable for this study; K. V. Ostrovitianov, ed., Istoriia Akademii Nauk SSSR [History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR] (Moscow, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 13–19. The degree of success or failure is an issue not relevant to the point under discussion. With one important exception: the preservation of serfdom. See J. P. Nettl, “Ideas, Intellectuals, and Structures of Dissent,” in On Intellectuals, ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1969). A. Besançon, Le Tsarévich immolé: La symbolique de la loi dans la culture russe (Paris, 1967). Alexander Herzen’s expressions. See Raeff, Origins; M. M. Shtrange, Demokraticheskaia intelligentsia Rossii v XVIII veke [The Democratic Intelligentsia in Russia in the Eighteenth Century] (Moscow, 1965). See my “Le paysan russe jugé par la noblesse au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue des études slaves 38 (1961). Among the Russians elected to the St. Petersburg Academy during its first fifty years, none was of gentry origin; until the middle of the nineteenth century the nobility supplied 25 percent of its total membership. See Vucinich, Science, p. 80. On the nobility’s lack of interest in university studies, see ibid., pp. 49, 80, 127–128, 134. See my “Histoire et psychologie: A propos de la noblesse russe au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E. S. C., no. 6 (November–December 1967). M. Speranskii, “Draft of Introduction to the State Laws” (1809), in J. Mavor, An Economic History of Russia (London and Toronto, 1914), vol. 1, p. 333. A. Herzen, O razvitii revoliutsionnykh idei v Rossii [On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia] (Moscow, 1958), p. 47. See Vucinich, Science, pp. 30–31, 62–64; A. G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography (Princeton, 1958), pp. 9–49; Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1960), pp. 186–252. M. Raeff, Imperial Russia, 1685–1825: The Coming of Age of Modern Russia (New York, 1971), p. 146; see also V. O. Kliuchevskii, “Vospominanie o N. I. Novikove i ego vremeni,” [My memories about N.I.Novikov and his times] in Sochineniia [Writings] (Moscow, 1959), vol. 7, pp. 223–252. See A. McConnell, “Radishchev’s Political Thought,” American Slavic Review 17 (1958): 439–453. I should hasten to add that until the October Revolution, Radishchev’s kind of suicide was rather rare among Russian intellectuals; see A. Gaiev, “Suicides

114 • Russia before the “Radiant Future”

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

d’écrivains soviétiques” and I. Krotov, “Trois suicides,” Le Contrat Social 12 (December 1968); and for a comprehensive and sophisticated examination of this issue see Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca, 1998), and Susan K. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge, 2007). See Herzen’s testimony on himself and Ogarev in Byloe i dumy [My Past and Thoughts] (Moscow, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 84–91. I owe the idea of the heading above to Sir Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Marvelous Decade.” A. Herzen, N. Ogarev, N. Stankevich, V. Belinskii, M. Bakunin, N. Turgenev, V. Passek, N. Ketcher, N. Sazonov, A. Savich, N. Satin, A. Lakhtin, T. Granovskii, and a few others. Herzen, Byloe i dumy, vol. 1, p. 364 (Herzen’s emphasis). See Nahirny, “The Russian Intelligentsia.” The one major exception is Belinskii, who stands out clearly with regard to attitudes and psychological makeup. A. Herzen, “Bazarov, Letter II,” in My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett (London, 1927), vol. 6, p. 206. The letter can also be found in Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen. 4 Vols. Trans. Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin (New York, 1968), vol. 4, pp. 1760–1765. “Slova poeta sut’ uzhe ego dela” (The poet’s words are his deeds). Herzen, “Bazarov,” p. 208. The “seven years” were the period of political reaction in Russia extending from the 1848 revolutions through the death of Nicholas I in 1855. T. Granovskii to Alexander and Natalie Herzen, Moscow, [June] 1849, Byloe i dumy, vol. 2, p. 621. (Belinskii died in 1848.) Berlin, “The Marvelous Decade,” p. 34. See above the description of the current characterization of the intelligentsia. Berlin, “The Marvelous Decade,” p. 34. I shall not discuss here the history and etymological aspects of the term “nihilism,” for although a reconsideration of several points may be useful, such a discussion would extend this chapter beyond any reasonable length. As to the periodization, according to established custom in Russian historiography, the “sixties” represent the period from the mid 1850s to the mid 1860s. Such was the orthodox Soviet view; for two examples in Western works see E. Lampert, Sons against Fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution (Oxford, 1965), p. 85; Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” p. 452. For some scattered data, see V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, “Formirovanie raznochinskoi intelligentsii v Rossii v 40-kh godakh XIX v.,” Istoriia SSSR 1 (1958): 83–104. In the 1850s and 1860s, compared to the enrollment of students from the lower and middle classes, the representation of the gentry in the universities was rising. In the academic year 1860–1861, at St. Petersburg University there were 1,228 students of gentry origin and 203 of more modest origin. V. V. Grigoriev, Imperatorskiii S. Peterburgskiii universitet v techenie pervykh piatidesiati let ego sushchestvovaniia [The Imperial University in St. Petersburg during the First Fifty Yars of Its Existence] (St. Petersburg, 1870), p. 306. Reliable

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37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

data in recent publications tend to confirm this assessment; other evaluations hint at the possibility that the raznochintsy’s breakthrough in the universities might have happened only in the late 1860s or early 1870s. See L. V. Kamosko, “Izmeneniia soslovnogo sostava uchashchikhsia srednei i vyshei shkoly Rossii (30-80-e gody XIX v.),” Voprosy istorii 10 (1970): 203–207; Pollard, “The Russian Intelligentsia,” pp. 26–27; and in particular the groundbreaking research of Elise Kimerling Wirtschafer, Structures of Society: Imperial Russia’s “People of Various Ranks” (DeKalb, 1994). N. K. Mikhailovskii, Sochineniia [Writings] (St. Petersburg, 1896), vol. 2, col. 623 (the essay appeared in 1874). Oddly enough, Mikhailovskii adds also that the raznochintsy were, however, immediately followed by “the other social element which at first played only a subordinate role, but afterwards dominated the entire scene. I refer to the repentant noblemen … Pisarev was, at least in literature, the figure most representative of this sect” (ibid., p. 647). On the whole question, see the excellent analysis of C. Becker, “Raznochintsy: The Development of the Word and of the Concept,” American Slavic and East European Review 18 (February 1959): 70–74, who aptly remarks that for Mikhailovskii, “in literature (and by implicit reference, in the radical movement) the raznochinets arrives late on the stage in the late 1850s and leaves it mysteriously in the late 1860s”; this author points out too that Mikhailovskii “regarded the word as something he was consciously putting into circulation” (p. 71). However, the real mythmakers appear to have been Ivanov-Razumnik and Lenin. See also Pollard, “The Russian Intelligentsia,” pp. 10, 26. See for example: Armand Coquart, Dmitri Pisarev (1840–1868) et l’idéologie du nihilisme russe (Paris, 1946); Sh. M. Levin, Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v 60-70-e gody XIX v. [The Social Movement in Russia in the 1860s and 1870s] (Moscow, 1958); L. A. Plotkin, Pisarev i literaturno-obshchestvennoe dvizhenie 60- kh godov [Pisarev and the Social and Literary Movements in the 1860s] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1945); B. P. Koz’min, “‘Raskol v nigilistakh’ (Epizod iz istorii russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli 60-kh godov),” in B. P. Koz’min, Iz istorii revoliutsionnoi mysli v Rossii: Izbrannye trudy [On the History of Revolutionary Thought in Russia: Selected Works] (Moscow, 1961), pp. 20–67; F. C. Barghoorn, “D. I. Pisarev: A Representative of Russian Nihilism,” Review of Politics 10 (April 1948): 190–211, and “Nihilism, Utopia, and Realism in the Thought of Pisarev,” Harvard Slavic Studies 4 (1957): 225–235; J. A. Rogers, “Darwinism, Scientism, and Nihilism,” Russian Review 19 (1960): 10–23. F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York and London, 1960), p. 325. S. V. Utechin, Russian Political Thought (New York and London, 1963), pp. 112–114. Herzen convincingly argued that nihilism “has brought forth no new principles” (“Bazarov,” p. 209). This kind of criticism implies too a tribute to the ideas of the “men of the forties,” for it means that they had valuable thoughts, but refrained from acting in order to implement them. If not so, the criticism regarding the lack of action would have been pointless. I shall discuss below what the nihilist meant exactly by “action.”

116 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” 43. Pisarev’s attitude on this issue may seem ambivalent, for on the one hand he advocated action, and on the other hand he opposed political organizing, stressing the importance of learning, consciousness, acquiring knowledge, and thinking. This apparent contradiction receives at least a partial explanation when examining the specific content that Pisarev and his fellow nihilists attributed to action, and which was different in several respects from the views of Chernyshevskii and Dobroliubov. For a good treatment of the differences between the two groups, see Koz’min, “‘Raskol v nigilistakh.’” 44. I follow here R. A. Nisbet’s analysis and definition of “modernist revolt” in the introduction to his book Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New York, 1970), pp. 3–5. 45. The expression is used here as in Nettl’s “Ideas, Intellectuals, and Structures of Dissent.” The case under discussion shows clearly, I believe, the limitations of this model. 46. This part of the essay is based on extensive contemporary reports and testimonies: diaries, letters, memoirs, and so forth. For some especially useful examples see: E. N. Vodovozova, Na zare zhizni: Memuarnye ocherki i portrety, [At the Dawn of Life: Memoirs and Portraits], 2 vols. (Moscow, 1964); S. V. Kovalevskaia, Vospominaniia detstva i otobiograficheskie ocherki [Memories from Childhood and Autobiographical Sketches] (Moscow, 1945); L. F. Panteleev, Vospominaniia [Reminiscences] (Moscow, 1958); N. V. Shelgunov, L. P. Shelgunova, and M. L. Mikhailov, Vospominaniia [Reminiscences], 2 vols. (Moscow, 1967); N. Belogolovyi, Vospominaniia i drugie stat’i [Reminiscences and Other Writings] (St. Petersburg, 1901); P. D. Boborykin, Vospominaniia [Reminiscences], 2 vols. (Moscow, 1965); A. V. Nikitenko, Dnevnik [Diary], 3 vols. (Moscow, 1956), vols. 2 and 3; I. Khudiakov, Opyt otobiografii [Autobiographical Essay] (Geneva, 1882); E. Breshkovskaia, Iz moikh vospominanii [Reminiscences] (St. Petersburg, 1906); I. M. Krasnoperov, Zapiski raznochintsa [Notes of a raznochinets] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1929); Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 2 vols. (London, 1899); Stepniak [S. Kravchinskii], Underground Russia (New York, 1883). 47. Kropotkin, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 90. 48. Kovalevskaia, Vospominaniia, p. 68; see also Vodovozova, Na zare, vol. 2, pp. 99, 221; and Shelgunov et al., Vospominaniia, vol. 1, pp. 39–40. 49. Kropotkin, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 89. 50. For a detailed analysis of these political groups see Venturi, Roots of Revolution; Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (New York, 1962). 51. Stepniak, Underground Russia, p. 4. 52. See, for instance, D. Pisarev, Sochineniia [Writings], 4 vols. (Moscow, 1955– 1956), vol. 2, pp.120–126. 53. See Vodovozova, Na zare, vol. 2, p. 9. 54. Ibid., p. 486. 55. Among those who married at that time, especially the women, many developed a keen interest in child rearing. Subjects of discussion were, for instance, toddlers’ hygiene, physical culture, liberty in artistic education, and swaddling or not swaddling babies. Some of the important (and “modernistic”) new

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56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

trends and reforms in Russian pedagogical thought and practice were initiated by these circles or under their influence. See Vodovozova, Na zare, vol. 2, pp. 197–198; Shelgunov et al., Vospominaniia, vol. 1, pp. 137–138. See Vodovozova, Na zare, vol. 2, p. 29; Kropotkin, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 84. For a recent (historical and terminological) treatment of the intelligentsia’s evolution from the 1860s to the 1880s, see Nathaniel Knight, “Was the Intelligentsia Part of the Nation? Visions of Society in Post-Emancipation Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russia and Eurasian History 7, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 733–758. The author writes: “My purpose … is not to contribute to the longstanding and still ongoing discussion about the impact of the intelligentsia as a social group on the fate of the Russian nation. I am primarily interested in the discourse of the intelligentsia, how the concept itself was formulated and articulated and how it interacted with the idea of Russia as a nation” (p. 737); see also Laure Troubetzkoy and Stéphane Viellard, L’intelligentsia en Russie: La Revue russe 30 (2008). See for instance, letters to aunt (29 December 1854) and to the Blagobrazovs (20 April 1855), in K. T. Soldatenkov, Materialy dlia biografii N. A. Dobroliubova [Materials for a Biography of N. A. Dobroliubov] (Moscow, 1890), vol. 1, pp.190, 210. See Vodovozova, Na zare, vol. 2, p. 282. Raeff, Origins, p. 173. This counterculture had some abstract theoretical components: positivism, scientism, and anti-aestheticism. But they were coincidental, adopted by this generation because of the contingent junction of two sets of facts: the education received in their formative years, and the discovery of these theories as dernier cri in the years 1855–60. Moreover, while the function of this set of theories was essential, their specific content was not. Actually, there were, within this generation, various subgroups professing slightly different social, political, and philosophical theories while fulfilling—socially and culturally—the same role and function and keeping homogeneous the generational framework with its distinct role and place in society (transcending the political tendencies and almost unaffected by them). On a similar issue, R. Pipes argues convincingly that the rationalism of the critical intelligentsia “was a historical coincidence … the essence of this group [being] the critical spirit of which ‘rationalism’ is merely one expression,” and could be exercised from many different positions (“The Historical Evolution,” p. 497). Marxism presents some peculiarities that will be mentioned in the next section of this essay. To F. D. Batiushkov, from Nice, 23 January 1898 in The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov, ed. and trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson (London, 1928), p. 253. To his brother Mikhail, from Nice, 22 February 1898, Life and Letters, p. 256. K. Orgeiani [G. Gogelia], Ob intelligentsii (London, 1912), pp. 4, 12. To I. I. Orlov, from Yalta, 22 February 1899, Life and Letters, p. 265. Note also that Chekhov considers Katkov, Pobedonostsev, and Vyshnegradskii as belonging to the intelligentsia, even though they had well-known conservative (and reactionary) opinions and the last two exercised official state functions.

118 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” 67. Orgeiani, Ob intelligentsii, p. 17. 68. N. Berdyaev, Dostoievsky: An Interpretation, trans. Donald Attwater (New York, 1934), pp. 163–164. 69. V. I. Lenin, “Ekonomicheskoe soderzhanie narodnichestva i kritika ego v knige g. Struve,” Sochineniia [Writings] (Moscow, 1941), vol. 1, p. 401. 70. I. Mechnikov’s expression, in A. Vucinich, “Politics, Universities, and Science,” in Russia Under the Last Tsar, ed. T. G. Stavrou (Minneapolis, 1969), p. 178. 71. See R. Pipes, “Russian Marxism and Its Populist Background: The Late Nineteenth Century,” Russian Review 19 (1960): 316–337. 72. V. I. Lenin, “Obshchii plan reshenii III s’ezda,” Sochineniia (Moscow, 1947), vol. 8, p. 162 (Lenin’s emphasis). 73. The “two Russias” theory essentially means: (1) simultaneous existence of two cultures in Russia, the one Westernized (however superficially) among a small elite in the nobility and the bureaucracy; the other, popular, indigenous, traditional, well-rooted in Russia’s past and ethos; (2) a very simple class structure—on the one hand the nobility and the bureaucracy, on the other the peasantry—a conspicuous feature being the lack of a middle class. According to this theory, the intelligentsia emerges within this twofold social cultural context, and the role it would have to fulfill is almost inevitably determined par la force des choses. Culturally, it would try to bridge the gap between Western enlightenment, progress, and science, and the Russian popular values and native culture. Socially, it would fill the vacuum between the upper and the lower classes of society, although it would not perform what is sometimes considered the traditional and congenial role of a middle class. Just the opposite. Some of the ultimate conclusions of this theory (such as “permanent state of isolation and alienation,” “profound unhappiness”) are speculations of the mind, much more than results of solid research. 74. See Labedz, “The Structure of the Soviet Intelligentsia,” p. 505. 75. L. S. Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals: A Set of Post-Ideological Essays (Garden City, NY, 1969), pp. 56–57, 67–68. 76. Voline [V. M. Eichenbaum], La revolution inconnue: Russie 1917–1921 (Paris, 1969), p. 205.

d The Nobility in Russia CHAPTER 5

and Western Europe Contrasts and Similarities

e

The history of the nobility in imperial Russia is a central topic of research in the historiography of the two hundred years before the great upheavals of 1917. Its importance has been acknowledged since the times of A. V. Romanovich-Slavatinskii to those of Iurii M. Lotman and to our own days because of the major role of the nobility in the social, political, and cultural developments in the realm. For that reason this subject has attracted the attention of scholars in the West (several of whose works are quoted below) who have devoted particular attention to the history of the nobility, such as Marc Raeff, Jerome Blum, Seymour Becker, Daniel Field, Terence Emmons, Paul Bushkovitch, Ivo Banac, Dimitri Schakhovskoi, Rex Rexhauser, Brenda Meehan-Waters, and Roberta Manning; and for an earlier period in Russian history, Richard Hellie, Robert O. Crummey, André Berelowitch, Nancy Shields Kollmann, Inge Auerbach, and Valerie Kivelson. More recently, the books of Priscilla Roosevelt, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Michelle Lamarche Marrese, Mary W. Cavender, and Colum Lekey shed light on the role of noblewomen, life on the country estate, the provincial gentry, the nobility’s voluntary associations, and the social meaning of cultural endeavors and of entertainment. This essay intends to analyze some aspects of the role and ethos of the nobility, and to draw a comparison between the Russian and other European nobilities under the Old Regime.

Approaches to Comparative History There are several major approaches to the use of the comparative method among historians, some of whom have raised substantive objections to it. Thus, one approach holds that historical events and processes are discrete, unique, and non-repetitive phenomena. As such, they cannot be compared with each other, and there is no point in comparing them for two reasons: 119

120 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” firstly, being unique, each one has a specific and exclusive set of features; secondly, because they are non-repetitive, it would be an exercise in futility to compare events that “seem” to belong to the same category when in fact they do not and, at bottom, each of them represents a category in itself. In this light (so this approach assumes), historical comparisons cannot fail to be but an inventory of the most trivial common features of the compared phenomena, and for that reason they amount to a rediscovery of the obvious. In fact, from that point of view, the comparative method is, so to speak, a non-starter. A second approach, also opposed to comparative history, is based on different theoretical assumptions and is influenced by various philosophical views, among them historicism and neo-Kantian epistemology, with their strong stress on the unique elements in the historical process. As a result, the scholars who hold these views inevitably have very limited interest in comparative history. Another negative attitude is informed by the post-modernist “theory” in the social sciences, which strongly and explicitly opposes the comparative method. In Pauline Marie Rosenau’s succinct analysis: Dismissing the possibility of representation undermines modern social methods in general, but its questioning of comparative analysis is especially thoroughgoing. The very act of comparing, in an effort to uncover similarities and differences, is a meaningless activity because post-modern epistemology holds it impossible ever to define adequately the elements to be contrasted or likened. The skeptical post-modernists’ reservations about the possibility of generalizing and their emphasis on difference … form the basis of rejecting the comparative method. If, as they conclude, everything is unique (Latour 1988: 179–81), then the comparative method is invalid in its attempts to search for and explain similarities and differences while holding certain dimensions constant (assuming a degree of sameness in other variables). The affirmative post-modernists, as well, question the linguistic representation upon which any comparative statements are necessarily based. They also argue that comparative analysis makes assumptions about presence or absence, and this is too a contentious matter.1

The stance of Marxism and neo-Marxism toward comparative studies is more difficult to assess. In principle, one would expect that these theories—largely based on laws of social and economic development with universal validity—should adopt a favorable view toward such studies. But this is not the opinion, for instance, of one of their eminent representatives, the noted historian Eric Hobsbawm, who has equated comparative history with conjectural history, and has warned against the danger “in the temptation to isolate the phenomenon of overt crisis from the wider context of

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society undergoing transformation. This danger may be particularly great when we launch into comparative studies.”2 Marxism’s historical materialism approach assumes that it knows the road that history is traveling and the goal toward which it is moving. The historical process is uniform, gradual, and progressive (with occasional brief regressions), and it follows a “stage theory” of socioeconomic evolution according to laws valid everywhere. If so, why should this Weltanschauung make comparative history unnecessary and even dangerous? To be sure, some of the theoretical objections to the comparative method should be taken into serious consideration in any analysis. Nonetheless, the approach adopted in this essay is different: it is, so to say, universalistic and assumes that historical events and processes at different times and in various countries or societies are meaningfully comparable, implying that they have, or may have, some common points of reference and some similar features—whether structural or functional or both. This view implies also that there might be differences between the compared events and processes, and that by confronting these differences we can better evaluate the significance of the similarities. Briefly summarized, this approach posits that by comparing social or political phenomena we can better understand their structure, their interrelations with other phenomena, and their evolution over time, and it assumes that the real problem is not whether to use comparative methods in historical research, but how to do it. It assumes also that all research entails comparisons for two main reasons. First, at the core of mental processes, thinking without comparison is impossible: in human thinking in general, as well as in historical thinking in particular, we always refer to, and compare, what we find and what we see with something we already know. In this respect, comparison is a generic aspect of human thought even before being a special method of investigation. Second, the historian’s preoccupation with change (and with the study of change) is a commitment to comparison. Thus, the study of any process over time (a most common and widespread topic of study) from state “A” to a subsequent state “B,” is always done by explicitly comparing the process’ components (or variables) at state “A” with what they became at state “B.” Similarly, the study in depth of major historical events such as, for example, the reforms of Peter the Great, the French Revolution, or the abolition of slavery in the United States, necessarily entails an analysis or examination of the historical context of the event before and after it occurred. This is done as a means to evaluate the changes brought about (at least in the short run) by the studied event. In fact, what is routinely done (whether knowingly or not) is a comparison of the main parameters of society before and after the occurrence of that event, which is usually a very complex comparison.

122 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” When such a comparison is undertaken by one who is unaware of its implications, it may miss the main issues, compare factors that are not comparable, and present an impressionistic and arbitrary reflection of the antecedents and consequences of the event. It is only when the comparison is done explicitly and knowingly that it can become a useful tool of research and a fruitful source of new questions, such as suggesting via examples that what looks like change may be continuity, and vice versa, or that things seemingly unrelated are maybe connected and could lead to uncovering new correlations and unseen linkages.

Russian and European Nobility Let us now turn to the case of the Russian and the Western and Central European nobilities under the Old Regime. It is agreed in contemporary historiography, in Western as well as in Eastern Europe, that the European nobilities (noblesse, dvorianstvo, Adel, nobleza) under the Old Regime represented a privileged order (estate) that held a non-negligible degree of political power, owned large tracts of land, exploited a considerable part of the population (in most cases as serfs), and had over them rights of dominion implemented in ways sometimes brutal, sometimes enlightened, and often paternalistic. It is agreed also that this general description is not sufficient to convey all the aspects of the nobility’s evolution as a social and economic group, and its political and cultural role.3 The examination that follows does not intend to present a broad synthesis of that kind but rather to deal comparatively with one circumscribed topic related to the social and psychological makeup of the European nobilities under the Old Regime, and to take as its starting point the Russian dvorianstvo.4 According to a current interpretation in Russian historiography (mainly in the West), the Russian nobility was a phenomenon sui generis within the family of European nobilities in modern times.5 Its being a phenomenon sui generis is attributed to the following characteristics. First, the Russian dvorianstvo was a “service nobility.” This meant that the primary source of the title of nobility and all concomitant privileges, such as ownership of land, possession of serfs, exemption from taxes, and other rights, was service to the tsar and to the state and not lineage and transmission of the title by inheritance as in the West. To use a more colloquial expression: service, not “blue blood,” was the raison d’être and the dominant feature of the Russian nobility. As a result, noble rank and status in Russia stemmed from the will of the tsar, rather than being an autonomous attribute in no need of external justification. Second, the Russian nobility’s ethos and mental makeup were an ethos and a mentality of service, whereas Western nobil-

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ity had an ethos of honor and birthright.6 This specific ethos of the Russian nobility was at the root of its subservient position vis-à-vis the sovereign and explains a great deal—according to this view—of Russia’s “specific” political development. It is, then, on account of these differences that the Russian nobility is not considered similar to the other European ones, and it is as a result of this kind of comparison that these differences are formulated. Needless to add, the description of the nobility is not only important per se: under the Old Regime the nobility’s structure and characteristics had also wider implications for the country’s society, political regime, and history, since the nobility was usually the backbone of the military command, the state apparatus, and the cultural and economic center of power. Thus, the question of how the nobility is described by the historian has, eo ipso, wider implications for the profile of the entire society in the era under consideration. I will not address an important weakness of this thesis, namely its reductionism (as if service were the overwhelming characteristic of the Russian nobility and the only one worthy to be taken into consideration), although there are weighty objections that may be raised to this reductionism. Moreover, although this weakness is obvious, nevertheless—as we shall see—it is not among the greatest flaws of the thesis.

The Russian Nobility in the Eighteenth Century The Russian nobility was, indeed, a service nobility (sluzhiloe dvorianstvo). Without looking further back than the reign of Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century, we see that his legislation, and in particular the Table of Ranks (about which more will be said below), stipulated that one had to serve the state in order to acquire the title of nobility, and—according to some interpretations—all the male descendants of title-bearers had to serve, too, in order to keep the title of nobility. This legislation represented Peter’s will, and in this society of orders (estates), it was the origin of the legal definition of dvorianskoe soslovie or sostoianie. However, even in Peter’s lifetime, the implementation of these juridical stipulations turned out to be extremely difficult, and after his death in 1725 the stipulations were quickly replaced by a very different reality in the status of the nobility and its relations with the sovereigns.7 To summarize the main features of the real situation and its evolution over time, it should be stressed that Peter’s legislation did not abolish the titles of the ancient noble families: to the contrary, it recognized them unconditionally even before the male members had to serve. To be sure, these noblemen were invited (at times roughly) to do so, but never under threat

124 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” of forfeiture. This continued existence of past tradition, which Peter could not do away with (after all, he needed people like the dreadful Prince Fedor Romodanovskii, a descendent of Riurik, and other wellborn sons of old boyar families), had an unexpected influence on Peter’s efforts to reform Russian society and remodel its estates, and was a social and political impediment to his reforms and legislation. The Russian nobility did not develop the blood myth with a tenacity comparable to that of the nobilities in several Central and Western European countries, but the myth of noble origin did exist, and many families claimed for themselves illustrious ancestors and a high rank of noble distinction (dvorianskoe dostointstvo), lineage, and hereditary title “from time immemorial.” There were many families that, like the Romodanovskiis, pretended to be descendants of Riurik—Dolgorukii, Obolenskii, Gorchakov, Shakhovskoi, Shcherbatov, Tatishchev—or of the Jagellon dynasty— Khovanskii, Golitsyn, Kurakin, Trubetskoi, and others—whose pretentions were more modest, but whose ancestors, even if less illustrious, had too their origins “in antiquity.” This “historic” dimension of the high nobility’s status, ethos, and culture survived in spite of Peter’s reforms and became a norm followed and imitated by the whole order of the nobility, from the grands seigneurs to the petty country squires. (Alexander Menshikov, for example, a parvenu par excellence through service to the tsar, claimed to be a descendant of an ancient Lithuanian family.) The fact that during the following two centuries there appeared some cases of grotesque pretensions befitting characters in a Gogol play, illustrates the extent and resilience of this search for origins and the importance attached to them. Notwithstanding a widespread view in historiography, the chin (rank) was not the determinant factor in this hierarchical society. In order to keep one’s noble status, other attributes and qualities were necessary as well; noble ancestors (real or mythical) were one of them. In this light, it seems doubtful that in the Russian nobility the principle of lineage and inheritance was marginal and unimportant, or in any case subordinated to the principle of service. Paradoxically, the same legislation and the same documents that serve usually to demonstrate the primacy of service also contain the essential elements proving the importance of the hereditary principle, which was invariably accepted by all the sovereigns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (except Paul I, who in this instance remains an exception to the rule), and universally respected by all the nobility.8 Two main legal instruments regulated the status of the nobility. The first was a decree (ukaz) issued by Peter the Great on 23 March 1714; erroneously labeled the decree of the “majorats,” that is, right of primogeniture. Actually, it established the rule of a one-heir succession, edinonasledie,

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whose goal was to prevent the parceling out of the gentry’s landed property from generation to generation. To that effect it forbade the division of the estates by inheritance (the votchiny as well as the pomest’ia9), and was in fact a law of single inheritance.10 Only one son (not necessarily the eldest) was entitled to inherit the landed property and the country house, while the movable property could be divided among all the seigneur’s children. The sons who did not inherit the landed domain had to engage—this ukaz stipulated—in another useful profession such as “[civil or military] service, teaching, trade, etc.” This decree clashed to such an extent with established custom and family traditions that the nobility succeeded in having it repealed in 1731.11 Its effects were therefore short-lived, and all the more so as many exceptions were allowed from the very beginning. This development is well known and agreed upon; however, the major point that is rarely mentioned is that the sons who did not inherit a part of the landed estate and went away to look for a “useful profession” did not lose their title of nobility or the right to transmit it to their descendants. The indirect consequence of this decree was not only, as is well known, the assimilation of the pomest’e and the votchina, but also (if it were implemented entirely) the admission, and even encouragement, of the existence of a hereditary nobility that did not own any landed property. The Table of Ranks (Tabel’ o rangakh) was the second legal act concerning the status and condition of the nobility.12 Issued on 24 January 1722, it is usually regarded as the major tool for the “regimentation of the nobility” and as the foundation of its obligation to serve the state and the tsar. In fact, the Table of Ranks comprised a basic ambiguity that the nobility used successfully during the following years to reduce considerably the scope of the rule concerning the obligation to serve, and to strengthen the privileges, status, and prestige founded on birthright. The Table of Ranks included fourteen ranks (the first rank being the highest) and established a title of “personal nobility” (lichnoe dvorianstvo) for those who during their civilian or military service had risen only up to the ninth rank (chin), as well as a hereditary nobility (potomstvennoe dvorianstvo) for those who had climbed above the fourteenth rank in military service and the eighth rank in the civilian service. The ambiguity lay in the fact that the hereditary noblemen could transmit unconditionally the title of nobility to their descendants without any obligation on the latter (including the men) to ascend the ladder of the Table of Ranks in order to conserve the title of nobility and the privileges which it carried. Thereby the Table of Ranks institutionalized a distinction of honor and prestige in favor of the hereditary nobility and, paradoxically, acknowledged the privileges stemming from birth and lineage that this same Table of Ranks was supposed

126 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” to abolish and replace with the “service, fountain of all distinction.” The Table of Ranks, while establishing the obligation to serve, also conferred a privileged status to birthright. It is for that reason, among several others, that during the eighteenth century the nobles began to use more and more often the terms blagorodnye dvoriane and khorosho rozhdennye (wellborn; Wohlgeboren), which until the end of the seventeenth century had been exclusively reserved to the members of the tsar’s family.13 The largely successful policy of the nobility after 1722 aimed at minimizing the role of the service as a source of rights and privileges and strengthening the juridical, social, and cultural justification of birthright and inheritance. Several of the nobility’s requests in this respect were satisfied by Empress Anna Ivanovna (who reigned in 1730–40) during the succession crisis in 1730. The ukaz of 31 December 1736 authorized one of the sons (or one of the brothers) of the landlord to remain on the estate and either serve in the local administration, or not serve at all but send a serf in his stead.14 The decree also enumerated various cases when the other sons could partially dispense themselves from the service and send a serf as replacement. Similar measures were taken also by Empress Elisabeth Petrovna (reigned 1741–61), who toward the end of her reign was considering abolition of the obligation to serve altogether. Indeed, the goal that the nobility pursued relentlessly and tenaciously was the abolition of the obligation to serve. This was granted to it by Peter III in 1762, two months after his accession to the throne.15 Peter III and his advisers did not fear (and rightly so, as we will see) that this measure would bring about a massive exodus of the nobility from the army and the state administration. The Manifesto on the Freedom of the Russian Nobility (Manifest o darovanii vol’nosti i svobody vsemu rossiiskomu dvorianstvu) of 18 February 1762 ordered the abolition of compulsory service by the nobility and declared that “as a consequence of this decree no Russian nobleman will ever be obliged to serve against his will.”16 This was a concession to the nobles, who greeted it with enthusiasm, but it was also—as often happens in matters of legislation—the consecration of an état de fait that existed already in reality. It existed “illegally,” of course, but was nevertheless considered a normal and customary practice by Russia’s political class and the nobility. The abrogation of the legal obligation to serve the state and the tsar did not bring about a wave of resignations of noblemen who served in the army and the bureaucracy. They continued to serve (as did their sons) assiduously, for reasons stated very clearly in the Manifesto (thereby reflecting not only the social realities but also the nobility’s collective psychology and code of conduct): the service had become a matter of honor, of social status and prestige; it appears, therefore, that it was the obligation to serve,

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and not the service itself, that upset the nobility. In the latter’s representations, the service enhanced and justified the dignity bestowed by the notion (or the myth) of noble birth and ancient lineage. Thus, in this respect, the Russian nobility had an ethos and a conduct that did not differ from those of the Western and Central European aristocracy. The last legal act that completed the process of the nobility’s emancipation was the Charter of the Nobility (Zhalovannaia gramota na prava, vol’nosti i preimushchestva blagorodnogo rossiiskogo dvorianstva) granted by Catherine II on 21 April 1785.17 Article 1 of this document stipulated: “The title of nobility is hereditary and stems from the qualities and virtues of leading men in antiquity who distinguished themselves by their service, which they turned into honor (dostoinstvo) and acquired for their posterity the title of nobility.” Thus the cycle was closed: the service, emblem of honor, had ceased to be compulsory, and the title of nobility was defined as hereditary, stemming from the qualities and virtues of distant great men and illustrious founders of noble lineages “in antiquity.” Thus, the law did not limit itself to sanctioning the custom, the aspirations of the nobility, and its self-image: the legislation had become, if not a generator of myth, at least an important vehicle for its dissemination.

The Nobility in the Nineteenth Century The Table of Ranks devised by Peter the Great and his advisors was supposed to serve as a grid and a scale of professional (civil and military) advancement according to merit and social rank achieved through service to the state. As we noted above, it failed to eliminate the preeminence of the principle of birthright both professionally and socially. Neither did it succeed in serving as a grid regulating social stratification and status. It opened an avenue for upward mobility to non-nobles and bestowed “rank” and honors on those who succeeded in making their way up the ladder to its upper echelons. But can we assert that in the first half of the nineteenth century “ennoblement was no longer important, or, in other words, even a nobleman was nobody without a rank”?18 Before trying to answer, we should first ask: What was a “rank”? When using the term in this context, historians rarely indicate what exactly they mean by it or how it should be understood. The name of the Table of Ranks, in Russian, borrowed a foreign word (rang, pronounced à la russe: like sprang), used in everyday speech mostly in the army and the navy. The Russian word was chin, but what was a “chin”? Formally, it was one of the fourteen classes of the Table of Ranks; socially it was nearer the modern meaning of status, a complex lexicological mixture of birth (ancestry),

128 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” wealth, and official position. And although, as Western travelers to Russia like August von Haxthausen and the Marquis de Custine had observed, in church the believers attending the service represented an admixture of classes, ranks, men, and women both in the capitals and in the provincial towns, in everyday life and in “society” the usage was completely different, and strict status separation was the rule. Ancestry mattered: not for nothing did families claim that they were descended from Riurik or from the Jagellon dynasty. Thus, for instance, Princess Sof’ia Vaslil’evna Meshcherskaia’s visiting card, in French, included also her maiden name: “Princesse Meschersky, née Princesse Obolensky.”19 The family name “Obolenskii” had cachet, opened doors, and elicited respect much more than many other names of the nobility. But lineage was not enough either. Gary Hamburg writes: “Respect did not automatically attach, for example, to a person named Prince Golitsyn, everything depended on whether the prince was rich or poor.”20 Jerome Blum analyzed this fact of life vividly in a chapter entitled “Rich Noble, Poor Noble” in his magisterial book Lord and Peasant in Russia,21 and Daniel Field wrote (for the period 1833–1857): “[W]hen contemporaries spoke of ‘the nobility’ they meant usually the serf owners, ignoring the legal demarcation of the estate. Nobles without serfs were not thought to have a common interest with the rest of the nobility, and were excluded by law from participating in the corporate institutions of their estate.” He concludes in these words: Real noble status was not a matter of gentle birth or past services to the fatherland, it was a function of rank and serfholding. Those who held many serfs and had at least been blooded in the service of the state were full-fledged noblemen, those who held a modest number of serfs were equivocally noble, while the unfortunates who had few serfs or none, even though heroes of 1812 or descendants of Riurik, were effectively excluded from the noble estate … [The Russian nobility], whether considered as a legally defined status, or, more realistically, in terms of the franchise law … was divided within itself.22

“Rank and riches”: a comparable situation existed in England in the eighteenth century: What one notices about it first of all [writes E.P. Thompson] is the importance of money. The landed gentry are graded not by birth or other marks of status but by rentals: they are worth so many thousand pounds a year. Among the aristocracy and ambitious gentry, courtship is conducted by fathers and their lawyers, who guide it carefully towards its consummation, the well-drawn marriage settlement.23

Rich nobles, poor nobles: how many were they in each category, and what was the social profile of the nobiliary estate? In addition to foreigners

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like von Haxthausen and de Custine, who noticed the wretched situation of part of the noble families, Russian contemporaries, too, were well aware of this state of affairs. As Minister of Education Prince K. A. Lieven wrote in 1828, “the extent of the noble estate is so boundless that at one end it touches the foot of the throne and at the other is almost lost in the peasantry;”24 and a statistical survey of the Tver’ province carried out in the 1840s observed that the rural gentry “constituted an entirely separate segment of the dvorianstvo that had more in common with the peasantry than with the rest of the soslovie.”25 “A segment of the noble estate,” but what was its size? The numbers speak for themselves. On the eve of the emancipation of the serfs, 44 percent of the serf owners held only 3.3 percent of the serfs and were in a state of sheer poverty, while 3.6 percent of the nobility owned 43.6 percent of the serfs. In the eighteenth century the picture was not very different. In 1777, 59 percent of the pomeshchiki owned fewer than 20 serfs (including 32 percent who had fewer than 10 serfs), 2 percent owned between 501 to 1,000 serfs, and only 1 percent owned more than 1,001 serfs—and even these serf-holders could not be considered really wealthy except for the magnates among them, like the Sheremetevy, who possessed thousands of serfs. A government report of 1843 indicated that 9,287 nobles (the majority in the gubernii of Smolensk, Riazan’, Simbirsk, Kaluga, and Vologda) had little land, no serfs and a style of life “virtually indistinguishable from the peasantry.”26 The number of serfs owned was the main indicator of the economic situation of a noble family. In this respect, the available data indicate that from 1777 to the emancipation in 1861, the high (and wealthy) nobility, representing 1 percent of the total number of nobles, included approximately 1,000 families (870 in 1834) and owned 2 million peasants (20 percent of the total number of serfs), but in real life only the big landowners (who had more than 6,000 serfs) were truly rich; they included 150 families in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. The middle nobility, with 101 to 1,000 serfs, represented 15 percent of the estate, and the lower (and poor) nobility, with 10 to 100 peasants, amounted to 84 percent of the total number of nobles (landless nobility not included). In the 1850s about 6 million “souls” (out of 9,800,000 serfs) were mortgaged to the State Bank, and in some provinces in European Russia the debt of the landowners was higher than the total market value of their properties.27

On Lineage and Inheritance The two major elements of the thesis regarding the nature of the Russian nobility were presented above. The first asserted that Russia’s was a ser-

130 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” vice nobility, whereas in the other European nobilities there reigned the principle of lineage and inheritance. Indeed, lineage and inheritance are important characteristics of nobilities, although they are quite often exaggerated and idealized, and in this respect some elements of the nobilities’ own myths and fantasies seem to have been perpetuated in the historiography, too. But important as they may be, even lineage and inheritance must have had a beginning sometime and somehow. After all, the fully fledged “European nobleman” did not appear on the historical stage suddenly, ex machina, with all his attributes and privileges including lineage and inheritance. When looking back into the past and at the origins of even the most illustrious aristocratic families, the historian reaches the beginning of the “noble lineage” and finds in most of the cases that the founder of the noble lineage distinguished himself at the service of a king, an overlord, or a seigneur, and was awarded a title of nobility on that account. Service was at the origin of many noble families in Western and Central Europe; for others the beginning was either usurpation or the whim of a monarch. Thus the founders of aristocratic family trees, before being ennobled, had their origins in various modest social strata, having been commoners, peasants, simple folk, or quite often daring swashbucklers who distinguished themselves in combat. Such is, for instance, the well-known case of Markward, born a serf, who rose under Emperor Barbarossa to become governor of Sicily and duke of Ravenna. In this light, the oft-mentioned case of Alexander Menshikov, who was the son of a “stable-boy” and had started in life as a street peddler yet became prince of the Holy Empire in 1706 and field-marshal under Peter the Great, should not be presented as a “typically Russian phenomenon.” The fact that in the West these sorts of beginnings of aristocratic lineages occurred earlier in time than in Russia creates no difference in either the social nature of the phenomenon or in the fact that in Russia, too, lineage and inheritance followed immediately upon reception of the title of nobility. In addition, did such phenomena in the West belong indeed to a remote past? Menshikov began his career as a pastries peddler on the streets of Moscow in the 1690s, but Laurence Sterne had seen a chevalier de Saint-Louis doing the same in Versailles in 1765.28 When speaking of “lineage” in the West, it is important to distance oneself from the old nobiliary myths and pretensions that the title of nobility was held “from time immemorial.” Most had a modest beginning, and service as the origin of the title and as its raison d’être was neither episodic in the West nor peculiar to Russia, but rather a pervading element in the history of the European nobilities: scholarly research has convincingly demonstrated this feature. Thus, referring to England, Jonathan Powis writes: “At the end of the Middle Ages Nicholas Upton observed that

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service in the Hundred Years’ War enabled many ‘poor men’ to become noble,” adding that: Government service certainly provided a route to social advancement for those involved in it: newcomers as well as those of established rank… . And in any case, families which rose to prominence in the service of the state were unlikely to resist the immense—and highly aristocratic—attractions of landownership . … The grander forms of public service, even undertaken by men of modest origins, thus involved unmistakable signs of social distinction . … Down the centuries the service of government implied not an alternative aristocratic distinction, but a means for newcomers to acquire it: both for themselves and for their heirs.29

This influx of newcomers elucidates two important features of the noble condition. First, the “aristocratic distinction” was bestowed by the monarch and by his will. This was done in Russia as well as in the West. In the early thirteenth century the Emperor Frederic II ruled that without imperial mandate no one was to claim the rank of knight. From the fourteenth century onward, all the Central and Western European kings and queens kept for themselves the prerogative (in fact, the monopoly) of being “the fountain of honors” and distributed titles of nobility by writ, patent, and the like. The case of the numerous new titles created in Britain by the Stuart regime after 1603 is one example among many. They were not different from the practice in eighteenth-century Russia. The second trait that emerges from these descriptions concerns the assertion that the basic principle of the nobility was service in Russia, and lineage (and inheritance) in the West. However, if this was indeed the case (and without qualification), it would signify that in the West the nobility was, if not a caste, then a tightly closed class. But such a view is indefensible and inaccurate. In 1939, Marc Bloch determined clearly that if, in the Middle Ages, the doors of the nobility were not wide open, they were never entirely closed either.30 In 1975, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote that this situation had not changed five centuries later, and that at all times the doors were even more open than it was imagined: On the other hand, ennoblements are common in the eighteenth century: most noble lineages, even the highest ones among them, originate from medieval ancestors who had no blue blood pedigree, but were commoners and even peasants. In that Age of the Enlightenment nobody except Boulainvilliers believed or tried to make believe that the noble families are descendants of the ancient Germanic conquerors.31

There was, then, a continuous influx of non-nobles in the ranks of the nobility: commoners, wealthy merchants, successful entrepreneurs, lawyers, military commanders, and distinguished scientists. “Without courting

132 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” extinction, no aristocracy could permanently say ‘Keep out.’ So at varying speeds in different contexts newcomers were recruited, both to the enjoyment of privilege and to the exercise of leadership; and new dynasties grew up.”32 This process of social mobility is known to have been the source of the English nobility’s capacity for survival and adaptability to the new social and economic conditions created by the development of capitalism from the Reformation to the late nineteenth century.33 But this type of upward mobility, although not as frequent or easy as in England, existed in other countries too; it was known in France (ennoblissement de la bourgeoisie), where chancellery ennoblements were a cottage industry, as well as in Russia (odvorianivanie burzhuazii).34 Finally, in each and every family that acquired the title of nobility in Russia (through service or imperial grant), as anywhere else, the principle of inheritance was strictly observed with respect to the title as well as to the ownership of the land.35

An Ethos of Service and Honor The second proposition of the traditional interpretation of the Russian nobility’s ethos (and social psychology) holds that it was an “ethos of service,” whereas in the West it was one of “honor and birthright.” Is this distinction sufficient for an adequate representation of the main characteristics of this social group? It does not seem so. In addition to the fact that military career (that is, military service) remained a major avenue of social distinction for all European nobilities, service to the state in all its forms brought honor and prestige in the West too. On the other hand, noble lineage entailed a social and family duty to serve the state and the sovereign. It was, so to say, an ethos of service as part of the all-encompassing concept of honor in the West as well as in Russia. Thus, Jonathan Powis writes: In the middle of the fifteenth century the Burgundian Gilbert de Lannoy warned his noble readers that ‘riches’ must be acquired ‘honourably’, and in his view no source of riches was more honourable than service to one’s prince. … In a more remote past this was the logic behind such texts as the constitution of feudal rights issued by the Emperor Barbarossa in 1158. This insisted on the aristocratic duty of service to the emperor as sovereign.

The same author mentions several other examples of this feature. Thus, “a representative of the nobility at French Estates-General of 1588 told his audience that he represented not merely the nobles of his own day, but all the aristocratic generations that had gone before: it was the ancestral example of ‘inherited generosity’ that inspired their successors to serve the state.” Similarly, “a distinguished ancestry obliged men to serve the state:

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this was the view of a provincial magistrate writing to the chancellor of France in 1602. The point was a commonplace down the centuries.” This was the view not only of provincial magistrates, but of major thinkers too: “in the middle of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu saw a hereditary nobility as fundamental to the character of monarchical regimes; men born to distinction naturally—he thought—pursued honour in the service of their royal master.” Powis concludes: “In an important sense, rulers were the leaders of the greatest of all aristocratic entourages. And like those of their lords, their followers were bound to them by personal obligations of honour and service.”36 Chaussinand-Nogaret offers this additional explanation: “From the middle ages, and more precisely from feudal law, the nobility had inherited the notion of service.”37 This was, then, the “ethos” of the Western nobility: an ethos of “honour and service,” both closely linked and each conditioning the other. For the grandees, service was regarded as a matter of prestige and access to the centers of political power; for the wretched “nobiliary proletariat,” service appeared to be a financial necessity and—by way of social mimetism—a device to pretend that they shared in the “noble way of life”—vivre noblement—canonized by the illustrious (and rich) families of their class, the grandees and the big magnates. But the poor nobles had to content themselves with pretending only, for that way of life was well beyond their financial means and much above their cultural level (material as well as intellectual). Thus, for them the service to the state came handily as a means of not only alleviating their pecuniary difficulties but also creating a tool for the perpetuation of this social self-delusion. As aptly described by Chaussinand-Nogaret, in France there were the numerous nobles who only knew the harsh life of the countryside, often poor, ill-educated, endlessly reliving in their cramped manors and halls the old dreams of glory, and for whom the king’s service seemed the only option, for the very good reason that they had not been fitted or trained for anything else within the narrow horizon of their daily activities. How could a grand-father, uncle or distant cousin, back home with the cross of St Louis after 20 or 30 years on active service or garrison duty, not seem a model hero whom young men thought of following in the future? Neither their social environment nor their cultural world led them to think of anything different. To serve the king was at once a duty, an inspiring adventure and the expression of an ascetism which had long been accepted and absorbed. For among the nobles whom contemporaries and historians alike often misunderstood, there was a willingness to sacrifice themselves that was well captured by the chevalier d’Arc, the king’s bastard son and stern and haughty lord, in his dream of a society where luxury would be banned and the nobility, thinking only of serving, would be endowed with a quite unrealistically austere and grandiose moral code.38

134 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” If one way of self-delusion was to pretend that all the nobles shared in the luxuries of vivre noblement, another way was to reject the noble manners and way of life altogether and to dream not of riches, but of a puritan utopia. But the idea of service was at the core of both the delusions and the morose existential realities in which the dreamers and pretenders lived. Moreover, in the eighteenth century in France and in other continental countries, service had become almost the raison d’être of the nobility, a feature that some historians regard as being the major trait of Russian nobility’s supposed exceptionalism. This is, for instance, what Chaussinand-Nogaret writes about the French nobility: To serve, which was one of the essential defining principles of nobility in the eighteenth century, was everybody’s ambition, or almost everybody’s. Those who did not serve, with few exceptions did so not by design or desire not to be involved, but because it was impossible or because they had tried and failed: they lacked money or promotion prospects. The right to serve was considered an essential privilege of noble status and partly explains noble hostility, however relative and ambiguous to commoners in service. To serve the king was at one and the same time a right, a duty and an honour, and a nobleman could not avoid these moral obligations. Only poverty, limits on recruitment and the injustices of the system kept some in inactivity.39

Madame de Sévigné would have said: “On se croirait en Russie.” Although Chaussinand-Nogaret stated explicitly that the nobility had inherited the notion of service from the middle ages and from feudal law, one may raise the hypothesis that these “Russian characteristics” in the French nobility emerged only toward the end of the Old Regime, when increased social mobility and rapid transfer of (novel) ideas created confusion in minds and disorder in the hierarchy of estates, both of which disrupted the harmony of nobiliary life and the strength of traditional values.40 But this would be a gratuitous hypothesis without foundation in historical realities. In fact, the exalted notion of service to the state existed already au siècle de Louis XIV, one hundred years before the end of the Old Regime; as for the notion of duty and honor to serve the king, it had been present at all times. Nevertheless, it is interesting to examine briefly this subject for the given period, and all the more so as 1700 was also approximately the starting point of our analysis of the Russian nobility. In their important work La véritable hiérarchie sociale de l’ancienne France, François Bluche and Jean-François Solnon have examined the place and characteristics of the service in seventeenth-century France. The book’s chapter VI is entitled “The Three Pillars of the State” (Les trois colonnes de l’Etat), represented by the army, the bureaucracy (including the judiciary),

The Nobility in Russia and Western Europe • 135

and the financial administration. These were three great social forces in the realm, and they “followed the orientations and specialties necessary to the public service.”41 One section, entitled “The Primacy of the Service” (Le primat du service), deals with the major political, social, and ideological role of the service. (Note that this is said about France, not Russia.) There is nothing more eloquent—the authors assert—than the definitions of the words service, server, and serviteur in the Dictionnaire universel of the abbé Furetière. The entries were written in the 1680s, twenty years after the beginning of the absolutist rule of Louis XIV, and ten years before France’s first Capitation (of 1695). “What does Furetière—this educated bourgeois, this wise man, this Molière of lexicology—say on these notions?” Here are some excerpts of the answer, which, because of their lexicological content, I will quote also in the original French to capture the particular flavor of the text: Servir, se dit aussi des secours et assistance qu’on donne au roi, à l’Etat tant en guerre qu’en paix . … Servir, se dit aussi à l’égard du roi et de la république. Aller servir le roi, c’est s’enrôler, prendre parti dans les troupes. On le dit aussi dans la robe. Cet ambassadeur a bien servi dans un tel traité, celui-là dans une telle intendance . … Ce magistrat, ce capitaine sont de bons serviteurs du roi.42 To serve also means to give aid and assistance to the king, to the State, in war as in peace. One may serve the king or the republic. To enter into the service of the king means to enlist, to join the troops. It also applies to officials. This ambassador served well through a treaty, another through a commission. This magistrate, this captain are worthy servants of the king.

Louis XIV devoted much of his time and attention to instilling in the French elites an attachment to their offices and an awareness of the importance of the service. And he meant service in all its forms: although his foreign policy required an army of 300,000 men, he cultivated and tried to improve all the other branches of public activity and management of state affairs. The civilian service made great progress under Louis XIV—as Bluche and Solnon affirm—for he understood well that the king needed an efficient and reliable one. To that effect (which nothing shows better than the tarif of 1695), Louis XIV established almost a kind of table of ranks— Tableau des rangs (sociaux)—like the one that Peter the Great would invent in 1722, a chin, where the civilian service—bureaucrats, administrators, judges, financial officials—was no longer humiliated and crushed by the military one. By the king’s will, the military, the civilian service, and the financial administration were declared the foundations of the state and dominated French society of that time.43

136 • Russia before the “Radiant Future”

Conclusions With Louis XIV’s Tableau des rangs we have, in a way, reached our point of departure and Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks, often defined as a “typical Russian institution” and the foundation of “a nobility sui generis.” This time we find it at the other end of the Continent, in France, and not only in Russia: in the nobilities of other countries, similar institutions existed, if under different appellations. As seen during our comparisons, several established interpretations have become less certain than at the starting point. Service to the state appeared as a current practice in other countries too, and various nobilities undertook it either by necessity or for the sake of honor, or both. The collective psychology of the nobility, as a social group and as a juridically defined order, entailed—from the times of its ancient origins (if there were suchlike)—the notion and the function of service as integral parts of the nobiliary condition, its raison d’être, and self-esteem as a class that had linked its privileged distinction to duty and responsibility toward the king (or the queen) and the state. Values, honor, birthright, inheritance, service: these were the key notions—carrying polyvalent and complementary meanings—that defined the nobiliary specificity in Eastern as well as in Western Europe. They shaped also the nobilities’ collective mentalities and group consciousness. It is on this account, too, that the eighteenth century has been described as a most cosmopolitan era: the nobilities of all European countries had comparable education, similar cultural interests, and a common social language, in addition to a common language tout court, which most often was French.44 Instead of the great contrasts usually admitted between the Russian dvorianstvo, the French nobility, and the English aristocracy, it is instead analogies and parallels that emerge. There is no doubt that in other respects there existed differences and dissimilarities, but certainly not to such an extent as to make these social, national, and cultural bodies non-comparable. In any case, the differences between the Russian nobility and those in the West were certainly not greater that those that existed among the various Western nobilities. The lesson that can be drawn from this examination is that in comparative research one should posit a priori neither a (hypo)thesis of absolute contrast nor one of a perfect similarity. This lesson applies also to the comparison of Russia or its nobility—or any other social, political, and cultural phenomenon—with the Occident or the Orient. Here, as in other cases, the first step is to define adequately the terms of the comparison, in order not to compare Russia or its nobility, for instance, with mythical or nonexistent entities from which, obviously, neither of them could be expected to be similar or different.

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Notes 1. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton, 1992), pp. 105–106; the book referred to in the quotation is Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA, 1988). 2. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London, 1997), pp. 80 and 89–90. 3. For Central and Western European nobilities, see J. K. Powis, Aristocracy (Oxford, 1984); J.-P. Labatut, Les noblesses européennes de la fin du XVe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1978); J. Meyer, Noblesse et pouvoirs dans l’Europe d’Ancien Régime (Paris, 1973); M. L. Bush, The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis (Manchester, 1984); J. Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984); G. Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1985); W. Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985); Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660–1815 (Cambridge, MA, 1958); O. Büsch, Militärsystem und Sozialleben im alten Preussen (Berlin, 1962); Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Las clases privilegiadas en la España del Antiguo Régimen (Madrid, 1973); David Higgs, Nobles in Nineteenth-Century France: The Practice of Inegalitarianism (Baltimore and London, 1987); Claudio Donati, L’idea di nobiltá in Italia: Secoli XIV–XVIII (Rome and Bari, 1988); David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, 1990); Antony Taylor, Lords of Misrule: Hostility to Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2004). See also Dominic Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815–1914 (London, 1992); H. M. Scott, ed., The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London and New York, 1995). 4. For some useful works, old and new, on the Russian nobility, see A. Romanovich-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnogo prava [The Nobility in Russia from the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century to the Emancipation of the Serfs] (Kiev, 1912); A.D. Gradovskii, Nachala russkogo gosudarstvennogo prava [Principles of Russian Public Law], 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1875–1883); V.O. Kliuchevskii, Istoriia soslovii v Rossii [History of the Estates in Russia], vol. 6 in Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia [Writings], 10 vols. (Moscow, 1956–1959); Paul Dukes, Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility (Cambridge, 1967); Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York, 1966); Robert Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762–1785 (Princeton, 1973); Rex Rexheuser, Besitzverhältnisse des russischen Adels im 18. Jahrhundert (Nuremberg, 1971); Iurii M. Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture: Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII–nachala XIX veka) [Essays on Russian Culture: Way of Life and Traditions of the Russian Nobility in the Eighteenth and the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century] (St. Petersburg, 1994); S. M Troitskii, Russkii absoliutizm i dvorianstvo v XVIII veke (Formirovanie biurokratii) [Russian Absolutism and the Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: The Formation of the Bureaucracy] (Moscow, 1974); E. N Marasinova, Psikhologiia elity Rossiiskogo dvorianstva

138 • Russia before the “Radiant Future”

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

poslednei treti XVIII veka (po materialam perepiski) [The Psychology of the Russian Nobility’s Elite in the Last Third of the Eighteenth Century] (Moscow, 1999); Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 1985); Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca, NY, 2002); Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater (DeKalb, 2003); Mary W. Cavender, Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate, and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia (Newark, 2007); see also Noblesse, Etat et Société en Russie: XVIe – début du XIXe siècle, a special issue of Cahiers du monde russe 34, nos. 1–2 (January–June 1993). In Russia, Soviet and post-Soviet historians have devoted their research mainly to the political positions of the nobility and its role as owners of land and serfs. Generally they have shunned comparative research. See, for example, Marc Raeff, “The Russian Nobility in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Trends and Comparisons,” in The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. Ivo Banac and Paul Bushkovitch (New Haven, 1983), pp. 99–121. Banac and Bushkovitch, The Nobility. For other examples, see Raeff, The Russian Intelligentsia; Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility; Roberta Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (Princeton, 1982). For a rare exception to this sort of treatment, see S. Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia. For a critical examination of Raeff’s book, see M. Confino, “Histoire et psychologie: A propos de la noblesse russe au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales, E.S.C. 22, no. 6 (1967): 1163–1205 and S.M. Troitskii, “Russkoe dvorianstvo XVIII veka v izobrazhenii amerikanskogo istorika,” Istoriia SSSR 5 (1970): 205–212. For the many cases and types of the nobility’s evasion and non-observance of the stipulations of the Table of Ranks, see James Hassel, “Implementation of the Russian Table of Ranks during the Eighteenth Century,” Slavic Review 29, no. 2 (June 1970): 287, 288, 289, 292, 294. In summing up his argument on the implementation of the Table of Ranks in the eighteenth century, James Hassel writes: “Fundamentally, the Table of Ranks was an attempt to establish merit instead of birth as the basis for awarding government positions. Since eighteenth-century Russia was a class society with the nobility in a strongly dominating position, the attempt failed.” (“Implementation,” p. 294). Originally the votchina (patrimonium) was a hereditary family estate and the pomest’e a landed domain received from the tsar as retribution for service. See the excellent article on this subject by Lee A. Farrow, “Peter the Great’s Law of Single Inheritance: State Imperatives and Noble Resistance,” Russian Review 55, no. 3 (July 1996): 430–447. Lee Farrow writes: With this law, Peter went into the nobleman’s home and dictated to him how he was to provide for his family and bequeath his ancestral lands. Many nobles considered this an infringement on their ability to provide for family members and protect their families’ political and social interests, and thus saw Peter’s new law as unjust and immoral. Family preservation was critical to eighteenth-century Russian nobles, who

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still relied heavily on clan and family connections to establish and maintain political and social status. (Farrow, “Law of Single Inheritance,” p. 430)

12. Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (PSZ), vol. VI, no. 3890, pp. 486– 493. The Table established an order of fourteen ranks, the first rank (chin) being the highest one. 13. See Romanovich-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii, pp. 72ff. 14. PSZ, vol. VII, no. 7142, pp. 321–325. 15. On this episode see Carol S. Leonard, Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia (Bloomington, 1993), pp. 40–72. 16. PSZ, vol. XV, no. 11444, pp. 912–915 (Article 1). 17. PSZ, vol. XXII, no. 16187, pp. 346–351; the use of the terms blagorodnoe dvorianstvo (wellborn nobility) in the title of the charter indicates that they were already part of the current vocabulary. 18. Hans-Joachim Torke, “Continuity and Change in the Relations between Bureaucracy and Society in Russia, 1613–1861,” Canadian Slavic Studies 5 (1971): 467. A literary example of a person who, though of high birth, did not count in society is Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s Idiot. 19. Cavender, Nests of the Gentry, p. 187. 20. Gary Hamburg, Politics of the Russian Nobility, 1881–1905 (New Brunswick, 1884), p. 5. 21. Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1961), chap. 19, pp. 367–385. 22. Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855– 1861 (Cambridge, MA, 1976), pp. 10, 19. 23. E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” Social History 3, no. 2 (May 1978): 138. 24. S.V. Rozhdestvenskii, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 1802–1902 [Historical Survey of the Activity of the Ministry of Education, 1802–1902] (St. Petersburg, 1902), 196–198; quoted in Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 1997), p. 67 25. Voenno-statisticheskoe obozrenie Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. 4, part 1. [MilitaryStatistical Survey of the Russian Empire] (St. Petersburg, 1848), pp.159–160; quoted in Cavender, Nests of the Gentry, p. 186. 26. See Michael Confino, “Histoire et psychologie”; Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, chap. 19, pp. 367–385; Arcadius Kahan, “The Cost of ‘Westernization’ in Russia: The Gentry and the Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” Slavic Review 25, no. 1 (March 1966): 40–66. 27. See Confino, “A propos de la noblesse russe,” pp. 1193–1194; A. I. Koshelev, Zapiski [Memoirs] (Berlin, 1884), appendix V, p. 136. 28. Laurence Sterne, Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (London, 1768). 29. Powis, Aristocracy, pp. 20, 77, 78. 30. Marc Bloch, La société féodale: La formation des liens de dépendance (Paris, 1939); in this classic work Bloch also describes in detail the duty of “service” that seigneur and vassal owed to each other (p. 337)—an illustrious lineage of the notion of “service.” 31. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Présentation,” in G. Chaussinand-Nogaret, La noblesse au XVIIIème siècle: De la Féodalité aux Lumières (Paris, 1976), p. iii; this

140 • Russia before the “Radiant Future”

32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

text was published in Le Monde, 2 June 1975; it is not included in the English translation of the book. Powis, Aristocracy, p. 4. For a discussion, brilliant but inconclusive, of how open the English nobility was, see L. Stone and J. C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984). For France, see David. D. Bien, “Manufacturing Nobles: The Chancelleries in France to 1789,” Journal of Modern History 61, no. 3 (September 1989): 445– 486; Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility; for Russia, see N. I. Pavlenko “Odvorianivanie russkoi burzhuazii v XVIII v.,” Istoriia SSSR 2 (1961): 71–87; and M. Confino, “The Limits of Autocracy: Russia’s Economy and Society in the Age of Enlightenment,” Peasant Studies 13, no. 3 (1986): 149–170, particularly pp. 151–153 and 167–168. For a similar case in Croatia, see Mirjana Gross, “The Position of the Nobility in the Organization of the Elite in Northern Croatia at the End of the Nineteenth and Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in Banac and Bushkovich, The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe, pp. 137–176. Except for those holding the title of “personal nobility” awarded to non-noble state officials who did not climb above the eighth rank in the Table of Ranks, and whose title was not hereditary. Powis, Aristocracy, pp. 30, 68, 69, 71, 74, 80. Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility, p. 48. Ibid., pp. 88–89. Ibid., p. 49. For an interesting parallel of the views in the West and in Russia on these issues, see Derek Offord, “Denis Fonvizin and the Concept of Nobility: An Eighteenthcentury Russian Echo of a Western Debate,” European History Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2005): 9–38. F. Bluche and J-F. Solnon, La véritable hiérarchie de l’ancienne France: Le tarif de la première capitation (1695) (Geneva, 1983), p. 74. Ibid., pp. 74–75. Ibid., p. 75. For the cosmopolitan character of the eighteenth century, see the magisterial multivolume work of Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, 8 vols. in ten books (Turin, 1969–1990). (Three of these volumes have been translated into English.)

d Comparing Russian Serfdom CHAPTER 6

and American Slavery

e

The Urge to Compare Russian history—maybe more than that of other countries—almost inevitably invites those who study it to engage in comparative observations. There are two main reasons for this urge to compare. The first is the perennial topic in Russian thought variously called “Russia and the West” or “Russia and Europe,” which from the eighteenth century on raised agonizing questions among the intellectuals and the political class about the cultural relations and mutual influences between Russia and the West—the way they viewed each other, understood (or misunderstood) their evolution, and evaluated their respective contributions to the cultural and political heritage of “the family of nations.”1 Peter Chaadaev epitomizes in extreme form this mental and philosophical feature of Russia’s spiritual life.2 But he was not alone in his reflections, and almost nobody in the gallery of eminent Russian thinkers and writers remained immune from this “cursed question”: Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev, Lev Tolstoy, Fedor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solov’ev, and of course the successive varieties of Westernizers and Slavophiles for whom it remained a central theme of debate and cause of dissension. All of them and many others wrestled with the dilemmas and paradoxes of an endless quest for answers and certainties.3 These soul-searching meditations and heated debates played a major role in the shaping of Russia’s national consciousness and identity, and they continue to do so.4 The second reason for this urge to compare is more modest but also more important from the point of view of the topic under discussion. One of the prominent features of Russian historiography at all times has been a constant reference to “the West” when dealing with most developments in the course of Russia’s history. There is a permanent use of “the West” as a term of reference by professional (and not-so-professional) historians in their examination of Russia’s social, economic, cultural, and technological evolution over the centuries.5 141

142 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Thus, when they discuss the peculiarities of various aspects of Russia’s development, they mean as a rule “peculiarities” vis-à-vis an assumed pattern often designated as “the way of the West.”6 This kind of discussion is for all practical purposes a comparison, whether the historians who indulge in it conceive of it as such or not. For instance, when economic historians deal with Russia’s development in terms of “degrees of backwardness,” they mean “backwardness” with regard to “the West”; in this case “the West” represents a very complex model about which more will be said below.7 Another apposite example is supplied by scholars who hold that the Russian nobility is sui generis and does not belong to the family of European nobilities.8 This too implies a comparison, and in addition it raises several methodological questions. First, it uses (unconsciously) the concept of “the nobility,” a model that is rarely defined, described, or specified. Second, it proceeds as if a systematic comparison has been carried out between “the Russian nobility” and this model (whatever it is). And third, it contends (as a would-be deduction from this non-comparison) that the Russian nobility is sui generis. But this contention is a non sequitur and a fallacious one since, by definition, entities that are sui generis cannot be compared to anything else: they stand by themselves. Therefore, what this statement purports is to have achieved is a comparison between non-comparable entities. At this point it would be useful to enunciate three distinctions, which, though obvious, need to be defined. The first is a linguistic one concerning the terminology used by historians and laypersons in historical discourse. “To compare” does not mean to use a comparative method or a comparative approach. (As will be seen below, we all compare all the time.) Similarly, not all historical comparisons constitute comparative history; in many cases comparisons are just stereotypic metaphors that have become part and parcel of the basic stock of everyday speech. Such are, for instance, the implied comparisons in such terms as “Weimar Germany,” “Munich 1938,” “Stalingrad,” “Vietnam,” “Watergate,” etc., whose comparative meaning is purportedly too well known to require further elaboration. Second, in many other cases these run-of-the-mill comparisons are vitiated by the fact that the entities referred to are nonexistent. “The West,” mentioned above in the Russian historiographic context, is a case in point. What is the precise content of this notion? For what does it stand? What does it include? Probably England and France (although even this simple proposition cannot ignore the vexing question “Why was England first?” which differentiates so neatly between the two countries).9 Does it include Germany, which stands clearly apart from its western neighbors, as exemplified in the debate on the Sonderweg—that is, the peculiarities of German history?10 In spite of these peculiarities, Germany is certainly considered part of “the West.” But if so, in what way do Russia’s peculiarities exclude

Comparing Russian Serfdom and American Slavery • 143

it from this club? Moreover, how can such an exclusion be sustained if “the West” includes such “eccentric,” “non-Western,” and maverick countries (in terms of their historical development) as Italy, Spain, and Portugal? Finally, it may be asked what is left of this “West.” Is it just Max Weber’s northwestern corner of Europe, about which he himself had doubts regarding the degree of its cohesion and unity? Mutatis mutandis, questions similar to those raised by the themes “Russia and the West” and “Russian peculiarities” could be asked with regard to the concept of “American exceptionalism” (without belittling the significance of the frontier in American history). In the first place, how exceptional is American exceptionalism? And “exceptional” with regard to what? Obviously, in this case other points of the compass would have to be chosen. For the United States, Russia’s “West” should be replaced by “East” (Europe), “North” (Canada), or “South” (Mexico and Central America). The findings of such an intellectual exercise might be interesting; but in terms of historical method the analysis should be carried out according to rules of comparability and with well-defined concepts. For the fact is—as in the Russian case—that the “exceptionalism” thesis entails a set of complex comparisons, whether explicit or implicit, and quite often they are done not according to the requirements of comparability but with shallow notions borrowed from the current stereotypes of everyday speech.11 Finally, the same problematic applies also to other national (and nationalistic) narratives that invoke “uniqueness,” “distinctiveness,” and “particularism.”12 This is so with regard to the ever-thriving cottage industry on the “national character” of this or that people.13 A change in this respect is discernible lately in some members of the European Community, where a new intellectual and political trend prioritizes European unity “from time immemorial” and generates fancy attempts to obliterate the past, to erase the differences between the member states, to find common origins where there are none, and to extol a “European identity” even when that concept means nothing to millions of people.14 To sum up briefly: in terms of comparability, “the West” (and its equivalents) is a faulty model or a pseudo-model, and in many cases it does not stand for any precise and tangible reality. It is a beautiful metaphor, but a metaphor all the same; it is an idealization, wishful thinking or distorted representation based on sweeping generalizations drawn from a bird’s-eye view of European history that flies high and does not see the details, and also on a certain degree of ignorance of the major fault lines of Europe’s human geography. It is a gratuitous construction of the mind, not a concept or a model representing social, political, or cultural realities. It appears, then, that the issue of comparability is often neglected in historians’ work when they are making comparisons. Nonetheless, in spite

144 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” of the theoretical objections that can be raised against the use of comparative method,15 our contention is that this method is useful and necessary in historical research, and it warrants a universalistic approach that considers historical events, processes, and developments at different times in various countries or societies as meaningfully comparable. This implies that they have (or may have) some common points of reference and some similar features, whether structural or functional, as well as differences among events and processes; by confronting these differences we can better evaluate the significance of the similarities. Finally, it holds also that the problem of comparability and its examination are of primary importance.16

Similarities and Differences: Orientations Slavery in the antebellum American South and serfdom in European Russia were systems of unfree labor that invite comparisons and raise arresting topics and questions of comparability. Nonetheless they have not attracted the attention of a great number of scholars and have generated relatively few comparative studies.17 A preliminary brief inventory of differences and similarities indicates clearly the scope and richness of this problematic. Broadly speaking, several substantial differences emerge between the wider historical contexts in which each of the two systems developed during the period under examination—i.e., from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. First, Muscovy/Russia was a sovereign tsardom/empire that exercised a colonial foreign policy toward its neighbors in general and in its eastern marches in particular. The American South was a colony under British rule during a considerable part of that period (to 1776). Second, Russia evolved as a state that maintained continuous relations (diplomatic, cultural, or warlike) with European countries and a kind of “open frontier” in the East and Southeast. The American South was not an autonomous political entity and represented a relatively isolated and closed society with weak external links (political and other). Third, Russia’s state and social institutions, traditions, and practices had existed, as of 1700, for roughly eight centuries; in the American South they were relatively recent and without deep roots (unless one regards the South as an extension of Britain’s history and political traditions, in which case this evaluation should be modified). Fourth, institutionalized religion was represented in the one case by a hierarchic and centralized religious establishment—the Russian Orthodox Church—and in the other case by a mosaic of denominations and by religious pluralism. Fifth, Russia was a country of scarce natural resources, a severe and unforgiving climate, a very short summer (in terms of agricultural work), and messy springs and falls. The South was endowed

Comparing Russian Serfdom and American Slavery • 145

with a rich soil, abundant and diversified crops, and a mild and propitious climate, and has been characterized by two distinguished economic historians as “one of the most prosperous regions of the world.”18 Regarding the similarities, both systems evolved during the seventeenth century; both were abolished in the 1860s—Russian serfdom in 1861 (with no internal strife), American slavery in 1863 (in the course of a bloody civil war). During the systems’ initial period their respective locations were situated—both geographically and economically—at the periphery of Europe at a time when the latter was undergoing a process of rapid expansion—with this difference: that Russia was an active agent in this process of expansion, whereas the American South was an object of colonial domination. As for the causes underlying the formation of the two systems, some authors hold that it was due to a scarcity of labor stemming from a low population density with almost limitless availability of arable land—i.e., a high land-to-population ratio. This theory was formulated for the first time by the Dutch scholar Herman Jeremias Nieboer (1873–1920) at the beginning of the last century, and at about the same time, with some qualifications, by the noted Russian historian Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii (1841–1911);19 more recently it has been expounded, for instance, in the works of Peter Kolchin, quoted above, and Evsey Domar.20 Rejecting this theory, other scholars, such as Orlando Patterson, have argued that in many parts of the world there is no evidence that the existence of slaves in a society was due to labor scarcity resulting from the man-to-land ratio; in their view slavery developed and existed in different kinds of social systems for entirely different reasons, and not necessarily because of a shortage of labor.21 I tend to agree with this second view; more specifically I think that even if a shortage of labor may have been an important element in the antebellum South, it had a rather limited role in the formation and existence of Russian serfdom, in which, as we will see, other factors were at work. In this respect there is again a difference rather than a similarity between the two systems. Modern slavery and serfdom represent systems of labor exploitation that take place in specific socioeconomic units. These units were the plantation in the American South and the pomest’e (domaine, estate) in Russia, which could include one or more villages and their land and peasants. Over these economic units “reigned,” in the South, the planter and slave owner, who was the absolute master of the slaves, and in Russia, the pomeshchik or seigneur (lord, landowner, or serf owner), always a member of the nobility, whose power over the “souls” was not unlimited and whose rights (in fact privileges) were strictly defined by law as well as by custom. But slavery and serfdom were not only “systems of labor exploitation”; they involved in each case a way of life, a conception of the human condi-

146 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” tion, an ideology of society, and a set of economic arrangements—in short, a cultural apparatus by which the serfs or slaves and the masters were related. It is from this point of view that the comparison between the two systems reveals their most interesting features.

Social and Cultural Contexts of Labor Supply To the extent that a shortage of labor or a high ratio of land to population had, for the sake of argument, some validity, how was this economic problem solved in the two cases under examination? In the American South the unfree workforce consisted, as we know, of black slaves transferred from Africa to the plantations. In this socioeconomic unit—the plantation (as well as in the country as a whole)—the slave was the newcomer, the master the old-timer. In this setting the master was at home; the slaves were aliens, spoke another language (Angolan, for example), were forcibly removed from their familiar environment, community, and way of life, and had experienced a break in their traditions and culture. The slaves had endured the trauma of the Atlantic passage, the brutality of the slave merchants, and the humiliations of the slave market. The answers to the question “How did Africans and their descendants respond to the process of enslavement in the Americas?” point to such features as “efforts to survive extremely hostile environments,” “psychological constraints,” “a systematic assault on their sense of self,” “erasure of subjectivity,” and other physical and mental ordeals.22 The slaves’ marriage and family were not legal institutions. And finally, masters and slaves belonged to different races and, for a time, to different creeds. Needless to add, the planter was the sole owner of the land and the slaves had no claims whatsoever on it.23 In rural Russia matters stood as follows. The serfs represented approximately 50 percent or less of the peasant population24 and had lived in their villages, if not “from time immemorial” as they believed, then at least for many generations. They had enjoyed a long and uninterrupted continuity of their traditions, customs, agrarian festivals, and creeds (some of which had their roots in the pre-Christian era). The serfs and the seigneurs belonged to the same ethnic group, spoke the same language, and worshiped the same God according to the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church.25 Above all, in the countryside the peasant was the old-timer, the seigneur the newcomer. The serf lived and worked in a familiar environment that to some extent he had modeled to serve his needs; he knew the location, shape, and quality of the fields—usually divided into a great number of long narrow strips, redistributed among the households of the rural commune (mir, obshchina) once every three or six years. And since enserf-

Comparing Russian Serfdom and American Slavery • 147

ments took place also through the end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth century,26 the serfs—even as late as the 1830s, for instance—still remembered (from personal experience and not from hearsay) the time when they were free peasants, knew what it meant to be free, and preserved the hope of being free again. The seigneurs (at least those of the first generation of serf owners) came to their estates from above and from without. The landscape they found was unfamiliar, the location of the fields they owned unknown, the periodic redistribution of the strips a puzzle, the crop rotations and the three-field system a mystery, the connection between the sequence of agricultural work and the seasons baffling. As time went by the pomeshchik learned and understood, if not all, at least most of these local agrarian practices and conditions; but whatever the degree of his understanding and involvement in rural affairs and peasant life, in the eyes of the serfs he always remained an outsider, a foreigner, a usurper, and above all a temporary fixture that one day or another would go away—he came out of nowhere and would some day return there. How did this order of things come about? The answer to this question provides also an explanation of why in Russia “shortage of labor” was not a central factor in the origin of serfdom. Serfdom arose from two main causes. The first, and less significant in terms of quantity and social imprint, was the diverse economic obligations that peasants had contracted toward landlords, leading eventually to voluntary serfdom in return for loans. The second, massive and widespread, was initiated by the state when free peasants were told by the tsar’s officials in his name: “From now on you will serve the seigneur and work for him because he is serving the tsar, and the tsar cannot give him a just compensation. Your labor for the seigneur will be the tsar’s compensation, and by doing so you will be serving the tsar.” (In economic terms this seems to indicate not a scarcity of labor but rather a scarcity of capital in the state’s treasury). Three features stand out in this situation. First, at the center of the relationship thus created lay the notion of contract. To be sure, it was a one-sided and compulsory one, but a contract all the same. It represented an explicit institutional arrangement, ordered and mediated by the state, sanctioned by the Church, and understood by the parties. Its stipulations should not come as a surprise, since from the promulgation of the Muscovite Law Code (Sobornoe ulozhenie) of 1649 serfdom itself became a state institution. From that time on, and until its abolition in 1861, no private serfs and no private serf owners existed in Russia. Legislation decreed also that, besides the state and the imperial family, only noblemen (dvoriane; sing. dvorianin) had the right to own land and serfs.27

148 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Second, this institutional arrangement entailed both de facto and de jure the seigneurs’ obligation to serve the tsar and the state either in the army or in the central and local government. From the reign of Peter the Great (1689–1725) onward, the government tried to enforce this obligation as strictly as possible.28 Thus in order to own serfs the noblemen had to serve, and they received in return an allowance from the state and an income from their estate. The legal link between service and the right to own serfs was dissolved on 18 February 1762 by Peter III, who issued the Manifesto on the Abolition of the Russian Nobility’s Obligation to Serve, often referred to as the “Emancipation of the Nobility.”29 The gentry was elated and assumed that this was the end of the story. In fact, in one respect at least, it was just a beginning. When the stipulations of the manifesto became known in the countryside, the serfs petitioned the authorities demanding to be freed without delay from the obligation to work for the pomeshchik and from any bond with him. The reasoning underlying this request was clear and simple: since the seigneurs were no longer obliged to serve the tsar, the serfs had to be liberated from all and any dues and duties to the seigneurs. As to the land, in the eyes of the peasants the issue was even clearer and completely unequivocal. Their religious beliefs and social outlook mandated that the land—mother earth (zemlia matushka)—belonged to those who tilled it and, more generally, to the rural commune and all its members. Like the air and the water, it was nobody’s property; a sort of res nullius to be used but not to be owned. For this was the will of God, and declaring ownership of the land was sinful. During the years of serfdom, this conception found its original expression in the peasant saying “I am yours [the seigneur’s], but the land is mine” (Ia tvoi, no zemlia moia), meaning that even when deprived of liberty, the peasant kept possession of the land. However, this conception was diametrically opposed to the imperial legislation governing property rights and related matters. In official law, the owner of the land was the pomeshchik; but the views of the peasants were not entirely ignored, and they would be one of the reasons for the government’s reluctance to emancipate the serfs without land—a persistent motif in the long and protracted debates in the many state committees appointed during the years to deal with the “peasant question” up to the emancipation in 1861, when the serfs were actually liberated with land. In 1762 the serfs demanded freedom; they would have to wait for it exactly ninety-nine years. In the meantime, they intensified the state of endemic disturbances and disorders in the countryside.30 This state of unrest led finally to the great peasant rebellion headed by the Cossack Emelian Pugachev in 1773–74, in which several hundred thousands peasants took part, and against which a sizable portion of the Russian army had to be

Comparing Russian Serfdom and American Slavery • 149

diverted from the war with Turkey in order to defeat the rebels. This was the fourth massive jacquerie in two centuries: Bolotnikov’s in 1606–07, Stenka Razin’s in 1670–71, and Bulavin’s in 1707–08.31 They were all mercilessly crushed, but given their scope and number of participants, Friedrich Engels’s term “peasant wars” seems eminently appropriate. Peasant risings and rural unrest in Russia were proportionately much more frequent, sustained, and more impressive in strength and numbers than all forms of protest among the slaves in the American South.32 In sum and substance, in Russia the state stood between the serf and the pomeshchik and fulfilled several roles: it defined their relationships and enforced these by legislation and jurisdiction; it regulated the social ladder; it defined the respective rights and duties, including the number of work days that a master could exact from his serfs; finally, it would abolish serfdom by fiat in 1861, and with no opposition from the serf owners. It appears that there were no equivalents in the American South (functional or otherwise) to this social and legal framework, and this kind of relationship was absent between slave and planter. There were no equivalents either to this sort of interference in their relations, and no third party to whom the slave could complain against the master. In the American South the slave always individually faced the planter. Not so in Russia, where on each and every estate the serfs always dealt collectively with the seigneur. This brings us to the third important feature in the Russian rural setup—the several interconnected attributes that characterized the structure and ethos of Russian peasant society. To start with, one of these attributes was that the serfs were at all times an indivisible part of that society; in many areas serfs lived in the vicinity of free peasants, and there was no segregation of any kind between serfs and freemen. Further, as mentioned above, there existed a historical continuity in the collective life of the serfs, a “collective life” that was neither a vague notion nor a metaphor but an institutionalized set of rules and practices enforced and carried out by the mir, the peasant commune. Even under serfdom the peasant commune retained a large extent of autonomy and self-rule; the communal assembly (mirskii skhod) elected the elders of the village, who acted as the peasants’ representatives vis-à-vis the local authorities and the seigneur. Usually the landowner dealt with the serfs through these elders or the senior among them, the starosta. In many estates the steward (prikazchik) was appointed from among the serfs. The mir decided on agricultural matters, social affairs (such as mutual aid, care for widows, orphans, and the sick), and its decisions were widely respected—witness the popular saying: “The mir’s decision is God’s will.” Above all, the peasant commune was also a land commune (pozemel’naia obshchina): it had possession of the land of the village and was

150 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” solely responsible for implementing the periodic redistribution of lots, including those of the réserve seignoriale, which were inextricably mixed with those of the serfs and located in all the different parts of the estate.33 Since the Russian countryside was open-field country and no enclosures separated the fields, lots, and strips, it took great skill and long experience to distinguish among them and carry out a just and equitable repartition; for that reason old peasants were usually put in charge of the delicate mission of the repartition among the households, which was done in public and in the presence of all the heads (bol’shaki; sing. bol’shak) of households.34 There were two main reasons for these repartitions. First, egalitarianism and the sense of equity in the commune dictated that all households be apportioned lots of equal quality (which explains the division of the arable land into multiple narrow strips, dispersed in the various parts of the domain, that were of unequal agricultural value). The second reason was demographic: newlywed couples (or established families), the sons and daughters of peasants who wanted to leave their parents’ household and establish a new, independent one for themselves, were entitled to receive land according to the same rules and principles as all the other households. This system, usually carried out at the next repartition, created an internal population pressure and a scarcity of land if no new tracts of land were added to the domain by the seigneur (either through purchase of a neighbor’s land or by inheritance, matrimonial arrangements, or other family events, as well as real estate deals in the vicinity of the domain).35

More Differences than Similarities Russian serfdom and American slavery were both systems of unfree labor. However, beyond this indubitable (but quite low) common denominator lay many kinds of complex and diverse realities. The serfs had a relatively stable and well-rooted communal life, with shared traditions and collective memories, and rules of work and behavior accepted by the authorities and by the seigneurs. By contrast, the slaves on each and every plantation had to create, anew, mutual bonds, collective representations, and a group ethos. In Russia, the marriage and family of serfs—in contradistinction to those of the slaves—were legal institutions, sanctioned by the Church and recognized by the civil authorities and the courts, both in the state’s written laws and in the customary law of the peasant society.36 The household (dvor) was a social, administrative, and fiscal unit with clearly defined rights and duties. This was not the case with the slaves’ status in the American South. For these reasons, and for others mentioned above, serfdom

Comparing Russian Serfdom and American Slavery • 151

was not “a form of slavery”; it was so only metaphorically speaking, like, for instance, the “slavery” of the industrial workers under capitalism.37 The differences between the two systems are also remarkable regarding the serfs’ and the slaves’ place in the wider society. The Russian peasantry, including the serfs and the state peasants, was part of the nation; in any case they were not “less Russian” (and maybe even more) than the French peasants were French, as described in Eugene Weber’s remarkable book Peasants into Frenchmen.38 The serfs could complain to a higher authority against their master; they served in the army and fought with it on many a battlefield in Europe;39 there was among them an awareness of such national events as wars, the beginning of a new reign, the meaning of imperial manifestoes. Their “naive monarchism,” often deprecated, was in fact a sort of political consciousness and a belief in the existence of a supreme power over and above the serf owner and inferior only to God. In the American South, the slaves seem to have been segregated from the wider society, from the nation, and for a long period, from the great events in the country. In light of all the above, two major conclusions seem possible regarding what I would call “the peculiar character” of the comparison between Russian serfdom and American slavery. The first indicates that this is a comparison between a peasant society, in Russia, and a social category—the slaves—that consisted in a group of agricultural workers. Although relatively large, the group was for a long time in a state of ruthless atomization, and its members had, so to say, to reinvent it as an organic group. The fact that racial exploitation and demonization were not part of Russian serfdom, whereas in the American South these were part and parcel of the “peculiar institution,” reinforces the contrast between them. The second conclusion is that in Russia, from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, a peasant civilization existed, and the serfs were an integral part of it both before and after the emancipation in 1861. In this light, it turns out that the “peculiar” comparison we attempted to draw was chiefly not one between slaves and serfs, but between what I would define as “a world of slave owners” and a “peasant world.” In terms of comparability, this too makes a difference.

152 • Russia before the “Radiant Future”

Appendix Table 1 • Number of Serfs in European Russia and of Slaves in the Antebellum South 1795 1858 1790 1860

Serfs

Tot. pop.

%

19.5 m. 22.5 m.

36.33 m.** 57.87 m.**

Slaves

Tot. pop.

%

657,000 3,950,000

1,961,000** 12,241,000**

33.2 32.3

53.9 39.2

*Number of serf owners: 103,880 **Number of slave owners: 383,657

Table 2 • Distribution of American Slave Owners and Slaves by Size of Holdings, 1860 1–9 % of slave owners % of slaves

71.9 25.6

Number of slaves owned 10–19 20–49 50–199 16.0 21.6

9.3 27.9

2.6 22.5

>200 0.1 2.4

Table 3 • Distribution of Russian Serf Owners and Serfs by Size of Holdings, 1858 1–20 % of slave owners % of slaves

43.6 3.3

Number of male serfs owned 21–100 101–500 >501 33.9 15.9

18.9 37.2

3.6 43.6

1–20 43.6 3.3

Table 4 • Percentage distribution of pomeshchiki according to the number of serfs in their possession in 1762 and 1777* Number of serfs 1001

% of pomeshchiki, 1762

% of pomeshchiki, 1777

51 31 15 2 1

59** 25** 13** 2** 1**

*Landless gentry not included. **Including fewer than 10 serfs: 32%.

Comparing Russian Serfdom and American Slavery • 153

Sources of Tables Tables 1–3 U.S. Census Office, Agriculture of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1864), p. 247. Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1933), vol. 1, p. 530. A. Troinitskii, Krepostnoe naselenie v Rossii, po 10-oi narodnoi perepisi [The Serf Population in Russia According to the Tenth National Census] (St. Petersburg, 1861), p. 45. Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA, 1987), p. 54. Table 4 Michael Confino, “Histoire et psychologie: A propos de la Noblesse Russe au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales, E.S.C. 22, no. 6 (1967): 1194.

Notes 1. See Michel de Taube, La Russie et l’Europe Occidentale à travers dix siècles (Brussels, 1926); B.H. Sumner, “Russia and Europe,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 2 (1951): 1–16; Franco Venturi, “Ricerche e note nei rapporti tra Russia e Occidente nel sette e ottocento,” Rivista storica italiana 84 (1972): 437–513; S.V. Chugrov, Rossiia i zapad: metamorfozy vzaimovospriiatiia [Russia and the West: Metamorphoses of their Mutual Perceptions] (Moscow, 1993). 2. The writings of Peter Chaadaev (ca.1794–1856), and in particular the first of his Philosophical Letters (1836), raised acutely the problem of Russia’s relationship to the West and its role in the history of human culture and progress. Chaadaev deplored the backwardness of Russia and tried to explain how and why it had fallen so far behind the West. For Chaadaev, Russia, alone among all the peoples of the world, had given nothing to humanity besides an example of total failure. It contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit and had only debased it; Russia was nothing but a void in the intellectual order. Both the Slavophiles (Ivan Kireevski and Aleksei Khomiakov) and the Westernizers (Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinskii) rejected—for diametrically opposite reasons—Chaadaev’s views. The government, under the direct instructions of Nicholas I, pronounced him insane and placed him under house arrest and medical supervision. 3. See Nikolai Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa [Russia and Europe] (St. Petersburg, 1871); Konstantin Leontiev, Vostok, Rossiia i slavianstvo [The East, Russia and the Slavs] (Moscow, 1885); Vassili Zenkovski, Russian Thinkers and Europe (Washington, D.C., 1953); Nicholas Riazanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology (Cambridge, MA, 1954); Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, trans. Hilda AndrewsRusiecka (Oxford, 1975), and see Isaiah Berlin’s review of this book: “Russian Thought and the Slavophile Controversy,” The Slavonic and East European Review 59 (1981): 572–586.

154 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” 4. For the earlier period see Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in EighteenthCentury Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1960); on nineteenth-century writings see above note 3; for some recent views: Andrei Zagorsky, “Russia and Europe,” International Affairs 1 (1993): 43–50; S. Neil MacFarlane, “Russian Conceptions of Europe,” Post-Soviet Affairs 10 (1994): 234–269; Iver B. Neuman, Russia and the Idea of Europe (London, 1996); Pavel Tulaev, ed., Rossiia i Evropa: Opyt sobornogo analiza [Russia and Europe: An Attempt at Comprehensive Analysis] (Moscow, 1992); Sergei Chugrov, “Rossiia mezhdu vostokom i zapadom” [Russia between East and West], Mirovaia ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia 7 (1992): 76–85; A.V. Golubev, “Rossiia i vneshnii mir” [Russia and the Outside World], Otechestvennaia istoriia 3 (1995): 214–226; T. G. Parkhalina, ed., Rossiia i Evropa: Tendentsii razvitiia na poroge 3 tysiacheletiia [Russia and Europe: Directions of Development on the Eve of the Third Millennium] (Moscow, 1995). 5. See for instance: Alexander von Schelting, Russland und Europa in Russischen Geschichtsdenken (Bern, 1948), and the review of this book by Boris Elkin, “The Conflict between West and East: A Philosophical and Historical Approach,” Slavonic and East European Review 27 (1948–49): 579–592; E. H. Carr, “Russia and Europe as a Theme of Russian History,” in Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, ed. Richard Pares and A. J. P. Taylor (London, 1956), p. 357–393; Henry Roberts, “Russia and the West: A Comparison and Contrast,” Slavic Review 23 (1964): 1–13; Marc Raeff, “Russia’s Perception of Her Relationship with the West ,” Slavic Review 23 (1964): 14–19; Marc Szeftel, “The Historical Limits of the Question of Russia and the West,” Slavic Review 23 (1964): 20–27; Paul Dukes, World Order in History: Russia and the West (London, 1996). I will not deal with the rather sterile question “Is Russia part of Europe or not?” discussed sometimes in connection with the above topic. 6. See Marc Szeftel, “Some Reflections on the Particular Characteristics of the Russian Historical Process,” The Russian Review 23 (1964): 223–237; Vladimir Kantor, “Rossiiskoe ‘svoeobrazie’: genesis i problemy” [Russia’s ‘Distinctiveness’: Origins and Problems], Svobodnaia mysl’ 10 (1994): 78–85. 7. The concept of “backwardness” in Russian history (with special emphasis on its economic development) was masterfully elaborated by Alexander Gerschenkron, who was well aware of the comparison it entailed and addressed explicitly the issue of comparability by using various methodological approaches; see his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1962), where he applies this concept to the economic development of Italy and Bulgaria, too. 8. For some views on this question see Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Russian Nobility (New York, 1966); Ivo Banac and Paul Bushkovitch, eds., The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe (New Haven, 1983); Michael Confino, “Some Current Problems in Comparative Social History. The Case of the European Nobilities,” in Ferenc Glatz, ed., Modern Age – Modern Historian. In Memoriam György Ránki (1930–1988) (Budapest, 1990), pp. 87–96. 9. See N. F. R. Crafts, “Industrial Revolution in Britain and France: Some Thoughts on the Question ‘Why Was England First?’” Economic History Review 30 (1977):

Comparing Russian Serfdom and American Slavery • 155

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

429–441; W.W. Rostow, “No Random Walk: A Comment on ‘Why was England First?’” Economic History Review 31 (1978): 610–614; see also E. P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” in E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978): 245–301. Research on this theme has produced numerous important works. For a succinct example see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984); Jürgen Kocka, “German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg,” Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988): 3–16. For some recent works see Byron E. Shafer, ed., Is America Different: A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford, 1991); Ian Tyrrel, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1031–1055; Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly 45 (1993): 1–43; Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996); Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Jackson, MI, 1998); see also Ryan K. Beasley, Juliet Kaarbo, Jeffrey S. Lantis, and Michael T. Snarr, eds., Foreign Policy in Comparative Perspective: Domestic and International Influences on State Behavior (Washington, D.C., 2001); the authors examine the foreign policy formation of thirteen countries and purposefully omit the United States because, they write (p. 6), “the United States is … exceptional when compared with other countries of the world,” and “comparison with other countries” would be “like comparing apples and oranges.” Thus, for example, the “uniqueness” of France and of its history is a recurrent theme in numerous works (and not only on the extreme right) in this country; see Gustave Rodrigue, La France éternelle (Paris, 1919); Alexandre Eckhardt, Le Génie français (Paris, 1942); André Siegfried, L’Ame des peuples (Paris, 1950); Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre: L’Appel, 1940–1942 (Paris, 1954); see also Raoul Girardet, Le Nationalisme français (Paris, 1966); Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (Paris, 1972); Alain Peyrefitte, Le Mal français (Paris, 1976); Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945: Intellect and Pride (Oxford, 1977); and on, a lighter note, Andrew Jack, The French Exception: Still so Special? (London, 1999). Works on that topic, from the highly fanciful to the truly serious, have in common a constant recourse to discursive comparisons and analogies, usually based on clichés. The national character’s raison d’être (and the study of it) implies a contradistinction to others’ (one or more) “national characters”; hence the constant tendency “to compare.” In the recent past the word “mind” was used instead of “character” to the same effect (the Italian mind, the Japanese mind, etc.). Lately the term “culture” has become fashionable: thus, “Russian culture” is supposed to explain why this country cannot have a democratic regime and a market economy. These are the results of the search for word substitutions, since “Russian soul” is old-fashioned, “race” utterly discredited, and “genes” not politically correct. Taking again the example of France, once upon a time the universalistic and centralized French educational system of the Third Republic, whose goal was

156 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” cultural uniformity, required that children in Algeria, Sénégal, and Indochina read and repeat in school “Nos ancêtres les Gaullois.” Not everybody perceived the ridiculousness of this metropolitan schooling system. Today, French children and those of Vietnamese and Algerian immigrants recite studiously “Nos ancêtres les Européens.” To that effect historians are already producing textbooks that minimize (in scope and content) the endless wars waged between Europe’s nations during the centuries, emphasize beyond measure cultural interactions, and coyly skip over the duplicities of European international diplomacy at all times and the unsavory facts (atrocities, massacres, and the like) that occurred from the Hundred Years’ War to the Thirty Years’ War to the endemic Franco-German conflicts. One would think that the lofty ideal of European unity and cooperation should be a matter of the present and of the future, not a pretext for presentist projections to the past and rewriting history à la mode du jour. 15. See above, in chapter 5, the introduction to the article on the nobility in Russia and Western Europe. 16. For some important works on comparative history and methodology by historians and non-historians see Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes,” Revue de synthèse 46 (1928): 15–50, reprinted in Bloch, Mélanges historiques, 2 vols. (Paris, 1963), vol. 1, pp. 16–40; William H. Sewell, Jr., “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” History and Theory 6 (1967): 208–218; Alette Olin Hill and Boyd H. Hill, Jr., “Marc Bloch and Comparative History,” American Historical Review 85 (1980): 828–857; Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Essays on Comparative Institutions (New York, 1965) and Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View (Chicago, 1998); Richard L. Merritt and Stein Rokkan, eds., Comparing Nations: The Use of Quantitative Data in Cross-National Research (New Haven, 1966); Cyril E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York, 1967); Ivan Valier, ed., Comparative Methods in Sociology: Essays on Trends and Applications (Berkeley, 1971); Daniel P. Warick and Samuel Osheron, eds., Comparative Research Methods (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973); Neil J. Smelser, Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976); Raymond Grew, “The Case for Comparing Histories,” American Historical Review 85 (1980): 763–778; Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Pietro Rossi, ed., La Storia comparata: approcci e prospettive (Milan, 1990); Matei Dogan and Dominique Pelassy, How to Compare Nations: Strategies in Comparative Politics (London, 1990); Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London, 1992); André Burguière and Raymond Grew, eds., The Construction of Minorities: Cases for Comparison across Time and Around the World (Ann Arbor, 2000); Geoffrey Pridham, The Dynamics of Democratization: A Comparative Approach (New York, 2000). (Works on comparative history related to the American South and to Russia will be mentioned in the second part of this essay.) 17. On each of these two subjects there is of course an enormous body of research—books and monographs—much of it of the highest quality; this fact underscores the paucity of the comparative works. Important in this category

Comparing Russian Serfdom and American Slavery • 157

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

is Peter Kolchin’s Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA, 1987). As will be seen below, on several major issues of this comparison I propose a different interpretation from Kolchin’s. See also M. L. Bush, ed., Slavery and Serfdom: Studies in Legal Bondage (Cambridge, 1996), a useful collection that offers a juxtaposition of essays on each of the two systems rather than a comparative examination. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, 2 vols. (New York, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 249–251. H. J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague, 1910); V. O. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii, vols. 1–5 in Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia [Writings], 8 vols. (Moscow, 1956-1959); Engl. abridged trans. by C.J. Hogarth, A History of Russia (London, 1911). Evsey D. Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic History 30 (1970): 18–32. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1982); see also Patterson, “The Structural Origins of Slavery: A Critique of the Nieboer-Domar Hypothesis from a Comparative Perspective,” in Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, vol. 292 of Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1977): 12–34. See Alex Bontemps, The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (Ithaca, 2001), and the book review by Sean Condon, “Searching for the Enslaved Subject,” H-Net Reviews ([email protected]), 22 February 2002. For some important works on these topics from a comparative perspective see C. Vann Woodward, The Comparative Approach to American History (New York, 1968); George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (Oxford, 1995) and The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley, 1997); and see also Leonard Thompson’s review of these books, “Comparatively Speaking,” New York Review of Books, 14 May 1998, pp. 48–51; Enrico Dal Lago and Rick Halpern, eds., The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History (London, 2002). For some informative data on the respective numbers of slaves, serfs, and landowners, size of holdings, and percentage distribution of serf ownership, see the tables in the Appendix at the end of this chapter. A clarification is in order here. As hinted above, our terms of reference do not include ethnically non-Russian areas such as the Baltic provinces, for example, where the seigneurs were German barons and the serfs Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian peasants; in this case, masters and serfs belonged to different ethnic groups, spoke different languages, and did not always share the same religious beliefs. Thus, for instance, during the reign of Catherine II (1762–1796), the empress gave away about two million free peasants to favorites, courtiers, and other noblemen who had distinguished themselves in service to the state in the army or the bureaucracy; Catherine’s son, Paul I (1796–1801), distributed in a much shorter time more than one and a half million peasants; see Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1961), pp. 355–358.

158 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” 27. Although this was the accepted wording of the laws and regulations, women of noble origin (or commoners married to noblemen) had the same rights and privileges as men regarding estate and serf ownership. Since women were not required to serve the state, various juridical expedients were found in these cases to regularize them. For a thorough examination of this topic, see Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca, 2002). 28. For the attitude of the landowners toward this obligation and their relations with the authorities, see “The Nobility in Russia and Western Europe: Contrasts and Similarities” in this volume. 29. The manifesto canceled only the legal obligation to serve; in fact the vast majority of the nobility continued to serve as in the past, but now they conceived of it as an act of free choice and not as an imposed duty. In addition, during the decades of compulsory service a psychological shift had occurred in the attitude of the nobility toward the service: initially an inconvenience and a disruption in one’s life, it had become a fountain of honor and a source of enhanced social status (in addition to the state’s pay, the tsar’s grants, and the military and civil medals, which carried various rewards for life). 30. Thus, for instance, in 1764–1769 in Moscow guberniia alone (European Russia was divided at that time into fifty administrative units called gubernii) there were more than forty uprisings and outbreaks of violence; thirty proprietors, nine of them women, were slain by their peasants, and many others had attempts made on their lives (see Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, p. 554–555). 31. On these rebellions see Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels, 1600–1800 (New York, 1972). 32. In the South, one of the biggest uprisings was that of Nat Turner in 1831; it involved seventy slaves and lasted two days. 33. See Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, passim; Dorothy Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930 (Stanford, 1983). Two main systems of agrarian exploitation were used on the seigneurial estates. In the first, the land was divided evenly between the serf owner and the commune, and the peasants rendered barshchina (corvée)—usually three days a week on the lord’s plots and three days on their own. The barshchina system was widespread in areas where soils were of superior quality and the land was located close to bustling markets. During the winter (four to five months), when there was no agricultural work, peasants would leave the estate for various periods of time and work in all sorts of crafts and menial jobs in nearby or faraway towns. In the second system, all the land of the estate was left to the serfs and they had to pay an annual amount of money (obrok) to the lord. This system existed mostly in regions of poor soils, and a considerable proportion of the peasants worked in seasonal non-agricultural crafts outside the estate, in many cases hundreds of miles from home. This practice was called otkhod and annually involved millions of peasants and serfs; see Boris Gorshkov, “Serfs on the Move: Peasant Seasonal Migration in Pre-Reform Russia, 1800–1861,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History [Bloomington] 1 (2000): 627–656.

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34. According to custom, in various circumstances, a peasant woman too could be the head of a household (bol’shukha, bol’shitsa) and participate in the communal assembly with the same rights as a man. 35. The question could be asked, why did the seigneurs, who wielded considerable powers, not try to break up the peasant communes and differently organize the estates’ economic activity and agricultural work? Briefly stated, these were the main reasons for not doing so: (1) in many respects the commune served as a useful intermediary between the landlord and the serfs, (2) it guaranteed the regular and orderly execution of the agricultural work and served as a sort of fiscal agent for collecting state taxes and seigneurial dues, and 3) the pomeshchiki always feared that attempts to break up the commune might meet with peasant resistance and bring about the collapse of the precarious equilibrium in the estate and even beyond it (“beyond it” because they knew from experience that disturbances in one estate could quickly spread to neighboring ones and quite often to entire regions). In a word, the seigneurs behaved the way they did for the sake of convenience: out of sheer necessity, they preserved (some of them grudgingly) the peasant commune, the village, the customary ways of life and work, and the cohesion of rural society. 36. Peasant customary law constitutes a major topic in Russian rural history; classic works in this field include: E. I. Iakushkin, Obychnoe pravo [Customary Law], 3 vols. (Iaroslavl’, 1875, 1896; Moscow, 1908); S. V. Pakhman, Obychnoe grazhdanskoe pravo v Rossii [Customary Civil Law in Russia] (St. Petersburg, 1877); Alexandra Efimenko, Issledovaniia narodnoi zhizni, vol. 1: Obychnoe pravo [Studies in Popular Life; vol. 1: Customary Law] (St. Petersburg 1884); A. A. Leontiev, Volostnoi sud i iuridicheskie obychai krest’ian [County Courts and Peasants’ Judicial Customs] (St. Petersburg, 1895) and Krest’ianskoe pravo [Peasant Justice] (St. Petersburg, 1909); K. R. Kachorovskii, Narodnoe pravo [Popular Justice] (St. Petersburg, 1906); V.V. Tenishev, Pravosudie v russkom krest’ianskom bytu [Justice in the Russian Peasant Customs] (Briansk, 1907). For some recent studies see William T. Shinn, Jr., “The Law of the Russian Peasant Household,” Slavic Review 20 (1961): 601–621; Peter Czap, Jr., “Peasant Class Courts and Peasant Customary Justice in Russia, 1861–1912,” Journal of Social History 7 (1967): 149–178; V. A. Alexandrov, Obychnoe pravo krepostnoi derevni Rossii XVIII–nachalo XIX v. [Peasant Customary Law under Serfdom in Russia in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century] (Moscow, 1984); and the Forum in The Russian Review 44 (1985): 1–43: Moshe Lewin, “Customary Law and Russian Rural Society in the Post-Reform Era”; Christine D. Worobec, “Reflections on Customary Law and Post-Reform Peasant Russia”; George Yaney, “Some Suggestions Regarding the Study of Russian Peasant Society prior to Collectivization”; Michael Confino, “Russian Customary Law and the Study of Peasant Mentalités”. 37. For an opinion on serfdom as a “variant of slavery” see Kolchin, Unfree Labor, pp. 41–46. 38. Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976); for a recent evaluation of Weber’s book, its place in historiography, and its importance in comparative history, see Miguel Cabo

160 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” and Fernando Molina, “The Long and Winding Road of Nationalization: Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen in Modern European History,” European History Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2009): 264–286. 39. Although there was no general conscription, peasant communities had to supply a certain number of young men to every draft. Service in the army (although brutish and exhausting) was a formative experience; Russian soldiers, most of them peasants, were in Berlin in October 1760; they crossed the Alps by the St. Gothard Pass in August 1799 under Suvorov; they fought in Dresden in the “Battle of the Nations” in 1813, and the following year they were in Paris and bivouacked on the Champ de Mars, the extensive park that today extends from the Ecole Militaire to the Eiffel Tower.

d Agrarian Crisis, Urbanization, and CHAPTER 7

the Russian Peasants at the End of the Old Regime, 1880s–1920s

e

Introduction Three main topics in Russian rural history from the 1880s through the Great War and the subsequent social and political upheavals have been the object of reexamination and debate:1 the “agrarian crisis” (linked to the agricultural crises and peasant standards of living); the peasantry and the process of urbanization in relation to the problem of seasonal migratory work; and finally, the rural commune. Ideally, an examination of these issues should have addressed historical writings both in Russia and in “the West” (which includes also such geographically non-Western countries as Japan, India, and Israel). However, the events of the 1990s in Russia have created a peculiar situation for an endeavor like this. On the one hand, it seems out of place to re-address Soviet historical writings, most of which are characterized by dogmatism and one-sidedness: the criticism of this historical production has already been done in the past, and the discussions between Western and Soviet scholars on the issues it raises were often rather sterile, didactic, and of little profit for the advancement of creative research. On the other hand, although the new departures and the attempts at criticism of the old approaches in current Russian historical writing (to be mentioned below) have made remarkable progress, their scope as of now is relatively limited, and their results too fragmentary to be meaningfully evaluated. For that reason part of the Soviet and Russian research could not be discussed, which has inevitably led to a certain imbalance in the presentation (within its terms of reference as defined above) between the treatment of Western scholarship and new scholarship in Russia. In contradistinction to this disruption in Soviet/Russian research, Western scholarship on peasant Russia shows a remarkable continuity. Indeed, its most recent advances have built to a great extent upon the thematic 161

162 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” groundwork and the conceptual breakthroughs achieved during forty years of steady contributions by earlier specialists, who worked in a field that not long ago (in the 1950s and 1960s, for instance) was regarded as esoteric and marginal against the background of the pervasive enticement of the profession by political, diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural history. These scholars’ work transformed this “marginal” field into a major area of study, and this was done well before the appearance of “history from below,” of the “history of simple folks,” and latter-day exogenous trends and fads that confer now upon peasant studies a phony intellectual chic more akin to salon-peasantism than to the spirit of the subject matter. In this cohort of pioneers are the founders of Russian peasant and agrarian studies in the West and the teachers of generations of distinguished researchers in this field. Among them one can find, for instance, scholars like Pierre Pascal (professor at the Sorbonne and a great connoisseur of the life of Russian peasants, among whom he lived several years in the 1920s, and who was the first to coin, in 1936, the enduring expression civilisation paysanne), Geroid T. Robinson, Roger Portal, Basile Kerblay, Olga Crisp, Lazar Volin, Jerome Blum, Alexander Gerschenkron, Moshe Lewin, Peter Czap, Arcadius Kahan, R. E. F. Smith, William Shinn, Jean-Louis Van Regemorter, Mary Matossian, François-Xavier Coquin, Eberhard Müller, Evsey Domar, James Y. Simms, and many others (who will forgive me for not naming them all). These scholars wrote well before the 1980s, which clearly disproves the view of one scholar about the would-be existence of a “curious and lengthy ‘silence’ of Western Russianists on the peasant question,” a silence that supposedly was finally “broken” only in 1986.2 It is thanks to this tradition of scholarship that Russian agrarian history in the West has achieved remarkable results, and it is in a position to raise new questions, to test new paradigms, and to set the research agenda for the future.

An “Agrarian Crisis”? The mainstream historical research on late Imperial Russia, both in the former Soviet Union and in the West, was informed (until very recently) by a twofold explicit or implicit approach to the course of Russia’s history during this period: it was both deterministic and teleological. Reading x Russia’s history life from the vantage point of 1917, it posited that most of the major historical processes and events during the preceding one hundred years or so were inevitable and almost preordained. It assumed that this inexorable succession of occurrences led necessarily to “1917” in general, and to the October Revolution in particular. Within this general conceptual framework, this approach looked into the “agrarian question” for the elements and de-

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velopments that would confirm the “drift to revolution.” “Many analysts,” observes Robert C. Stuart, “have focused upon the Russian rural economy for the light that such an investigation might shed upon political and economic forces leading to the Revolution of 1917, the base upon which postrevolutionary agricultural developments would proceed.”3 It is doubtful, however, that this approach, which usually considers the “agrarian problem” purely in terms of political forces and sees the dynamics of rural society mainly in terms of the assumed immiseration of the peasantry, could lead to a balanced vision and deep understanding of the complexities and richness of this major field of Russian history. Using more rigorous, diversified, and sophisticated methods of research, other specialists of Russian rural history have focused their attention on three distinct, albeit closely related, aspects of the subject: (1) the agricultural crisis, (2) the problem of the peasants’ living standards, and (3) the agrarian crisis proper. The central and well-established theory in Western and Soviet/Russian scholarly literature was that between 1880 and 1914 rural Russia underwent a succession of crises in each of these three major areas. It experienced an agricultural crisis consisting in a decline of agricultural production relative to the level of accepted utilization of agricultural produce. It had a crisis in peasant living standards leading to a steady process of peasant immiseration as a result of both diminishing grain for consumption (either because of heavier tax burdens, decreased production per capita, or the government’s policy of forcing grain exports) and declining effective wage rates for rural labor. Finally, it was assumed that there existed a “deepening agrarian crisis” (Teodor Shanin), compounded in part by the results of the first two ongoing crises and in part by a “land hunger,” an exploitative relationship between the industrial and agricultural sectors, and the government’s inept policies in general and in the agricultural economy in particular. According to this theory, the event that epitomizes best this situation is the 1905 Revolution, attributed in large part to an “agrarian crisis.” Its specific symptoms were rising land prices, growing arrears in peasant redemption payments, the famine of the early 1890s, declining per capita land holdings of the peasants, and reports of peasant impoverishment in graindeficit provinces. The 1905 uprising appears, therefore, as an “obvious and not surprising peasant reaction” to an unbearable economic situation. Not long ago a majority of Western historians subscribed to this hypothesis. Although arrived at by entirely different theoretical assumptions and statistical procedures, a similar theory was held by Soviet historians, who saw it as “the violent reaction of exploited peasants and industrial workers against their growing immiseration, compounded by a political crisis of the regime as a result of the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.”

164 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” However, new research has offered other interpretations that led to debates among economic and social historians on most of these issues. Among the important contributions to this debate were those of Arcadius Kahan, Paul Gregory, James Y. Simms, Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Elvira M. Wilbur, and others. What are the main findings that should be cited in this short overview? One of the first salvos of disagreement from established orthodoxy was fired by James Y. Simms, whose seminal article “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View,”4 inaugurated a lively and prolonged debate in which numerous scholars participated, among them Gary M. Hamburg, John Thomas Sanders, and others mentioned below.5 Simms contested the existence of an endemic crisis of Russian agriculture and rejected the link between increases in peasant arrears in annual tax assessments and the assumed mounting poverty. He argued that peasant ability and willingness to make voluntary contributions to indirect taxes and the liquor tax proved that increasing arrears in redemption payments did not necessarily indicate peasant distress as usually assumed. He criticized, therefore, both the theory of the crisis in Russian agriculture and the supposed existence of its basic component—the impoverishment and destitution of the vast majority of the peasants, as argued or implicitly assumed by the Soviet scholars and by Geroid T. Robinson, Theodore von Laue, Lazar Volin, Leopold H. Haimson, Donald Treadgold, and other Western scholars.6 Simms contended that virtually every index that has been used to prove the existence of the crisis (tax arrears, the burden of indirect taxation, declining output of cereal per capita, and the impact of low grain prices) has been shown to have other interpretations. At about the same time, Paul Gregory’s fundamental findings on Russian national income and on tsarist agriculture indicated that the empirical evidence fails to support the agrarian crisis hypothesis. Using original quantitative data, and correcting the pioneering statistical work of Raymond Goldsmith,7 Gregory found that There is little evidence of declining per capita incomes or living standards in Russian agriculture between the 1880s and 1905. Instead, the picture is one of an agricultural population that was experiencing rising per capita income and living standards. The evidence presented in this paper is aggregative and does not rule out the possibility of declining per capita incomes in particular agricultural regions. In fact, the origins of the agrarian crisis hypothesis may ultimately be traced to certain agricultural regions that were suffering substantial declines in real incomes. For the Empire as a whole, this did not appear to be the case.8

In addition, Gregory contested the prevalent bleak picture of the state of the agriculture in pre-revolutionary Russia and produced computations

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indicating that it “performed much better than the proponents of the agrarian crisis hypothesis would have us think.” According to this view, Russian agricultural labor productivity growth does not seem to be much lower relative to other countries, as shown in Gregory’s table on “the rate of agricultural labor productivity + rate of growth of industrial labor productivity in Russia and selected countries”: Country Russia Germany France U.S. Japan Norway Canada U.K.

Period 1883–1913 1850–1909 1870–1911 1870–1910 1880–1920 1875–1910 1880–1910 1801–1901

Relative growth rate .75 .67 .99 .87 .86 1.00 .77 .749

Finally, Gregory’s research, far from detecting a process of immiseration among the peasantry, found rising consumption in 1880–1914. This fitted well in his overall thesis of a rising per capita income in Russia during this period, and of a continuous economic growth rather than crisis and stagnation. The most articulated contrary opinion to these new findings was Teodor Shanin’s in his work The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of the Century (volume 1: Russia as a “Developing Society”; volume 2: Russia, 1905–1907: Revolution as a Moment of Truth [New Haven, 1986]). A sociologist turned historian, Shanin tried to connect three major developments in his interpretation of Russia’s agrarian and political development. His first thesis repeated the old view that (1) the Russian peasantry was undergoing a process of immiseration stemming both from overpopulation and from the government’s policy of forcing grain exports, and (2) that Russia’s industrial growth was achieved by squeezing the peasantry by means of the government’s fiscal policy. His second thesis was that this course produced a condition defined as Russia’s “dependent development,” i.e., being the first Third World country in modern history, which is what accounts for Russia’s “otherness.” These two theses engendered Shanin’s profound pessimism about pre-revolutionary Russia’s long-range opportunities for economic development and transformation, and they provided the background for his third thesis: the 1905 Revolution (defined for some reason as “the moment of truth”) as the result of these inexorable developments, which took their roots (as the first part of Shanin’s book argues) from Kievan Rus’ in the early Middle Ages.

166 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” The presumed link between the 1905 Revolution and a supposed agrarian crisis was convincingly refuted by Paul Gregory, as we have seen above. On Shanin’s second thesis about peasant immiseration, John Bushnell, reviewing his book, wrote: the evidence will not support Shanin’s simplistic picture of industrial growth fueled by government exactions that drove the Russian peasantry as a whole ever deeper into destitution. If this had been presented 15 or 20 years ago, it might have seemed a reasonable summary of familiar ideas. In the meantime, however, additional information has come to light, older data have been brought into new focus, and the abundant ethnographic evidence that never fit the conventional picture very well now makes more economic sense. Shanin has overlooked, or chosen to ignore, all that evidence.10

Indeed, this is maybe the weakest of Shanin’s already flimsy interpretations. The “model of dependent development” describes Russia’s agrarian and agricultural evolution before 1917 as belonging to the same category as that of Third World countries today. Apart from the inherent vagueness of the “model” (to which type of Third World countries is Russia assimilated? Saudi Arabia? Mexico? Bangladesh? Haiti?), and whatever its definition—either lato senso or stricto senso—it is obviously open to criticism in several crucial respects. In this perspective, Shanin’s attempt appears to be an effort to revive old views and interpretations on the agrarian crisis by using a new, fashionable, and ineffective model. Moreover, further conceptual refinement, additional data, and availability of untapped original sources have produced new research that corroborates James Simms’s and Paul Gregory’s earlier work and disproves Shanin’s speculations. Prominent among this research is that of Stephen G. Wheatcroft, whose main findings, for our purpose, may be summarized as follows: 1. The growth in peasant unrest around 1903–1906 “was probably more a consequence of the decline in government authority, regional problems, and the specific problems of wage laborers, than any increase in overall peasant destitution.” On the contrary, according to Wheatcroft, there was “a long-term improvement in the major indicators reflecting the living standards of peasant producers—namely rising per capita grain production even net of exports.” 2. According to all evidence livestock farming was in a general longterm crisis, but the latter had no immediate effects on the peasant economy. 3. There were two serious periods of crisis in peasant living standards: in 1891–1893 (during the “great famine” resulting from massive

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droughts), and in 1905–1908, that is, after the disruptions caused by the 1905 Revolution, and not as a cause of it. “In both cases [writes Wheatcroft] the government responded with enormous amounts of relief in the form of food loans,”11 a fact completely passed over in Shanin’s thesis about the government’s “inept” and “exploitative” agricultural policies. Subsequently, several Soviet/Russian scholars produced findings that support some of these new conclusions. Thus A. S. Nifontov’s study of the grain trade indicated that, contrary to earlier estimates, Russia’s production was actually outstripping population growth (a per capita increase of 0.6 to 0.8 percent per annum). A. M. Anfimov pointed out a small but measurable increase in the peasants’ standard of living. And the respected agrarian specialist Boris Mironov confirmed the hypothesis, which I formulated nearly thirty years before him (to the chagrin, then, of some colleagues of mine), that the rich kulak and the poor peasant were marginal figures in the social landscape of rural Russia,12 and therefore stratification was limited, immiseration too, making all the interpretations based on the existence of these two socially marginal entities eo ipso devoid of factual foundation. In the Russian village at that time the seredniak (middle peasant) was king. In effect, an in-depth study conducted by Elvira M. Wilbur on the Voronezh province, a key agricultural area, brought forward new supporting evidence for these findings, even with regard to the so-called grain-deficit and “impoverished” provinces in Central European Russia. Moreover, she uncovered some basic methodological flaws and systematic statistical bias in the computations underlying the traditional interpretations, which explain in part their faulty results.13 Concluding her study, she writes: It shows an economy in which two-thirds of the counties were prosperous or doing tolerably well, while only one-third lived poorly and apparently even this third did not live on the brink of catastrophe. Second, the study shows how the traditional view erred by demonstrating that it rested on three major errors in methodology and interpretation: draft animals were undercounted and the reasons for leasing and fallow reduction and what they meant were seriously misinterpreted. Each error understated prosperity and overstated poverty in the prosperous and middle income counties. Cumulatively, the effect rendered the eight counties virtually invisible in traditional accounts. Although the findings deal only with one province, they are based on comprehensive and detailed data. I think they clearly raise the possibility that the traditional interpretation was seriously overstated for the whole region in which Voronezh was located. Evidence from the “impoverished center” was a pivotal element in shaping the traditional view that the Rus-

168 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” sian peasantry faced a severe economic crisis during this period. If further investigation demonstrates that the traditional view seriously overstated the degree of peasant poverty in the region, it will be necessary to reopen the question of the severity of the Russian agrarian crisis on the eve of the Revolution of 1917.14

One last but important by-product of this debate was that it also validated many of the theses of Alexander Chayanov, who in 1915 and 1922, while studying peasant budgets, concluded that agricultural conditions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia were much better than assumed at that time by liberal and Marxist critics of the regime. This is not the place to enter into an examination of Chayanov’s theory of the “family labor farm,” his insistence on the resilience of the peasant farm, and its ability to survive and prosper in a capitalist economy, which lay in the peasant’s economy “peculiar features”—specifically, the elastic labor capacity of the peasant household with its high adaptability to small-scale agriculture, “dead seasons,” and irregular labor requirements. Chayanov’s topical theory was analyzed and made available in English by Daniel Thorner, R. E. F. Smith, and Basile Kerblay as early as 1966,15 that is (according to the view quoted above), in the years of the “curious and lengthy silence” of Western Russianists, as Kingston-Mann would have us believe.16 Reformers in post-communist Russia and their Western advisers should ponder these old truths and Chayanov’s theory—preferably before they engineer the next, now “market economy”–generated, rural catastrophe in the Russian countryside. After Stolypin’s reform, Stalin’s collectivization, Khrushchev’s “virgin lands” experiments, and Brezhnev’s “stagnation,” this would be an additional heavy blow to rural Russia.

The Peasant and the City The thesis of the existence of an agrarian crisis and a process of constant immiseration of the peasantry suffers from another major weakness: it ignores the social and geographical factors at play and overlooks one of the major characteristics of the Russian peasantry that had a direct effect on both on its material situation and sources of income, and its way of life, namely, the seasonal peasant migratory work and the role of the rural commune. Whatever one’s thesis and findings regarding the existence (or nonexistence) of an agrarian crisis in Russia at that time, these characteristics must be taken into account in order to depict realistically the peasants’ everyday life and the dynamics of rural society. This is not an easy task, especially since many “social” historians today are city-bred educated boys and girls whose representations of the countryside come mostly from

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books and movies, a fact that deserves a few comments and a brief aside from our main subject.

City Dwellers Look at the Russian Peasant Since presently most of us are anyway “city boys” and “city girls,” this of course could not be sufficient explanation for the difficulties that researchers encounter in the writing of rural history, although one can find by and large that it is still easy for scholars to fall in the trap of placing peasants’ behavior into patterns that represent the perspective of non-peasants, such as, for instance, the “perspective” of non-peasants like the scholars themselves. Some historians are aware of these pitfalls; as a young scholar put it not long ago (after delivering a paper on Russian peasants) in reply to some objections and criticism: “What do you want? These peasants belong to another culture. We cannot identify with them and understand their culture. It’s not like the [Russian] intellectuals, with whom we can identify and whose mentality we understand.” (I am not sure that the condition of a twentieth-century American or French intellectual, for instance, is sufficient guarantee of a better understanding of the “mentality” of nineteenthcentury Russian intellectuals, but this is another question.) Be that as it may, we should look also for other recurrent factors that influence the work on this topic. It seems that the study of the peasantry and of the subjects related to it presents several specific difficulties. One of them is a widespread approach that sees the peasants as an inert mass—a mass awaiting to be told what things are, when they will change (if at all), and how. It is admitted that this “inert mass” is capable of occasional violent outbursts (krest’ianskie bunty, volneniia, or, in Sovietese, krest’ianskoe dvizhenie), but these “outbursts” are seen as inconsequential because, adopting de facto Marx’s pessimistic view of “rural cretinism,” it is held (wrongly, as we shall see) that the peasants had no program, no organization, no social cohesion, and that their revolts could lead nowhere, and certainly not to the radiant “future society.” This “inert-mass approach” implies also that usually peasants are acted upon by outside forces and represent a passive factor reacting to external stimuli consisting mainly in pressures or blandishments (which is an erudite formulation of the popular theory of the carrot and the stick). In one word, the peasants can be the object, not a subject, of political action. Another difficulty stems from the fact that most scholars approach this topic without a theory of how an agrarian society works, and not just of how it is replaced by a modern industrial society, the topic that interests them chiefly. In a certain sense, they approach their subject with various theories of change while ignoring the forces of cohesion, of persistence,

170 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” and of tradition. But in fact, no theory of change can have an explanatory value if it does not incorporate in the model the structural forces of persistence. We may ask now, what happens when these difficulties obstruct the way to a clear understanding of peasant topics? What happens when there are problems that need to be explained “somehow”? It appears that one of the substitutes for knowledge and understanding is the use of broad generalizations like “the Russian mind,” “Russianness,” and the “Russian soul,” or their implicit and trendier equivalents like “the national character” and “culture.” Unfortunately, the “national character” concept, like psychoanalysis, has an equally successful explanation for everything and for its opposite; as for “culture,” it has become lately a passe-partout notion that explains everything and nothing. These cannot produce serious explanations, a state of things that once more exemplifies first, that we are skillful at devising models but much less so at understanding human beings (thus, in fact, “Russianness” is a model of sorts), and second, that we follow the prevalent tendency of thinking—particularly on social and national issues—in terms of stereotypes instead of doing it along rational lines. Why do we believe or why do we agree with these stereotypes? Primarily, I think, because they are consistent with our own prejudices. Thus, the Russian peasantry has been described in otherwise competent works as “an amorphous mass,” as a “cloudy mass of isolated” villages, and as “hordes of people who had no real links whatsoever with the social groups.”17 It has been said also that the Russian peasants were divorced from the realities of Russian life. One wonders where these “realities” were: only in the offices of the chinovniki? Only in the editorial boards of the “thick journals”? Only in the intrigues of Rasputin, who was just a manifestation of the “idiosyncrasies of Imperial Government,” as one respected scholar put it in a dramatic understatement? Is it possible that none of the “realities of Russian life” existed in the countryside? In agricultural work? In the rural industries? In the army, where millions of peasants spent long years of service? A distinguished scholar has argued in a widely used book that the Russian peasant did not love the soil: “There is no evidence that the Russian peasant loved the soil; this sentiment is to be found mainly in the imagination of gentry romantics who visited their estates in the summertime.”18 Let us set aside “the gentry romantics” and the questions of whether “love” is an appropriate category in this context and how it can be assessed in this case. After all, how can we separate “the soil” from the family, the household, and the village with which it was inextricably bound in the peasant’s life? Can we meaningfully isolate one element of a highly integrated social fabric and a total way of life whose interconnectedness—un admirable

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engrenage, in Marc Bloch’s memorable expression—was its main characteristic? In any case, I doubt also that anybody in quest of such “evidence” would have missed the many forms and manifestations—social, economic, and religious—of the peasant’s attitude to the soil. Thus, under serfdom the peasant used to say to the landlord: “Ia tvoi, no zemlia moia”—“I am yours, but the land is mine.” Serfs detached from their families and from agricultural occupations in order to work as servants (dvorovye) in the lord’s household considered the separation a calamity. Feuds over land possession were not rare between villages and between seigneurial estates. Between 1861 and 1900 Russian peasants bought millions of dessiatines of land from noblemen, who were losing interest and money in their estates and leaving them, at times with nostalgic musings like Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard romantic heroes. Finally, the soil—mat’ syra zemlia, in popular parlance—was a central and active element in peasant beliefs, which had survived from pagan times through centuries of Christian preaching. It was present in rites and rituals, and its fecundity was a major theme of worship. How can we measure, then, if the Russian peasant “loved” or did not “love” the soil? But if, for the sake of argument, we were to use this terminology, then if not the soil, what did the peasant love, this rare specimen in the rural history of the world? Only the tsar? Only vodka? Only beating his wife? The fact is that in Russia the attachment to the soil was part of the meaning of peasant life. And if we cannot understand this link to the soil, then we cannot understand very much of rural Russia.

Peasant Cities One of the salient trends in modern historiography is the emphasis on Russia’s pre-revolutionary industrial development and the making of the working class. Influenced maybe by the massive work of Soviet historians on this subject, and by the erroneous hypothesis that the February and October Revolutions were led, if not made, by the urban proletariat and its “vanguard,” the Bolshevik Party, this approach implies that the peasantry had, at best, a secondary role both as a social element and as a political force, and that the slow changes in agriculture were of much less importance than the dynamic developments and by-products of industrialization, considered (wrongly, as we shall see) to have been primarily urban based. One of the by-products of this approach is the view that the peasants, “scattered in the cloudy mass of isolated villages, and out of touch with their times,” became an effective factor only to the extent that they joined the industrial workforce in the cities. Furthermore, this approach assumes implicitly or explicitly that from the moment the peasant joined the urban

172 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” proletariat, he or she became an “ex-peasant” and adopted the worldview, mental makeup, and propensity for social and political activism of his or her fellow industrial workers. The “ex-peasant” has been, indeed, a key concept in this approach, best exemplified, for instance, by Leopold Haimson’s studies on workers’ identity and their role in social polarization.19 Stemming from a strange misconception of the mental processes in an individual’s psyche and in collective mindsets, this approach seems to have led also to a disregard of the social and political role of the peasantry, an underestimation of the fact that the bulk of the urban mass were peasants, and to a neglect of the momentous feature, pointed out by Reginald Zelnik, that most of the workers were in fact peasant-workers, whose mentality was “a volatile mix” of old ways and beliefs meeting new conditions and impressions.20 This nexus of questions is of great importance for understanding Russia’s peasant world as well as its encounter with modernity and its salient epitomes: the city and industrialization. Starting in the 1880s the urban population in Russia experienced a continuous increase. Following the pattern of other European countries, Russian cities’ pace of growth was brisk, but (with the exception of St. Petersburg) the level of takeoff, too low. Industrialization helped speed the process in that it attracted great numbers of peasants to the cities, but this was so only to a limit since many factories (particularly textiles in the Moscow region) were being built not in the cities, but in and around the villages, where the workforce was to be found and at cheaper rates. On the other hand, peasants commuted to the cities, not only in search of industrial work but also—and in much greater numbers—in order to engage in many other economic activities, about which more will be said below.21 Thus, as a result of this suddenly increased influx, “urban Russia” around 1900 consisted to a great extent of what I would term “peasant cities.” What is the justification for using this term? In 1910, the proportion of peasants in all big cities (of more than 100,000 inhabitants) was around 68 to 75 percent, even in the two largest and most “urbanized”: St. Petersburg (68.8 percent) and Moscow (72.1 percent). These figures included workers and worker-peasants (or peasant-workers); the latter’s permanent way of life consisted in spending part of the year in the city and part of it in their villages. In St. Petersburg (and for different historical reasons in Moscow and in smaller cities too) the peasant and rural Russia were not a remote phenomenon far away in the countryside or in outer-city distant slums. They were literally in the heart of the city because of the sociodemographic pattern of Russian cities, in which predominated a horizontal segregation in the dwellings, and not a social vertical segregation as in most big cities in the West, where the “popular classes” lived in the “red belts,” and the bour-

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geoisie in the beaux quartiers. Peasant Russia, with its culture and so-called nekul’turnost’ (lack of culture), was not only in the upper and lower floors of the buildings, but everywhere: in the factory and the workshop, in the service sector and urban transportation, in the building industry (where they fared not only as workers: two-thirds of the buildings were owned by peasants), and also in retail trade, and to that effect the city streets were the peasants’ “shops.” In his monograph on St. Petersburg, the geographer James Bater writes: Petty trade in St. Petersburg had not been erased in consequence of industrialization. Streets remained rife with peasants hawking wares of every description, and it was through this congestion that the giants of trade and commerce had daily to pass. Together, however, their entrepreneurial talents resulted in a trade turnover varying between 800 and 900 million roubles annually, a value in excess of that generated by industry in 1913.22

Under these circumstances of social admixture and group relationship, it followed that influences, cultural survivals, and transfer of customs were part and parcel of everyday life, inevitable consequences of the closeness of the various layers of town dwellers: old-timers and new arrivals, permanent residents and part-time seasonal commuters, rich and poor, peasants, workers, noblemen, and bourgeois. What were the effects of this urban environment on the peasant, whether seasonal commuter or permanent city dweller? Did it erode village manners, habits, and values, or on the contrary, was it a factor favoring their preservation? This is a large and complex subject, on which I can make here only a few cursory remarks.

The Urban Peasants According to all evidence, the peasants succeeded in preserving village customs and rural values in the urban environment. The causes of this sociocultural phenomenon lie in the original features of the Russian processes of industrialization and urbanization. Briefly stated, Russia had no process of “rural exodus,” and by 1914 the majority of the urban and industrial workforce consisted of peasants who had not severed their ties with the village; moreover, most socioeconomic indicators suggest that the peasants did not intend to sever their close personal, family, and communal ties with the countryside. These peasants were spending part of the year at the factory or workshop, and the other part in the village. (In Moscow, for instance, most of those who had to work on a year-round basis managed nevertheless to go back to the village two to five times a year.) In so doing, the peasants were following an old tradition and an occupational cycle that had already existed for nearly two hundred years, during which peasants (even

174 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” under serfdom) would leave temporarily the village (and, under serfdom, the seigneurial estate) to look for work as construction, transportation, and factory workers, carpenters, barge haulers, blacksmiths, tradesmen, and the like, in cities or other faraway places. Eighteenth-century annals are replete with permanent city dwellers’ complaints about the “great and unbearable multitudes of peasants” swarming in St. Petersburg and Moscow. They were called otkhodniki (peasantmigrant workers) and their work, otkhozhie promysly (peasant-migrants’ crafts), and the same terms were used in the early twentieth century not as archaisms, but to designate mutatis mutandis the same type of usual peasant occupations. Another term, more modern, appeared as time went by: sezonniki, which indicated with greater precision the seasonal back-andforth movement of these men and women—including those who worked in factories—between the village and the city. As Robert Johnson has aptly pointed out, the peasant-worker’s condition was not “a transitory stage of development,”23 nor was it perceived as transitory by the peasant-workers themselves. It should not be considered as such by the historians either. The view that upon their arrival in the city the peasants became “ex-peasant masses” ignores the complex realities of the relationship between the peasant and the city, and makes short shrift of the peasants’ strong and multifold ties with the village and the commune. In actual fact, millions of peasants were “peasant-workers” as a permanent condition and occupation.24 The finding about the non-transitory nature of this condition is important because it also epitomizes one of the original characters of the Russian “rural non-exodus” and urbanization. The rural exodus proper included a very small number of peasants who had lost forever “the endless horizon of the countryside” and were forced to live in the city. The bulk of migrants were either whole families (a minority) who made the journey to other (less populated and more promising) agricultural areas—Siberia, for instance—or the massive majority of otkhodniki-sezonniki who went back and forth between the village and the city without the strains and traumas of uprootedness. It seems that the painful and dramatic effects of the earlier rural exodus in England, or the urban industrialization in some other countries, were endured to a far lesser degree in the Russian rural migrations. In other words, in this particular case the usual strains and stresses of this process were minimized to a great extent because of the specific mode of labor supply to industry, namely otkhodnichestvo, which did not entail a severance of rural ties.25 It was not an ideal solution for industrial management and for maximum profitability, perhaps, but it had the merit of preserving Russian rural society and providing a path for its integration into the modern era. This had also a momentous role in defining the actual

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situation of the peasant in whatever kind of crisis (economic, agrarian, agricultural, or other) might occur. What explains the persistence of this phenomenon? Why did not the peasant decide either to stay in the village or to move permanently to the factory? There were several important climatic, social and economic longterm factors at play, only a few of which will be mentioned here. The first was the high seasonality of Russian agriculture, and the very short period from late April to September—less than five months—in which all agricultural work was done. This was the fleeting Russian summer, about which Sergei Esenin wrote in “Anna Snegina”: I leto takoe korotkoe Kak maiskaia teplaia noch’…

“And the summer is so short, like a warm night in May …” and elsewhere (but where? I quote from memory): “Our love was so short, as a Russian summer …” More prosaically, this seasonality created the availability of labor on a large scale for seven to eight months a year. The effect was to put a premium on activities that could be combined with farming—hence, first off, the growth of local artisan industry on a seasonal basis (kustarnye promysly, cottage industries), and above all the massive seasonal migration to the cities. As a result, in real life the peasant’s choice was not “either agriculture or wage labor,” but both, which was effected through movement back and forth between the village and the city. Thus, for example, in 1912, 90 percent of peasant households in Moscow province had on average 2.6 persons per household (out of 6.5 persons on average) working on the outside. As a parallel development, and partly for the same reasons, the urbanization process in Russia did not entail various (often concomitant) socioeconomic phenomena, two of which are important in this context. First, there was no massive slum-building around the cities (but rather a “piling up” in the city center); second, chronic sub-proletarianization, unemployment, and trends of social marginalization were limited, considering the great numbers of people involved in this process.26 A peasant who failed to find work in the city could go back home: he was not an uprooted man, and there was no crippling pressure on him to remain in the city at whatever human and social cost (this applies, of course, to the peasant woman, too). As a worker, in cases of rough times (as during the depression of the 1880s or the economic crisis of 1902–03, or if laid off for misbehavior or political militancy), he could leave the city and go back to the village, where one additional mouth could always be fed—at least for a time. Upon arriving in the city, the peasant did not feel like a stranger: it was a kind of “great village.” The path to the city and back was a customary

176 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” and well-trodden one and, as such, part of peasant tradition, literally from the time of their ancestors. (These permanent links with the city should suffice to dispose of the thesis of the “isolation” of the Russian peasantry from “society.” Compared to what Carlo Levi saw south of the Eboli in the 1930s, the nineteenth-century Russian peasant will compare very well—in terms of social integration and modernity—with the villagers of many areas in Southern Italy, France, Spain, and Prussia.) Moreover, following another old tradition, the peasant-workers would organize in various permanent communal frameworks such as zemliachestva, arteli, and kruzhki.27 The artel’ (from “time immemorial”) and the zemliachestvo played an important role in keeping peasants from the same village together, engaged in similar occupations or in the same factory, and in preserving relationships and customs of mutual aid, common responsibility, and moral support (as well as the constraints of social self-regulation) as they had always existed in the rural commune. In fact, the artel’ was a sort of urban extension of the village commune, and in some cities, like Moscow for instance, most of the workforce in many factories was bound together by this traditional and popular communal form of organization “from below” avant la lettre. This brings me to the last topic of this paper: the peasant commune, traditionally a subject of great debate in Russian thought and historiography for more than one hundred years and in our time, too.

The Peasant Commune One of the most intriguing developments in Russian agrarian studies has been, both in the West and in Russia, the renewed interest in the history and structure of the rural commune.28 In the Soviet Union an effort was made to ignore Marx’s negative opinion on the “peasant commune” or the “rural commune” (Marx’s inverted commas) by citing ambiguous sentences in letters of his to Vera Zasulich (letters that underwent, under his pen, numerous drafts and countless corrections before being sent).29 In fact, Marx believed that the commune was the quintessence of “rural cretinism” and the epitome of peasant backwardness. He thought that “these idyllic village communities” had always been the foundation of “Oriental despotism,” and in speaking of India he sarcastically observed that they had “restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.”30 But, after decades of relative neglect, in Russia too this topic has been the object of some serious works.31 This research generated new debates in Russia, although on some issues they strikingly parallel, mutatis mutandis,

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those held in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between populists, Marxists, and liberals on the history, nature, and future of the peasant commune. Thus, the well-known agrarian specialist Viktor Danilov observed that Russian scholars seem to be again in the throes of a heated debate like the one held a century ago “on the virtues and weaknesses of the commune, its usefulness or negative role.”32 The main topics of debate in the West that will be mentioned here concern three aspects of the structure and development of rural society. It has been argued that the commune was not an autonomous peasant institution but merely an administrative unit sui generis in the state bureaucracy, and that as such it should not be regarded as a specific and authentic peasant institution. In this perspective, it has been also argued that the commune, far from being an original peasant creation dating “from time immemorial,” as conventional scholarship had assumed, was created by the state at a relatively late date (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) for fiscal and administrative purposes, and that it fulfilled local government functions, i.e., the state bureaucracy’s functions at the lowest level. The commune was not (in this interpretation) the representative of peasant society vis-à-vis the landlord and the powers, but a convenient instrument of the government, born out of necessity, for the management of peasant affairs. Thus, this functionalist approach—although rejecting the extreme view that the commune “was in many ways a myth”33—essentially sees the commune only in administrative and instrumental terms. A “middle of the road” hypothesis, propounded by V. A. Aleksandrov and by Steven Hoch, states that the commune was an institution capable of defending peasant interests as well as acting as agent of the landlord and the state.34 But this technically correct opinion does not answer a basic question, for it skirts round without addressing the issue of what was essential and durable, and what was secondary and temporary in the commune’s functions and structure. Another hypothesis holds that the commune was not the egalitarian society imagined by populist theoreticians who were idealizing the muzhik, and by modern historians who are following conventional wisdom. It was, rather, an economic association of producers established for profit maximization within the given specific conditions of agricultural production and marketing (Steven Hoch). Incidentally, whether explicit or implicit, this view is similar in part to certain business schools’ vulgata on supply-side economics, and in part to old Marxist (and neo-classical) economic theory, which assumed that profit maximization regulated peasant economic behavior. As we shall see, this was not the case. A third opinion holds that peasant collectivism has been overblown, and therefore the “collectivist mentality” of Russian peasants, promoted by

178 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” the Slavophiles, by many socialists (and purportedly by Lenin too), and by various later historians should be an early casualty of the new investigations into the Russian national identity. Finally, without necessarily subscribing to the above interpretations, another school of thought assumes—not unlike Lenin, the Russian social democrats (Mensheviks included), and Westernizing liberals (P. Miliukov, M. A. Gertsenshtein)—that the peasant commune was in a process of disintegration and, “in the final account,” was doomed to disappear under the combined blows of capitalism and modernization (Dorothy Atkinson, Moshe Lewin). These interesting, although not entirely new and original, interpretations (some of them, as we saw, were formulated ninety years ago) raise important questions and invite a useful reexamination of these issues with the more precise methods of today’s historical research and social sciences. In this light it would appear from the outset that the main methodological weakness of these interpretations lies in their reductionist approach: they view the commune as nothing but an administrative organ or an economic venture. For, even forbearing to idealize in the least either the Russian rural commune or “peasant collectivism,” one cannot ignore three basic attributes of this institution that, if properly accounted for, change the terms of the debate entirely: the commune represented the existential space for most of the Russian peasantry; it regulated all common pursuits in the village in daily life and the execution of the agricultural work (strongly linked to religious beliefs and practices), customs, and celebrations; and, finally, it was activated by an unwritten corpus of dos and don’ts embedded in peasant customary law (obychnoe pravo) accumulated through the centuries.

A Peasants’ Agrarian Program The most important element in the peasant mindset was the view of the Black Repartition (chernyi peredel), that is, the general repartition of the land among the peasant communes in Russia. The roots of the chernyi peredel lay in the peasant belief that the land ought not to be the property of anyone; created by God, the land belongs only to God, and it is His wish that it be possessed only by those who till it. Thus, the land was both nobody’s property and the exclusive possession of the tillers of the soil. The state and the landlords were sinful usurpers, carrying out the devil’s deeds on earth. Thus, the Black Repartition represented also a common vision and a “program” of the peasantry that made them act for the realization of a greater goal, and not only for the satisfaction of immediate grievances. Pace Karl Marx’s doctrine and his latter-day de facto followers, the peasants had both a program and tactics to implement it.

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In the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social and legal realities, the Black Repartition amounted to a general land expropriation of the state and all privately owned non-peasant plowland, pastures, and forests—that is, in fact, to an agrarian revolution. The obstacles to the implementation of this measure were the state and the landowners, whether noblemen or urban middle-class entrepreneurs. Thus, from the 1880s to 1917, in the changing social and economic conditions, the peasants’ old vision of a general repartition was beginning to acquire strong political undertones and an acute topical significance. Diffuse longings were turning into a most potent, spontaneous, self-evident, and radical anti-governmental stance, which erupted in the 1917 Peasant Revolution and lasted against all odds until it was crushed by Stalin’s agrarian counter-revolution, called “collectivization,” implemented by the party and the NKVD, as well as by man-made terror-famine in vast areas of the country. Empirical proof of the vitality of this peasant view can be found in the fact that in the 1920s, after the Peasant Revolution, 95.5 percent of all peasant land was held in communal tenure.35 This figure epitomizes several closely connected developments. It means that under circumstances permitting the exercise of their free choice (circumstances that obtained after February 1917 because of general chaos and anarchy), the Russian peasants massively and unequivocally chose the commune and the communal tenure of the land as forms of life and work. The peasants implemented their choice by means of the general repartition of the land that occurred in 1917–18, a clear-cut and wholesale Black Repartition almost “by the book,” that is, according to the peasants’ hopes and expectations. It lasted twelve years or so (1917–29). Its end came not through a gradual “withering away” of the commune, but by a massive and ruthless destruction that in vast areas took the form of sheer physical annihilation by the Soviet authorities. It was not, then, as utopian as some historians seem to believe, if so much force and coercion were needed to bring it down. The course of these historical events from 1917 to 1929 clearly answers the questions whether the chernyi peredel was a utopia, whether the commune was fading, whether peasant behavior was irrational, and whether the Russian peasant “loved” the soil or not. In fact, it appears that the Black Repartition was less “utopian” than the agrarian programs of the political parties in the early 1900s, from the Bolsheviks back to Stolypin. The latter’s program was utopian in its overestimation of the tsarist bureaucracy and underestimation of the strength of peasant society. It failed. The Bolsheviks did not fail (as usual, they failed “the others”), but their agrarian program was never tested, let alone implemented. After tactical circumstances brought them to adopt, first, the Socialist Revolutionaries’ program, then the peasants’ Black Repartition (without believing in it), and

180 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” later a hybrid reform, they finally undertook—under Stalin, Trotsky, and Bukharin—wholesale statization of the land and of the peasant, which had never been proclaimed as their program. The “utopian dreamer” Peter Kropotkin and his fellow anarchists were right in their persistent prediction, from the early 1900s on, that this was precisely what the Bolsheviks would do if they ever seized power. The Black Repartition—this basic ingredient of communal life, of customary law, and of the Russian peasants’ mentalités—was one of the most interesting social and political outlooks in Russia’s history, and it became acutely topical from the 1880s to the 1920s. It was not defeated by “History,” but by powerful adversaries. It did not wither away because of inner weakness or lack of supporters, but died an unnatural death. “History” does not take notice of this difference; historians should.

Notes 1. For reviews of relevant publications, see Ben Eklof, “Ways of Seeing: Recent Anglo-American Studies of the Russian Peasant,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 36, no. 1 (1988): 57–79; John Channon, “From Muzhik to Kolkhoznik: Some Recent Western and Soviet Studies of Peasants in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,” Slavonic and East European Review 70, no. 1 (January 1992): 127–139. 2. Esther Kingston-Mann, “Breaking the Silence,” in Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921, ed. E. Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter (Princeton, 1991). This collection of essays includes papers presented, according to Dr. Kingston-Mann, at “the first international conference ever to focus on the peasantry of European Russia,” held in Boston in 1986, which she regards as a landmark in the history of historical writing on the Russian peasantry. Besides two pages of perfunctory remarks, no historiographic examination is offered to substantiate these otherwise modest claims. 3. Robert C. Stuart, “Introduction: Perspectives on the Russian and Soviet Rural Economy,” in The Soviet Rural Economy, ed. Robert C. Stuart (Totowa, NJ, 1984), p. 3. 4. Slavic Review 36 (1977): 377–398. 5. See Gary M. Hamburg, “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture: A Comment,” Slavic Review 37 (1978): 480–490; John Thomas Sanders, “‘Once More Into the Breach, Dear Friends’: A Closer Look at Indirect Tax Receipts and the Condition of the Russian Peasantry, 1881–1899,” Slavic Review 43 (1984): 657–671; and see also James Y. Simms, “The Crop Failure of 1891: Soil Exhaustion, Technological Backwardness, and Russia’s ‘Agrarian Crisis,’” Slavic Review 41 (1982): 236–250 and “More Grist for the Mill: A Further Look at the Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Slavic Review 50 (1991): 999–1009. 6. Simms, “Crisis in Russian Agriculture,” pp. 377–380.

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7. Raymond W. Goldsmith, “The Economic Growth of Tsarist Russia, 1860–1913,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 9 (April 1961): 441–475. 8. Paul R. Gregory, “The Russian Agrarian Crisis Revisited,” in Stuart, The Soviet Rural Economy, p. 29; see also Gregory, Russian National Income 1885–1913 (Cambridge, 1982); Gregory, “Grain Marketing and Peasant Consumption, Russia, 1885–1913,” Explorations in Economic History 17 (1980): 135–164; Gregory, “Russian Living Standards During the Industrialization Era, 1885–1913,” Review of Income and Wealth 26 (1980): 87–103. 9. Gregory, “Russian Agrarian Crisis,” p. 30. 10. John Bushnell, “Peasant Economy and Peasant Revolution at the Turn of the Century: Neither Immiseration nor Autonomy,” The Russian Review 47, no. 1 (1988): 9–10. 11. Wheatcroft, “Crises and the Condition of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia,” in Kingston-Mann and Mixter, Peasant Economy, pp. 128–172. 12. Boris Mironov, “The Russian Peasant Commune after the Reforms of the 1860’s,” Slavic Review 44 (1985): 438–467. 13. Elvira M. Wilbur, “Was Russian Peasant Agriculture Really That Impoverished? New Evidence from a Case Study from the ‘Impoverished Center’ at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 43, no. 1 (March 1983): 137–147. 14. Ibid., p. 144. 15. Daniel Thorner, R. E. F. Smith, and Basile Kerblay, eds. and translators, A.V. Chayanov and the Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood, 1966). 16. See above the beginning of this essay and note 2. 17. George Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861–1939 (Urbana and London, 1982), passim. 18. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), p. 156. 19. Leopold H. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905– 1917,” part 1, Slavic Review 23, no. 4 (December 1964): 619–642 and part 2, Slavic Review 23, no.1 (March 1965): 1–22, with comments by Arthur Mendel and Theodore von Laue, and Haimson’s reply. See also George L. Yaney, “Social Stability in Prerevolutionary Russia: A Critical Note,” Slavic Review 35, no. 1 (March 1966): 521–527; Alfred Levin, “More on Social Stability, 1905–1907,” Slavic Review 35, no. 1 (March 1966): 149–154; Arthur Mendel, “On Interpreting the Fate of Imperial Russia,” in Russia Under the Last Tsar, ed. Theofanis George Stavrou (Minneapolis, 1969), pp. 13–41; Haimson, “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth-Century Russia,” Slavic Review 47, no. 1 (1988): 1–20; Haimson, “‘The Problem of Political and Social Stability in Urban Russia on the Eve of War and Revolution’ Revisited,” Slavic Review 59, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 848–875. 20. Reginald Zelnik, “The Peasant and the Factory,” in The Peasant in NineteenthCentury Russia, ed. Wayne S. Vucinich (Stanford, 1968), pp. 158–190. 21. For instance, in 1902 in Moscow the percentage of peasants among factory workers was 92.7 percent (107,781), in non-factory branches of industry 90.3 percent (104,899), and in transportation 94.6 percent (37,679); Moscow’s total population at that time amounted to 1,170,000 inhabitants.

182 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” 22. James Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (Montreal, 1976), p. 264. 23. Robert Johnson, The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, 1979), p. 50. 24. In 1897, in St. Petersburg, the percentage of married workers who maintained their families in the village was as follows: in metalworking 69 percent; textiles 87 percent; printing industry 62 percent. From 1906 to 1910, 9,399,400 passports for up to one year were issued annually on the average in European Russia; this represented a figure of 120 passports per 1,000 rural inhabitants, and 237 passports per 1,000 active rural population (aged 15–60). 25. Seasonal non-agricultural work was not, of course, a peculiar Russian phenomenon; it existed also in several Western European and other countries. For interesting examples regarding France and England, see Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976); Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (New York, 1984). The peculiar and significant trait of the Russian case was the persistence and extent of this way of supplying a workforce for industrial development, and the extremely low percentage of peasants who decided to stay permanently in the cities. The paradox (to be found later in several other countries too) was therefore a simultaneous growth of the industrial labor force and of the rural population. 26. See above n. 24. 27. In this way, going to the cities was an orderly matter. In many cases peasants arrived there in groups, and agents of firms or private subcontractors signed the work contracts in advance in the communal offices. But in spite of being engaged in gang labor of a seasonal nature, no “padrone system,” which is thought so typical of the Italian immigration in the United States, developed in Russia, and neither did various forms of forced labor. 28. Important works on the commune in the West include Dorothy Atkinson’s study The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930 (Stanford, 1983); Roger Bartlett, ed., Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia: Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society (Basingstokes, 1990); see also Steven A. Grant, “Obshchina and Mir,” Slavic Review 35 (1976): 636–651. 29. Several of these letters, carefully “selected” and “edited,” can be found in Perepiska K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa s russkimi politicheskimi deiateliami [Correspondence of K. Marx and F. Engels with Russian Political Personalities] (Moscow, 1951), pp. 299ff. For a non-expurged, “neo-Marxist” interpretation of Marx’s sociological metaphysics, see Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism” (London, 1984), pp. 97–137; there are also unfinished drafts and outlines of letters that finally were not sent. 30. See James Clifford, “Review [of Edward Said, Orientalism],” History and Theory 19, no. 2 (1980): 217. 31. For the Soviet/Russian research, see: V. A. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossii XVII–nachalo XIX v. [The Rural Commune in Russia from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century] (Moscow, 1976); L. S. Prokof’eva, Krest’ianskaia obshchina v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII–pervoi polovine XIX

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32. 33. 34. 35.

veka [The Peasant Commune in Russia in the Eighteenth and First Half of the Nineteenth Century] (Leningrad, 1981). See Danilov’s article in Bartlett, Land Commune, p. 287. David A. J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861–1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reform (DeKalb, 1987), p. xiii. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina; Steven Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, A Village in Tambov (Chicago, 1986). Danilov, Sovetskaia dokolkhoznaia derevnia, 2 vols. (Moscow 1977–1979), p. 170; Lewin, “Customary Law,” p. 18; Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, passim.

d Approaches to the PART THREE

History of Russia

e

d Reinventing the Enlightenment CHAPTER 8

Western Images of Eastern Realities in the Eighteenth Century

e

The Enlightenment was a complex cultural and intellectual movement informed by a secular, humanist, universalist, and rationalist outlook.1 It influenced many fields of thought and learning, and in particular philosophy, empirical epistemology, science, and the critical examination of the political and ecclesiastical institutions of the time. It is a vast subject, and so is the ever growing scholarly literature dealing with it. In his book, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Larry Wolff, associate professor at Boston College, has addressed a specific yet important item in the Enlightenment’s worldview: its notions and representations of Russia and Poland, and their meaning in European culture. This is an erudite and well-written book, and although it is based on well-known primary sources already used by scholars, it brings new vistas and hypotheses on several issues in Europe’s intellectual life in the eighteenth century and on the enlighteners’ “Philosophic Geography.”2 Wolff has worked many years on this book, and we are indebted to him for a number of insights and interesting observations. Some of his findings are well founded, others invite further debate and inquiry, all deserve attention and close analysis.

Scope and Themes of the Book In the author’s view, this work attempts “to bridge the historiographic gap between Eastern Europe and Western Europe in the interest of a study of their complementary relation in intellectual history” (p. vii). It has an introduction, a conclusion, and eight chapters, which fall into three main categories. The first includes impressions and observations of travelers (chiefly on Poland and Russia), under the following headings: “Entering Eastern Europe: Eighteenth-Century Travels on the Frontier” (chap. 1); “Possess187

188 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” ing Eastern Europe: Sexuality, Slavery, and Corporal Punishment” (chap. 2); and “Imagining Eastern Europe: Fiction, Fantasy, and Vicarious Voyages” (chap. 3). The second category is a compendium of what was known (mainly in France and England) about the lands and peoples in an area situated east of a line drawn from Gdan´sk on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic; it includes the following chapters: “Mapping Eastern Europe: Political Geography and Cultural Cartography” (chap. 4); “Peopling Eastern Europe, Part I: Barbarians in Ancient History and Modern Anthropology” (chap. 7); and “Peopling Eastern Europe, Part II: The Evidence of Manners and the Measurements of Race: (chap. 8). The third category contains two chapters: “Addressing Eastern Europe, Part I: Voltaire’s Russia,” and “Addressing Eastern Europe, Part II: Rousseau’s Poland.” The body of knowledge examined in the book encompasses fields like cartography, geography, and vsiakaia vsiachina, which can be loosely defined by the anachronistic term “anthropology” (manners, race, customs, dress, creeds, behavior). On these topics, the book offers descriptive summaries of eighteenth-century writings with Wolff’s comments and interpretations. As a genre, it pertains to history of ideas. It is not about “Eastern Europe,” but about what educated men and women wrote on lands and peoples in a vast geographic area, which the author defines as “Eastern Europe.” The primary sources used in the research belong to four main types. First, there are accounts of travelers who prepared their grand tour by extensive readings on the countries they were about to visit and, once back home, wrote their impressions de voyage on lands known and sometimes unknown. To this type belong the books of William Coxe, Lady Elizabeth Craven, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Marquis Charles-Marie de Salaberry d’Irumberry, Giacomo Casanova, Joseph Marshall, William Richardson, Chappe d’Auteroche, and a few others who are occasionally quoted, like Joachim Christof Friedrich Schulz, John Parkinson, and Comte AlxandreMaurice d’Hauterive. Conspicuously missing are eighteenth-century German travelers, whom a recent scholar rightly described as “Europe’s most assiduous producers and consumers of travel accounts … and who brought to Russia a long tradition of Kavalierstour and … a fully developed science of academic fieldwork (gelehrte Reise).”3 The second type of source includes reports by diplomats accredited chiefly to St. Petersburg: Comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur, Claude Carloman de Rulhière, Lord Cathcart; the third type comprises information gleaned from books of geographers like Nicolas Samson, Robert de Vaugondy, Philipp Johann von Stahlenberg, and Louis de Jaucourt. In the last type of source are found writings of philosophes, among whom Voltaire takes the lead, followed at a distance by Diderot, Rousseau, and Madame Geoffrin; other

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thinkers make brief appearances: the Marquis de Sade (in chapter 2), Herder and Kant (in chapter 7), Fichte (in chapter 8). Since this sort of writing is central to any description of the “mind of the Enlightenment,” several grands absents strike at once, like Montesquieu and Condillac, for instance. What view of the Eastern European lands does Wolff’s narration convey? A few quotations summarize both the features he has chosen to stress and the impressions of this eighteenth-century peripatetic company. Commenting on Russian serfdom, William Richardson wrote in 1784: Poor abject slaves! Who are not allowed the rights of men – hardly those of irrational creatures! Who must toil, undergo hardship, and suffer the most grievous suffering. … From the hour of their birth they are in the power of a rapacious chief, who may sell, scourge, or employ them in any labour he pleases. They have no property – no home – nothing that their proud superior may not seize, and claim as his own. The horse and the bull may chuse [sic] their loves, according to their own inclination; a privilege not allowed to Russians. (p. 86)

And in an account of a journey that he might (or might not) have made in the East, Joseph Marshall observed in 1772: “The personal service, in which the lower ranks of Poland are kept, is a mere slavery … a despotism as the planters in the West-Indies use over their African slaves. Compared with this, the oppressed state of the Russian peasants is an absolute freedom” (p. 81). Yet he believed also that the peasants in Russia were “very near on the same rank as the blacks on our sugar colonies.” Summing up his impressions, Richardson wrote: “There is some satisfaction in recollecting, that while other nations groan under the yoke of bondage, the natives of our happy islands enjoy more real freedom than any nation that does now, or did ever, exist.” On this reflection, Larry Wolff comments: “Every traveler from Western Europe was capable of deriving ‘some satisfaction’ of this sort from the contemplation of Eastern Europe, which served to define the superior civilization of the visitor” (pp. 85–86). Was this kind of “satisfaction” unique to Western travelers in “Eastern Europe”? Was it different from these travelers’ impressions of Western countries, say, of Frenchmen in Spain, Spaniards in Prussia, and Englishmen in France or elsewhere? (Arthur Young’s travels in France, for instance, gave him the satisfaction of England’s “superior civilization”; Samuel Johnson considered the Scots “wild and barbarous”; and Lord Holland – unlike “Corsica Boswell” – described Corsicans as “the vile inhabitants of one of the vilest islands in the world.”) Was the attitude toward “Eastern Europe” similar or different from that of urban educated society in Italy, for whom most visitors from the north were “barbarians”? The book gives no answers to these questions, as the author has not applied a comparative approach to European travel in general, and has not analyzed eighteenth-century

190 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” discourse on race, ethnic groups, and foreign lands and customs. Such an approach would have permitted the author to establish a repertoire of clichés, stereotypes, and idées reçues in travelers’ accounts on Poland, Russia, and other parts of Europe, to evaluate the types of misrepresentations of cultural differences, and to discuss the issue of “the continent’s internal other.”4 Such a cultural and semantic context would have been of considerable value in a research whose central subject is the “invention” of one part of Europe by another and the image of “Eastern Europe.” “Poor abject slaves; barbarians”: these are in capsule form the impression and main idea of “Eastern Europe” that Wolff has found in eighteenthcentury travel accounts, philosophical cogitations, and political theories. But was this a novel idea for that time? Sixteenth-century English voyagers in Russia described it as a “rude and barbarous kingdom,” and “une infinie brutalité” was Russia’s image in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.5 But if these images of Russia took shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then what is the novelty of Larry Wolff’s treatment? The important difference, he says, is that the Enlightenment transformed the current stereotype (my term) of “Poor abject slaves!” into a signifier of a wide range of meanings. Among them were the idea of Western Europe’s higher civilization, the view of the debased nature of the Russian and Polish national character, and the concept of “backwardness” as a characteristic of these peoples’ state vis-à-vis the West.

A Thesis on the Role of “Eastern Europe” The elaboration of these new meanings was synchronic with “the emerging idea of Eastern Europe.” In the eighteenth century, writes Wolff, the whole idea of Eastern Europe “was not the given framework of analysis, but rather what had to be pieced together by the accumulation of perspectives and resemblances” (p. 52). This is what the philosophes did: “The idea of Eastern Europe was invented in Western Europe in the age of the Enlightenment, and Russia was included in that idea. Russia was subjected to the same process of discovery, alignment, condescension, and intellectual mastery” (p. 15). Similarly, “[t]he Enlightenment had discovered Poland as a part of Eastern Europe, and Romanticism was ready to take up the task of preserving such a precious construction, with all its interesting intimations of ancient Sarmatia, barbarous Scythia, and even the moon” (p. 281). Once “invented” by the Enlightenment, Larry Wolff’s “Eastern Europe” included, in addition to Russia and Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Moldova, Ukraine, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, while Berlin was “the frontier of Western Europe” (p. 170).

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This “Eastern Europe” was not only a geographic notion, but a philosophic, an anthropological, and a political concept. The new notion was gradually invested with the various meanings that were taking shape at that time, namely Western Europe’s higher civilization, the wretched state of Eastern Europe’s peoples, and the concept of “backwardness.” Thus, in the enlightenment’s discourse, “Eastern Europe” became a code name signifying backwardness, barbarism, ignorance, and despotism. Simultaneously, as a part of this process of word- and meaning-formation, there emerged the notion of “Western Europe,” which stood for civilization, good manners, and of course, enlightenment. Why is Larry Wolff’s thesis important? He explains: “The question of how the Enlightenment came to think of Europe as being divided into east and west is, I think, an urgent one for both historical and political reasons” (p. vii). “Political reasons,” because this geophilosophical division was not a short-lived eighteenth-century intellectual fad, but the expression of a chasm that continues till the present. The Enlightenment’s idea of “Eastern Europe” absorbed the representations that ran in the “Western mind” from the “infinie brutalité” of the sixteenth century through the Iron Curtain in the twentieth century and after. The intellectual foundation of the Iron Curtain dividing Europe in two, into Western Europe and Eastern Europe, was laid when the Enlightenment conceptualized this fundamental divide. The Iron Curtain did not create it, for it had already existed for two hundred years (pp. 3–5). As Wolff points out: “The idea of Eastern Europe, born from [Voltaire’s] head in Catherine’s service, would outlive them both to influence the modern history of Europe over the next two centuries” (p. 234). This persistence was due to an “intellectual continuity” and to “the political relevance of the Enlightenment’s idea of Eastern Europe” (p. 362), a topic to which I will revert at the end of this essay. If correct, this thesis would be an important contribution to our understanding of Europe’s past and present. In this light, we will examine two questions related to the “invention of Eastern Europe,” the central theme of the book. First, what exactly did the Enlightenment say in this respect? Second, what did it mean?

In Search of “Eastern Europe” The first question provides a test of the book’s main thesis, and can be framed thus: Did eighteenth-century discourse—of philosophes and educated society—use the terms “Eastern Europe” and “Western Europe”? If it did not, then the Enlightenment may have invented many notions, but not the concept of “Eastern Europe”; and if the term was missing in the vo-

192 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” cabulary, then certainly it could not have served as a code for the cultural and political meanings attributed to it by Wolff. A close reading of the 406 pages of text and notes, packed with abundant quotations from eighteenth-century sources, reveals that Larry Wolff does not supply a single case of an author using the term “Eastern Europe.” In addition, he consistently substitutes the rubric “Eastern Europe” for other precise geographic and ethnic names used in the sources he quotes. Here are some examples. Summarizing Salaberry’s voyage to Hungary, Wolff writes: The road to Buda passed through villages where the houses resembled “the huts of savages,” and through countryside “as fertile as it was uncultivated.” These were the more generally recognizable marks of Eastern Europe. The Hungarians thought Buda was “the first city of the world,” and this reminded Salaberry of Voltaire’s castle Thunder-ten-tronckh so much admired by Candide because he had never seen any other. This reference to the world of philosophical fable set the stage for Salaberry’s Eastern Europe, a domain in which nothing was quite taken seriously. (p. 45)

Salaberry speaks of “Tartars,” of “Hungary,” and of “Buda,” and names many other specific geographic locations and ethnic groups; he never uses “Eastern Europe,” a term found only in Wolff’s comments on Salaberry’s account. Wolff quotes William Richardson’s remarks on the Russian peasants thus: It is impossible for a native of Britain, giving an account of this country to an Englishman, not to express such feelings and reflections as a comparison between the British government, and that of other nations, must naturally suggest. The peasants in Russia, that is to say, the greatest part of the subjects of this empire, are in a state of abject slavery; and are reckoned the property of the nobles to whom they belong, as much as their dogs and horses.

The abjectness of slavery in Eastern Europe—adds Wolff— was thus defined by direct comparison with Western Europe (p. 84). No such words were used by Richardson, who wrote on “Britain” and “Englishmen,” “Russia” and “Russians.” The “Western Europe/Eastern Europe” terminology is not Richardson’s, but Wolff’s. In another context the latter writes: The traveler of the Enlightenment mastered Eastern Europe by learning to know it, and the whole point of the experiment, and the dialogue, was Tott’s learning “to know the Moldavians.” Similarly, Casanova insisted a visit to Moscow was necessary to “know the Russians.” That knowledge, of course, was not for the traveler alone but also for the readers in Western Europe … (p. 72)

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Tott and Casanova learned, as they tell, “to know the Moldavians” and “to know the Russians,” not “to know Eastern Europe,” as Wolff infers with no evident reason. These examples show the terms’ substitution mentioned above and followed throughout the book: first comes a quotation containing a precise geographic and/or ethnic reference, then the author’s comment, which replaces the original terms with that of “Eastern Europe.” The same pattern appears in the analysis of texts by philosophers and historians. Wolff writes: Like so many other great ideas in the age of the Enlightenment, that of Eastern Europe may be said to have begun with Voltaire. His famous fascination with Russia was formalized in the extremely uncritical History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great, published in two volumes in 1759 and 1763. (p. 89)

(Note that Voltaire’s idea of “Eastern Europe” consists of his “fascination with Russia.”) Voltaire, however, had already made up his map of Eastern Europe much earlier in his long career, for Wolff writes: In 1731 his enormously successful History of Charles XII followed the Swedish king on a campaign of conquest, describing lands that were only just being recognized as conceptually related [?], Poland and Russia, the Ukraine and the Crimea… . Voltaire, encouraging his readers to follow with him the trail of the bold campaigner through little-known lands, became the Enlightnment’s first traveler to Eastern Europe. (p. 89)

If this were so, then Voltaire and his readers, like Monsieur Jourdain, were traveling in “Eastern Europe” without knowing it, and what they knew and spoke about were “little-known lands” like Poland, Russia, the Crimea, and Ukraine. On the latter Wolff writes: “The Ukraine was introduced by Voltaire as the ‘land of the Cossacks, situated between Little Tartary, Poland and Muscovy,’ and that grouping of lands could only make sense as Eastern Europe” (p. 91). Make sense for whom? The author adds that Voltaire explained Ukraine’s geographic location by reference to its neighboring lands, “surrounded by Muscovy, the [Ottoman] states of the Grand Seigneur, [and] Poland.” Voltaire’s explanation of Ukraine’s location by naming its neighbors (a current device in geographic description) clearly shows that he lacked a grander construction like “Eastern Europe.” He did not say, for instance, “the Ukraine is at the heart of Eastern Europe,” as Wolff does (p. 214). Voltaire did not because he lacked le mot et la chose. One last example: “Voltaire, in his Essay on Manners [writes Wolff], associated Dalmatia with the most remote lands of Eastern Europe, naming ‘part of Dalmatia, the north of Poland, the banks of the Don, and the fertile

194 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” country of the Ukraine’s as a domain of colonization” (p. 318). The striking feature of this geographic description is that Voltaire clearly delineated the frontiers of the entire area without using the rubric “Eastern Europe,” which would have been appropriate here, were the notion in use in his time. Voltaire not only did not invent it, he ignored its existence. Texts by Diderot are interpreted in the same fashion. During his stay in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1773–74, Diderot wrote Entretiens avec Catherine II (erroneously translated by Wolff as “interviews”). One is entitled “My Reverie to Myself, Denis the Philosophe,” and is written in the form of a letter addressed to “Your Imperial Majesty,” or, more directly, to “Madame.” Wolff deducts: “The barrier that separated philosophy and power, aligned with the curtain between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, meant that Diderot had traveled across a terrestrial demi-diameter to address himself” (p. 224). Where does this “curtain” come from? Diderot advised Catherine to move the empire’s capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow because of the latter’s central location. His memorandum was entitled, with false modesty and according to social and literary conventions of the time, “Of the capital and of the true seat of an empire by a blind man who judged colors.” Wolff comments: “The epistemological conceit of the blind man, which always interested Diderot and the Enlightenment generally, here marked again the barriers between philosophy and power, and between Western Europe and Eastern Europe” (p. 226). On the idea of changing the capital of the empire, Wolff says: “This was just the sort of speculative manipulation of the map that Western Europe practiced upon Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century” (p. 227). (In fact, this sort of “map manipulation”—either speculative, or martial—was current practice in eighteenth-century Europe, and was condoned by monarchs and philosophes alike.)6 It seems to this reviewer that these cases and similar ones are beyond the limits of interpretation, and verge on a speculative application of a model, inapposite to the sources and the subject of inquiry. Minor differences apart, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is submitted to the same treatment: “Gibbon attended to Eastern Europe in the opening pages of his gargantuan history, when he celebrated Trajan’s conquest of Dacia and the ‘absolute submission of the barbarians.’ Gibbon then mapped the conquered province” (p. 296). Here the anachronism is twofold, for the term “Eastern Europe” was unknown both in ancient times and in Gibbon’s. Further: Gibbon’s Eastern Europe was most fundamentally formulated in Chapter XLII, which surveyed the “State of the Barbaric World” in the sixth century and introduced the “Tribes and inroads of the Sclavonians.” He began with a dual classification: “The wild people, who dwelt or wandered in the plains of Russia, Lithuania, and Poland, might be reduced, in the age

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of Justinian, under two great families of the BULGARIANS and the SCLAVONIANS.” (p. 299)

Gibbon’s “most fundamental formulation” of Eastern Europe had the odd characteristic of not naming it. In a similar case, we read: “Gibbon’s analytical vocabulary counted the Slavs as many tribes constituting a single race; his mapping from ‘the Euxine to the Adriatic’ measured the depth of Eastern Europe to its western limit” (p. 301): an “analytical vocabulary” that measured the depth of “Eastern Europe” without naming it. Referring to Gibbon’s chapter on the conversion of Kiev to Christianity, Wolff remarks: “‘The northern and eastern regions of Europe,’ [Gibbon] wrote, formulating the geographic idea of Eastern Europe, [were] ‘submitted to a religion more different in theory than in practice from the worship of their native idols’” (pp. 304–305). Gibbon formulated no such idea, and Wolff has overlooked the differences (lexicological, semantic, and geographic) between “the eastern regions of Europe” and “Eastern Europe.” Similarly, the “western parts of Europe” are not as he says, an “explicit reference to Western Europe” (p. 41), and even not an implicit one. The examples quoted above show two variants of the pattern of “replacement”: one consists in “redefining” precise eighteenth-century geographic and ethnic terms as “Eastern Europe”; the other consists in attributing the term “Eastern Europe” to eighteenth-century thinkers and travelers even when they explicitly use other geographic and ethnic designations.7 The urge to impose the rubric “Eastern Europe” takes other forms too, and sometimes leads to awkward results. Thus, in the story of how Casanova was chasing a Russian peasant girl, we are told: “Casanova was hunting after all, and the ‘hut’ where he ran his prey to ground linked his hunt to so many eighteenth-century accounts of Eastern Europe” (p. 51). Was a “hut” at that time a differentia of “Eastern Europe”? Apropos corporal punishment with the knout in Russia, Wolff reproduces a print from Chappe d’Auteroche’s Voyage en Sibérie; fait par ordre du Roi en 1761; contenant les moeurs, les usages des Russes… (Paris: Debure, 1768), showing the beating of a half-naked Russian peasant girl in front of other peasants, men and women. Chappe d’Auteroche’s legend reads: “Supplice du Knout Ordinaire”; Larry Wolff’s: “[T]he gaze of the Russian spectators in the print, meeting the gaze of the French readers outside the print [that is, not on it], creates a pornography of barbarism in the encounter between Eastern Europe and Western Europe” (p. 77). Thus imagined Western eyes encounter an imaginary Eastern Europe in a godforsaken Russian village. Casanova would have said: se non a vero, e ben’ trovato. The narrative tries to convince the reader of the existence of the rubric “Eastern Europe” in the eighteenth century, not by proof and evidence, but

196 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” by force of repetition and the effect of accumulation. On the average, the term is used about four times a page, often with no good reason. Thus, William Coxe discerned in the court of St. Petersburg “traces of Asiatic pomp, blended with European refinement”; Wolff explains: “Coxe was in Eastern Europe after all” (p. 37). Voltaire writes to Catherine about his reluctance to undertake the voyage to St. Petersburg. Wolff comments: “The alleged obstacle, the frigid northern climate of St. Petersburg, was in fact precisely what liberated his imagination to encounter Catherine all over Eastern Europe” (p. 209). That is, if “Eastern Europe” did exist in his time—but it did not, and the use of “Eastern Europe” in an eighteenth-century context is an anachronism and a projection backward of a notion that emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century and has acquired well-known connotations since the middle of the twentieth century.

East or North? At this point another question is pertinent: If eighteenth-century educated men and women did not know this term, then what did they use, in addition to plain geographic names and points of the compass, to designate the area that Wolff calls “Eastern Europe”? They used “northern countries,” and for short, “the North.” This term had been in circulation since the sixteenth century, and for that reason Wolff sets his task to describe how the Enlightenment generated the conceptual reorientation that would recognize northern countries as “eastern” (pp. xii, 3–8, 10–12, 14, 15, 90–91, etc.). But this “conceptual reorientation,” although frequently stated, is never demonstrated. We read that the orientation of barbarism shifted from the north to the east, but no evidence is given to support this “shift.” In fact, this designation, “the North,” continued to be consistently in use till the 1850s.8 Acknowledging its use in the eighteenth century, Wolff says that it was “anachronistic” (p. 5), but he never proves that. He believes that the Enlightenment “had to invent Eastern Europe” instead of “the North,” but he does not explain why. The terms “North” and “Northern kingdoms,” as applied to Russia and its European neighbors, are mentioned in the book. They are used by Nuncio G. Archetti in 1783, by William Coxe in 1785, and by Diderot and Voltaire throughout their writings (pp. 5, 13, 14, 22, 90, 91, 200, 209–210, etc.). Pierre Antoine de la Place wrote Anecdotes du Nord: Comprenant la Suède, le Danemarck, la Pologne & la Russie depuis l’origine de ces monarchies jusqu’à present (Paris, 1770). In the eighteenth century, Poland and Russia were a self-evident component of the “Northern Tour,” a part of the better known “Grand Tour.” John Parkinson considered his Tour of Russia,

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Siberia and the Crimea 1792–1794 (London, 1971) “a northern tour,” and so did many travelers in Russia who referred to it as “the North” till the 1840s.9 The long war (1700–21) between Peter I and Charles XII was named “The Northern War.” Nikita Panin, Catherine’s foreign minister, devised in the 1760s a diplomatic scheme for an alliance comprising Russia, Prussia, Sweden, England, Denmark, Saxony, and Poland, and named it the “Northern System”; and in 1800 Comte d’Hauterive wrote on the European balance of power in terms of “équilibre du nord [et] du midi.” In 1806, Napoleon named the Polish regiments of his army the “Northern Legion.” St. Petersburg is often referred to as the “capital of the North” (pp. 22, 44); there is no mention of a single Russian city as the “capital of the East.” The philosophes called Catherine II, “Sémiramis du Nord,” “Cleopatra of the North,” and “Star of the North” (pp. 209, 213, 220). She is mentioned in the book not less than eight times as “Empress of the North,” (pp. 126, 128, 140, 209–210, 212, 220), a title of the Russian emperors that would last till the time of her grandson, Nicholas I, “der nordische Kaiser,” who died in 1855. Voltaire wrote to Catherine: “truth comes from the North” (p. 212)—a ridiculous statement, but it shows his “philosophic geography.” In 1769, during the Russo-Turkish war, he envisioned Catherine “on the road to Adrianople,” calling her the “legislator of the North.” Wolff complains that “Adrianople was anything but northern” (p. 212); for Voltaire, it was. Wolff clings to his thesis against the evidence when he writes: “No one held more tenaciously to the rubric of ‘the north’ than Voltaire, who, himself, emptied the concept of its significance in discovering Eastern Europe” (p. 200). In Wolff’s terminology eighteenth-century travelers were “entering Eastern Europe,” “discovering Eastern Europe,” though none said or thought in these terms. Paradoxically, they said that they were “going east” to reach “the North.” This apparent nonsense has its logic, which shows that their geocultural concept for our “Eastern Europe” was “northern countries.” Curiously, when summarizing philosophes’ and travelers’ writings, Wolff makes them say “Eastern Europe,” even when they write “the north of Europe”; here is one example: Charles crossed the Baltic from Sweden in 1700 and proceeded to defeat Peter in the battle of Narva. Voltaire therefore started his survey of Eastern Europe with “very curious particularities” about Russia. He began by locating it geographically for his readers and then evaluated its level of civilization: “Muscovy, or Russia, embraces the north of Asia and that of Europe…” Voltaire emphasized Russia’s position on two continents, Europe and Asia. Its European part he always assigned, according to the prevailing convention, to the north of Europe, though Peter’s conquests

198 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” had taken him almost to the Black Sea by the end of the seventeenth century. (p. 90; my italics)

This was indeed the “prevailing convention,” and Voltaire followed it. The last example about “the North” comes from Montesquieu, who, in Wolff’s felicitous expression, “virtually inaugurated the Enlightenment” with the Persian Letters in 1721 (p. 97). In The Spirit of the Laws, published in Geneva in 1748, Montesquieu drew two crucial distinctions between nations according to the climate, the ethnic character, and génie politique: one between Europe and Asia; another between the North and the South in Europe itself. He included Russia in Europe and in the North, among the peoples who had “few vices, many virtues, and were sincere, honest, and law-abiding.” In the cold countries of the north, people did not succumb to “vain pleasures,” and man “rejected slavery.” The inclusion of Russia in the nations of the North was even more remarkable, considering that it created an intellectual difficulty that Montesquieu had to overcome in order to make his theory stand. According to contemporary accounts, Russia was a “despotic empire,” her people lived in “abject slavery,” and their manners were rude: they lied, cheated, were lazy and most of the time drunk. How was Montesquieu to explain that? He solved this discrepancy by a tour de force of argumentation: the Russian spirit and manners “are true to the North and its climate”; the oft-described features are due to centuries of contacts with the Tartars and are “foreign to the climate.” That is why Peter’s reforms succeeded so easily: he had to discard the superficial crust of artificial foreign ways, and restitute the manners of Europe to a European nation (a grand idea, which Catherine adopted verbatim in her Nakaz). Wolff remarks on this issue: “Political attention to climate clouded the emergence of Eastern Europe throughout the eighteenth century. Yet Montesquieu, firmly committed to the notion of ‘the North,’ had no reservation about including Russia in Europe” (p. 204). Quite so. Montesquieu and educated people in his time were firmly committed to the notion of “the North,” which not only “clouded the emergence of Eastern Europe,” but obviously prevented its emergence.

East and West in the Mind of the Enlightenment Succinctly summarized, the book’s thesis holds that the newly invented rubric “Eastern Europe” was conceived as a paradigm of backwardness and barbarian mores. Thus the philosophes were presenting to educated society of their countries an example that should not be followed, and an

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inverted mirror image of the higher civilization of the West. Through this process of intellectual invention and stigmatization of “Eastern Europe,” Western Europe defined its own identity and drew up the dividing line between itself and the East. Yet it appears that this thesis has overlooked several notable features of the Enlightenment without directly confronting them or constructing explicitly an alternative interpretation. For that reason, one more question has to be answered in this examination. Assuming that the Enlightenment did not know the notion of “Eastern Europe,” did it elaborate (under other names) views and representations similar or equivalent to those conveyed by “Eastern Europe” in Wolff’s interpretation? It does not seem so. One of the central elements in the philosophes’ teaching was the belief that better institutions make better human beings, and that all politics are an exercise in education. This belief also informed their own “philosophic politics,” “philosophic geography,” and attitudes toward the “eastern”—in fact northern—countries in Europe, as well as fictional islands (like Robinson Crusoe’s) and imagined Persias. In this context, geography was used not for its own sake, but instrumentally and without much regard for geographic precision (a feature that Wolff repeatedly deplores). Geography served them not to establish imaginary dividing lines between “Eastern” and “Western” Europe, but to demonstrate, according to their universalistic Weltanschauung,10 that all men and women and all peoples and nations are the same, and that good institutions make good peoples while bad institutions corrupt them—“bad institutions” like those that, in their view, prevailed in their own countries in “Western Europe.” Following Montesquieu, Catherine II declared in paragraph 6 of the Nakaz: “Russia is a European State”; in his “Observations sur le Nakaz,” Diderot remarked: “It does not matter if it is Asiatic or European; the important point is that it be great, flourishing, and enduring. The customs [moeurs] are everywhere the product of legislation and of government, and they are neither African, nor Asiatic, nor European: they are good or bad.”11 Instead of inventing a “divide,” the philosophes imagined one Europe, one humanity, one universe, and wrote in glowing terms about the “unheard-of progress” in Russia. Voltaire affirmed that under Peter, “Russia achieved in fifty years what we did in five hundred,” because the tsar followed the advice of the philosophes, which was uniformly applicable to all nations. Thus Russia became a model for the nations, and in particular for the “old nations” in the west of Europe, as Diderot told Catherine II: “You have a young nation to form; we have an old one to rejuvenate” (p. 230). In the philosophes’ representations, these “old nations” were in a deplorable state produced by old traditions, superstitions, feudal survivals, the Church’s authority, and kings who did not care about the philosophes, let

200 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” alone about asking their advice on how to manage the affairs of the realm. (Frederick II was an exception, and he does not belong to Wolff’s “West.”) This cultural and political criticism was the core of the Enlightenment’s project, and it did not escape the attention of the powers: hence the harassments and censorship to which the philosophes were submitted. How are these views to be reconciled with Russia’s “backwardness,” often voiced by the philosophes themselves? On this question, there is a serious difference between this reviewer’s interpretation and Wolff’s. Following Albert Lortholary’s excellent study,12 Wolff aptly remarks: “Enlightened despotism and accelerated progress were interdependent parts of Peter’s myth, shaping the idea of Eastern Europe [that is, of Russia] as a domain of backwardness” (p. 202). But he does not pursue this idea in the perspective of the Enlightenment’s thought, but of his own model of Eastern Europe’s backwardness vis-à-vis Western Europe’s higher civilization. Far from stigmatizing Russia, the philosophes’ concept of “backwardness” was the starting point for Peter’s glorification, and for measuring the extent of Russia’s achievements. In their accounts, before Peter there was chaos, darkness, nothing. Peter came and there was light (for he followed the advice of the philosophes). This allusion to fiat lux, and the idea of creation out of chaos and ex nihilo, were important elements in the philosophes’ strategy of how to use Peter’s myth (which they had created) and Russia’s “example” to the nations. First, it alluded to a godlike wisdom achieved through enlightenment; second, it implied that the greater the backwardness, the greater the glory of the Enlightened Monarch and the scope of Russia’s progress to civilization. Thus the “backwardness” of Russia was the first step toward presenting it as an “example to the nations.” This view, shared by all the philosophes except Rousseau, disproves the meaning of Wolff’s “Philosophic Geography” and the role reserved in it to “backwardness.” He writes: “Voltaire’s enthusiasm for Catherine’s codification of laws followed naturally from the myth of Peter which he had codified himself; absolute power became an unequivocal force for civilization and enlightenment when applied to the backward lands and peoples of Eastern Europe” (p. 211). Here the error is both semantic and substantive: the philosophes’ schemes were not conceived especially for “the backward lands and peoples of Eastern Europe,” or for Robinson Crusoe’s allegoric island, but above all for “old nations” like France, England, Spain, the Italian- and German-speaking countries, and they had a universal value.13 Their descriptions of Russia as a well-ordered state and a rational society were made in full knowledge of the wretched Russian realities. This mythical Russia was a hoax and a lie, but it was, in Voltaire’s words, “a useful lie,” doing a greater service to humanity than many truths. This lie had both a didactic and a propa-

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gandistic purpose, and was intended to show to Western rulers what can be achieved when kings take the advice of the philosophes and depart from the trodden paths of old traditions and “bad laws.” It was intended to convince educated society that the social and political order advocated by the philosophes was not an empty dream and a utopia, but an order of things that had already been implemented elsewhere, and therefore could be achieved everywhere. The “Russian example” transposed the philosophes’ project from their minds and books into “reality.” This gave reasons for hope and fortitude against the “stagnation” and the repressions in their own countries. Wolff correctly sums up Voltaire’s idea in Anecdotes on the Tsar Peter the Great (1748): “Eastern Europe [in fact: Russia] became the domain in which enlightened despotism proved itself as political theory, as the formula for development and civilization” (p. 205). But he errs when he writes ironically of Diderot: He summoned [his compatriots] to a fantasy with Catherine as its object. “Ah! my friends! suppose this woman on the throne of France! … Just come pass a month in Petersburg. Come relieve yourselves of a long constraint that has degraded you; it is then that you will feel yourselves to be the men that you are!” (p. 225)

“A long constraint that has degraded you”: this is how Diderot perceived life in France under the Ancien Régime, which the philosophes deeply hated. Diderot would gladly have seen, not Catherine, but an enlightened monarch like Catherine on the throne of France instead of Louis XV or Louis XVI, who succeeded him on 10 May 1774. In its historical context, this utterance does not warrant Wolff’s sarcasm, nor his view that it had “the stuff of vaudeville performance” (p. 225). For Diderot, the painful farce was sitting on the throne of France, not of Russia. Twenty years later, on 21 January 1793, the farce would turn to tragedy, staged by Diderot’s followers. Wolff often chides the philosophes—Voltaire, Jaucourt, Montesquieu, Rousseau—for not having visited “Eastern Europe,” and having “never seen” St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Taganrog, Kiev, and other places while continuing to write diligently about them (p. 186, 196, 199, 204–206). Of course, it is always better “to see for oneself,” but for their purpose the philosophes did not have to. What they needed were imagined countries, and even more—real but faraway and unknown ones, about which they could write and “prove” that their gospel was no utopia, but a reality implemented by enlightened monarchs ready to listen to the philosophes. The same effect was produced by the literary genre depicting imaginary foreigners who visit Western countries and comment on them, as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1772). Wolff writes: “Montesquieu virtually inaugurated the En-

202 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” lightenment by inventing Usbek, a Persian traveler to France, and critically analyzing French society, religion, and civilization from the perspective of the Oriental eye” (p. 97). Not “from the perspective of the Oriental eye,” but from the critical perspective of the Enlightenment. Montesquieu’s purpose is obvious, and because the book satirized unmercifully the social, political, and ecclesiastical institutions in France of his day, it could not be published there and appeared anonymously, with Cologne on its title page but in fact printed and published in Amsterdam. The themes of “chaos” and creation ex nihilo and from tabula rasa (whose epitome was Robinson Crusoe’s “barren” island) had a double explanatory and propagandistic edge in the philosophes’ description of Russia, and should not be ironically dismissed as “fantasies.” First, the creation of Russia ex nihilo had a biblical undertone in that it bestowed on Peter a semi-godlike status, a device always useful for exciting the imagination and strengthening the faith. Second, the “state of tabula rasa” (from which purportedly Peter began his state- and nation-building) was precisely what the Western countries needed most in order to go forward, and was missing there because of the bric-a-brac of old institutions and superstitions, of Church canons and royal lits de justice. Tabula rasa was the object of the philosophes’ innermost wishes and dreams. Such a tabula rasa was what the French Revolution would try to accomplish—as the Marseillaise loudly proclaimed: Du passé faisons table rase—after years of guidance and inspiration of the philosophes, whose central message was that the only way to progress was to erase the existing social and political institutions in their countries, and to begin anew, ex nihilo, with Reason as the only guide.14 Thus all these elements of the Enlightenment’s worldview were linked in a perfect fit: the creation ex nihilo, the backwardness, the advice of the philosophes, the swift civilizing process under an enlightened monarch, the lesson to be learned by kings, and the example to be followed “by all men and women of good will.”

Concluding Remarks The author expressed the hope that his thesis “will provoke further critical discussion of the issue” of Europe’s division into east and west (p. vii). It does, and this underlines the interest of his book, its qualities, and wealth of topics. Because of space limitations, some issues in this review were touched upon very briefly, some not at all. Two final remarks are in order before bringing it to an end. One of the book’s qualities is that it relies extensively on primary sources; one of its blemishes, the narrow range of secondary sources (syn-

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theses, monographs, articles). Important works on the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment are not mentioned. Thus, except for one short article (p. 383, note 88), there is no reference to the magisterial multivolume work Settecento riformatore by the late Franco Venturi, probably the greatest specialist on the Enlightenment, and no trace of his books translated into English, which would have supplied an all-European comparative perspective. I missed also Louis Réau’s rich panorama in L’Europe française au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 1951), and works by Haumant, Pingaud, Rogger, Chaunu, Cranston, Margaret C. Jacob, Chantal Grell, Wade, Formigari, Domenech, Walicky, and many others.15 There might be some mistake of mine in this list: sadly, there is no bibliography in the book, and to find an item (or its absence), one has to go over thirty pages of notes in small print (pp. 377–406) and check and double-check 928 notes. In his conclusion, Larry Wolff tells us that the Enlightenment’s idea of “Eastern Europe” and of Europe’s division into two continues in the present. Its persistence is due, in his view, to an “intellectual continuity” whose principal landmarks, after Voltaire’s times, are Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, which “put Philosophic Geography at the service of military mapping” in his attempt “to establish an Empire in Eastern Europe” (pp. 8, 362); Custine (Russia in 1839), who studied “with almost erotic fascination … the men of pure Slavonian race,” and whose “Chinese Wall of 1839” between Russia and the West “prefigured the ‘iron curtain’ of 1946 as the barrier between Eastern and Western Europe” (pp. 364–365); the Crimean War (p. 363); Disraeli’s “containment of Russia” (p. 366); and more recently (I skip over some names and events cited in the book), Archibald Cary Coolidge, professor of history at Harvard, who “conducted inquiries for Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House on Eastern Europe”; Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; the Ostforschung professors in Nazi Germany who endorsed the conquest of Ostraum and racist policies (pp. 368–369); Churchill’s Fulton speech in 1946 announcing that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent” from Stettin to Trieste; the Cold War divide; and James Bond in From Russia with Love (p. 371). The common denominator of these ideas and events is that all stem from the Enlightenment’s representations and conceptualization of “Eastern Europe,” and they use the same formulas and the same vocabulary in which the issues of Eastern Europe were defined: civilization and barbarism, wildness and the frontier, the picturesque and the instructive. This is an interesting filiation of ideas, but is it history? After all, ideas exist in given historical contexts and are propounded by men and women who live by them, fight for them, and occasionally (rightly or wrongly) die for them. Historical contexts are always discrete and specific; they rarely resemble each other. Over time the same ideas have different functions and

204 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” dissimilar results in various sociocultural contexts. And “the second time” the results are not always farcical, as Marx believed. A filiation of ideas stretching from Voltaire, to Custine, to Disraeli, to Ostraum professors, to Churchill, and to Stalin’s Iron Curtain, is a total decontextualization of these ideas, and a gratuitous and ahistorical exercise of the mind. There is no benefit and inspiration in it for the historian’s craft, or in the search for understanding the past and the present.

Notes 1. This text is a review of Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994); it was published originally in Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des slavistes 36, nos. 3–4 (September–December 1994): 505–522; chapter and page numbers in the text refer to Wolff’s book. For a perceptive analysis of this review and of the problems discussed by Wolff, see Guido Franzinetti, “The Idea and the Reality of Eastern Europe in the Eighteenth Century,” History of European Ideas 34, no. 4 (December 2006): 361–368. 2. A term coined by John Ledyard, an American who visited Russia in 1787–88. 3. Y. Slezkine, “Naturalists Versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity,” Representations 47 (1994): 171; see also F. B. Kaiser and B. Stasiewski, eds., Reiseberichte von Deutschen über Russland und von Russen über Deutschland (Cologne, 1980). 4. G. Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor from Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis, 1992), p. xxx. 5. L. E. Berry and R. O. Crummey, eds., Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers (Madison, 1968); M. Mervaud and J. C. Roberti, Une infinie brutalité: L’image de la Russie dans la France des XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1991). On the transmission of stereotypes over time, and from one travel account to another, see the excellent work of M. S. Anderson, Britain’s Discovery of Russia, 1553–1815 (London, 1958). 6. Western monarchs practiced “map manipulation” not upon “Eastern Europe,” but upon each other’s dominions at will. With this in mind they started the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), the War of the Polish Succession (1733–35), the War of the Austrian Succession (1730–48), the three Silesian Wars, the Seven Years’ War (1757–63), and the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–79). All were fought for a piece of map. Wolff chides Voltaire for his enthusiasm during Catherine’s war against The Porte (pp. 209–220); most enlighteners did the same in various wars on various sides. Incidentally, the first to make a “map manipulation” in moving the state’s capital was of course Peter the Great, not a “Western European.” 7. Most of the cases consist in replacing “Russia” with “Eastern Europe.” 8. The shift from “North” to “East,” as a geographic and diplomatic designation, occurred between the Congress of Vienna and the Crimean War, when the cultural dichotomy along east-west lines replaced the centuries-old view of

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

a north-south divide. This reorientation has been persuasively demonstrated by H. Lemberg, “Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert vom ‘Norden’ zum ‘Osten’ Europas,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 33 (1985): 48–91. It seems that Wolff has not seen this article. For example: N. W. Wraxall, Jr., Cursory Remarks made in a Tour through some of the Northern parts of Europe, particularly Copenhagen, Stockholm and Petersburgh (London, 1775); J. Carr, A Northern Summer, or Travels round the Baltic through Denmarck, Sweden, Russia, Prussia and Part of Germany in the Year 1804 (London, 1805); C. B. Eliot, Letters from the North of Europe, or a Journal of Travels in Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Prussia and Saxony (London, 1832); H. Achenbach, Skizzen aus Norden: Erinnerungen eines Ausruhenden (Düsseldorf, 1736; Part I: Reise nach Russland im Jahr 1832). The universalistic outlook of the Enlightenment is missing in Wolff’s treatment except for a passing reference to Diderot (pp. 231–232). D. Diderot, “Observations sur le Nakaz” (1774), Oeuvres politiques (Paris, 1963), p. 349. A. Lortholary, Le mirage russe en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1951). In his remarks on the Nakaz, Diderot observed: “What Peter I brought to Russia, if it was good in Europe, was good everywhere.” Oeuvres politiques, pp. 349–350. See R. Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la Révolution Française (Paris, 1990). Here are some of them: U. Ricken, Sprache, Anthropologie, Philosophie in der Französischen Aufklärung (Berlin, 1984); H. Vyverberg, Cultural Diversity and the French Enlightenment (Oxford, 1989); Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991); Chantal Grell, L’histoire entre érudition et philosophie: Etude sur la conaissance historique de l’âge des Lumières (Paris, 1993); Z. M. Trachtenberg, Making Citizens: Rousseau’s Political Theory of Culture (London, 1993); D. Brewer, The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing (Cambridge, 1993).

d Political Murder in CHAPTER 9

Russian Culture Comparisons and Counterfactuals

e

Conventional Wisdom and Open Questions The history of the Russian revolutionary movement has raised agonizing questions—political, ethical, and existential—some of which are still topical in today’s societies. Such is, for instance, the use of terror and political assassination, whose practice and theory were on the agenda of the populists in the 1870s and 1880s, of the anarchists at the fin de siècle, of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) before the revolution, and of the Bolsheviks after they seized power in 1917. Conventional wisdom has it that political assassination rarely achieves its aim and often leads to results unintended by the perpetrators of the act. Thus, Benjamin Disraeli, in his speech on the death of Abraham Lincoln, said that “assassination never changed the history of the world.” Similarly, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin held that “there are apparently some simpletons in our movement who believe that they can change the course of history with one kilogram of dynamite.” The first question the historian encounters is: are these statements confirmed by the historical evidence? The second is: does terrorism indeed never achieve its aims? Another set of questions regards the historical philosophy underlying Disraeli’s and Kropotkin’s views that assassination “never changed the history of the world” or “cannot change the course of history.” These views assume that history has a preordained course and a purposeful motion. They presume that neither “one kilogram of dynamite” nor the presence (or absence) of given historical personalities can divert it from its “inevitable course.” They have, then, a deterministic and teleological bent, which begs the question whether these are not ahistorical generalizations. In any case, such views differ markedly from those of Alexander Herzen, who in a poetic description wrote that history has no plan, no libretto, and knows only “the flow of life,” that it is all passion, will, improvisation: 206

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sometimes roads exist, sometimes not, and where there is no road, genius will blast a path.1 In other words, history is governed by contingency and indeterminism. Sometimes it is genius that blasts a path; sometimes it is an assassin’s bullet. In this light, we may posit as a working hypothesis that “one kilogram of dynamite” could change the direction of historical events. We may assume also that when a political assassination is perpetrated, the extent of the changes wrought depends mostly on two variables: “who” is assassinated, and “when” it occurred. In other words, it depends on the potential role of the historical agent “removed from circulation” (to use a term coined by Russian terrorists: iz’iat’ iz obrashcheniia), and on timing—that is, on the nature of the historical situation, the degree of polarization between the political forces in society, and the magnitude of the issues on the national agenda.

A Note on Terminology and Historiography The notions of “political murder” or “political assassination” are used in this essay in a wider meaning that comprises both individual or collective murder (or attempted murder) directed at representatives of the ruling power, and a similar reaction by the state against individuals or groups that challenge it. “Political assassination” will include also mutual assaults (from the sporadic and narrowly targeted to the strategically conceived plans) between competing organizations, none of which holds power at the time of these assaults. Finally, the notion will also encompass assassinations on a large scale with a great number of casualties, resulting from a government’s policy of persecution of national, ethnic, religious, or social groups in the realm. Thus, without ignoring currently established terminology (such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust, terrorism), it is assumed, for example, that the Nazi policy of extermination (of Jews, communists, and Roma) is also a political murder—a mass political murder. Such became also, indirectly, the Soviet plan for the collectivization of agriculture, as it entailed massive deportations of rural population, liquidation of individual peasants and, when opposed by the peasantry, intentional man-made famine in whole regions. (These two examples raise, tangentially, the vexing issue of Russia’s uniqueness, which will be addressed below.) What other definitions of “political murder” do we find in the research? In his encompassing and almost encyclopedic compendium Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism, which stretches from Judith and the beheading of Holofernes to the assassination of Anwar Sadat, Franklin L.

208 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Ford is one of the few scholars who offers from the outset an explicit and clear-cut definition, namely: “Assassination is the intentional killing of a specified victim or group of victims, perpetrated for reasons related to his (her, their) public prominence and undertaken with a political purpose in view.”2 Israeli scholars, writing on the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, tend to use generally variants of the definition proposed by Franklin Ford.3

Political Murder and Russia’s Uniqueness Matters seem to stand somewhat differently among Russianists. In contemporary Russian historiography in the West there are several approaches to the phenomenon of political assassination. Richard Pipes, for instance, views this phenomenon as a component of terrorist activity, which includes “any sequence of daring acts, publicly committed—assassinations, bombings, self-immolation, hijackings.”4 One of the characteristics of this terrorist activity is that, after it fails to achieve its aims, it becomes “terror for the sake of terror, carried out with impressive cunning and courage simply to prove that it could be done: a contest of wills between a tiny band of radicals and the whole imperial establishment.”5 Franco Venturi, a specialist of the populist movement in Russia, also assimilates political murder with terrorism, observing that “the spirit of terrorism had penetrated deeply into Narodnaya Volya, absorbing and consuming every other political idea or feeling,”6 and he describes the link between the goal of assassinating Tsar Alexander II and the vision of a “terrorist revolution” that the Narodnaia Volia finally adopted.7 In Russia, Soviet and post-Soviet scholars usually describe the theory and practice of terrorism, and secondarily political murder as one of its manifestations.8 Another view holds that in Russia’s history and political culture, violence and assassination were permanently a dominant feature and a modus operandi of both the ruling power and the various groups opposed to the established regime. This thesis starts from the assumption that in this respect as in others, Russia was (and still is) a case sui generis whose main feature is its uniqueness. Similarly, because of the continuous use of this practice, Russia stands apart from the European family of nations and is, in short, a morbid and pathological historic phenomenon. A representative example of this thesis is a book by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, professor of political science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, former chair of Russian Studies at the Sorbonne, and presently Secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie Française. Published in French in 1988 and in English in 1992 (with a foreword by Adam Ulam, professor of Soviet history at Harvard University), the book is entitled: The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand

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Years of Political Murder (French title: Le malheur russe: Essai sur le meurtre politique).9 Political murder is conceived in this work as the Russian syndrome par excellence, and as the differentia between Russia and the rest.10 Thus, without knowing it, Brutus and Ravaillac, John Wilkes Booth and Gavrilo Princip, Lee Harvey Oswald and Yigal Amir were reenacting the form and content of a perennial Russian syndrome. This view is closely linked to the question of Russia’s uniqueness. Carrère d’Encausse has seen it, and she writes: Eleven centuries of a history notable for its murders make Russia unlike any other country … The true continuity of Russo-Soviet history can be found instead in the country’s never-ending tragedy, symbolized by the systematic use of murder as a means of retaining power and as a reaction to that power. This tragedy sheds light on the uniqueness of the history of the country.11

This question is important both for its own sake and for its implications regarding the political culture of the country. But as formulated here it begs two important questions. The first concerns the issue of violence. We are told: “This long tradition of murder has doubtless created a collective consciousness that has little hope for a pacified political world, while violence or the fear of violence remains deeply rooted.”12 With regard to the use of violence, there is no conceptual distinction between violence in general and political murder in particular, and this oversight undermines the argument.13 Murder represents indeed a sort of violence, but wars, revolutions, and peasant revolts, for instance, are types of violence that are not necessarily political murders. Carrère d’Encausse refers to the Russian Revolution of 1905, which was a succession of acts of violence (as are most revolutions East and West, including the French and the American Revolutions). But a revolution cannot be equated with political assassinations, although suchlike may occur in its course. Does the factual evidence for the use of murder and violence in Russia support the view for the creation of the “collective consciousness” mentioned above? When was this consciousness created? Among whom? What were its forms? How long did it persist? Did it, too, last “one thousand years”? How does it compare to the practice in other places and peoples? Actually, during the entire course of Russian history before 1917, with the exception of the massacre of thousands of Jews by Bohdan Khmelnytskyi in 1648–49 (an event missing from the otherwise exhaustive inventory of murders drawn on by professor Carrère d’Encausse), there was nothing comparable in intensity of violence to some of the massacres that took place in the West, such as, for instance, the successive Crusades, with the massacres along the itinerary from Clermont to Jerusalem via Christian

210 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Constantinople, sacked and plundered by the Crusaders; such was also the so-called Albigensian Crusade in 1208–13, when Simon de Montfort (the elder), supported by the pope and the king of France, committed a series of horrors while trying to obliterate the Provençal culture and incorporate this country into the kingdom of France. Later on, as we know, there were the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth, the Civil War in the United States in the nineteenth, and the Spanish Civil War in the twentieth century (and this is only a short sample). Probably, there resulted in each case various sorts of historical and collective post–conflictual-trauma stresses, but what were they? What were their symptoms? What kind of “syndromes” did they bring about? What were the similarities and the differences between them? Can we assert, without serious research and comparative examination, what “collective consciousness” was generated in Russia or in any other place? This brings us to the second aspect of this view, which needs clarification. Regarding political murder, too, the thesis of Russian uniqueness lacks sufficient evidence and proper conceptualization. In terms of method, the only way to establish “uniqueness” is by comparison with the other objects of discourse, in this case “the other large European countries” referred to in the text.14 As Isaiah Berlin once put it (I quote from memory): “If uniqueness of a phenomenon is examined, we must not rush to the conclusion that it is unique before we have compared it to other events which in some ways resemble it.” In The Russian Syndrome this comparative approach is missing. There are analogies but no comparative analysis. For that reason it remains unclear whether Russia is unique or not, and if so, in what way. Russia’s uniqueness in matters of political assassination is asserted but not proven; it remains a question of belief, not a result of scholarly enquiry.

Similarities and Differences Another historiographic approach to political murder holds that Russia is neither a case sui generis nor a locus classicus in this matter, but rather one specimen among many others.15 There occurred in world history, and (as we shall see below) in that of the West, too, different forms of political assassinations. Russia’s history has known almost all of them, and it is neither a “classic case” nor a prototype, but one example among many that occurred from Caesar’s death to Yitzhak Rabin’s. Actually, when compared to its “more advanced” Western neighbors, like France, England, Italy, and the United States, it would seem that in this respect, till 1917 Russia lagged behind them both in terms of scope and frequency, and in terms of the theoretical justification of political murder. Indeed, the major theories on

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this subject originated in the West: in ancient Greece, tyrannicide was considered a civic virtue; Rome’s legal touch produced neotyrannicide; the sixteenth-century Monarchomachs could take inspiration for regicide from the reasoned and avowed rationale of Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579) as well as from Machiavelli’s innuendos. The number of political assassinations in Russia up to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power was much lower (as will be seen below), and their frequency much more sporadic, than in several Western countries where, as a technique in the struggle for political power, assassination was used in most periods of their history, and under a wide variety of political forms. Let us take a brief look at two examples out of many. It is often said that one of the causes of Russia’s “deficient” historical development was that it did not have a Renaissance and did not experience the Reformation and Counter-Reformation with their religious uplifting, cultural refinements, and political accomplishments. This may be true, but as a by-product of this deprivation, Russia shared to a lesser degree the by-products that went with them, chief among them political assassination for raison d’état and (if I may say so) for “raison de religion”—for this was the result of the rule Cuius regio, eius religio, since in the struggle between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation the principal strategy was to capture the thrones of Europe for one creed or another. This strategy was supported by theories, religious as well as secular (which were not identical with those of the Monarchomachs), of the permissibility of regicide, theories that laid the basis for revolutionary assassination at a later stage. The second example is a reminder that from the early modern period onward, political assassinations were quite common in the more civilized countries of the West. This was so in France, from the fate of Henri IV to that of Jean Jaurès.16 Among the many victims of political murders in England were Mary, Queen of Scots, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Charles I.17 Italy’s history of political assassinations relates the deeds of Cesare Borgia, the Medici family victims, the political murders in the Serenissima, and that of Umberto I, King of Italy, of Giacomo Matteotti, and of Aldo Moro. Germany still remembers the slaying of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Walter Rathenau.18 The young democratic republic of the United States has its share with Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, as well as the attempted murders of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. Finally, smaller countries were not immune from this scourge. In the Netherlands, William the Silent was shot dead by political opponents (1584) and Johan van Oldenbarnevelt was legally decapitated (1619). In Switzerland, in 1553, Michael Servetus (Miguel Serveto), a Spanish fugitive from

212 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” the Inquisition, was burned at the stake for (Catholic) heresy by order of the (Calvinist) Council of Geneva; if this sounds strange, the explanation is in that it was in fact a political execution. In Austria-Hungary, victims of attentats were Empress Elizabeth (1898), Count Andreas Potocki, Hapsburg governor of Polish Galicia (1908), and Prime Minister Count Stürgh (1916). And in the Iberian Peninsula, King Carlos of Portugal and his son were killed in 1908; and in Spain so were Prime Ministers Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (1897) and José Canalejas y Méndez (1912), in addition to an attempted murder on Alfonso XIII (1906).19 Southeastern Europe (the stereotypical “ghastly Balkans” and their “one thousand years of horrors”) had also had its repertoire of political murders, but they are not part of our purview, which includes only the “more civilized Western countries.” This is why the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in 1914 should not be included here; nor the assassination on 9 October 1934, in Marseilles, of Alexander I, King of Yugoslavia, and of French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. Excluding “the Balkans” from this narrative is a loss, for the stories of “The Black Hand,” of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), and of Hungarian-based Croat Ustaša hit men, for example, would have added some vivid nuances to the European experience.

Russia: Types and Periodization In Russia, political assassination appeared under two main types. The first was the dynastic type, which existed in the annals of most monarchies almost everywhere. The second was the ideological one, which could be religious, revolutionary, or nationalistic, or any combination of the three. In modern Russia the revolutionary form is dominant, whereas in earlier times the dynastic form prevailed. In this respect, in terms of periodization, I would distinguish between three main periods in Russia’s history, which correspond roughly to the different types of political assassination. The first period, from medieval Muscovy to the beginning of the nineteenth century, represents the dynastic form of political assassination. I would propose to define it as assassination from within, because it involved only the imperial family and was executed within the ruling elite. The second period goes from the mid nineteenth century through 1917, during which emerged the ideological-revolutionary form of political murder. I would call it assassination from below, because it was perpetrated by underground voluntary political organizations opposed to the tsarist regime, its head, and its government. The third period, spanning the time between the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and 1956, was a time of an ideological-

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totalitarian form of terror and mass political murder of real or imaginary opponents to the Soviet regime. I would call it murder from above, since it was carried out by the government against the citizens and the peoples of the Soviet Union. Are we on the eve of a fourth period, in which political opponents of the government are mysteriously liquidated by unnamed and ghostly killers? As a historian, I will leave this question open, and allow the facts in the present and near future to speak for themselves.

The First Period of Political Assassinations If we were to adopt the “one thousand years of Russian history” paradigm, then the first political assassination took place in the year 1015 upon the succession of Prince Vladimir the Saint, when his two sons Boris and Gleb were murdered by their elder brother Sviatopolk, who wanted to secure for himself the Kievan throne by eliminating any potential rivals. This was a momentous event that left a lasting imprint in Russia’s history. Although he had been warned that Sviatopolk was planning to kill him, when urged to march with his army against his older brother, Boris refused. Explaining his attitude, George Vernadsky writes that Boris had accepted Christianity in all seriousness. He was not willing to resist evil with evil and abhorred the idea of fighting his elder brother; he therefore dismissed his retinue and waited for the assassins. He was murdered but by his death remained forever alive in popular memory as a symbol of brotherly love. Boris and his brother Gleb … were the first two Russians to be canonized by the Church... . The assassination of the two brothers was a shock to the Russian people at large. While not strictly martyrs of the faith, they were considered innocent “sufferers” who sacrificed themselves for the ideal of brotherly love. … Boris’ attitude is that of nonresistance to evil, the result of a literal acceptance of Christ’s words. It was for their innocent suffering that Boris and Gleb were considered saints by the large masses of the Russian people.20

They are remembered every year on 2 May (O.S.), and till the 1930s they were present in the peasant folklore and in the agricultural calendar of seasonal works.21 Their murder is an event with psychological dimensions that has to be taken into consideration in examining the formation of the Russians’ collective memory over time. The next political murders occurred in the sixteenth century (which was rich in such events all over Europe) during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, from 1533 (when he ascended the throne as a three-year-old) to 1584. Two main circumstances led him to the physical elimination of po-

214 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” litical opponents. The first had a personal character: during his childhood intense political strife developed among noble families vying for greater control of a weak central government; later on, with the experience in public affairs that he acquired during his youth, Ivan did not hesitate to execute or banish high dignitaries suspected of treasonable relations with Lithuania and Turkey, or of conspiring against him. This was the fate, for instance, of Prince Mikhail Glinskii, Prince Ivan Vorotynskii, Prince Ivan Belskii, Mikhail Vorontsov, Prince Ivan Obolenskii, and two high church dignitaries, Metropolitan Philip and Metropolitan Leonid. This list fits well within the European practice of that period, particularly in France and England, where many a king or dignitary was assassinated ad majorem Dei gloriam. The second factor derived from Russia’s historical situation in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, known as the period of “the gathering of the Russian lands” under Ivan III (the Great; 1462–1505) and Ivan the Terrible. It entailed foreign conflicts and great internal tensions. Within Russia the Princes of Moscow fought against “feudal” lords, as well as against the independent cities of Pskov and Novgorod. Carrère d’Encausse writes: “Western rulers, too, resorted to violence to destroy feudalism in their states, but hardly on a scale and with the cruelty exhibited during the reigns of Ivan III and Ivan IV.”22 As for Franklin Ford, he defines this same period (the late fifteenth and sixteenth century) in Western Europe as “a century of bloodshed.”23 The incorporation of the free city of Novgorod into the Russian state was a painful episode in Ivan the Terrible’s reign. Suspecting secessionist tendencies among the city’s notables and clergy, he launched a “punitive expedition” in 1570, during which Novgorod was sacked and plundered, church buildings desecrated and burned, and public officials and priests publicly flogged, tortured, and murdered, not sparing high ecclesiastical dignitaries such as Metropolitan Philip and Metropolitan Leonid. Whether generated by a mental disorder or not, Ivan’s oprichnina (a private army of loyal men) terrorized the population and wrought havoc in the realm (1564–72). Those were indeed, East and West, times of slaughter and cruelty. Ivan’s bloody internal policy fits well within a general European pattern. Thus, the Massacre of the St. Bartholomew’s Eve in France occurred just two years after the Novgorod expedition. At about the same time, from 1568 to 1573, the Duke of Alba, special envoy of the King of Spain Philip II, was devastating the Netherlands with an army of 10,000 and decimating the Dutch political class, using a tribunal (appropriately called the “Court of Blood”) that he had created to carry out political assassinations. This was how the Count of Egmont and the Count of Hoorn, who had not fled the country, found their death. But this was not the end of violence in

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Western and Central Europe, for the atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War still lay ahead.

Peter the Great’s Verdict and Voltaire’s Comments The next episode of political assassination appears 130 years after the time of Ivan the Terrible, under the tsar and self-proclaimed imperator Peter the Great. The story is well known, and it represents a dark chapter in the tsar’s life. His son, the Tsarevich Aleksei, was a religious man who preferred the company of priests to that of soldiers and politicians. He resented Peter’s brutal attitude toward the clergy and the requisition of the churches’ bells to cast iron for cannons. Still, he was an obedient and respectful son. Be that as it may, Peter did not trust that Aleksei would continue his policy of modernization and secularization of Russia’s state and society and therefore decided to thwart Aleksei’s succession to the throne. The tsar accused Aleksei of participating in a plot to overthrow him, and the tsarevich was arrested, tortured, sentenced to death, and executed on 26 June 1718. Can this lamentable act be attributed to the “Russian soul” or the “Russian political mind”?24 Rather it seems that it fits within the political customs of the period and the wars of dynastic successions in Western and Central Europe in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They included, for instance, the War of Devolution (1667–68), called the First War, followed by the Second War (1672–78) and the Third War (1688–97); the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–15); the War of the Polish Succession (1733–38); the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–79), and their concomitant elimination, or exile, of contenders from the best European royal dynasties and princely families.25 Was civilized Europe upset by the tsarevich’s execution? Here is what Voltaire—a Western mind and the conscience of enlightened society—had to say about this political murder: This was a moment worthy of an ancient Greek tragedy. Peter was torn between his fatherly feelings and the statesman’s duty to the welfare of the people. His greatness lies in that he decided to follow the imperatives of the statesman’s duty. … When people reflect on this unfortunate event, the hearts of the weak faint, but those of the courageous and resolute approve and praise.26

This is what enlightened people (not cynics like Frederick the Great) had to say on the political murder of a son by his father. But this should not come as a surprise: a similar event set a precedent in the annals of Europe’s monarchies when King Philip II of Spain put away his own son, Don Carlos, in 1568.

216 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Voltaire’s praise and approval could be compared with the opinion of an assembly of Russian ecclesiastical dignitaries to whom Peter put the question of the tsarevich’s guilt before his execution. In spite of having witnessed a few months earlier the fate of the Bishop of Rostov, Dosipheus, who on Peter’s orders had been broken on the wheel, the assembled clerics, although threatened by the tsar’s wrath, gave a noncommittal answer, quoting examples from the Old and the New Testaments in support of both clemency and just punishment. At least they did not praise, like Voltaire, nor did they give Peter the moral endorsement he was looking for. One hundred years later, Alexander Herzen—a Westernizer and a supporter of Peter’s drive to modernize and secularize—characterized Peter as a “crowned terrorist” and a “Jacobin avant la lettre.” The comparison with the Jacobins is apposite, for it reminds us that in this same eighteenth century, after several decades of enlightenment, the civilized people of France beheaded their king and queen, and then beheaded those who had beheaded them. And then they settled for the autocratic rule of a selfproclaimed emperor who, for almost twenty years, put Europe to the fire and the sword.

The Era of Women’s Rule and Palace Revolutions The period from the death of Peter the Great in 1725 till the end of the century is often designated in Russian historiography as “the time of the women’s rule,” in reference to the reign of four empresses: Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna, Elizabeth, and Catherine II. It is called also the “era of palace revolutions” because of the way they came to power. All these palace coups were the result of personal conflicts related to dynastic successions or aristocratic conspiracies against one ruler or another. Quite remarkably, during these seventy-five years there were only two political assassinations. The most notorious was that of the Emperor Peter III. He ascended the throne legally in December 1761 after the death of Empress Elizabeth. In June the following year he was overthrown by his own wife, the German Princess Sophia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst, the future Catherine II, who led a palace conspiracy, connived with officers of the Imperial Guards, whose four regiments were usually stationed in St. Petersburg. The former emperor was put under arrest in his country estate, where he was assassinated two weeks later on 6 July 1762. Thereafter, his widow ruled for thirty-four years. Nobody in Europe and in the monarchs’ courts contested the legitimacy of her reign, and she had many friends among the political and cultural elite of her time, including Voltaire, Diderot, Grimm, Frederick the Great, Marie Antoinette, Maria Theresa, and other empresses, kings, and philosophes. She had also many domestic,

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diplomatic, and military successes, and on that account she entered the history textbooks as “Catherine the Great.” She died a natural death in her bed. No such lucky end befell her son, Paul I, who ascended the throne in 1796 and met the same fate as his hapless father, Peter III. After five odd years of an erratic reign, a group of respectable aristocrats (in contradistinction to professional conspirators) decided to put an end to Paul’s eccentricities in domestic and foreign affairs, and he was murdered in his palace in March 1801, in the best interests of the Empire.27 Rumor has it that his son and successor to the throne, Alexander I, knew of the assassins’ design. Was this a rare event in L’Europe française au siècle des Lumières, to use the title of Louis Réau’s book?28 It happened exactly nine years after the assassination of Gustav III, King of Sweden, by a similar aristocratic coup. It happened also one year after the second attempt on the life of George III, King of England, at London’s Drury Theatre. It was after this aborted murder that the playwright and diplomat Richard Sheridan composed at once a new stanza to the British national anthem, which read: From every latent foe, From the assassin’s blow, God save the king!

The “assassin’s blow” was certainly not related to the “Russian syndrome.”29 It appears, then, that in Europe’s political arena the murdered Tsars Peter III and Paul I were not solitary victims of oriental palace conspiracies. They were in good company, with Gustav III, the attempted assassinations on George III, Louis XV, and Joseph I, King of Portugal, and of course the political murders of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. One may object that the latter were sentenced and executed after “due judicial process” (of sorts), but so was also Tsarevich Aleksei; whether these were cases of “judicial murder” is still an open question.

Political Murder “From Below” The assassination of Paul I was the last dynastic murder in Russia. The next political assassination—exactly eighty years later, in March 1881—was the first of the ideological-revolutionary political assassinations. It was a murder “from below,” executed by the terrorists of the Narodnaia Volia (People’s Will), and its victim was the Emperor Alexander II.30 On this event Franklin Ford writes that it “place[s] the Russian episode squarely within a familiar modern European pattern.”31 It opens also the second stage of the periodization proposed in this essay, the stage of terrorist po-

218 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” litical assassinations characterized by their being ideologically motivated, carried out by a permanent organization (and not an ad hoc conspiratorial coterie) whose explicit purpose was to implement a policy of political elimination. This policy, conceived as a tactic, was based on a theoretical analysis of what the group’s members considered as illegitimate and wrong in Russia, and on a vision of what the future society and political regime should be after the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy. What were the goals and rationale of this type of political assassination, which was carried out in Russia mainly by the populists and later on by the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and the anarchists? Part of the answer can be found in a document entitled “Letter of the Narodnaia Volia to the American People,” dated 10 September 1881, that is, six months after the narodovol’tsy had assassinated Alexander II; it reads as follows: Extending to the American people our deep condolences on the occasion of the death of President James Abraham Garfield, the Executive Committee [of the Narodnaia Volia] considers it is its duty to express in the name of Russian revolutionaries its protest against such violent deeds as the attempt of Guiteau on the life of the President. In a country in which freedom of the person guarantees full possibility of an honest struggle of ideas, where a free people’s will not only makes the law but also elects the rulers – in such a country political murder as an instrument of political conflict is an expression of that very spirit of despotism from which it is our aim to extricate Russia. Personal despotism is contemptible as political despotism, and violence can be justified only if it is directed against violence.32

The position of the Narodnaia Volia and of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (a member of the Second International) was that political assassination is permissible only in an autocratic state and against a non-democratic regime, but not in societies that guarantee free speech, free elections, and the liberty of political organizing.33 As for the anarchists who advocated “individual terror” (i.e., assassination), the nature of the political regime seemed irrelevant and did not influence their position since they were fundamentally opposed to the existence of the state as such. In addition, contrary to the centralized Socialist Revolutionary Party, the anarchists in Russia as elsewhere represented a loose confederation of autonomous groups with no central “command” or compulsory discipline. Consequently, a sizable number among them were opposed to terrorism and to political assassination for tactical or doctrinal considerations.34 None of these parties intended to seize power after the overthrow of the regime. (In this respect they stood in contrast to the Bolsheviks, for whom seizing power was the summum bonum.)35 They aimed, in their words, to facilitate the holding of free general elections by way of “universal suffrage

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with no limitations of class or income,” elections to be carried out with “complete freedom of conscience, speech, press, association and electoral agitation [that is, campaigning].” These elections would designate the deputies to a Constituent Assembly that would establish the law of the land. This was their long-term plan; as for the short-term goal, in despotic regimes the political assassination was seen as the quintessence of “propaganda by the deed,” an expression coined by the French anarchists (propagande par le fait). The political murders’ propaganda effect was intended to prove that it was possible to fight autocracy and the tsar’s gendarmes (and thus “to awaken the masses”), to demonstrate that the autocracy was vulnerable and therefore could be overthrown, and in the meantime to disorganize the state apparatus and frighten the government. One major pitfall of this theory and praxis was that sometimes the tactics became strategy and replaced it, and terrorism became no longer a means for attaining goals, but a goal in itself. The Combat Organization (Boevaia organizatsiia) of the Socialist Revolutionary Party carried out several hundred murders or attempted murders between 1902 and 1906, directed against representatives of the government who were personally involved in repressions and persecutions, and explicitly avoided harming chance bystanders.36 Among the most prominent personalities assassinated were a minister of education, two ministers of interior, one minister of justice, several province or city governors (of Ufa, Finland, the Caucasus, Moscow, Kharkov, and Vilnius), and a number of generals and high ranking police chiefs. Eleven attempts were made to kill Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, who was finally murdered in September 1911 by an unaffiliated anarchist. Most revolutionaries who carried out these acts were either killed on the spot or summarily judged and sentenced to death. All of these acts encompassed dilemmas and tragedy. One of them has attracted special attention. The Combat Organization had charged two of its members (Ivan Kaliaev and Peter Kulikovskii) to assassinate the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, commander of the Moscow Military District and uncle of the tsar. On 2 February 1905, they waited for the Grand Duke’s carriage on two different places on his itinerary, each of them carrying one bomb. When the carriage drew nearer, Kaliaev noticed that a woman and two children were sitting in it, too; for that reason, in a split-second decision, he refrained from throwing his bomb, thus aborting the whole plan.37 The assassination was carried out two days later by Kaliaev alone when the Grand Duke traveled unaccompanied in his carriage. Kaliaev’s decision not to harm a woman and two children while trying to kill Sergei Alexandrovich, and to act according to a sort of “code of honor,” provided the plot of Albert Camus’s play Les Justes (translated as

220 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” The Just Assassins), which displays the conflicting aspects of this situation, showing Kaliaev’s in a positive light. Camus’s actual absolution of this terrorist action was due, first, to Kaliaev’s refusal to take the lives of innocent people. For Camus, this meant that these assassins set limits to their action; as one of Camus’s heroes observes: “Even in destruction, there is a right way and a wrong way – and there are limits.” Or, to put it differently, these revolutionaries held that the goal does not justify all the means. The second consideration behind Camus’s exoneration of them is that their acceptance of killing went along with their own readiness to die; that is, they acted in a spirit of self-sacrifice. Opposed as he was to all kind of fanaticism, it may be surmised that today Camus would have changed his view on this point. On the other hand, as Michael Walzer has observed, in our moral judgments, “we judge the assassin by his victim, and when the victim is Hitlerlike in character we are likely to praise the assassin’s work.”38 This explains why Kaliaev and Schwarzbard,39 for instance, are seen as belonging to one category, while a different one is assigned to terrorists like Abu Nidal and Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin. On this second category it may be said, again to quote Michael Walzer, that “[i]n its modern manifestations, terror is the totalitarian form of war and politics.”40 Indeed, Yigal Amir’s act is both morally and politically an expression of the Israeli brand of nationalistic right-wing extremist ideology, and of national-clerical fundamentalism, which sometime has led to totalitarian forms of politics, whether openly or under the guise of a pseudo-democratic regime emptied of its main functions and characteristics. All this applies also, and to even a greater extent, to Islamic suicide-bomber fundamentalists. The tsarist empire’s history of political assassination ended on a singular and eccentric note with the unclassifiable murder of Grigorii Rasputin on 29 December 1916. It was a political murder par excellence; it did not belong to the murder “from above” type, but marginally, perhaps, to the old murder “from within” category. If in the recent past the revolutionaries’ terror was aimed at shaking the tsarist regime, Rasputin’s assassination by Prince Felix Yusupov and his confederates was intended to save the Romanov dynasty and the empire from the evil influence of the “Siberian starets” on the imperial family, the court, and the government. In this endeavor, the plot failed and foreboded the coming collapse of the regime.41

Murder “From Above” The third type of political assassination in Russia appears with the formation of the Soviet Union and lasts from 1917 to 1956. This is a grim

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period in its iniquity, both in the course of Russian history and on the European scene till 1933. Its story has been told in many books, and it will be examined here briefly, stressing some aspects relevant to the present discussion. Under Lenin and Stalin a dictatorial regime used political assassination as a tool of government and as a device for policy enforcement in the administrative, social, economic, and cultural spheres. It began with the extermination of political opponents, of its yesteryear critics and its yesterday non-communist allies in the Civil War, most of them on the revolutionary left. Among the first to be hit were the anarchists; they were sent again to the Lubianka (as in the times of the Okhrana), then to prison (as under the tsars), then to concentration camps (which were a novelty in Russia); the Socialist Revolutionaries followed, then the Mensheviks. These opposition parties reacted by political organizing until they were driven to clandestinity, whereupon the Left SRs reverted to their traditional weapon: political assassination, as in Fanny Kaplan’s unsuccessful attempt on Lenin’s life in August 1918. Meanwhile the assassination of Nicholas II and the imperial family was carried out without trial on orders from Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership.42 With the relative stabilization following the war communism and the beginning of the New Economic Policy (NEP), it was expected that the wave of liquidations would subside and the government turn to constructive projects. But it turned out, first, that all and any “constructive projects” would need scapegoats; and second, according to Stalin’s bizarre idea, the greater the scope and success of the “socialist construction” (sotsialisticheskoe stroitel’stvo), the fiercer the “class struggle,” and concurrently, the need to find always new “enemies of the people.” This led to more persecutions, deportations, and millions intentionally made to starve to death in a sort of famine-terror in the Ukraine and the Caucasus. Subsequently, when it seemed that there were no opponents left, the leader and his henchmen invented them, or devised categories of the population that “might breed them.” Thus, in order to give an ideological justification for a massive social disruption and physical annihilation, real or imaginary groups were defined and targeted. Such were, for instance, the “bourgeois elements”—a hotchpotch of citizens from almost all walks of life; the “kulaks” (an old word given now a new “sociological” definition), which in fact meant the peasantry at large, including even the landless and the poorest peasants. (Were there indeed so many millions of “wealthy peasants” inherited from the Old Regime?) Then came the turn of engineers, saboteurs, wreckers, spies, foreign agents, the old intelligentsia, the falsifiers of science, army commanders, writers, and artists who had succumbed (by birthright) to “cosmopolitanism”; and “counter-revolutionaries,” that

222 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” is, anybody who for some reason or another did not please someone in authority, or someone else “making it” in the budding nomenklatura. While the simple folks’ souls were taken care of, there came also the turn of party members, variously accused of belonging to ill-advised (and often fatal) oppositions and deviations: the right and the left opposition; the “workerism” deviation; the nationalist, the industrial, and the syndicalist deviations. Whoever did not fit in these categories was assassinated by so-called “enemies of the people,” like Kirov, or committed involuntary suicide, like Ordzhonikidze. Others died from unnatural deaths, concealed in the medical jargon of faked death certificates (which many did not believe anyway).43 But if the mass political murder of millions could be justified by relentless propaganda, the liquidation of “straying” eminent party members—till yesterday respected leaders of the people—raised troubling questions for the man and woman in the street in their so-called “everyday ordinary life.” This was political assassination from above (sverkhu), that is, from the powers, by the powers, for the powers against their own citizens and the peoples of the USSR. It was carried out in spite of the fact that it inflicted great damage on the economy, whatever the compensation might have been from the use of the low-cost slave labor in the Gulag; according to Western economists’ calculations, it was detrimental to the military forces and to population growth. But the argument of “self-inflicted damages” by the regime becomes irrelevant when policy was carried out and acts were perpetrated out of ideological fanaticism. Lenin and Stalin (and for that matter Trotsky and Bukharin, too) were fanatics with a utopian goal and the conviction that this goal justified the means, including mass political assassination. Stalin and his associates were no cynics or madmen, but fanatics, meticulously planning and implementing their bloody march toward utopia. That some of them might have been also paranoiacs, sadists, or mentally deranged in other ways does not change this basic fact; it only shows the nature of this would-be “non-totalitarian” regime, which allowed these kinds of people to rule for so long over so many nations on what was then proudly called “one-sixth of the earth.” How does the “Russian syndrome” theory apply to the Soviet period, extensively dealt with in the book of Carrère d’Encausse quoted above? First, it seems that anybody inclined to use this metaphor should replace it with “Soviet syndrome” and ask: “How Russian was the Soviet syndrome?” The answer is: not very. The reasons are obvious: show trials, persecutions, “reeducation camps,” and political assassinations took place in such diverse cultures and societies as Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, and (on a smaller scale) in the “popular democracies” of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia, Poland,

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and Vietnam. Consequently, this kind of phenomenon cannot be attributed to a Russian uniqueness, since the common denominator of all these countries at that time was the nature of their political and social regime. It was this type of regime, not an imaginary “Russian syndrome,” that generated in each of them a similar result. Another trait they had in common was their leaders’ fanaticism, which they shared with other political assassins, whether individual or mass killers. For that reason, too, the root of political assassination is neither Russianness, tatarshchina or Jewishness, nor any other offshoot of “national character” or “political culture” but fanaticism, in all its forms and guises—in Russia as elsewhere. Second, as of Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing the “cult of the personality” in 1956 through perestroika in 1985, there was a total absence of political assassination, in addition to the slow and uneven thaw in the penitentiary system. Nevertheless, according to the “Russian syndrome” thesis, the perennial and centuries-old syndrome did not disappear but only changed its form, inaugurating—with remarkable continuity—the period of “the symbolic murder.”44 Thus, for example, when removed from office in 1964, Khrushchev was “murdered symbolically”: he became “a political corpse, but was not subsequently destined to become a dead body” as would have been his fate under Stalin; now he was “a political corpse enjoying a peaceful retirement.”45 This mutation of the “syndrome,” I dare say, made an enormous difference in one’s life. But it was not only a mutation but a dialectical transformation of a thing becoming its opposite. Indeed the “syndrome” became its antithesis: from the time of SS. Boris and Gleb through Nikita Khrushchev it signified death; after Khrushchev it represented “peaceful retirement.” However, whereas Khrushchev was “a political corpse but not a dead body” in the era of the inverted syndrome, the exact opposite happened to his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, who became first a dead body, then a political corpse: “The most symbolic ‘murder’ of this period [says The Russian Syndrome] has been that of Leonid Brezhnev, who was not made a political corpse until after his natural death,” which represented “an inversion of Stalin’s method.”46 This is correct, but according to this new taxonomy many statesmen, whatever their country’s political regime, would qualify to have been at one time or another symbolically murdered (for a while); such were, for instance, David Ben-Gurion when he quit the prime ministership in 1953 and settled in the Negev; Charles de Gaulle when he left the government and retired to Colombay-les-Deux-Eglises in January 1946; Winston Churchill during most of the 1930s; Yitzhak Rabin when his party lost the elections in 1977; several Italian prime ministers, symbolically murdered each and every time that they were not in office. This is then a symbolic murder with a subsequent resurrection, or at least the

224 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” possibility for a future resurrection: thus, Ben-Gurion rose from the Negev ashes and returned to power in 1955, de Gaulle in 1958, Churchill in 1940, Rabin in 1992, Andreotti countless times. The “resurrection” paradigm is mentioned explicitly in The Russian Syndrome: “Nikolai Podgorny, purged and ‘killed politically’ by his rivals in the mid 1970s, was eventually authorized to make a timid reappearance at an official festivity: [this was] death with resurrection.”47 Thus, the “symbolic murder” begat a “symbolic death.” (After all, “a timid reappearance” is surely preferable to a total disappearance.) This is an elegant idea, and a basically correct one, which pinpoints an important aspect of the difference between these two major periods in Soviet history. In the second one there were “political murders,” but only metaphorically speaking—and this should be stressed, lest it be construed as stretching the “Russiansyndrome-murder” too far, so as to include (symbolically) even deaths from totally non-political causes.

Lessons of the Past Russia’s history has seen its share of human misery caused by political assassinations. They were not a peculiarly Russian phenomenon: most nations have had their share, and in this respect (as in others) Russia fitted well within a broader European pattern. It was not sui generis; its history can be compared to that of other states, and the comparison is meaningful: in this respect, too, they belonged to the same family of nations and bore the same main paradigmatic patterns. The thesis of Russia’s uniqueness has one cheerful and optimistic quality for those who hold it: these horrors and terrors in Russia were a local, indigenous affair. They don’t concern us; we don’t have to worry; we are immune and protected from such excesses. Such a view is cheerful and optimistic, but wrong. “We” are not immune, and “we” have never been. We know today that the Russian experience does not demonstrate the inevitability of evil but provides an example of the many variations of the pattern toward totalitarianism that has emerged among different peoples by different ways, and can happen anywhere.48 We know also that patterns of history occasionally do repeat themselves (with changes and variations), but “the second time” they are not always played as a farce, as Marx’s aphorism had it, but as tragedy.

Counterfactuals? Let us revert now to a question we raised at the beginning of this essay: Did political assassinations influence the course of Russia’s history?

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A counterfactual approach may be useful here in several regards.49 First, it can emancipate the historian’s thinking from the instinctive and culturally generated bent for a deterministic and teleological approach. As mentioned above, Disraeli and Kropotkin held that history has a preordained course: they were historical determinists. So was Marx, of course; and Stalin too, but not because of diamat, but because he believed that Istoriia eto ia (in French: l’histoire c’est moi), a belief stemming from his megalomania. De Gaulle too was a determinist, with la France éternelle as helmswoman of the march of time. Second, a counterfactual approach invites the historian to pay attention to contingency and unexpected consequences, and to keep in mind that there is a fundamental difference between logical and historical outcomes. Third, it compels the historian to be aware of the issue of causality in historical analysis, an issue that is conceptually nonexistent for many a practitioner of our craft. Fourth, at every stage of the examined historical process and of the research work, it allows the historian to consciously look for the many possible alternatives that existed in the ongoing developments, and thus to avoid a de facto (even non-conceptualized) deterministic view, based on the (unspoken) erroneous conception that Hegel’s proposition “What is real is ideal,” means that “everything that did happen, had to happen.” Counterfactuals are a good antidote to such pitfalls and historiosophies of the common sense. But the question to what extent political assassinations influenced the course of Russia’s history is a tricky one, and a historian should have insurance that covers professional malpractice before trying to answer it. Nevertheless, I will venture some hypotheses, and because of space limitations will examine only a few examples. What if Tsarevich Aleksei, Peter’s son, had not been executed? What would have been the consequences of his remaining alive? In spite of the many variables, the historical setup and the alternatives are relatively simple. First, if he were to succeed to the throne, he would have had the support of the Church and of the old boyars and their clans, and it is probable that Russia’s domestic policies would have changed: modernization and secularization would have been slowed down or even reversed; the organization of the army would not have followed the Western model; Russia’s position vis-à-vis its neighbors—particularly the Ottoman Empire—would have been weakened and Russia’s standing in Europe crippled. Second, these trends would have probably raised opposition to the new nobility and the officialdom, that is, the political elite created by Peter, the army high command, and the entourage of Peter’s widow, Catherine. How long could Aleksei have reigned in such a political environment? Third, and most important, there is no certitude that Aleksei would have inherited the throne, since on 5 February 1720 Peter had issued a

226 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” decree on the rules of succession that abolished the age-old custom of inheritance by primogeniture and ordered that the heir to the throne be designated by the tsar himself. Then Peter died intestate, without nominating an heir. Nevertheless, this decree, even if not fully implemented, would have diminished the legitimacy of Aleksei’s claim to the throne, for it abolished explicitly the automatic right of the eldest son. Moreover, in May 1724 on Peter’s request, the Senate and the Holy Synod conferred the title of empress to his consort, Catherine. Six months later, upon Peter’s death, the former Livonian peasant girl swiftly seized the throne with the support of the main centers of political and military power and reigned till May 1727, when she died from illness. The two cases that most probably affected Russia, and in particular its foreign policy, were the accession to the throne of Catherine II in 1762, and of her son Alexander I in 1801. Catherine’s husband, Peter III, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, rose to the throne in December 1761 at a crucial stage of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Russia participated in it as an ally of France and Austria against Prussia; its troops successfully engaged Frederick the Great’s army, considered to be “the best in Europe”; they won several important battles (Gross-Jägersdorf, Kunersdorf, Kolberg) and entered Prussia’s capital Berlin on 28 September 1760 (9 October 1760, O.S.). Upon his accession to the throne, Peter III, an obsessive admirer of all things Prussian and of Frederick II, at once ordered Russia’s withdrawal from the war. To the outrage of his allies, he signed a treaty with Prussia, reentered the conflict on its side, and sent troops to fight Denmark in order to recover Schleswig for the benefit of Holstein. (Even Frederick II, his new ally, did not approve of this capricious decision, warning him to “leave alone Denmark”). Finally, Peter announced that the army would wear Prussian uniforms, and that the four regiments of the Imperial Guard (traditionally stationed in the capital) would depart to the front. This unprecedented and unpopular order had, for immediate effect, to transfer the Guards’ allegiance to Catherine and give her their support to seize the throne in a palace coup.50 The future French ambassador to Russia during Catherine’s reign, Comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur, summed up the event by saying crisply: “Le trône de Russie n’est ni héréditaire, ni électif, il est occupatif.” Catherine’s policy was dictated by cool and unsentimental considerations (except for the phantasmagoric “Greek Design” aimed at restoring the Byzantine Empire under a Russian tsar) and Russia’s strategic goals, international situation, and domestic needs. She applied avant la lettre the principle that Russia had no permanent friends or policies, only permanent interests. Thus, instead of fighting the “abominable revolutionary pest” in France after 1789 (as she ardently urged other European crowned heads

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to do), and instead of helping her “beloved friend” Marie Antoinette, she took advantage of the turmoil in that country to pursue traditional Russian goals of expansion. She waged wars against the Turks and the Swedes and meddled in Polish affairs, thus diverting the attention of Prussia and Austria—which were fighting revolutionary France—to their eastern marches. The “replacement” of Paul I by Alexander I followed a similar pattern. Paul’s erratic behavior in foreign and military affairs in time of war,51 his moody disposition and unpredictability convinced the leaders of the court nobility and the high command that he was ill suited for the task. He was assassinated in March 1801. It can hardly be disputed that the conspirators’ assessment of Paul’s behavior and intentions was right, and there is no doubt that the personality and the policies of the new tsar, Alexander I, were to play a key role in the fateful years to come from 1801 to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, where Russia emerged as a dominant European power. It is not difficult to imagine the havoc that a ruler and supreme commander of the army like Paul may have wrought upon Russia, although this is in no way a moral justification for his murder. There were more differences than similarities between this period of assassination “from within” and the following one of political assassination “from below,” which stretches roughly from 1866, the year of the first attempt on the life of Alexander II by the student Dmitrii Karakozov, through 1917, and during which assassinations were motivated by opposition to the government, the main actors being the Narodnaia Volia, the anarchists, and the Socialist Revolutionaries. What kind of political change did the successful assassinations bring about? Paradoxically, the murder of Alexander II perhaps thwarted a new course of reforms that the tsar was contemplating on the eve of his death. They aimed at a greater liberalization, the election of a consultative council, and more autonomy to local government. On the other hand, the evidence is inconclusive as to when and how these reforms would have been implemented. Be that as it may, the murder of Alexander II, instead of shattering the tsarist regime as the assassins expected, demonstrated the opposite: the murder of the tsar could not shake its foundations and purpose. Autocracy was there to stay “for eternity,” as the official theoreticians explained. And instead of leading to reform, it led to a consolidation of reactionary and obscurantist policies. Would Russia’s history in 1900–17 have been different without the campaign of terrorist acts and political assassinations? Did the murder in September 1911 of the ablest statesman in modern Russia, Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, signify “the disappearance of Russia’s last chance”? And “last chance” for what? Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s answer differs substantially from that of liberal historians, let alone from Marxists who dismiss

228 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” this “incident” as negligible in the “march of history.” Could Stolypin’s leadership have changed Russia’s role in the war and avoided the 1917 revolutions? Maybe. But the amount of plausible scenarios is too vast to be treated within the scope of this paper. The third period, 1917–1956, was one of persecutions and massive murder “from above” in all its forms, but at its beginning it was not devoid of sporadic instances of individual assassinations, such as Fanny Kaplan’s attempt on Lenin’s life in August 1918. The extremely complex historical situation makes it almost impossible to guess how Lenin’s death at this early stage of the Soviet regime would have influenced its subsequent history. It is obvious that its course would have been different, but in what sense? An interesting attempt has been made, using a counterfactual approach, to imagine “a Russian Revolution without Lenin,”52 but its conclusions tend to demonstrate the obvious: of course, without Lenin and without his arrival in Russia at a given moment (April 1917), things would have been different both for Russia and for the world. In any case there is also a substantial difference between the following two counterfactual questions: “An October Revolution without Lenin,” and “What if Fanny Kaplan had killed Lenin in August 1918?” The days and months between October 1917 and 30 August 1918 are of crucial importance: the first question asks whether October would have happened; the second, what would have happened in Russia after the October seizure of power if Lenin had disappeared in August 1918. What would the members of the Bolshevik leadership have done after his death, and what would they have done to each other? In such a situation, “Kto kogo?” (freely translated as “Who will bury whom?”) is not a trivial question, for in 1918 it was less than certain that Stalin would eliminate his peers in the Central Committee. And there is also the perennial question: if Lenin had lived longer, would Soviet Communism have been much different from what Stalin made it?53 The Soviet regime, not Russia, was bound to pursue a policy of repressions, to use political terror (in 1917–56) as part of its system of government, and as a tool for achieving political, social, and economic goals. Did it serve the Soviet Union well? No counterfactuals are needed to answer this question. Its collapse is history’s verdict. Cheap slave labor extracted by terror was not sufficient to compensate for the moral and material damage that this regime generated for millions of human beings. The moral economy and the economy tour court could not support the “deficits” thus created. It was doomed to break down, and from 1956 the thirty years or so of interrupted “thaws” and timid “liberalizations” could not postpone indefinitely its collapse. There were no assassinations, all the players were present, and from Khrushchev to Gorbachev they played their roles, alive, till the final act.

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The Day After… The final act was the collapse of the Soviet Union, not the end of Russia, which fulfilled Charles de Gaulle’s persistent opinion (held at a time when common sense considered it a lunatic’s rambling) that Russia was eternal and represented the deep and imperishable essence of the nation, whereas the Soviet Union was just a political regime whose fate was to wane sooner or later. This “final act” marked the beginning of the post-Soviet era in Russian history, and, as of this writing, almost twenty years after its inauguration, it may be divided into two periods. The first was Boris Yeltsin’s and the oligarchs’ chaos and wild capitalism, the plundering of Russia’s wealth and natural resources. The second is Vladimir Putin’s, the time of “sovereign democracy” and the KGB heirs’ rule, the persecution of opponents of the regime and the killing of critically minded journalists.54 By 2007 Russia was the third deadliest country in the world for journalists over the past fifteen years, just behind the civil or international war-ridden countries of Algeria and Iraq. As Anne Applebaum wrote in 2006 after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya: “Of course, if the murder follows the usual pattern in Russia, no suspect will ever be found and no assassin will ever come to trial.”55 Thus, one of the initial questions raised in this essay returns with a vengeance: Are the covert political murders in Putin’s Russia a manifestation of the “Russian syndrome” or, as Charles de Gaulle would have said, just one of the vagaries of a regime bound to disappear sooner or later? But at what a price?

Notes 1. Quoted in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York, 1978), p. 165. 2. Franklin L. Ford, Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1985), p. 2 3. See Ehud Sprinzak, Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination (New York, 1999); Yoram Peri, ed., The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (Stanford, 2000). See also Charles S. Libman, ed., Political Assassination: The Murder of Rabin and Political Assassinations in the Middle East (Tel Aviv, 1998; in Hebrew). 4. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), p. 298. 5. Ibid. 6. Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York and London, 1960), p. 711. 7. Ibid., pp. 716–720. 8. See, for example, O. V. Budnitskii, ed., Zhenshchini-terroristki v Rossii [Women Terrorists in Russia] (Rostov on the Don, 1996).

230 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” 9. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Political Murder, trans. Caroline Higgit, foreword by Adam B. Ulam (New York and London, 1992); the French original: Le malheur russe: Essai sur le meurtre politique (Paris, 1988); if not indicated otherwise, the quotations and page references are from the English translation. 10. In her last book, Alexandre II: Le printemps de la Russie (Paris, 2008), Carrère d’Encausse does not use this theory to explain the tsar’s assassination by the Narodnaia Volia. Hers is a straight narration of the march of events that led to his murder in March 1881, with no reference to Russian syndromes or national character theories. The story is told with many facts and historical and psychological speculations, but features no explanation of the main event’s causes, which amounts to saying that the tsar was killed because he was killed. 11. Carrère d’Encausse, Russian Syndrome, pp. 393, 399. 12. Ibid., p. 3. 13. Reviewing this book, the late Richard Hellie, professor of Russian history at the University of Chicago, observed: “The number of incredible statements is almost beyond count…” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (1995): 762. 14. Thus, the author admits that all nations at one time or another experience cases of political murder, which become keys to tragic episodes in their history. “But this happens only at one time or another; in Russia this is a permanent and continuous phenomenon, and this is what makes her a striking exception vis-à-vis the other large European countries.” Carrère d’Encausse, Russian Syndrome, pp. 5–6 (emphasis added). 15. For Russia, considered a locus classicus of an “organized technique of murder to carry out a conscious program of social reconstruction,” see Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1953), entry on “Assassination,” vol. 2, p. 274; and as a forerunner of modern terrorism and the use of it as a means to achieve political ends, see ibid., entry on “Terrorism,” vol. 14, pp. 475–580. 16. This was also the fate of Henri de Guise, Henri III, François de Guise, Gaspard de Coligny, Charles de Guise, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marat, Danton, Robespierre, Saint Just, Sadi Carnot, and Paul Doumer. There were also attempted murders on Louis XV, Louis-Philippe, Napoleon III, and Charles de Gaulle (several attempts). 17. The roster included also Sir Thomas More, Thomas Lord Cromwell of Wimbledon, David Cardinal Beaton, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Henry Stewart Lord Darnley, Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and Thomas Henry Burke. Attempts were made to murder George III, Queen Victoria, and Elizabeth II. 18. The macabre list includes also Kurt Eisner, Erhard Auer, Otto Neuring, Hugo Haase, Mathias Erzberger, Karl Gareis, Maximilian Harden, and Heinz Orbis (with several attempted murders on Emperor William I, Emperor William II, and Philip Scheideman.) The short period of the early 1920s had a total of 354 assassinations by the Right and 22 by the Left. I set aside the Nazi period, which requires a separate treatment in order not to amalgamate it with a different kind of historical phenomena, discussed here. 19. For more details see Ford, Political Murder; see also Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, edited with an introduction by Michael

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20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

Walzer; trans. Marian Rothstein (Cambridge, 1974); James W. Clark, American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics (Princeton, 1982); Sandy Lesberg, Assassination in Our Time (London, 1976); James McKinley, Assassination in America (New York, 1977); Michael Mallett, The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty (London, 1969); Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall (New York, 1999); Antonia Fraser, ed., The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England (New York, 1975); Dulcie M. Ashdown, Royal Murders: Hatred, Revenge, and the Seizing of Power (Stroud, 2000); Greg Woolf, Et tu Brute? A Short History of Political Murder (Cambridge, MA, 2007). George Vernadsky, Kievan Russia (New Haven, 1948), pp. 75, 267. Michael Confino, Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole: L’assolement triennal en Russie aux XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris, 1969); on SS. Boris and Gleb, p. 121; on the links between the saints’ worship by the peasants and the agricultural calendar, pp. 75–80 and 119–123. Carrère d’Encausse, Russian Syndrome, p. xiii. Ford, Political Murder, pp. 146–150. For an interpretation of the symbolic meaning of the “murder of the son by the father” in Russian culture, see Alain Besançon, Le Tsarevitch immolé (Paris, 1967); the author acknowledges his debt to the original work of Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People (New Haven, 1961). To this list of eighteenth-century succession wars we may add the three Silesian Wars waged by Frederick II, the Seven Years’ War (a total of eleven years), and the War of American Independence (omitting Russia’s wars with the Ottomans, for they do not belong to “Europe”). On this issue Carrère d’Encausse writes: “The eighteenth century in Europe was a civilized century where political conflicts were dealt with in other ways than by bloodshed. … Russia was a sinister exception to this rule” (Russian Syndrome, p. 145). Then, from the end of the civilized eighteenth century onward, began the peaceful era of Napoleon I. Voltaire, OEuvres, ed. L. Moland (Paris, 1880), vol. 16, pp. 592, 590 (my translation); see also Voltaire, Histoire de l’Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand (Paris, 1957), pp. 556, 560, 562. See Roderick McGrew, Paul I of Russia, 1754–1801 (Oxford, 1992). Louis Réau, L’Europe française au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 1951). For high-color treatment of this otherwise cheerless subject see Anne Somerset, Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I (London, 1998); Steve Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England 1760–1850: Troublesome Subjects (Manchester, 2001). The classic work on Russian populism is Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution; see also Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (New York, 1962); Adam Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia (New York, 1977). Ford, Political Murder, p. 224. “Letter of the Narodnaia Volia to the American People. September 10, 1881,” Russian text in Literatura Sotsial’no-revoliutsionnoi partii Narodnoi Voli [Writings of the Social-Revolutionary Party Narodnaia Volia] (n.p. [but probably London], 1905); my translation.

232 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” 33. On the Socialist Revolutionaries see Alexandre Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 1886–1917 (Paris, 1930); Oliver H. Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism (New York and London, 1958); Christopher Rice, Russian Workers and the Socialist Revolutionary Party Through the Revolution of 1905–07 (New York, 1988); and for an interesting post-Soviet compilation: Budnitskii, Zhenshchiny-terroristki v Rossii, quoted above in note 8. 34. On the anarchists see Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, 1967); James Joll, The Anarchists (London, 1964); Irving Horowitz, The Anarchists (New York, 1964); Jean Maitron, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France (1880–1914), 2 vols. (Paris, 1975; first published in 1951); H. Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (London, 1983); Adriana Dadá, L’Anarchismo in Italia: fra movimiento e partito (Milan, 1984); Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism (Princeton, 1993); J. Gómez Casas, Historia del anarco-sindicalismo español (Madrid, 1968). 35. The Russian Marxist parties—Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike—were opposed to terrorism and political assassinations. They looked upon individual terror as futile and even harmful, and relied upon “the insight, wisdom, and strength of a disciplined working class party supported by the masses,” that is, in the final analysis, a “vanguard” led by the Central Committee of the party and its general secretary. 36. The SRs believed—and this was the distinctive feature of the movement—in the efficacy of political terror; it was this dogma that held together the loosely knit groups of party members, in spite of their centralized organization. But they admitted that terrorism was not enough and should be combined with propaganda. 37. Besides the Grand Duke, the other passengers in the carriage were the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna and the two children of Sergei’s brother the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, Dmitri Pavlovich and Maria Pavlovna. 38. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York, 1977), p. 199. Incidentally, this is why the propaganda devised by Rabin’s opponents before his assassination displayed his picture in SS uniform: it was a way to give a legitimacy to his eventual murder in advance by demonizing the victim and assimilating him to an odious symbol that justified his death. 39. Shalom Schwarzbard (1886–1938), born in Balta (Province of Podolia), became a Jewish émigré to France in 1920. On 26 May 1926 in Paris, he assassinated Simon Petliura, a Ukrainian military expert and the supreme ataman, or commander, of the Ukrainian National Republic’s Army during the short-lived and wavering Ukrainian independence in 1917–1920. At his trial Schwarzbard declared that he had killed Petliura because of his direct responsibility for numerous pogroms on the Jews, during which Schwarzbard lost part of his family, including his pregnant mother. After tense and dramatic proceedings the twelve jurors acquitted him of all criminal charges; on the civil action, he was condemned to pay the symbolic 1 franc de dommages et intérêts, which amounted to an acquittal de facto. 40. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 203.

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41. Rasputin exercised a fascination on many of his contemporaries and on some of his biographers; his “life and times” have generated a considerable number of works by such diverse authors as René Fülöp-Miller, Alex de Jonge, Andrei Amalrik, Edvard Radzinsky, Princess Catherine Radziwill, M.V. Rodzianko, Joseph Fuhrman, Jane Oakley, Janet Serlin Garber, Heinz Liepmann, Frank N. Stein, Henri Troyat, Johannes von Guenther, Renata Fabel, Douglas Myles, Brian Moynahan, and more. See also Greg King, The Man who Killed Rasputin: Prince Youssoupov and the Murder that Helped Bring Down the Russian Empire (Secaucus, NJ, 1995); and Prince Felix Youssoupoff’s reminiscences: Lost Splendour: The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin, trans. from the French by Ann Green and Nicholas Katkoff (New York, 2003; first published in French and Russian in Paris in 1927). F. Yusupov (1887–1968) made, so to say, a living from this assassination; in addition to the memoirs, he took part in the script of a movie, lectured, wrote essays, sued MGM, etc. In the 1950s, I heard Russian émigrés in Paris calling him “L’homme qui n’en finit pas de tuer Raspoutine”. 42. On 17 July 1918, eleven members of the tsar’s family were killed near Ekaterinburg, five of them children. See Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1990), pp. 745–746, 770–788; Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II (New York, 1993). 43. On Kirov’s assassination see Robert Conquest, Stalin and the Kirov Murder (New York and Oxford, 1989); Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery (New York, 2000); see also Oleg Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow: The Career of “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze, trans. David J. Nordlander (New York, 1995). 44. Carrère d’Encausse, Russian Syndrome, pp. 396–397. 45. Ibid. In fact, this is not entirely correct either, since, like all human beings, Khrushchev, too, was destined to one day become a “dead body,” and the irrefutable proof of this is that he became one on 11 September 1971, which Carrère d’Encausse confirms when saying that “he received a hasty, secret burial” (Russian Syndrome, p. 378). The “secret burial” was not secret enough to pass unnoticed. 46. Carrère d’Encausse, Russian Syndrome, p. 397. 47. Ibid., p. 392. 48. See chapter 2 in this volume, “Russian and Western European Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism.” 49. For some valuable observations on this topic see the “Forum on Counterfactual History” in Historically Speaking 5, no. 4 (March 2004): 11–22), with an opening essay by Richard J. Evans (a counterfactual-history “denier”), and comments by Edward Ingram, Allan Megill, Robert Cowley, William H. McNeill, Gavriel Rosenfeld, Jeremy Black, and Richard Ned Lebow. See also Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London, 1997), in particular the editor’s theoretical Introduction (pp. 1–90); and the What If? volumes edited by Robert Cowley. 50. For a reassessment of Peter III’s reign, see the well-researched book of Carol S. Leonard, Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia (Bloomington, 1993).

234 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” 51. Two examples. In November 1797, Paul (a Russian Orthodox) had himself appointed Grand Master of the (Roman Catholic) Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in Malta. This made the marginal Maltese affairs a major concern of the Russian Empire, especially Malta’s “liberation,” first from Napoleon, then from the British. Later on, in January 1801, he ordered an expedition of thirty thousand soldiers and Cossacks to march to the conquest of India, with catastrophic results. 52. George Feifer, “No Finland Station: A Russian Revolution without Lenin,” in What If 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, ed. Robert Cowley (New York, 2001), pp. 210–235; see also Andrew Roberts, “Lenin is Assassinated at the Finland Station,” (which combines fact and fiction so is not exactly “counterfactual history”), in What Might Have Been: Imaginary History From Twelve Leading Historians, ed. Andrew Roberts (London, 2004). 53. In a book review of Robert Service’s Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA, 2000), Martin Malia writes: “can we really say ‘no Lenin, no communism’— that is, no twentieth century as we know it?” If we can, the Russian Revolution—one of the defining features of the century—becomes “accidental.” Malia’s (and Robert Service’s implicit) answer is “yes and no.” And addressing the possibility that Lenin might have lived longer, after 1924, Malia adds: The historiography of the Soviet Union is thus uniquely rich in counterfactual speculations; and the first of these is: if Lenin had lived, then something better would surely have emerged. But the real issue in judging the legacy of October is not Lenin the man; it is Leninism the system – a system, moreover, created to achieve Marx’s utopia of a marketless, propertyless society.

M. Malia, “Lenin and the Radiant Future,” New York Review of Books, 1 November 2001, p. 35. 54. See Andrew Wilson, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World (New Haven, 2005); Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution (New York, 2005); Andrew Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia: Can There Be Reform without Democracy? (New York, 2005); Anna Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy (New York, 2007); Politkovskaya, A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia, trans. Arch Tait (New York, 2007); Leonard Benardo and Aryeh Neier, “Russia: The Persecution of Civil Society,” The New York Review of Books, 27 April 2006, pp. 35–36; Jamey Gambrell, “Putin Strikes Again,” The New York Review of Books, 19 July 2007, pp. 74–75; Leon Aron, Russia’s Revolution: Essays 1989–2006 (Washington, D.C., 2007); Sergei Kovalev, “Why Putin Wins,” The New York Review of Books, 22 November 2007, pp. 64–66; Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, Putin: Itogi. Nezavisimyi Ekspertnyi Doklad [Putin: The Results: An Independent Expert Report] (Moscow, 2008). 55. Anne Appelbaum, “Anna Politkovskaya, 1958–2006: Russia’s Best-Known Journalist Murdered in Moscow,” Slate Magazine, 9 October 2006.

d Current Events and CHAPTER 10

the Representation of the Past Issues in Russian Historical Writing

e

The future is certain, only the past is unpredictable. —Onetime conventional wisdom of Soviet historians

Introduction Educated laypersons, and some scholars too, believe that “we can only read the past in terms of the present.” In support of this view they point out that historians’ attempts to reconstruct the past are fraught with insuperable obstacles such as psychological subjectivity, cultural bias, political attitudes, and the greatest of all, language. Laypersons stick to this view because it gives them a (false) sense of security, and the conviction that whatever they may think about the past, they cannot be wrong (for “we all think the past in terms of the present, don’t we?”). Theirs is an egalitarian attitude toward truth, which means that whatever they believe about the past is not less true than what the historians say: their truth is equal to the historian’s. Laypersons do not recognize that if all truths are equal, there is no truth at all. This stand gives them also the feeling of being great experts in history, or in any case not lesser experts than the professional historians, whose knowledge, anyway, “comes only from books.” Thus, with regard to truth (and its nonexistence) laypersons have always believed in what some postmodernist fads present as dernier cri in historical thought. There are also scholars who believe that all history is “history” of the present. This was a great issue in a great debate several decades ago. The debate is now over, and the issue pertains to historiography. Historians who happen to think today that “we can only read the past in terms of the present,” are either tired of writing history, or would like to make it more “contemporary” or more “relevant.” This trend is known as “presentism,”

235

236 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” and in our age of mass communications and mass exposure, of voyeurism and television, those who adhere to it are obsessed with “visibility” and with being “in,” and they want to tell a history with appeal to people today. The trend is well-known nowadays in stagecraft: enter Caesar in jeans and Napoleon wearing a Borsalino instead of the bicorne. As for the idea that all history is fiction because there is no truth, the scholars who share the layperson’s fantasies (and Henry Ford’s “all history is bunk”) belong mainly to the postmodernist streak of literary criticism in academe. Postmodernists tend to conceive of history as a form of fiction—postmodernist fiction, to be sure, what one of them called “a historiographic metafiction.” They think that history pertains to literature, that it was always part of it, should have never left it, and must quickly return to its proper place.1 Theirs is a surrealistic attitude, since they affirm also that not only does truth not exist, but the past does not exist either; meanwhile they show an acute sense of worldly pursuits in the present. But is the present (that is, tomorrow’s past) a pure fiction too? This is a more complex topic, for it deals with a particular case of academic imperialism blended with psychological nihilism and public relations know-how, which deserves a separate treatment, obviously beyond the scope of this essay. The obstacles mentioned above—bias, subjectivity, cultural boundaries—are very real, but they do not preclude the possibility of reconstructing the past in its own terms. Professional historians know that they are not immune from the pitfalls created by these obstacles, and regard them as occupational hazards. One does not stop driving one’s car because of the weekly statistics of traffic accidents. This essay intends to examine two such accidents in the writing of Russian history in the West. And since this may be construed as the “bad news,” a preliminary remark is in order. In the last thirty years or so, Western historians of Russia have made remarkable strides toward a greater knowledge and better understanding of Russia’s past. This applies to such diverse fields as social, intellectual, economic, and political history. There have been very promising achievements in women’s history and cultural studies. Suffice it to read, for instance, the standard textbooks used in university courses in the 1950s in order to gauge the tremendous progress made since that time. Take the widely known books of several distinguished historians: B. H. Sumner’s Survey of Russian History (1944), Hugh SetonWatson’s The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855-1914 (1952), V. Gitermann’s Geschichte Russlands (1944–1949), G. Welter, Histoire de Russie (1949), or B. Gille, Histoire économique et sociale de la Russie (1949): for all their qualities they are simply unusable today in any meaningful way except in the field of history of historical writing.2 Some people think that history is not a cumulative science, which may be so, but it is certainly a cumulative

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discipline: we know more today than yesterday, have better tools of enquiry, more refined methods, greater skills in extracting information from primary sources, and we achieve results of incomparably higher quality than in the past. We have moved nearer to the truth. But nothing is perfect, of course, and this great progress could not have been achieved without some failures and errors. And here begins the “bad news,” which is the main topic of this paper.

Reconsidering the Writing of Russian History Whatever the views about the events in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, all agree that it underwent great changes in many respects. Seemingly well-entrenched institutions were abolished. Nations achieved independence. New forces appeared in the social and political arena. Currents of ideas considered marginal in the past—or, as the cliché has it, abandoned to “the dustbin of history”—moved to center stage. The Soviet Union, born in October 1917, was gone. On all this, there is no disagreement. There might be divergent opinions as to the causes that brought about these momentous changes, but they are not the subject of this examination. The questions raised by our inquiry are: What did these events have to do with the writing of pre-revolutionary Russian history in the West? Did they have to change our perceptions and interpretations of Russia’s history? Did we have to reconsider, for instance, the historical role of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great? Or reexamine the nature of industrialization in late nineteenth-century Russia? Or its social structure? Did we have to ask, as one scholar did, “if the Soviet Union—the fruit of the Russian Revolution—has gone, what does the revolution itself now mean? Or was there ever any such thing?”3 One possible reaction of historians to such questions could be that current events should not have such an effect on historical writing. Historians have always assumed that changes in historiographic interpretations are mainly the results of two kinds of developments. The first is the finding of new primary sources, which by their sheer mass or unexpected content lead to a reassessment of conventional views. The second consists in the elaboration of new analytical and conceptual tools of research, which compel reexamination of known sources via new approaches, and arrive thereby at new interpretations. But nothing of the sort has happened yet— at least, nothing that should affect Western writing on Russia’s past. In order to explain this point let us take a comparative approach and examine, for instance, the effects of these same developments first on Soviet historiography, then on Western Sovietology.

238 • Russia before the “Radiant Future”

An Ideological Drama Soviet historians have been deeply affected by the unexpected changes and events that have unfolded since the beginnings of glasnost’.4 The many reasons for the shock are both complex and clear; suffice it to mention here the two most important amongst them. The first is theoretical and ideological, and it stems from the deinstitutionalization of official Marxism. Soviet Marxism (as interpreted for the historians’ benefit by the Politburo) ceased to be the mandatory matrix of historical interpretation, the theory supplying historical laws, models, and conclusions, and the source of examples, lessons of history, and antecedents that fed the always error-free prognosis of things to come in the future. In one bold stroke, Soviet historians were told that all that was bunk, and that they should begin to think for themselves about the content and methods of their profession. The second, psychological reason emanates from the emerging awareness that for decades, Soviet historians wrote (or had to write) a version of history that they knew (and certainly know today) to be inadequate, distorted, erroneous, or intentionally falsified. Whatever the degree of inadequacy, the Soviet historians were dimly aware (and understand now) that their product did not meet the standards of the historical discipline and the requirements of professional ethics. This lamentable situation has, of course, various explanations. As a current euphemism has it, the historians, like the overwhelming majority of the Soviet intelligentsia, “were not born to be heroes” and did not behave as such. They did not challenge the regime, took care of their lives and daily comforts, did not get involved “in politics,” and wrote the kind of books that were expected from them in line with the directives “from above.” Today it begins to appear that something was deeply wrong with this stand. The result of these phenomena is a crisis in historical writing and in the historical profession in Russia. One of the expressions of the crisis is a conceptual disintegration of the basic assumptions of Soviet historical thought, a situation described by the historian Aron Gurevich as a vacuum of historical vision (mirovozzrencheskii vakuum), and by Vladimir Kozlov as a “virtual ideological drama.”5 Others have termed it “a vacuum of identity,” which has led to a concomitant and deeply disturbing question: If the past is no longer what we were writing that it is, then what is it? The “vacuum” metaphor conveys also the prevalent mood of the general public. Russian historians and Russian society as a whole are in a state that James Billington has seen as a “fever break” whose central issue is “defining a post-totalitarian identity,” the main options being—in Billington’s view—a nationalistic identity or a democratic one.6 In fact, in terms of historical writing, the options are more numerous and diversified.

Current Events and Representation of the Past • 239

In a comment on Gurevich’s article, the historian S. I. Zhuk argued that Russian historical thought is moving now toward three directions: the Annales school methodologies; “nationalistic positivism” based on the theory of Russia’s singularity and exclusiveness; and a brand of neo-Marxism linked—in his view—to the New Left and the New History in the West, but smacking much more of the old Soviet historiography’s dogmatism.7 But even the three orientations delineated by Zhuk do not exhaust the many trends and intellectual phenomena that inhabit now the perplexed world of Russian historical thinking. Indeed, the vacuum is being filled nowadays with strange theories and odd beliefs: the “discovery” of superseded interpretations abandoned in the West long ago; Great Russian ultra-nationalism; neo-Slavophilism; old would-be “prophetic” visions and “up-dated” Berdyaevism, which are as pathetic as they are anachronistic; historical selfflagellation (in fact, an inverted samokritika); wild anti-Communism (dated canards about the Soviet period that have been clearly refuted in the West); nostalgia for the certainties of old Soviet-Marxist dogmas, and even plain endorsement of past approaches; and last but not least, an increased propensity to make use of the past (old vintage or newly discovered) in current political debates.8 At a “roundtable” with Western scholars held in 1989—when things in Russia seemed much clearer, Russia’s future less insecure, and her past more certain—Iurii Afanas’ev observed: “Soviet historical studies … have continued to be not primarily a search for historical knowledge, but a forum of propaganda and an adjunct to ideology.”9 V. A. Kozlov concurred: “We have not yet managed to purge ourselves of old impediments, while new impediments and myths have already begun to pile up.”10 And Victor Danilov deplored the “historical quality of the questioning” to which the historians’ work in the past was being subjected: “The fact that society has turned to history to find out who is to blame leaves a particular mark on the position of historical scholarship and its development.”11 Five years later, events such as the August putsch, the shelling of the White House and the storming of Ostankino, and the dismal results of the elections had increased the soul-searching, disorientation, and malaise. And the search to understand this strange turn of events increasingly led those seeking answers back to the past. Indeed, these events compelled Russian historians, and Russian society as a whole, to look back to their past. In so doing they faced the terror of history—of their own history, of the “blank spots,” and even more so of the badly written ones. This was a difficult and painful process that, once it had begun, could not be stopped and had to run to the bitter end of revelation, contrition, and comprehension. It was a process of facing the past whose many varieties and shapes could be seen in other nations, too. The German people was doing it sedulously and at

240 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” an excruciatingly slow pace; the French were beginning it after forty-five years of conscious or unconscious efforts to avoid it; the Japanese rejected the very notion that they had to come to grips with their past. In Croatia this soul-searching process would probably never take place, thanks first to Iosip Broz Tito and then to Helmut Kohl, both of whom, for quite different reasons, absolved the Croatians from having to look at their past. In striking contrast, history was debated everywhere in Russia, and Danilov should not have been worried by that. It could certainly bring some temporary discomfort to the historical profession, but it also promised long-term benefits for the historical consciousness of the Russian people. It was both a chance and a risk, for the “terror of history” could lead either to a redeeming catharsis or to inventing a mythical past. The historians could certainly play a salutary role in this process, once they had sorted the wheat from the chaff. This is, then, an obvious example of the sort of effect—albeit a traumatic one—that these epochal events had had on historical writing in Russia.

The Predicament of Western Sovietology The second example of such an effect is Western Sovietology. Since 1991, students and observers had variously described this field of study as being in deep trouble: “crisis,” “disaster area,” “bankruptcy,” “collapse,” were among the terms most frequently used when referring to its condition.12 There is no need, then, to elaborate at length why the disintegration of the Soviet Union brought upon Sovietology a crisis of identity, a malaise, and a predicament. The latter could be summarized grosso modo by the question: had Sovietology become a field of study without a subject?13 Sovietology’s predicament entailed the need for a reexamination of the subject matter of former Soviet studies, and of their tools of research, models, and approaches. Above all, Sovietologists had to come to terms with two questions. Why were they surprised by the turn of events in the Soviet Union? Will Sovietology continue to exist as an independent field of study, and if so, in what ways will it be different from, say, Egyptology? The prognosis, which epitomized the mass of the Sovietologists’ shortsighted analyses and comments, was probably Jerry Hough’s belief, in February 1991, that “Mr. Gorbachev’s position will be very strong in the mid 1990s.”14 As a symptom of intellectual failure, this utterance is eloquent not because of its error in predicting the course of events, but because of the very intention, scholarly arrogance, and rashness in formulating such predictions and prophecies. Subsequent developments compounded Sovietology’s already serious problems, for it was clear that the more Russia was “returning to herself”—to her cultural heritage, historical memory,

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and national traditions—the more Sovietologists would find it difficult to comprehend the new Russian scene. Another question was, what will be the unifying ground and the integrative force that will keep together the various elements of Sovietology? Since the Soviet Empire was irrevocably a matter of the past, what should prevent this field of study from being diluted into the historical discipline? This incorporation of Sovietology within the historical discipline could have been done only by a complete revision of Sovietology’s concepts, methods, and approaches, which had proven to be less than adequate in the past, and certainly had no better prospects in the future within such a highly sophisticated discipline as history. As former Sovietologists quickly found, understanding the past is not less difficult than predicting the future. Such an outcome implied also the implosion of Sovietology into several fields along disciplinary lines, such as economic history, ethnography, anthropology, sociology, and the like, stressing the need to study many things from the outset.15 Thus it became clear that the events in the former Soviet Union had an earthquake effect on Western Sovietology and put on its agenda vital questions—literally and metaphorically—that should have led to fundamental transformation of this field of study.

History and Current Events Why is this not so with regard to historical writing on Russia in the West? Is there any reason, indeed, for reappraisals as a result of these events? I am fully aware that there are deeper forces of historical contingency at work in the profession, and that many of our methods and standards of competence inescapably flow with the tides of history. In other words, we historians are influenced—on both the conscious and the unconscious levels—by the “history in the making” that we live in or witness at close distance. Suffice it to look at the graveyard of ideological models that historical writing has abandoned during the last sixty years or so in order to grasp the extent of the present’s influence on historical thinking. Two examples would illustrate this point. The first is Jacob L. Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Published in 1952, its main thesis was that Rousseau’s thought is at the origin of modern totalitarian regimes; from this assumption stemmed a sweeping interpretation of this aberrant turn in the history of otherwise civilized Western nations as Italy and Germany (only Russia was seen as a case in which this phenomenon had to be expected). In the climate of the Cold War, the book knew great success quite unwarranted by its modest scholarly value. It is today almost forgotten and rebutted by most subsequent research. The second example is Peter Novick’s book That

242 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Noble Dream, published in 1988, which presents with great lucidity the successive views and approaches in the American historical profession on the “objectivity question.” In his analysis, in between the clash of ideas and paradigms, one can clearly sense the influences of the ambient intellectual and political trends on the historian’s thinking. One such influence has always been the temptation to learn from the (changing) present about the past or to project (unconsciously) present phenomena backward to the study of the past. (The parallel temptation—or projection—is, as we well know, drawing lessons of the past for explaining the present). This trend is perhaps almost inevitable among professional historians and, so much the more, among educated and not-so-educated laypersons. There are today, however, some forms of reading history back, and of trying to learn about the past from the present, that are deeply disturbing and at the same time revealing of some of the weaker spots of our assumptions and conventional historical wisdom. For the purposes of this study, I will examine two cases of such “lessons from the present.” The first is a correct, but belated one; the second is timely, but dubious. One deals with the “1917 paradigm”; the other with the latest attraction for the “historic roots” of reforms in Russia today, and the equal or greater attraction of historical parallels.

The 1917 Paradigm and Its Discontents A short note entitled “Russia after the Coup: Rethinking the Past” by Joseph Bradley, published in November 1991, epitomizes in capsule form a certain train of thought that is making its way among historians.16 The author begins with the observation that in the events of August 1991 and “the rapidly changing present,” two aspects stand out, namely the greatly expanded role played by society and the pressure of the non-Russian peoples toward independence. These developments [he writes] pose important questions for teaching Russian history. How can we help our students, schooled in seeing mainly autocracy and imperialism in Russia’s past, understand that even during the height of autocratic politics there were in Russia alternative views and possibilities? To put it only slightly differently, what usable past can help us understand the emergence of democracy and political pluralism?

The “usable past” that the author finds appropriate to this effect includes: emphasizing the state less; teaching more about social groups, families, personal networks, and non-state institutions; alerting students and the general public to ideas of federation, confederation, and commonwealth

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in the past, to constitutional projects that cropped up from time to time, to peasant strategies intended to confound bureaucratic tutelage, and “even [to] the Brezhnevite ‘deal’ which sanctioned native cultural autonomy and fiefdoms in return for political loyalty.” Presenting such variety in a history survey [concludes Bradley] is a daunting prospect, but if Russians can challenge the state principle on the streets of Moscow, so can we challenge it in the classroom. Our students and the general public need to look at Russia and the Russian past in a new way. They need to learn more about the many alternatives in the past and learn that, despite the odds, Russians have indeed aspired to govern themselves, to act rather than be acted upon.

This analysis hints at or implies two major historiosophical assumptions, which I would summarize briefly. First, to ignore or overlook that in each and every historical situation there are always many alternatives and possibilities besides the one that materialized, means that historians have said or implied that what actually happened in Russia’s past must have happened. This means also that at all times there were never other possible ways (“alternatives”) to the future. Consequently, it has been assumed that Russia’s history was governed by an iron determinism and an inflexible predestination. The second assumption holds that while Russia’s history followed this inexorable path, it was not going nowhere but headed toward the major event and the central result of its motion: October 1917. This is implicitly posited in Bradley’s analysis: the past that historians described was usable for explaining autocracy and its concomitant phenomenon—the revolutionary process; and since there was only one alternative toward the future (which excluded “the emergence of democracy and political pluralism”), the latter was revolution and totalitarianism: ergo October 1917 and its sequels. Strange as this may seem, Bradley is quite right on one major point: this is indeed the view that many (and even most) Western historians of Russia had adopted in their analyses and syntheses of Russia’s past. Theirs was, implicitly or explicitly, a deterministic and teleological approach to Russian history. And this was so regardless of the nature and direction of current events, which for some historians had apparently the catalytic effect (for the wrong reason) of exposing and revealing this hitherto unconscious approach, and of uncovering the “hidden” past that it prevented them from seeing. What is the fundamental reason for this “revelation”? Whether justified or not, one of the historiographic side effects of the Soviet Union’s disintegration has been to put a big question mark on the foundational event of its formation. This leads to the loss of authority, of

244 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” paradigmatic coherence, and of explanatory value of the Bolshevik Revolution in the reconstruction of Russia’s past and of its supposed evolution toward the future. For that same reason, the Bolshevik Revolution lost its validity as the paradigmatic event and as a self-evident starting point for a different Russian and world order. As a consequence the problem of what came before 1917 acquires an enhanced importance, and demands a new analysis. This consequence is obvious and inevitable: if 1917 is no more what it seemed to be, all the evolution and processes that were supposed to lead to it must be reexamined because of the suddenly changed nature of their “outcome.” Since the “result” disappeared, its “causes” must be checked for their real meaning.17 In my view, this “lesson of present history” regarding the significance and paradigmatic value of October 1917 is correct but belated, for the question is: Did we have to wait till August 1991 in order to discover these weaknesses of the 1917 paradigm? But one may ask: Did we wait, indeed? We did, and a few examples will suffice to illustrate this fundamentally deterministic and teleological approach (for this is what it is) that dominated the historiographic scene over the past forty years or so. Edward Crankshaw’s The Shadow of the Winter Palace is a “non-controversial,” elegant, and well-written book, often listed as required reading in university courses on the “End of the Russian Empire.” In fact, the book tells a story with a known end, an end hinted at in the title and overtly declared in the subtitle. “The shadow” of the Winter Palace spreads far back over Russia’s history and directs its inevitable and well-targeted course. The subtitle tells in a few words the story of this inexorable fatum: “The Drift to Revolution, 1825–1917.” Thus, as the book keeps reminding its readers, from 1825 onward “the way was being prepared for the convulsions of 1905 and 1917”; the Decembrists “started a process which was to continue, to develop, to ramify … until almost a century later the autocracy was swept away. The scene on the Senate Square on 14 December 1825 marked the beginning of this tremendous process which was to end in a global convulsion.”18 Well-targeted and non-controversial, too, is Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism.19 Also often recommended in college reading lists, Yarmolinsky’s century covers the events and radical ideas from Alexander Radischchev to the Decembrists to the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 by the Narodnaia Volia. But in order not to leave the reader with the impression that this was the end of the “road,” the last sentence of the book’s epilogue states: “The final stretch of the road to the revolution that has proved one of the most fateful events in history [i.e., the Bolshevik Revolution] is beyond the scope of the present book.”20 Thus, with regard to their terminus ad quem, this book and Crankshaw’s are sim-

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ilar, the only difference between them in terms of periodization being that Yarmolinsky’s begins “the road to revolution” some thirty years earlier. In clear contrast to these works stands Franco Venturi’s Il populismo russo (1952), whose Italian title says exactly what the book is about. It is probably for publishing purposes that the English translation is misleadingly entitled Roots of Revolution and is only subtitled A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, which reflects the content of the book.21 A similar “teleological” adventure occurred with the French translation, too: the title chosen by Pierre Nora and the publisher (Gallimard) is Les intellectuels, le peuple et la révolution; the subtitle, Histoire du populisme russe au XIXe siecle. Venturi’s book is, indeed, about populism and socialism, not about “roots”: this is its strength and its lasting value.22 A third example that comes to mind is Alexander Yanov’s The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History (Berkeley, 1981). According to Yanov, the basic features of the Soviet political system date not from October 1917 but from January 1561, when in a bloody “revolution from above” and a subsequent reign of terror, Ivan the Terrible “set at naught his country’s European heritage and fundamentally altered its culture.” After that—and here is the interest of the author’s thesis—Russia underwent a succession of seven cycles from 1564 through 1964, which included: “tyranny”; “revolution of de-Stalinization” [sic]; and “attempts at reform followed by political stagnation.” In this perspective, 1917 was both inevitable and preordained, but for reasons completely different from those formulated by Crankshaw and Yarmolinsky. In this case, the determinism and teleology flow from the cyclical movement of Russia’s history, which encompasses in a perfect fit both the October Revolution from above and the subsequent totalitarian regime. If Yarmolinsky pushed back the “shadow of the Winter Palace” thirty years before the Decembrists, Yanov transposed it further back three hundred years. The fourth and last example is offered by two well-known books by the noted scholar Richard Pipes: Russia under the Old Regime (1974) and The Russian Revolution, 1899–1919 (1991). There is no need to recapitulate here the main thrust, content, and methodology of these solid scholarly works. For the purpose of this analysis, suffice it to say that both books reveal a strong deterministic and teleological streak in that they assume that the course of Russia’s history had a foregone outcome as of 1880. From that point in time a chain of violence between reaction and revolution created a tailspin movement that led inexorably to 1917, with the “Russian Revolution” proper beginning, as the second book forcefully argues, in 1899. This book has already elicited several thoughtful and learned reviews by professional historians such as Martin Malia, Israel Getzler, Geoffrey A.

246 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Hosking, Peter Kenez, Terence Emmons, and one authored jointly by David A. Rivkin, Jr., and A. Casey. Some of the reviewers liked the book, some did not; some were generous in their praise, others less. All had different kinds of criticisms, but only one of them, Terence Emmons, objected to this strong deterministic and teleological bent. I would infer from this fact that the other reviewers found nothing wrong in this kind of approach, or at least considered it just a minor blemish not worth mentioning. The most striking feature is that this acceptance of the deterministic-teleological approach cuts across ideological and political persuasions, and pops up regardless of the various schools of thought to which the reviewers belong, whether neoconservative or socialist-Menshevik, liberal or revisionist.23 The strangest example of this subconscious determinism is probably the comparative review of Pipes’ book along with Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution and W. A. Speck’s Reluctant Revolutionaries—strange because the authors of this review have clearly seen the problem, but have decided explicitly to ignore it against all the evidence available to them. They write: “In presenting a considered analysis of the events they describe, none of the authors [Pipes, Schama, and Speck] descends into the domain of historical determinism … [and they do not argue] that these revolutions were preordained.”24 But a few lines further they quote Pipes as saying explicitly that the seeds of the revolution were “sown as early as the mid-nineteenth century,” and that the revolution proper began either in 1880 or with “the general university strike of 1899.” Apparently “descending into the domain of historical determinism” means different things to different people, if it means anything at all. What other forms did this deterministic and teleological approach obtain in Western historical writing on Russia? I will briefly examine here three of its by-products: first, the so-called revolutionary process (or processes); second, the crisis paradigm; and third, the structure of Russian society.

A “Revolutionary Process” In current historiography, the “revolutionary process” in Russia is supposed to have lasted all through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its beginnings are variously set at the end of the eighteenth century, in 1825, the 1860s, or the 1880s, as is implied in the interpretations examined above. Here is another one. In a collection of articles published in 1991, Professor Abbott Gleason writes that the 1860s were “the real beginning of the Russian Revolution, which accelerated after 1890.”25 Subsequently, however, there appeared a shift of emphasis in Professor Gleason’s view, resulting in the original and rather paradoxical concept of a revolutionary process

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without a revolution. This was done in a lecture entitled “Doing without the Russian Revolution?” and an article on “The Meaning of 1917.”26 In his lecture, Professor Gleason asked (not rhetorically), “Was there really a revolution in 1917?” And after a perfunctory semantic inquiry into the many and “confused” meanings of the words “revolution” and “counterrevolution,” he gave a negative answer to the question, based on a grand interpretation of the course of modern Russian history. There was, explained Professor Gleason, a long process of change that started in the 1860s and lasted till the 1930s. Within this tumultuous process, “1917” was just one of the “periodic upheavals” that have always occurred in Russian history. This was, in his view, “a new Time of Troubles” like the one that existed from the death of Boris Godunov in 1605 through 1613. He also informed his audience that he intends now to use in his Russian history courses at the university the “Time of Troubles paradigm” instead of the “1917 paradigm.”27 Similarly, the article on “The Meaning of 1917” also raises the question “Was there really a Russian Revolution?”28 and although it goes over much of the same ground as the lecture, it has some new elements and arguments. Its starting point is that, whether Marxist or not, “the idea of progress governs the dominant interpretations of revolution,” and since the Russian Revolution was not “in any serious way progressive. … except, perhaps, the liquidation of aristocracy and the remnants of feudalism,” then it cannot be regarded as a revolution, and nothing of that sort happened in 1917.29 What happened was something radically different. Some historians [writes Gleason] are taking the view that the events of 1917 are merely the most recent of periodic upheavals that have characterized Russian history since the sixteenth century. It seems to me that a good deal of what took place during the so-called Russian Revolution and afterward is akin, for example, to the developments in Russia between the death of Boris Godunov in 1605 and the promulgation of the new code of 1649. Then, too, a crisis of legitimacy, intensified by war and famine led to the dissolution of Russia into class war and national war, followed by foreign invasion. A new dynasty was founded. Its leaders, in their search for solutions to the social and economic chaos in the country, found it necessary to increase social control drastically, and political autocracy as well. Serfdom was consolidated, and almost all Russians were bound to the place in which they lived or worked. … The crisis is usually known as the “Time of Troubles,” and its normally assigned dates are 1605–1613. But the new configuration of Russia really took until the middle of the seventeenth century to establish itself. Like its later cousin, the so-called revolution, it could be assigned a much longer duration.30

We shall not examine now the question of the validity and merits (or lack of them) of this historical analogy, but leave that subject for a later

248 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” section of this essay. The question discussed here is whether there was or not a revolution in Russia, and, if there was, when it occurred. Gleason sees “the Russian Revolution as actually beginning in the period prior to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and continuing all the way to the present. Then the communist period becomes only one phase in a very long and disruptive revolutionary process.”31 Thus, having made full circle, we returned to one of the initial premises of contemporary historiography, which postulated that the “revolution” began way back in the past: in the 1880s or, in Gleason’s version, prior to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Gleason’s truly original contribution is, therefore, the view that there was a revolutionary process without a revolution. But “Was there a revolution in 1917?” or not, is a false problem. The real question lies neither in the definitions of the word “revolution,” nor in finding a way to argue now that there was none. The problem is what we, historians, did with the Revolution in our thinking. In the past we put too much into it, and made of it a “paradigm” that was supposed to explain Russia’s past, present, and future. Now we want to get rid of it altogether—retro Satan!—and replace it with a melodramatic version of the longue durée. In its new version as in the old, the concept of a “revolutionary process” (or “processes”)32 stems from a basic misconception of the nature of historical processes; in this syntagma, the use of the term “revolutionary” is neither a misnomer nor an empty metaphor. But it may also be both a misnomer and an oxymoron, since, à proprement parler, “revolution” is a sudden, violent, and momentous change. If you take the elements of violence and of breakdown of continuities out of the concept of “revolution,” then what is left is a “revolution” only in the sense flourishing in the advertisement industry, where every new toothpaste is a momentous and unparalleled revolution in toothbrushing. Historical discourse should strive for more precision. “Revolution” in this context is also an empty metaphor because during all this long period nothing of that sort happened till 1905 and February 1917: no upheavals, no violent breakdowns—social, political, or otherwise. (The last one worth remembering was Pugachev’s bunt, which indeed was long ago.) Even the much-used (and abused) notion of “revolutionary situations” seems today, even more than in the past, inadequate and grossly overblown in most of the cases. Let us take two examples. The Emancipation of the serfs in 1861 is a locus classicus of this genre. A “revolutionary situation” is supposed to have compelled the autocracy to abolish serfdom and begin a series of internal reforms. In fact, this appears to be a clear-cut case of reform, about which even the term “revolution from above” is rather a metaphor than a precise sociological and political

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definition. Another example is the assassination of Alexander II by the Narodnaia Volia on 1 March 1881. In some interpretations this event is held (as the narodovol’tsy hoped in vain) to have triggered a “revolutionary crisis” representing one more phase of the “revolutionary process.” But in fact nothing happened after Alexander’s death: nothing moved, except that three ministers were replaced and a flurry of pogroms swept over the South. This event seems to exemplify just the opposite: it did not provoke the sort of popular action, the “revolutionary situation,” expected by the Narodnaia Volia and devised by later historians. Other examples of such terminological misuse of the term “revolutionary” concern well-known historical figures. Why is Alexander Herzen often defined as a “revolutionary”? One example among many is Edward Acton’s book, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary.33 Herzen was certainly an intellectual, but what did he do, and what did he write to be defined as “revolutionary”? Another example is Vissarion Belinskii: why does Wanda Bannour believe, in two books entitled Les nihilistes russes, that he is both a “nihilist” and a “revolutionary”? This is never explained with anything but grand generalizations and perfunctory linkages.34 Another case of such a misnomer—although for diametrically different reasons—is Sergei Nechaev, always defined as a “revolutionary’s revolutionary,” if I may say so. But in what way was he a revolutionary? What did he write? Nothing. What did he do? He killed in cold blood the student Ivanov, a member of his own radical group. On that account, he should qualify as a murderer, not as a revolutionary. In sum, the teleological “ex post” assumption that a revolution was bound to happen in the course of Russian history created several distortions and false retrospective views. It led, first, to imagining a mythical revolutionary chain of events, and second, to interpreting as “revolutionary” every social tension, political accident, or radical utterance. Thus, everything fell in place, but, unfortunately, in the wrong one.

The Crisis of the Old Regime The concomitant assumption is that a deep and multi-factorial crisis existed for decades in imperial Russia, coming (inevitably) to fruition in the big bang of its collapse. There is a certain logic in that. One cannot have a “revolutionary process” leading eventually to revolution, without some sort of underlying social and political crisis. As Tatyana Tolstaya bluntly summed it up for all those who cling to this view: “Revolutions don’t happen in paradise.”35 Thus hell, or at least some crisis, is needed. Sidney Monas writes: “Crisis followed crisis, almost as in a novel by Dostoevsky.”36 Roberta Manning’s competent work on the landed nobility in late imperial

250 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Russia is entitled The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia.37 One could read this useful book with interest, wondering all the way to the last page where “the crisis” is. The book features all sorts of descriptions—except one of “the crisis of the Old Order.” This “crisis” is assumed, postulated, and forgotten, like the quotations of Marx-Engels-Lenin at the beginning of Soviet books under the new Old Order. There is, then, a certain kind of logic in this view of Russian history: the “drift to revolution,” the “revolutionary process,” and the “crisis” were synchronic, complementary, overlapping (almost tautological), long-lasting, and feeding each other. But this kind of chronic and nearly permanent crisis, and all that the phenomena a crisis is supposed to entail, reminds of the old Soviet thesis about the continuous worsening of the peasants’ situation in Russia (a corollary of Marx’s unfulfilled prognosis about the process of continuous absolute pauperization of the proletariat). About this thesis, the Leningrad scholar Alexander Schapiro observed at a conference in 1958: My second remark concerns the condition of the peasantry about which all the speakers today elaborated at length. You see, what obtains is a rather paradoxical state of affairs. Scholars working on rural history in the early feudal period [that is, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries] tell us that the peasants were in such a miserable situation that it couldn’t be worse. They were utterly decimated. Nevertheless, according to other scholars the peasants’ situation did deteriorate in the following periods. In the fifteenth century it became even worse; in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries – worse, worse, and worse (khuzhe, khuzhe i khuzhe). And this continued unabatedly through the Great Socialist October Revolution.38

Shapiro’s ironic statement was a courageous one, and in 1958, in the Soviet Union, he could not say explicitly that if the thesis were correct, there should have been no peasants left alive to be “liberated” by the “Great October Revolution.” This is the “paradoxical situation” that results from any thesis of a continuous immiseration of the peasantry; and similar results obtain also from the thesis of a permanent and chronic social and political crisis. Indeed, a crisis that is supposed to have lasted nearly one hundred years raises, again, problems both of terminology and of the very nature of the crisis. Or is this word, too, used as a metaphor, and detached from any sociological and political content? But in history (as in medicine) a crisis is not a chronic illness with which one can live with for decades. When the crisis occurs, there are only three alternatives: you die, or you recover, or you get used to it. In all three cases, one thing is certain: the outcome puts an end to the crisis. But in current historiography, because of the untested

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and unchallenged “crisis postulate,” the most elementary questions are rarely asked. When did the crisis begin, and why? Was there a crisis at all? If not, what exactly are the phenomena referred to when using this term? In order to clarify this issue, let us evaluate the situation in pre-revolutionary Russia as against one of the many possible definitions of “crisis” in history. Jacob Burkhardt wrote, in an oft-quoted passage: Something breaks out, subverting the public order. Either it is suppressed, whereupon the ruling power, if it is a wise one, will find some remedy, or, unexpectedly to most people, a crisis in the whole state of things is produced, involving whole epochs and all or many peoples of the same civilization. … The historical process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments which otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms in months or weeks, and are fulfilled.39

This is how “crises” looked like before the age of hype, of word inflation, and of the present crisis in the discourse of the humanities. A striking example of this conservative approach toward the “crisis paradigm” can be found in the debate on the “agrarian crisis” in late imperial Russia, and its by-products—the agricultural crisis and the continuous immiseration of the peasantry. This thesis has been seriously challenged and found to be wanting or plainly wrong, by James Simms, Paul Gregory, Elvyra Wilbur, and other scholars. Their findings indicate a trend of rising agricultural productivity in Russia, rising living standards of the peasantry, and rising per capita income. Although this invalidates the very foundations of the existence of an agrarian crisis, the conventional wisdom of its existence still reigns supreme in historical writing, college textbooks, and university courses. And indeed, if the agrarian crisis is removed from the grand synthesis of “the causes of the Russian Revolution,” many other pieces fall apart, thus requiring its complete reexamination, which apparently not everybody is prone to do at this stage.40 One example of such an unreformed approach is Teodor Shanin’s work The Roots of Otherness, which posits that Russia was a “disarticulated” society marked by an agrarian crisis and an exploitive relationship between the industrial and agricultural sectors.41 In his review of the book, John Bushnell criticizes Shanin for ignoring the voluminous new research on the agrarian crisis, writing that the “evidence will not support Shanin’s simplistic picture of industrial growth fuelled by government exactions that drove the Russian peasantry as a whole ever deeper into destitution.”42

The Structure of Russian Society Crisis, revolutionary processes, revolution: momentous events that must have had deep origins and profound causes, rather than being the result of

252 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” some fortuitous historical accident. In any event, and more often than not, even historical professionalism could not overcome this deeply ingrained human yearning for order, logic, and plainness in the course of things in the past and in the present, and its aversion to the role of change, accident, and contingency in the outbreak of “great events that shape the fate of humanity.” These “deep origins” were found in the presumed faulty structure of Russian society. The latter has been usually described as characterized by a state of disequilibrium, a process of fragmentation and disintegration, its isolation from the state, and the alienation of every social group from the others. This is what “explains” the “drift to revolution” and the final collapse of the Old Regime. In fact, the reasoning went the other way round. Once the teleological perspective was adopted, it was assumed that the revolution was inevitable, which led to positing that the revolution could not have happened in a society that was not greatly divided, not deeply antagonistic, and not in a process of disintegration. Therefore, in view of the final outcome, all the social and political features that did not fit into this teleological pattern were seen as marginal, declared irrelevant, or not seen at all. In other words, scholars overlooked or chose to ignore them. Such features are, for instance, the degree of social cohesion, of stability, and of integration that existed in Russian society and polity. For, indeed, Russian imperial society was neither more nor less fragmented than other European societies, and its social groups neither more nor less isolated from each other, within the range of social integration that characterized agro-industrial societies at that stage of development. Thus, even such a strong proponent of the “disintegration and group alienation” theory as Alfred Rieber (who coined to that effect the “sedimentary society” paradigm), writes: “The social distance between the upper classes and the peasant masses was never so great in Russia as in Western Europe.”43 Nevertheless, many scholars keep assuming that the social cleavages between the various classes were always much greater in Russia than in Western European countries. Fragmentation and cohesion, stability and disequilibrium, are phenomena that exist in all societies to various degrees at various times. As in other countries, Russia’s social evolution was a process involving a permanent interplay of these features, and not only a succession of those belonging to one side of the spectrum: fragmentation, disintegration, crisis. It was neither a deviation from some European “normal” type, nor a “crooked” or “bastard” semi-European, semi-Asiatic excrescence à la Chaadaev. With all their vast erudition and discriminating minds, some scholars seem to have overlooked the elementary definition of Max Weber’s “ideal type” and replaced it with an imaginary “normal type,” which is historically nonexistent and sociologically a fallacy.

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In current historiographical discourse, this imaginary “normal type” is usually subsumed under the paradigm “Russia and the West,” in which the “West” is never clearly defined, and finally turns out to represent neither a variant of Weber’s “ideal type” nor of his “North-Western corner of Europe,” but an idealized type of a mythical West. No specialist of France, England, or Germany would recognize the “West” referred to by historians of Russia. In this idealized “West,” countries like France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire do not fit at all. But if most of Western Europe does not fit into the “paradigm West,” why do we expect that Russia should? This logical and methodological misunderstanding has led sometimes to paradoxical results in historical writing, such as collections of books and articles that systematically compare “Russia and the West” after informing the reader from the very beginning that, “there is no ‘West,’ after all.”44 Nonetheless, this “paradigm West” is deeply embedded in current historical thinking, and since its function is, in fact, to find differences and contrasts between Russia and the so-called West, the result of its use is inevitably an inventory of bizarre and awkward features. Russia was simply a “bad fit” and a “deviation from the Western path,” which serves as “an explanation for Russia’s erratic and collision-prone historical course.”45 Russia’s was an awkward society with awkward classes: it had an awkward peasantry; an awkward middle class, if at all; an awkward intellectual stratum called “intelligentsia,” supposedly unique to Russia. It had no genuine nobility and no true bureaucracy; the sosloviia were “an extreme and eccentric version” of Western European estates (A. Gleason) but were not Ständestaats in the “Western meaning.” Finally, Russia had an awkward political development, characterized—in Alexander Yanov’s view—by “the reversibility of political change.” As he succinctly put it: “It is really the reversibility of political change that sets Russia apart from the history of all other European nations.”46 Or, as he had said elsewhere, “Russia’s total experience with counter-reform” represented the fundamental differentia between it and the West. But even a superficial glance at major events in European history would indicate that “reversibility of political change” and “experience with counter-reform” were quite evenly shared by all Western European nations. Suffice it to mention the Counter-Reformation, the Glorious Revolution (in fact, an aristocratic coup d’etat, following … a Restoration) and the nobiliary reaction in several Western European countries, the royal putsch in Sweden in 1772, Napoleon Bonaparte (did he continue the Revolution, or rather reverse its course?), Napoleon III, Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, Vichy, the Greek colonels, parts of Europe today heading back to pre–World War I configurations, neo-Fascism in Italy, neo-Nazism in

254 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Germany and elsewhere, neo-Communism in Poland and Hungary, and on, and on. Nevertheless, the dominant view remains that nothing in Russia was as it should have been. This normative nonsense amounts to a bastardization of Russia’s history, and to an endorsement of the “Chaadaev syndrome,” stating that the only purpose of Russia’s existence is to serve as a negative example to the family of nations. Professor Rieber’s “sedimentary society” metaphor is an apt epitome of the whole approach: it made Russia utterly different from “the rest,” and brought about its final collapse.47

The Lure of Historical Roots If the first “lesson from the present” was correct but belated, the second, as noted above, is a timely, but dubious one.

The “Reforms Paradigm” Recent Russian historiography seems to feel a compelling urge to learn from the present and to find out how to use it. But of the many events that unfold before our eyes, the greatest attraction in the 1990s was exerted by the topic of reforms in the present and in the recent past. Here is how the reasoning goes. From some time now—we are told—and more precisely from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, reforms are the main issue on the national agenda and the most important matter at this stage of Russia’s history. In light of this momentous development, it would appear that conventional historiography has underestimated the place of reforms in the Russian political tradition. Therefore, the new assignment should be to turn to the past in order to make a complete inventory of reforms—planned, attempted, aborted, or carried out, and trace a Russian historical tradition of reform making. The question is, why do we need that? Several reasons are usually put forward. One of them begins by the rhetorical question: “Is it conceivable that Gorbachev and Yeltsin could embark on a program of reforms without a tradition of reforms in Russia?” Since this is not conceivable, we are invited to uncover its antecedents and to find out its origins. Thus, in spite of the new context, we are back again to the “search for origins” syndrome, this old professional deformation of historians that Marc Bloch ironically called l’obsession des origines. Here is a random example of this approach. In a review of R. W. Davies’ book Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (Bloomington, 1989), the reviewer complains that “Davies does not place their [the Soviet historians’] ferment in the context of the centuriesold conflict between historians and the Russian Government.”48

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Let us pause and examine this statement. How long is this “old conflict” between historians and government supposed to have lasted? Four, five centuries? Or none at all? Books on Russian historiography invariably state that no “Russian historian” worth the name existed before the first half of the eighteenth century. The earliest mentioned are Vasilii Tatishchev (1686–1750), August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809), Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–83), Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–65), and Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733–89). None of them was involved in any kind of “conflict” with the “Russian Government.” Moving forward in time we reach Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), a court “historiographer” (as his official title went) whose panegyrical prose hailed the monarchy from time immemorial to his own days. Who should be next? Solov’ev, Chicherin, Kliuchevskii (incidentally, a onetime tutor of Grand Duke Georgii Alexandrovich)? Where is the “conflict” between them and the powers? Pavel Miliukov did oppose the autocratic regime, but he did it as a political leader, not as a historian. This simple (and astonishing) error is symptomatic of a trend of thought bent on finding (or imagining) “ancient origins” of contemporary matters and issues. Moreover, this recourse to “origins” seems to be used also for its didactic role and legitimizing effect: developments with deep roots in the past could not be arbitrary or ephemeral. But this simple example amounts also to a sort of rewriting of Russian history. For what it really means is: the current conflict between Soviet/Russian historians and the government is an important feature of contemporary scholarly and political life; it should therefore have been so in the past, too. “Should have been.” But was it? Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s reforms, then, must have been preceded by similar attempts at, and executions of, reforms throughout the centuries. We therefore have to reexamine Russia’s history in the light of the present, and rewrite it in a way that will stress the plans for reforms, the ideas of reform, and the reforms carried out at different times. Thus, Yeltsin’s historical ancestors must be reformers. Not autocracy, but reform should be the dominant paradigm in the writing of Russian history. Otherwise, as Bradley candidly asks, how can we help our students “to understand the emergence of democracy and political pluralism” in Russia? A similar project informs an excellent collection of articles entitled Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? edited by Theodore Taranovski with the assistance of Peggy McInerny.49 It is the result of a conference held on May 1990 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Its twenty-three articles are presented in five sections: “Traditions of Reform in Late Imperial Russia,” “Autocracy and the Challenge of Constitutionalism,” “Forging the Socialist Polity in the 1920s,” “The Challenge of Pluralism from Khrushchev to Gorbachev,” and

256 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” “The Past, the Present, and the Future.” As usual in sborniki of this kind, some articles are excellent, some good, others less so. But generally speaking, except for the temerity of looking into the future and one author’s promise (in 1990) of Russia’s forthcoming “return to normalcy,” this is a solid scholarly work. What are its purpose and terms of reference? The participants found out that “the concept of reform in Russian and Soviet history remains complex and elusive.”50 Perhaps for that reason, and although the book’s pièce de résistance was “reform,” there was no attempt to prescribe a formal definition of reform [writes Taranovski in the introduction], other than the unspoken assumption that reform is more than mere change, that it involves conscious attempt at gradual transformation and improvement of state and society on the part of the political leadership, and that it addresses the needs of the governed and defects of the existing state of affairs.

Within these parameters, the questions that the participants were asked to consider included: What conditions gave rise to the consciousness of the desirability and necessity of reform? What was the historical range of reform alternatives and why were some chosen and others rejected? What were the intentions and goals of the reforms, whether explicit or implicit? What were the results of the reforms and what did they presage for the future? What were the lessons, if any, that could be drawn for the present?51

What new findings and elements have the focus on “reform,” whether as “progress” or as “cycle,” brought about? Strikingly, the more original articles (in view of the low quality of the output in this field during the last twenty years or so) are those dealing with Khrushchev and the subsequent period. The “more historical” ones seem to stay within the usual problematic and traditional range of topics. Thus, we are treated to the menu of nineteenthcentury reforms and reformers, the well-trodden path of Stolypin’s agrarian reform, the constitutional reform, “police and administrative reform” in the 1920s, the Soviets’ “anti-bureaucratic campaign” (a reform, too?), and finally the mandatory “reform and revolution.” These topics are not new. And although this does not detract from their importance, the question remains, in what ways has the new focus changed our understanding of these events and developments in the past? There are hardly any; rather, the main difference is the new (and slightly) artificial umbrella under which these topics, old and new, have been collected. But whereas they have been collected, they still are not integrated, since the projection of the knowledge of the present toward the past is not very illuminating: the good points are already known, and the new ones are not so good. (And indeed, did we have to wait for Gorbachev and Yelt-

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sin in order to discover past reforms, when as far back as 1966 Marc Raeff collected most of them in a handsome booklet entitled Plans for Political Reforms in Imperial Russia, 1730–1905,52 in the “Russian Civilization Series” edited by Michael Cherniavsky and Ivo J. Lederer? This, too, was so long ago…). This is, then, one of the lessons, from Russia’s present about its past, that some scholars and a few laypersons think can be drawn by observing current events and replacing the “1917 paradigm” with “reform.” This kind of reading history backward is neither new nor very successful, and whether its authors want it or not, it has inevitably political overtones, and even plain and explicit inferences. One may sympathize with their view, but this is quite irrelevant when the matter at stake is its value as historical explanation and its contribution to historical scholarship.

Lessons of the Past for the Present The approach described above has a twin, which consists in a simple inversion of the two terms of the proposition. Instead of learning from the present about the past, other students try to achieve a similar effect by the opposite means: let the past be our guide. A solid example of this approach is found in a collection of excellent papers written by excellent scholars. Historiographically, the collection’s combined effect and compounded result are probably well beyond what the authors had in mind when they gathered in 1986 at the conference where the papers were delivered. Its title, quoted above, is Reform in Russia and the USSR: Past and Prospects, edited by Robert O. Crummey, and the purpose of this collective effort is clearly stated in Crumney’s introduction: the “study of reform in Russia, remote and recent, illuminates the present contours of politics in the USSR and suggests the conditions under which the Soviet system of government—in many ways the heir of the Russian past—might undergo significant change.”53 It appears from this statement that one of the aims of this enquiry is to learn from the past about the present. Leaving aside all the methodological problems raised by this project, and sticking only to plain conventional wisdom, one may wonder whether it was really useful, in order to understand Gorbachev’s reforms, to go as far back as Alexander II and Catherine II, let alone to the “reform” of Ivan the Terrible or the “‘constitutional’ reform” during the Time of Troubles. This flashback is needed, then, because it is assumed that a comparison with reforms in the past will give more knowledge about the reforms today, and about how they may turn out in the future (hence the “prospects” in the book’s subtitle). This approach may be called “reasoning by antecedent,” by means of which the historian, a specialist on things past, enters now in a predictive

258 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” mode. The interesting feature of this kind of reasoning (and the one that makes it extremely questionable) is that it equally well serves both those who find in the antecedents reasons for hope about Russia’s future, and those who support the “Russia-is-doomed” thesis. Looking at antecedents (not necessarily the same ones), the latter say that Russia has had no tradition of reform, no schooling in liberalism, and no experience in democracy. Rather, it has known “centuries of slavery, submission, intolerance, and expansion.” This is why the present reforms are doomed and will fail; and this is why Russia’s case is hopeless (and one Western investors had better stay away from). One may ask: how many centuries of “slavery” came to an end with the collapse of Communism? Two, says Bernard-Henri Lévi, a longtime new philosopher and media star; for Henry Kissinger there were four; not to be outdone by “dear Henry,” Zbigniew Brzezinski makes them five, which should bring us back to square one, that is, to the question “How do you define ‘slavery’?” “Five centuries” should bring us back to “Europe ca. 1492.” It is intriguing to ask how many free people—and where—dwelt in Europe at that time, and whether there were “slaves” only in Russia. Actually, in Russia there were none. Thus, it appears that there is one past, but many antecedents, which is another way of saying that if Russia is not necessarily doomed, this approach should certainly be. This project assumes (rather boldly) that the tricky question of the “lessons in history” has already been solved, and it overlooks the great pitfalls (and political blunders) that the so-called “historical perspective” has brought upon the understanding of the present “in light of the past.” This brings us to another aspect of “the search for origins” and of the “lessons of the past” syndrome, namely “lessons of history through comparisons.”

Comparisons, Analogies, and Historical Parallels The turmoil in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union, the Gulf War, the tragedy of the peoples of former Yugoslavia—these and other epoch-making events seem to have created in the public, scholars and laypersons alike an irresistible urge to draw historical analogies. The Time of Troubles, Sarajevo 1914, Weimar, Munich, Yalta, Vietnam … Suffice it to open the daily newspaper to find oneself immersed in oceans of history (and of historical parallels), both recent and ancient. As in vino veritas of old, today it is in history that we find the truth about the present, the answers to its perplexities, and the keys to salvation. I shall examine some examples related to the topic of this discussion, while bearing in mind that what should interest us here is not only the content and conclusions of the analogies, but the method by which they are arrived at.

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In terms of typology, the most frequently used seems to be the “historical perspective analogy,” which may also be termed as the “straight analogy” case. Speaking on “Reform under Alexander II and Gorbachev” on 12 September 1988, Theodore Taranovski observed that the policies of Alexander II can serve as an instructive model for evaluating “the wisdom of [Gorbachev’s] reform program and its chances of success.” In his view, the times of Nicholas I and Leonid Brezhnev, predecessors to Alexander II and Gorbachev, respectively, “manifest uncanny similarities [and] both leaders presided over periods of prolonged stagnation.” After them, the reformers were liberal bureaucrats whose ideas and slogans have “a curiously modern ring.” However, Alexander’s reforms proved to be “halfway measures,” resulting in both “conflict and cooperation between the state and society.” Evaluating the similarities and the differences between the two cases, the lecturer found that Gorbachev’s program appears to be multifaceted, affecting all aspects of national life … Moreover, unlike in tsarist Russia, current reform extends to the central government. Thus, Gorbachev’s campaign to reorganize the national legislature and to strengthen the soviets as instruments of local government, reminiscent of the 1864 zemstvo reform, might avoid past conflict between “society” and the bureaucracy.

Taranovski drew “lessons for the present” from the comparison, concluding that “from the vantage of historical perspective,” these observations indicate ground for “cautious optimism” with regard to the content of Gorbachev’s proposals and chances of success.54 Evidently, it turned out to be not “cautious” enough, in the light of what we know from hindsight—one more reason why historians, as well as political scientists, should stay away from the game of predicting the future. A similar approach, in terms of both method and the precedent chosen, obtains in Ben Eklof’s Soviet Briefing: Gorbachev and the Reform Period.55 One reviewer correctly observed that “one of the most provocative aspects of Eklof’s study is his effort to place Gorbachev’s reforms in historical perspective.”56 This perspective leads the author to dismiss comparisons between Gorbachev and Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, and to a lesser degree even with Khrushchev. Like Taranovksi, he finds that “the most suitable model for Gorbachev” is provided by Alexander II and the Great Reforms of 1861–1874. Initially unsure of his goals, the Tsar understood reform and, in the process, devised a program that became increasingly sweeping and radical in its implications … Such a perspective makes the historian more appreciative even of modest reform and aware of the nearly universal tendency for grand design to be reduced, to the end, to ramshackle compromise and a tepid rate of change.57

260 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Ben Eklof’s conclusion in the light of this historical analogy is that “something momentous is in the making in the Soviet Union,”58 and he is right, albeit for the wrong reason, since the “something momentous” happened not thanks to Gorbachev, but in spite of him. The third example of that kind can be found in Vladimir Shlapentokh’s article “Alexander II and Mikhail Gorbachev: Two Reforms in Historical Perspective.”59 Like the previous ones, it is the “historical perspective” paradigm that explicitly informs this approach, although in light of the rules of historical evidence, it may be appropriate to ask what kind of “historical perspective” on Gorbachev’s rule we could have had in 1990, and how we could compare it with the other case of reforms, on which we have 130 years of historical perspective, scholarly research and archives, and reliable information about their outcome and consequences (which are the basic preconditions, as we all know, of any serious historical research). Since all these elements were missing in 1990 (and in 1994, too) with regard to Gorbachev’s experiment, what degree of validity does the comparison have? And if it has none, how trustworthy are “lessons” based on such shaky logical and historical ground? The other usual risks of this kind of comparison are also well represented in this article. Professor Shlapentokh thinks, for instance, that “the political reforms of Alexander II truly changed the structure of Russian society.”60 No such thing, of course, ever happened. In order to meet (implicitly) the requirements of comparability, he writes that “in both periods, the country was run by a bureaucracy organized according to more or less the same patterns”;61 this may be argued, of course, only at such a level of abstraction and generalization as to either render the statement meaningless or to refer to any kind of hierarchical organization, from standing armies to monastic orders. Again for the sake of comparability, it is said that “both Russias had a dominant class” (a platitude), “the nobility in the first case and the party nomenclature in the second” (a puzzling analogy).62 Other results stemming from the attempt to meet the comparability requirement include: “The mass media under Nicholas I were accessible to only a tiny minority of the population” (if so, what kind of “mass” media were they?), whereas by the early 1980s every Russian family was exposed to numerous mass media.63 “In each case, the major reform ideas were inspired by liberal intellectuals…”64 Were they? At least Taranovski was right in defining them as “liberal bureaucrats.” A second type of comparison is the “reverse perspective analogy,” if I may borrow the expression from Sidney Monas’s essay “Perestroika in Reverse Perspective: The Reforms of the 1860s.”65 At first, the author examines various kinds of comparisons current in political language around 1990. Thus, reference to the year 1921 and the New Economic Policy (NEP)

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was often used by Gorbachev and his associates “as an analogue to their own situation.” In the West, the historical parallel that suggested itself was Weimar Germany. Monas himself offers another: There exists in Russian history, however, a more striking and a deeper analogy, one that is not mentioned by Gorbachev. Given the projected scope, inherent dilemmas, and thorny paradoxes of perestroika, a more instructive comparison is to the Great Reforms of the latter half of the nineteenth century under Alexander II, beginning with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and ending with the abortive plans for a constitution in 1881, or perhaps one may even say ending only with the end of the old regime itself in 1917.66

Monas is well aware that “historical analogies are by their nature imperfect”; nonetheless, he believes that “if one focuses on those aspects of the situation that posed a dramatic problem for policy, the analogies are many, striking, and instructive.”67 It appears, however, that this “deeper analogy” is drawn between a brief (almost static) situation in Gorbachev’s short rule and a long period extending from 1861 through 1917. It is difficult to see how the analogies (real or imagined) can be “instructive” when the terms of the comparison are obviously non-comparable, even if they are strictly kept within the limits of metaphoric or symbolic discourse. It appears also that the “extension” of the earlier period (1861–1917) has brought this argument to the time-limits used by the deterministic and teleological “1917 paradigm” in its quest for the “origins” of 1917, the span of the “crisis” and of the “drift to revolution” discussed above. As a matter of fact this is also the interpretation, as far as the march of events is concerned, that Monas adopts in his article. Finally, I should stress also that Monas cannot be entirely faulted for the weaknesses inherent in historical analogy, for he has clearly seen them, and chosen nonetheless to proceed with his analogy. This is the last point of our discussion.

Why Eat Soup with a Knife? Historical analogies seem to be not only an obsession of laypersons in these troubled times of ours; they have a fatal attraction for seasoned scholars, too. Fatal, because even when the practitioners of our art are aware of the dangers and pitfalls of this sport, they often succumb to its blandishments. Thus, professor Monas’s “striking and deeper analogy” quoted above is introduced by a perceptive observation: “I believe these analogies have a certain usefulness if one holds clearly in mind the points that are being compared and the purpose of the comparison, which is generally to illustrate and dramatize an interpretation already conceived.”68

262 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” This definition therefore sees the analogy as one of many literary and rhetorical devices that the historian (and for that matter any writer) uses in his or her prose. It implies, methodologically, that the analogy does not add any substantive element in terms of evidence or of logical or historical proof. It is an illustration and a dramatization of a conclusion arrived at before the use of the analogy, one that should stand without it. This analogy, therefore, has no merit as an explanatory hypothesis. It is, as Monas clearly hints, an aesthetic adornment of the prose, not a demonstration. One can certainly agree with this view, and hold it as one of several possible approaches in the domain of writing and composition. It is a matter of individual taste and literary preferences, and as such, it should be respected without qualification. The question remains, however, whether an entire argument and a whole demonstration can rest on the basis of historical parallels, as Monas’s essay does, if those are really conceived only as literary devices. It would appear, therefore, that there is a contradiction between Monas’s restricted definition of what an analogy is, and the way he is using it as a heuristic device. Would it be exaggerated to wonder whether the fatal attraction of the analogy has played a trick to the author, even when he has so clearly defined what an analogy is and what it is not? One can imagine what usually happens to scholars (and to most laypersons, of course) who, unlike Monas, do not have the slightest idea that they should first think and define in what sense they are using the many analogies usually found in their discourse. This fatal attraction and its deceptive effects are manifest in another kind of rhetorical device where first a disclaimer states that analogies cannot be trusted, whereupon the analogies and comparisons follow in complete disregard of the disclaimer. The Professor Shlapentokh’s article on Alexander II and Gorbachev, quoted above, opens as follows: “Comparisons of different historical periods in order to find common patterns of behavior, even within the same nation, seldom produce more than platitudes. Nonetheless, comparisons of Russia in the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century promise to be more fruitful than most such comparisons.”69 No explanation is given to prove where this “promise” comes from, or why Russia is an exception to the “platitude rule” firmly stated in the first sentence. Everything proceeds as if the disclaimer serves mainly to appease the historian’s good conscience and to show that he is aware of the malignant character of analogies, while in fact this awareness is not intended to be a guide in the historical analysis that follows. In addition, comparisons not only “seldom produce more than platitudes,” as Professor Shlapentokh writes, but very often have much worse effects, for they may lead to plain errors, unwarranted generalizations, imagined similarities or differences, and other shortcomings, as seen from the random examples

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found in his own article, written without regard to the wise warning in its opening sentence. Finally, often mentioned in these pages but never addressed is the layperson’s train of thought on matters pertaining to analogies. Two examples will be cited, in conclusion, for the sake of fairness and comprehensiveness. In an article entitled “From England, a Lesson for the Democrats,” dated 14 June 1983, Joseph Kraft starts by saying: “Argument by analogy generally resembles eating soup with a knife—messy and not nourishing. But the rout of the Labor Party in the British elections last week delivers an unmistakable message to Democrats in this country.”70 The same pattern (“messy, but…”) appears here, too: the disclaimer comes first, then, the urge to compare takes over. As for the analogy between the “argument by analogy” and eating soup, Kraft is maybe not its only author, for a colleague of mine informed me that this utterance belongs to D. H. Lawrence, although so far neither his efforts nor mine have succeeded in finding out whether this is so or not. In an article written nine years later, Gary Lee, a former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, discussed “Yeltsin’s obsession” with Gorbachev, and quoted en passant another layperson’s obsession with analogies. When Blair Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, recently publicly dismissed Gorbachev’s chances of returning to active politics, he received an unusual note. It recalled the fate of Konrad Adenauer, the pre-war German politician who was blacklisted by the Nazis but rose to power after the Third Reich collapsed, ruling West Germany into the 1960s. The note came from a State Department official.71

The question is, of course, what dos this analogy prove? Does “Konrad Adenauer’s fate” enhance the chances of a political comeback of Gorbachev? Or is this analogy just one more example of a certain kind of sloppy thinking that exists among officials of the State Department as well as of foreign affairs ministries in other countries? There is something to worry about if this is the kind of thinking that stands behind the decision-making process on international affairs in these institutions, for this utterance may also be a clue as to where to look for the causes of blunders made by foreign affairs policy-makers (including the United Nations) in the recent and not so recent past. One striking and tragic example in this respect would probably be Bosnia. Illustrated in capsule form, here is the kind of analogy that was heard, as related by Strobe Talbott in an essay entitled “Bosnia is not Vietnam”: “There is another cliché [he writes] that haunts Western commentary and policy-making in the Balkans: ‘These people have been

264 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” killing each other for a thousand years; therefore we can’t possibly do anything to stop them.’”72 After having used and misused the “Bosnia = Vietnam” analogy, some commentators and politicians—i.e., those opposed to any kind of help for Bosnia—found a new argument in a “one thousand years” of Balkan history. But as Bosnia is not Vietnam, so these imaginary Balkans during one thousand imaginary years of people “killing each other” bear no resemblance to reality. The real Balkans “over there” are those that Strobe Talbott’s Western politicians could barely locate on the map just hours before they pretended to know everything about their “one thousand years” of history. They knew nothing, but one need not know anything in order to draw analogies. And in the West, this insidious “Balkan analogy” helped well the policy of nonintervention, and of letting the Serbs and the Croats slaughter the Bosnians. As a perceptive observer put it recently: “The Bosnian war was not caused by ancient hatreds; it was caused by modern politicians.”73 But this is a digression from my subject. The question raised by the State Department official’s note was, would Mikhail Gorbachev make a “comeback” as Konrad Adenauer did after the Second World War, even though he was “blacklisted by the Nazis”? Nobody knows whether Gorbachev will rise again to power or not, but whoever believes that his chances are greater because “Adenauer rose to power” displays not only sloppy thinking, but also gives the kind of advice that may lead to serious blunders not only in the process of great countries’ policy-making, but even in the daily household chores of a small family. What is this analogy supposed to prove? Let us follow, for the sake of argument, the same kind of sloppy thinking that informs it. There are scores of people in history who reached the pinnacle of power, then fell, were “blacklisted,” and never rose again to lead their country. Kerenskii and Khrushchev, the first blacklisted by the Bolsheviks, the second by Brezhnev, never made it to power again. (Notwithstanding the “State Department official’s” analogy and optimism, Gorbachev is certainly smart enough to ponder this analogy too, for whatever it is worth.) In other countries, too, the analogies warehouse is jam-packed with cases that should cause grave concern to any analogy consumer. Napoleon, blacklisted by the Holy Alliance, Guy Mollet, blacklisted by the Left (because of his Algerian policy), Pierre Mendes France, blacklisted by the Right (for the same reason)—none of them made it back to power, and the details are well known. In Israel, Ben-Gurion, a great statesman, blacklisted himself, in a way, and stayed in the desert both literally (in the Negev), and figuratively (out of politics). And in the United States, although 1992 was an annus mirabili in American politics (with wonders like non-election of the incumbent president, Ross Perot, tele-democracy, and other surprises),

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nobody in their right mind expected that the late President Nixon, blacklisted after the Watergate affair, would ever make it again to the presidency, even with a repeat of several great tricks that had led to several of his great comebacks in the past: no analogies of “Nixon then and now” would have helped to change this un-analogous reality. Obviously, all these examples would not augur well for Gorbachev if they were not also examples of superficial historical analogies, used here for the sake of argument in order to illustrate the faulty nature of the “Adenauer analogy.” They would be neither good omens nor bad, for it goes without saying that neither Napoleon, Ben Gurion, Richard Nixon, nor Adenauer can serve as the slightest hint with regard to Gorbachev’s future. These examples are irrelevant, and may barely be used to “dramatize an interpretation already chosen,” in Sidney Monas’s felicitous phrase.

De profundis I will add only a few cautionary remarks as a conclusion to these thoughts. The present agenda of historical studies on Russia in the West, as well as in Russia itself, requires the greatest awareness of today’s cultural and political influences on the historian’s work. It is important to pinpoint as precisely as possible, and to examine and discuss, the many reflections of current intellectual trends and fads on historical thought. It is urgent to overcome the old clichés like “cold-war mentality,” “totalitarian model,” “revisionist attitudes,” and many others, look for the real content of what we were writing and teaching, and bring it to overt debate and criticism. No “new paradigm” will emerge in our historical writing without bringing from the depth of our minds to conscious thought the meaning of the trends and directions of recent historiography, and the nature of our prejudices and mental habits. We have to uncover and make explicit the undeclared and hidden assumptions and stereotypes that inform our thinking without our being aware of it. These ready-made stereotypes are among the causes of our circular arguments. They provide fallacious solutions instead of original thought or concrete analysis of the subject matter. It is well known that in a person’s mind and consciousness the interaction between the knowledge of the past and the representation of the present is always a very complex mental process. Laypersons can (more or less) accommodate in their minds this complexity and its contradictions. They can do it because they forget; because the dialogue with the past is not their everyday pursuit, but an ancillary and episodic encounter; because they live much more with memory than with history, and with (faded)

266 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” memories of what they learned long ago, in high school, about history; and finally, because to the extent that they meet “history,” it is a processed, prepackaged, ready-to-serve version of what they want to believe is history, and of what the mass media is making them believe that history should be and has always been. This is “virtual history,” punctuated, reconfirmed, legitimized and ensconced by the periodic official celebrations, commemorations, and festivals (staged and mediated by television) that are amongst the most powerful means of creating in the public’s minds and representations a “history” that never was, and a simulacrum of the past. Historians have neither mental luxuries such as ignoring the contradictions between la pensée banale and historical thought, nor the ways to escapism that are open to others. For them, the complexities of the thought process about the past and the present acquire crucial importance because historians’ representations of the past and their research work is not their private business but, to the extent that it is published, also has public import and lasting significance, and therefore carries a responsibility toward their peers, their students, and the wider public. Fortunately, the historian’s choice is not merely between a complete detachment from the present or an endless and sterile search for history’s “relevance” to current events. The choice is not between finding ex post facto justifications in the present for events and actions in the past, or drawing elusive and misleading “lessons” of the past that would serve both as a guide to public affairs today and as a justification of the historical profession as the “high priesthood” of a “usable past.” Historians are neither priests nor judges, and their craft stands in no need of external justification. The present can teach the historian—and for that matter anyone else— many insights into human nature and human behavior in myriads of situations. The past can teach us how to grasp the historical uniqueness of situations, and how not to transpose current or past notions onto different times and contexts. These are modest lessons, indeed, in view of the immensity of the task of comprehending the world we live in. But modest or not, they are much more useful and wiser than the grandiose and unwarranted expectations derived from “lessons of history,” or the risky historical parallels that have led so often to disasters. The real issue is not to learn from the present about the past, but to learn the ways in which the present is constantly acting on our thinking about the past, what its influences are, and how to overcome them.

Notes 1. For one example of this wishful thinking, see Linda Orr, “The Revenge of Literature: A History of History,” New Literary History 18, no. 1 (1986): 1–22;

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2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

see also Larry Siner’s review of Linda Orr’s book Headless History: NineteenthCentury French Historiography of the Revolution (Ithaca, 1990), in History and Theory 32, no. 1 (1993): 90–96; see also Michael Confino, “Some Random Thoughts on History’s Recent Past,” History and Memory 12, no. 2 (2000): 29–55. Two of the very few books that survive the test of time are Geroid Tanquary Robinson’s Rural Russia under the Old Regime, first published in 1932, and Pierre Pascal’s concise and brilliant synthesis Histoire de la Russie des origines à 1917 (Paris, 1946). Abbot Gleason, “The Meaning of 1917,” The Atlantic, November 1992, p. 30. For two perceptive evaluations of these changes among Soviet historians during the early stages of glasnost’, see Michel Heller, “Current Politics and Current Historiography,” Survey 30, no. 4 (33) (1989): 1–5; Aleksandr M. Nekrich, “Perestroika in History: The First Stage,” ibid., pp. 21–43. A. Ia. Gurevich, “O krizise sovremennoi istoricheskoi nauki,” Voprosy istorii 2–3 (1991): 24; V. A. Kozlov, “Perestroika, History, and Historians,” Roundtable, Moscow, January 1989, Journal of Modern History 64, no. 4 (December 1990): 796. J. H. Billington, “Russia’s Fever Break,” The Wilson Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1991): 58–65. See S. I. Zhuk, “Odnomerna li istoriia?” Voprosy istorii, 8–9 (1992): 186–187. For some random examples of such trends of thought, see for instance: V. D’iakov, “Slavianskaia ideia v istorii sovremennosti,” Svobodnaia mysl’, 4 (1992): 73–83; M. Gareev, “Istiny i zabluzhdeniia istoricheskoi nauki,” ibid., 6 (1992): 15–24; V. Khoros, “Russkaia ideia na istoricheskom perekrestke,” ibid., 6 (1992): 36–39; V. Shapovalov, “Rossiiskaia istoriia i germenevticheskoe neponimanie,” ibid., 10 (1992): 17–27; I. Iakovenko, “Rossiia: Intelligentsiia. Revoliutsiia,” ibid., 11 (1992): 31–42; P. Gurevich, “Mifologiia nashikh dnei,” ibid., 11 (1992): 43–53; V. B. Mironov, “Vozrozhdenie Rossii,” Kentavr (July– August 1992): 16–25 (where the author, a seasoned historian, asks, “Tak chto zhe, pogibla Rossiia?” but answers, fortunately: “Net! Tysiachu raz net!” p. 24); A. Obolenskii, “Pochemu Rossiia ne stala ‘Zapadom’? O nekotorykh perekrestkakh nashei istorii,” Druzhba narodov 10 (1992): 72–86; T. A. Alekseeva and I. I. Kravchenko, “Politicheskaia filosofiia: k formirovaniiu kontseptsii,” Voprosy filosofii 3 (1994): 4–22. And for similar features on a more specific topic, see the discussion “Sovremennye kontseptsii agrarnogo razvitiia (Teoreticheskii seminar),” Otechestvennaia istoriia 2 (1994): 31–59. Afanas’ev, “Perestroika, History, and Historians,” Roundtable, p. 799. Kozlov, ibid., p. 797. Danilov, ibid., p. 801. See, for instance: Harley Balzer, “Can We Survive glasnost?” AAASS Newsletter 29, no. 1 (January 1989): 1–2; Mikhail Agursky, “The Bankruptcy of Sovietology,” The Jerusalem Post, 30 August 1989; Daniel Abele, “Looking back at Sovietology: An Interview with William Odom and Alexander Dallin,” Occasional Paper #239, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, October 1990; Thomas F. Remington, “Social Scientists and the Gorbachev Revolution,” The Russian Review 50, no. 2 (1991): v–vi; Martin Malia, “From Under the

268 • Russia before the “Radiant Future”

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

Rubble, What?” Problems of Communism (January–April 1992): 89–106 (Dale R. Herspring’s comments on this article [“Political Scientists and Sovietology,” pp. 113–116] show clearly to what extent some practitioners failed to grasp the problems on Sovietology’s agenda, let alone their solution); and for particularly harsh criticisms, Theodor Draper, “Who Killed Soviet Communism?” The New York Review of Books 39, no. 11 (11 June 1992): 7–14; Stephen R. Graubard, ed., The Exit from Communism, special edition of Daedalus (Spring 1992); The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: An Autopsy, special edition of The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993); and Thomas E. Ricks’s review in the Times Literary Supplement (26 March 1993) with the subsequent debate between Abraham Brumberg, Sidney Monas, and Robert Conquest. For some examples of educated laypersons’ views, see Felicity Barringer, “Sovietology Loses Academic Glamour in Cold War Wake,” International Herald Tribune (hereafter IHT), 1 April 1993. J. Hough, “Gorbachev: The Strongman is Playing for Time,” IHT, 21 February 1991. See the perceptive remarks of Ronald G. Suny, “A Second Look at Sovietology and the National Question,” AAASS Newsletter 33, no. 3 (1993): 1–2. J. Bradley, “Russia After the Coup: Rethinking the Past,” AAASS Newsletter 31, no. 5 (1991): 2. For a later (and curious) example of “reevaluation,” see Allan Wildman, “The Age of Democratic Revolution and the Transvaluation of Russian Historiography,” The Russian Review 42, no. 4 (1993): vi–viii. Ronald Grigor Suny’s recent article “Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics,” The Russian Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 165–182 is an important and interesting contribution to the current historiographic reconsiderations. However, his treatment is different from mine in that it does not relate its analysis to present events, and it does not address the question of the paradigmatic effect of “1917.” Crankshaw, The Shadow of the Winter Palace: The Drift to Revolution, 1825– 1917 (London, 1976), pp. 256, 20. New York, 1962. Ibid., p. 329. This hypothesis of mine, formulated in 1994, was confirmed recently by the publication of Franco Venturi’s correspondence with the British editor of his book, George Weidenfeld; see Antonello Venturi, ed., Franco Venturi e la Russia: Con documenti inediti (Milan, 2006). The Italian edition was published by Einaudi (Torino) in 1952; the English translation by Weidenfeld and Nicolson (London), and Knopf (New York) in 1960. Venturi wrote, for the second edition of the book (Torino, 1972) and for the French one (Paris, 1972), a magisterial historiographic introduction of 100 pages, updating all the subjects dealt with in the book and reviewing the scholarly literature that had appeared in the Soviet Union and the West during the twenty years since the publication of Il populismo. See Terence Emmons, “Unsacred History,” The New Republic, 5 November 1990, pp. 34–40; Martin Malia, “The Hunt for the True October,” Commentary (October 1991): 21–28; Israel Getzler, “Richard Pipes’s ‘Revisionist’ History of the Russian Revolution,” Slavonic and East European Review 70, no. 1 (1992):

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24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

111–126; Geoffrey A. Hosking, “The Sins of Russophobia,” Times Literary Supplement, 1 February 1991, pp. 3–4; Peter Kenez, “The Prosecution of Soviet History: A Critique of Richard Pipes’ The Russian Revolution,” The Russian Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 345–351; David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey, “The Russian Revolution in Comparative Perspective,” Problems of Communism (November–December 1991): 124–134. For a similar acceptance of the deterministic approach, see also Marshall D. Shulman, “After the Crackup,” The New York Book Review, 17 April 1994, pp. 3 and 29–30, a review of R. Pipes’ Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime and of M. Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991. Rivkin and Casey, pp. 125, 126. A. Gleason, “The Terms of Russian Social History,” in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. Best, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1991) p. 17. I hasten to add that this collection of articles is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking that has been published in many years; Russian historians were not well served by the puzzling and rather confused review of this book by I. V. Potkina in Otechestvennaia istoriia 2 (1994): 198–200. The lecture was held on 1 June 1992 at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, D.C.; the article appeared in The Atlantic (November 1992). From notes taken by the author during the lecture. A. Gleason, “The Meaning of 1917,” p. 30. Ibid. It is intriguing that a learned scholar uses the expression “remnants of feudalism”: it was standard Sovietese, but as Professor Gleason knows very well, no feudalism ever existed in Russia. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 34; emphasis mine: Gleason implies apparently that the events in Russia from 1985 on (“to the present”) are also only a phase in this “long and disruptive revolutionary process” that began prior to 1861. On “revolutionary processes,” see, for instance, Daniel Orlovsky, who writes about “the revolutionary processes that led to the collapse of the Old Regime in February 1917 and the establishment of Soviet power in October.” “The New Soviet History,” Journal of Modern History 62, no. 4 (1990): 832. Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Revolutionary Intellectual (London, 1979). The title of my book on Natalie Herzen was originally “Daughter of a Rebel.” I regret to this day that I yielded to the publisher’s choice, “Daughter of a Revolutionary.” See Wanda Bannour, Les nihilistes russes: Textes choisis de N. Tchernychewski, N. Dobrolioubov et D. Pisarev, Choix, préface, traduction, notes (Paris, 1974); and Les nihilistes russes (Paris, 1978). T. Tolstaya, “The Golden Age,” The New York Review of Books 39, no. 21 (17 December 1992): 3. S. Monas, “The Twilit Middle Class of Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in Clowes, Kassow, and Best, Between Tsar and People, p. 33. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (Princeton, 1982).

270 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” 38. A. L. Schapiro, [Comments in] “Obsuzhdenie dokladov,” AN SSSR/AN ESSR, Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii vostochnoi Evropy, 1958 (Tallin, 1959), p. 221. This was the first Ezhegodnik in this series, and also the last to include the minutes of the discussions following the doklady. 39. Jacob Burkhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History. Ed. James Hastings Nichols (New York, 1943), p. 267. 40. See “Agrarian Crisis, Urbanization, and the Russian Peasants at the End of the Old Regime, 1880s–1920s” in this volume. 41. T. Shanin, The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of the Century. I: Russia as a “Developing Society”; II: Russia, 1905–07: Revolution As A Moment of Truth (London, 1985–1986). 42. J. Bushnell, “Peasant Economy and Peasant Revolution at the Turn of the Century: Neither Immiseration nor Autonomy,” The Russian Review 47, no. 1 (1988): 9–10. 43. A. Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 16, nos. 2–4 (1989): 357. 44. See for instance, Gregory Guroff and Fred V. Carstensen, eds., Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (Princeton, 1983). In the very first article of this collection, Cyril Black perceptively wrote: The challenge of this collaborative study of entrepreneurship is not simply to compare Russia and the Soviet Union with the West. There is no ‘West,’ after all, to the extent that the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States, for example, differ significantly in the way they do things – or at least sufficiently so that one cannot envisage their adopting a common legal code in the foreseeable future. (p. 10)

45. Jane Burbank, “The Imperial Construction of Russian Nationality,” paper presented at the Social Science Research Council Workshop, “Reconstructing the History of Imperial Russia,” Iowa City, 1–3 November 1991, p. 1. 46. A. Yanov, “Is Sovietology Reformable?” in Robert O. Crummey, ed., Reform in Russia and the USSR: Past and Prospects (Urbana and Chicago, 1989), p. 265 (Yanov’s emphasis). 47. Rieber, “Sedimentary Society,” pp. 367–369, 374–376. 48. Barbara Clements, [Book Reviews], Russian History/Histoire Russe 17, no. 2 (1990): 256. 49. Cambridge, 1995. 50. T. Taranovski, “Aspects of Reform in Russian and Soviet History: An Introduction,” in Taranovski and McInerny, Reform, p. 31; see also Blair Ruble, “Reform and Revolution: A Commentary,” ibid., pp. 569–675. 51. T. Taranovski, “Aspects of Reform,” pp. 9–10. 52. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966. 53. Crummey, Reform in Russia, p. 1 54. Meeting report, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, The Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., n.d. [1989]. 55. Boulder, San Francisco, and London, 1989. 56. Hugh D. Hudson, [Book Reviews], Russian History/Histoire Russe 17, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 250. 57. Eklof, Soviet Briefing, pp. 181–182. 58. Ibid., p. 184.

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Russian History/Histoire russe 17, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 395–308. Ibid., p. 406. Ibid., p. 395. Ibid. Ibid., p. 396. Ibid., p. 401. South Atlantic Quarterly 90, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 253–267. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 256. Shlapentokh, “Alexander II and Mikhail Gorbachev,” p. 395. The Washington Post, 14 June 1983. Gary Lee, “The Obsession of Yeltsin,” The Washington Post, 14 June 1992. The subtitle reads: “Wherever he goes, Gorbachev has been there before – and may be back.” 72. Strobe Talbott, “Why Bosnia is not Vietnam,” Time, 24 August 1992, p. 49. 73. Noel Malcolm, “Seeing Ghosts,” The National Interest 32 (1993): 84.

d Afterword

e

Opinions and Prejudices Like every historian, I have views and prejudices of my own that I try to overcome when practicing my craft, and I believe also in several basic principles, which I check and recheck to confirm or refute their validity and soundness. I do my best in carrying on this self-examination. Frankly, I am not sure that I always succeed in uncovering my biases and preconceived ideas. The essays in this volume and those that I have written during the years, which are now scattered in different journals and in various languages, were informed by several principles and assumptions about the nature and purpose of the historian’s craft and its mission in modern society. In the final pages of this collection of essays, it is maybe appropriate to indicate some of them. The first assumption is that truth exists and is attainable through a process of trial and error. In this respect I subscribe to Arnaldo Momigliano’s prescient view, of thirty years ago, on the effects of Hayden White’s historiographic approach and theory of tropes: “I fear the consequences of [White’s] approach to historiography, because he has eliminated the research for truth as the main task of the historian.”1 Since that time, both historiographic and intellectual developments have proved that Momigliano’s fears were justified and that the solipsist challenge of metatheory and metanarrative to admit truth only as a discursive practice has ended as a failure and as a faddish cynical posture that, although negating truth, believes in the absolute truth of relativism. As Jean Baudrillard squarely put it: “The secret of theory is, indeed, that truth doesn’t exist.”2 But in such a case, is Baudrillard’s theoretical statement true or false? And what is the validity of any theory that ab initio negates the existence of truth? Another assumption stems to a certain extent from the first one. The genre described as l’histoire imaginare, which others have called “faction history,” mixes fact and fiction, and is not history. Its time and space are not filled with realities but with what the author chooses to put in them, or with “virtual realities,” that is, imaginary “realities,” fiction, faction, or 272

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various blends of “fact and fiction” like Ragtime, docudramas, TV miniseries like Winds of War, mega-movies like Ben Hur, Cleopatra, and JFK, the pseudo-historical (and imaginary) interior monologues of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s heroes in August 1914 and Lenin in Zurich or of Simon Schama’s anti-heroes in Dead Certainties.3 The logic and epistemology that command this new genre of “fictional history” are rarely explained. But the problem is not only theoretical and methodological; it has also another dimension that was clearly stated in 1991 by Linda Colley in her review of Schama’s Dead Certainties: To stand up and declare loudly what history can achieve is fully as important as pointing out its limitations and duplicities. In this century, in particular, millions of men and women have died because they or others have believed fabrications about the past fed them by politicians, by journalists, by fanatics—and by bad historians as well. If historians have any public function at all, and they should have, it is to point out that the past cannot be entirely mocked: that some truths can be ascertained amidst the myths, the memories, and the doubts. If they fail to do this, they deserve nothing better than the fate of Dr John Webster, to be hounded from the shelter of academe and buried in unknown graves.4

The third assumption, closely linked to the previous one, is that objective reality does exist in the present (and of course, did exist in the past); that we are part of this objective reality today, and that history’s heroes and anti-heroes were part of it in the past. The fourth assumption is that the study of history is justified ontologically. Some historians in the past who may have believed in its purported predictive quality (to the tune of “history holds the key to the future”), or that its utility (instrumental or pedagogical) lay supposedly in its lessons for moral values and political decisions, may have been naïve or groundless, but they cannot invalidate the raison d’être of historical writing and its role in shaping the human spirit and intellect. History does not have to justify its existence. Past historical theories (whether erroneous or superseded) do not disprove its ultimate raison d’être, in any case not more than Newton’s theory could be used to argue that Einstein’s theory of relativity is “bunk.” Similarly, history departments at universities do not have to be apologetic if some high-ranking academic or political ignoramus declares that funding the humanities is a waste of money. The dividends that the humanities have given humankind during the centuries cannot be measured by the yardsticks of managers, fundraisers, and professors of calculus. Russianists, like all historians, know that they should not try to predict future developments in their discipline; they already have enough difficulties explaining the past or meaningfully evaluating the present. At any rate, contemporary Russian historiography seems to be in a protracted transi-

274 • Afterword tional period, which makes foreseeing its future course even more difficult. (Paradoxically, in Russia as in the West, there are today at one and the same time many “schools of thought” and no schools at all.) To be sure, in history every period is transitional, but apparently some are more transitional than others, and we seem to be in the midst of such a period. Thus, David Shearer’s observation that this situation is one of “creative disorder,” and Laura Engelstein’s that it is one of “creative uncertainty,” made respectively in 1998 and 2001, seem to apply to a great extent to the present too.5 The common denominator of both views is the creativity that characterizes historical writing on Russia. The “disorder” and the “uncertainty” may go away or mutate, but they are not, I hope, symptoms of a “crisis” in history or a lack of interest in the Russian past but signs of growth and of an ongoing renaissance.

Russia’s Past and Present Another view of mine, mentioned at times in these essays is that historically and paradigmatically Russia is part of Europe, and that its history should be seen not only in terms of contrasts with other European countries, but also of similarities. Concepts and approaches used in European history are applicable to Russia; and searching for similarities and differences between Russia and “the West” is not substantially different from comparing other European countries. Thus, although Russia can develop a free market economy and establish a democratic political regime, more than one event in the last few years under Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Medvedev seems to put a question mark on such prospects and hopes. The mysterious and quasi-mysterious murders of independent-minded journalists like Anna Politkovskaia, the persecutions and condemnations of the so-called oligarchs, the brutality in Chechnia and Georgia, the growing role of the secret services in the life of the nation and of the individual citizen, the mandatory rewriting of the country’s history, the assertive foreign policy and the overt or covert support of rogue states, as well as signs of an imperialistic policy toward Russia’s neighbors: all these events and occurrences are bad omens and potential symptoms of a march toward an authoritarian and expansionist new Russia. But this is not a “non-European” course: after all, such unquestionable European countries as Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and even France have had their own brands of authoritarian regimes or colonial foreign policy. This feature makes such occurrences neither more palatable and desirable, nor less European6—nor does it justify the instauration in Russia of a regime ruled by democratic despots.

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After post-Soviet Russia had overcome the political chaos and wild capitalism of the 1990s, its way seemed open toward a democratic, liberal, responsible, and law-abiding polity. But opportunities were missed. Some hopes did not materialize. And today, in 2009, Russia stands again, as often in the past, at a crossroads in its historical journey. It can march toward freedom and the rule of law or toward a regime of fear and repression. All the options are open. Everything is possible. As Alexander Herzen wrote, “history has no libretto,” and there is no predestination. What will happen in the near future depends on the Russians themselves. Today’s historian can only say that it will be fascinating to read the books on Russian history fifty years from now. And till then, to hope for the best. Does this mean that Russia’s past is of no importance to its present state and future evolution? Not at all. Continuity and change are always inextricably mingled in the historical process of every nation and society. Almost nothing of what happens today in Russia makes sense if we fail to keep that in mind. The past always has a weight, but at the present juncture it seems (in spite of my professional bias) that the recent past is much weightier than the remote one in defining Russia’s future. Is Russia again on the eve of a new radiant future?

Notes 1. Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White’s Tropes,” Comparative Criticism 3 (1981): 259. See also Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York and London, 1994); Alan B. Spitzer, Historical Truth and Lies about the Past (Chapel Hill, 1996). 2. Jean Baudrillard, “Forgetting Baudrillard,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 141. 3. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, trans. Michael Glenny (London, 1972); Solzhenitsyn. Lenin in Zurich, trans. H. T. Willets (London, 1975); Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York, 1991). 4. Linda Colley, “Fabricating the Past,” Times Literary Supplement, 14 June 1991, p. 5. 5. David Shearer, “From Divided Consensus to Creative Disorder: Soviet History in Britain and North America,” Cahiers du monde russe 39, no. 4 (October– December 1998): 559–591; Laura Engelstein, “New Thinking about the Old Empire: Post-Soviet Reflections,” The Russian Review 60, no. 4 (October 2001): 488. 6. Mine is a rather pessimistic but not unwarranted view of Europe’s history. Current European historians’ idyllic rewriting of the past as a fairy tale of cooperation, collaboration, common roots, solidarity, and goodwill is more of a political aggiornamento than of good history writing. Regretfully, Europe’s history was a succession of international wars, dynastic wars, civil wars, political

276 • Afterword persecutions, and religious repressions, as well as vendettas, revanchismes, and irredentism that lasted for centuries. For a brief reminder of these deplorable events, suffice it to mention the sack of Christian Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, the Albigensian Crusade in Provence in 1208–13, the expulsion of two hundred thousand Jews from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella, the pitiless Wars of Religion, and the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century. As for the enlightened eighteenth century, a look at Albert Sorel’s l’Europe et la Révolution Française, vol. 1: Les moeurs politiques et les traditions (Paris, 1906) depicts well what were then the European realities; and Robert Justin Goldstein does the same for the following century in Political Repression in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Totowa, NJ, 1983).

d Selected Bibliography

e

Aksakov, Sergei. A Russian Gentleman. Trans. J. D. Duff. Westport, CT, 1977. ———. Years of Childhood. Trans. J. D. Duff. Westport, CT, 1977. Alexander, John T. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. New York and Oxford, 1989. Alexandrov, V. A. Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossii (XVII–nachalo XIX v.). Moscow, 1976. ———. Obychnoe pravo krepostnoi derevni Rossii XVIII–nachalo XIX v. Moscow, 1984. Anfimov, A. M. Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie i klassovaia bor’ba krest’ian Evropeiskoi Rossii (1881–1904). Moscow, 1984. ———. P.A. Stolypin i rossiiskoe krest’ianstvo. Moscow, 2002. Ashdown, Dulcie M. Royal Murders: Hatred, Revenge, and the Seizing of Power. Stroud, 2000. Atkinson, Dorothy. The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930. Stanford, 1983. Augustine, William R. “Notes toward a Portrait of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Nobility.” Canadian Slavic Studies 4, no. 3 (Fall 1970). Avrich, Paul. The Russian Anarchists. Princeton, 1967. ———. Russian Rebels, 1600–1800. New York, 1972. Baberowski, Jörg. Autokratie und Justiz: Zum Verhältniss von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Rückständigkeeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich, 1864–1914. Frankfurt am Main, 1996. Banac, Ivo and Paul Bushkovitch, eds. The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe. New Haven, 1983. Bartlett, Roger, ed. Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia: Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society. Basingstokes, 1990. Barykov, F. L., et al., eds. Sbornik materialov dlia izucheniia sel’skoi pozemel’noi obshchiny. St. Petersburg, 1880. Becker, Seymour. Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia. DeKalb, 1985. Beckett, J. V. The Aristocracy in England, 1600–1914. Oxford, 1986. Beik, W. Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc. Cambridge, 1985. Belogolovyi, N. Vospominaniia i drugie stat’i. St. Petersburg, 1901. Bensidoun, Sylvain. L’agitation paysanane en Russie de 1881 à 1902. Paris, 1975. Berlin, Isaiah. Personal Impressions. Ed. Henry Hardy. Pimlico, 1978. ———. Russian Thinkers. Ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly. New York, 1978.

277

278 • Selected Bibliography ———. Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. Ed. Henry Hardy. New York, 1980. ———. The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History. Ed. Henry Hardy. Pimlico, 1996. Besançon, Alain. Le Tsarevitch immolé: La symbolique de la loi dans la culture russe. Paris, 1967. ———. Education et société en Russie dans le second tiers du XIXè siècle. Paris, 1974. Billington, James. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive history of Russian Culture. New York, 1966. ———. Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. New Brunswick, 1999. Black, Cyril. The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History. New York, 1967. Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford, 1984. Bloch, Marc. Mélanges historiques. 2 vols. Paris, 1963. ———. Feudal Society. 2 vols. Trans. L. A. Manyon. Chicago, 1971. Blum, Jerome. Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, 1961. ———. The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe. Princeton, 1978. Boborykin, P. D. Vospominaniia. 2 vols. Moscow, 1965. Bogdanovich, T. A. Liubov’ liudei shestidesiaty godov. Leningrad, 1929. Bogoslovskii, M. Byt i nravy russkogo dvorianstva v pervoi polovine XVIII veka. Petrograd, 1918. Bontemps, Alex. The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South. Ithaca, 2001. Bradley, Joseph. Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley, 1985. Breshkovskaia, E. K. Memoirs. Stanford, 1931. Brooks, Jeffrey. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917. Princeton, 1985. Brower, Daniel. Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, 1975. Brzsheskii, N. K. Ocherki iuridicheskogo byta kretst’ian. St. Petersburg, 1902. Bukhovets, O. G. Sotsial’nye konflikty i krest’ianskaia mental’nost’ v Rossiiskoi imperii nachala XX veka: Novye materialy, metody, rezul’taty. Moscow, 1996. Burbank, Jane. Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–1917. Bloomington, 2004. Burbank, Jane, and David L. Ransel, eds. Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire. Bloomington, 1998. Burds, Jeffrey. Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905. Pittsburgh, 1998. Burguière, André, and Raymond Grew, eds. The Construction of Minorities: Cases for Comparison across Time and around the World. Ann Arbor, 2000. Büsch, O. Militärsystem und Sozialleben im alten Preussen. Berlin, 1962. Bush, M. L. The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis. Manchester, 1984.

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———. Rich Noble, Poor Noble. Manchester, 1988. ———. Slavery and Serfdom: Studies in Legal Bondage. Cambridge, 1996. Bushnell, John. “Peasants in Uniform: The Tsarist Army as a Peasant Society.” Journal of Social History 13, no. 4 (1980). Cannadine, David. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. New Haven, CT, 1990. Cannon, J. Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge, 1984. Carrère d’Encausse, Hélène. The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Political Murder. Trans. Caroline Higgit. Foreword by Adam B. Ulam. New York and London, 1992. ———. Alexandre II: Le printemps de la Russie. Paris, 2008. Cavender, Mary W. Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate, and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia. Newark, 2007. Charushin, A. A. Sel’skie skhody v bytovom ikh osveshchenii. Arkhangel’sk, 1911. Chaussinand-Nogaret, G. The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment. Cambridge, 1985. Cherniavsky, Michael. Tsar and People. New Haven, 1961. Chernukha, V. G. Krest’ianskii vopros v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii (60–70 gody XIX v.). Leningrad, 1972. Chugrov, S. V. Rossia i zapad: metamorfozy vzaimovospriiatiia. Moscow, 1993. Clark, James W. American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics. Princeton, 1982. Clements, Barbara, Barbara Engel, and Christine Worobec, eds. Russia’s Women: Accomodation, Resistance, Transformation. Berkeley 1991. Clowes, Edith W., Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. Best, eds. Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton, 1991. Cohen, Stephen F. Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. New York, 2009. Confino, Michael. Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle: Etude de structures agraires et de mentalités économiques. Paris, 1963. ———. Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole: L’assolement triennal en Russie aux XVIIIe–XIXe siècles. Etude d’économie et de sociologie rurales. Paris, 1969. ———. Daughter of a Revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the Bakunin-Nechaev Circle. London and New York, 1974. ———. Société et mentalités collectives en Russie sous l’Ancien Régime. Paris, 1991. ———. Anarchistes en exil: Correspondance de Pierre Kropotkine à Marie Goldsmith, 1897–1917. Paris, 1995. Coquart, Armand. Dmitri Pisarev (1840–1868) et l’idéologie du nihilisme russe. Paris, 1946. Coquin, François-Xavier. La Grande Commission Législative (1767–1768): Les cahiers de doléances urbaines. Paris and Louvain, 1972. Crankshaw, Edward. The Shadow of the Winter Palace: The Drift to Revolution, 1825–1917. London, 1976. Crummey, Robert O. Aristocrats and Servitors. Princeton, 1983. Danilevskii, Nikolai Ia. Rossiia i Evropa. St. Petersburg, 1871. Danilov, V. P. “Ob istoricheskikh sud’bakh krest’ianskoi obshchiny v Rossii.” Ezhe-

280 • Selected Bibliography godnik po agrarnoi istorii. Vol. 6, Problemy istorii russkoi obshchiny. Vologda, 1976. ———. Sovetskaia dokolkhoznaia derevnia: naselenie, zemlepol’zovanie, khoziaistvo [The Soviet Village before the Kolkhoz Era: The Population, the Land, and the Economy] 2 vols. Moscow, 1977–1979. Dashkova, Ekaterina. Zapiski, 1743–1810. Leningrad, 1985. de Madariaga, Isabel. Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. New Haven, 1981. de Toqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence. Garden City, NY, 1969. Dobroliubov, N. A.. Sobranie sochinenii. Moscow, 1962. Dogan, Matei, and Dominique Pelassy, eds. How to Compare Nations: Strategies in Comparative Politics. London, 1990. Donati, Claudio. L’idea di nobiltá in Italia: Secoli XIV–XVIII. Rome and Bari, 1988. Drozd, Andrew M. Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?: A Reevaluation. Evanston, 2001. Druzhinin, N. M. Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva. 2 vols. Moscow, 1958. ———, ed. Absoliutizm v Rossii. Moscow, 1964. Dubrovskii, S. M. Stolypinskaia zemel’naia reforma. Moscow, 1963. Dukes, Paul. Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility. Cambridge, 1967. ———. World Order in History: Russia and the West. London, 1996. Efimenko, Alexandra. Issledovania narodnoi zhizni. Fasc. 1: Obychnoe pravo. St. Petersburg, 1884. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. Essays on Comparative Institutions. New York, 1965. ———. Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. Chicago, 1998. Eklof, Ben. Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914. Berkeley, 1986. Emmons, Terence. The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861. Cambridge, 1968. Engel, Barbara Alpern. Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Cambridge, 1983. Engelgardt, Aleksandr. Letters from the Country, 1872–1887. Trans. Cathy Frierson. New York and Oxford, 1993. Eroshkin, N. P. Istoriia gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii. Moscow, 1983. Farnsworth, B., and Lynn Viola, eds. Russian Peasant Women. Oxford, 1992. Farrow, Lee A. Between Clan and Crown: The Struggle to Define Noble Property Rights in Imperial Russia. Newark, 2004. Ferguson, Niall, ed. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. London, 1997. Field, Daniel. The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861. Cambridge, MA, 1976. ———. Rebels in the Name of the Tsar. Boston, 1989. Figes, Orlando. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. New York, 2002. Ford, Franklin. Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism. Cambridge, MA, and London, 1985.

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Frank, P. Stephen, and Mark D. Steinberg, eds. Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton, 1994. ———. Crime, Cultural Conflict and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914. London, 1999. Fraser, Antonia, ed. The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England. New York, 1975. Fredrickson, George M. Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. Oxford, 1995. ———. The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements. Berkeley, 1997. Freeze, Gregory L. “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History.” American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (February 1986). Frierson, Cathy A. Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late NineteenthCentury Russia. Oxford, 1993. ———. All Russia Is Burning! A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia. Seattle, 2002. Gaudin, Corinne. Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial Russia. DeKalb, 2007. Gerschenkron, Alexander. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA, 1962. Ginzburg, Eugenia, Within the Whirlwind. Trans. Ian Boland. New York, 1982. Girardet, Raoul. Le Nationalisme français. Paris, 1966. Gleason, Abbot. Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. Oxford, 1995. Gradovskii, A. D. Nachala russkogo gosudarsvennogo prava. 3 vols. St. Petersburg, 1875–1883. Graziosi, Andrea. The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1918– 1934. Cambridge, MA, 1997. ———. Guerra e rivoluzione in Europa, 1905–1956. Bologna, 2001. Gregory, Paul. Russian National Income, 1885–1913. Cambridge, 1982. Grew, Raymond. “The Case of Comparing Histories.” American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (October 1980). Gromyko, M. M. Mir russkoi derevni. Moscow, 1991. Guerci, Luciano, and Giuseppe Ricuperati, eds. Il coraggio della ragione: Franco Venturi, intellettuale e storico cosmopolita. Torino, 1998. Haimson, Leopold H. The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Boshevism. Cambridge, MA, 1955. ———, ed. The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905–1914. Bloomington and London, 1979. Haxthausen, Baron August von. The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions, and Resources. Trans. Robert Faire. London, 1856. Herzen, Alexander. My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen. 4 Vols. Trans. Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin. New York 1968 Hibbert, Christopher. The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall. New York, 1999. Higgs, David. Nobles in Nineteenth-Century France: The Practice of Inegalitarianism. Baltimore and London, 1987.

282 • Selected Bibliography Hill, Alette Olin, and Boyd H. Hill, Jr. “Marc Bloch and Comparative History.” American Historical Review 85 (1980). Hobsbawm, Eric. On History. London, 1997. Hoch, Stephen. Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov. Chicago, 1986. Iakushkin, E. I. Obychnoe pravo [Customary Law], 3 vols. (Iaroslavl’, 1875, 1896; Moscow, 1908). Ignatovich, Inna Ivanovna. Pomeshchich’i krest’iane nakanune osvobozhdeniia. St. Petersburg, 1846. Jones, Robert. The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762–1785. Princeton, 1973. Kabuzan, V. M., and S. M. Troitskii. “Izmeneniia v chislennosti, udel’nom vese i razmeshchenii dvorianstva v Rossii v 1782–1858 gg.” Istoriia SSSR 4 (July–August 1971). Kachorovskii, K. R. Narodnoe pravo. St. Petersburg, 1906. Kahan, Arcadius. “The Cost of ‘Westernization’ in Russia: The Gentry and the Economy in the Eighteenth Century.” Slavic Review 25, no. 1 (March 1966). Kerans, David. Mind and Labor on the Farm in Black-Earth Russia, 1861–1914. New York, 2001. Khauke, O. A. Krest’ianskoe zemel’noe pravo. Moscow, 1914. Khristoforov, Igor’. “Aristokraticheskaia” oppozitsiia Velikim reformam (konets 1850– seredina 1870-kh gg.) Moscow, 2002. Khudiakov, I. Opyt otobiografii. Geneva, 1882. Kivelson, Valerie A. Autocracy in the Provinces: Russian Political Culture and the Gentry in the Seventeenth Century. Stanford, 1996. Kliuchevskii, V. O. Sochineniia [Writings]. 8 vols. Moscow, 1956–1959. Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Cambridge, MA, 1987. Kolonitskii, Boris, and Orlando Figes. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language of Symbols of 1917. New Haven, 1999. Konovalov, V. S. Krest’ianstvo i reformy: Rossiiskaia derevnia v nachale XX veka. Analiticheskii obzor. Moscow, 2000. Korelin, A. P. Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii, 1861–1904. Moscow, 1979. Korf, Baron S. A. Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1761–1855 godov. St. Petersburg, 1906. Kotzonis, Yanni. Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914. New York, 1999. Kovalevskaia, S. V. Vospominaniia detstva i otobiograficheskie ocherki. Moscow, 1945. Kozlinina, E. I. Za polveka. Moscow, 1913. Koz’min, B. P. Iz istorii revoliutsionnoi mysli v Rossii: Izbrannye trudy. Moscow, 1961. Krasnoperov, I. M. Zapiski raznochintsa. Moscow and Leningrad, 1929. Kropotkin, Peter, Memoirs of a Revolutionist. 2 vols. London, 1899. Labatut, J.-P. Les noblesses européennes de la fin du XVe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Paris, 1978.

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Lago, Enrico dal, and Rick Halpern, eds. The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno. Essays in Comparative History. London, 2002. Lampert, E. Studies in Rebellion. London, 1957. ———. Sons against Fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution. Oxford, 1965. LeDonne, John. Absolutism and Ruling Class. New York, 1991. Leonard, Carol S. Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia. Bloomington, 1993. Leontiev, A. A. Volostnoi sud i iuridicheskie obychai krest’ian. St. Petersburg, 1895. ———. Krest’ianskoe pravo. St. Petersburg, 1909. Leontiev, Konstantin. Vostok, Rossiia i slavianstvo. Moscow, 1885. Leroy-Beaulieu, Anatole. L’Empire des Tsars et les Russes. Paris, 1882. Lesberg, Sandy. Assassination in Our Time. London, 1976. Lewin, Moshe. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization. New York, 1968. Liessen, Peter. Verwaltungsgerichtsbarkeit im späten Zarenreich: Der Dirigierende Senat und seine Entscheidungen zur russischen Selbstverwaltung, 1864–1917. Frankfurt am Main, 1996. Lieven, Dominic. The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815–1914. London, 1992. Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York, 1996. Lositskii, A. Raspadenie obshchiny. St. Petersburg, 1912. Lotman, Iurii M. Besedy o russkoi kul’ture: Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII– nachalo XIX veka). St. Petersburg, 1994. Lotman, Iurii M., et al. The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays. Ithaca, 1985. Madsen, Deborah L. American Exceptionalism. Jackson, MI, 1998. Malia, Martin. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855. Cambridge, MA, 1961. ———. The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991. New York, 1994. ———. Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum. Cambridge, MA, 1999. Mallet, Michael. The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty. London, 1969. Manning, Roberta. The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government. Princeton, 1982. Marasinova, E. N. Psikhologiia elity rossiiskogo dvorianstva poslednei treti XVIII veka (Po materialam perepiski). Moscow, 1999. Marker, Gary. Publishing, Printing and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800. Princeton, 1985. Marrese, Michelle Lamarche. A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861. Ithaca, 2002. McGrew, Roderick. Paul I of Russia, 1754–1801. Oxford, 1992. McKinley, James. Assassination in America. New York, 1977.

284 • Selected Bibliography Meehan-Waters, Brenda. Autocracy and Aristocracy: The Russian Service Elite of 1730. New Brunswick, 1982. Meijer, Jan Marinus. Knowledge and Revolution. The Russian Colony in Zurich (1870–1873): A Contribution to the Study of Russian Populism. Assen, 1955. Melton, Edgar. “Enlightened Seigniorialism and Its Dilemma in Serf Russia, 1750– 1830.” Journal of Modern History 62, no. 4 (December 1990). Mendel, Arthur P. Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism. Cambridge, 1961. Merritt, Richard L., and Stein Rokkan, eds. Comparing Nations: The Use of Quantitative Data in Cross-National Research. New Haven, 1966. Meyer, J. Noblesse et pouvoirs dans l’Europe d’Ancien Régime. Paris, 1973. Miller, Martin A. The Russian Revolutionary Emigrés, 1825–1870. Baltimore and London, 1986. Mironov, Boris N., assisted by Ben Eklof. The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917. Boulder, 2000. Moon, David. The Russian Peasantry, 1600–1930: The World the Peasants Made. London and New York, 1999. Morrisey, Susan K. Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism. Oxford, 1998. Moser, Charles A. Antinihilism in the Russian Novel of the 1960’s. The Hague, 1964. Nathans, Benjamin. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley, 2002. Neuman, Iver B. Russia and the Idea of Europe. London, 1996. Nieboer, H. J. Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches. The Hague, 1910. Nikitenko, V. Dnevnik. 3 vols. Moscow, 1956. Oganovskii, N. P. Revoliutsiia naoborot (Razrushenie obshchiny). Petrograd, 1917. Orlovsky, Daniel. The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802–1881. Cambridge, MA, 1981. Ortiz, Antonio Dominguez. Las clases privilegiadas en la España del Antiguo Régimen. Madrid, 1973. Pakhman, S. V. Obychnoe grazhdanskoe pravo v Rossii. St. Petersburg, 1877. Pallot, Judith, ed. Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861– 1930. Basingstoke and London, 1998. Panaeva, A. Vospominaniia. Leningrad, 1927. Panteleev, L. F. Vospominaniia. Moscow 1958. Passek, Tat’iana P. Iz dal’nikh let: Vospominaniia. 2 vols. Moscow, 1963. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA, 1982. Pavlov-Silvanskii, Nikolai P. Gosudarevy sluzhilye liudi—proiskhozhdenie russkogo dvorianstva. St. Petersburg, 1898. Peri, Yoram, ed. The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Stanford, 2000. Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Old Regime. New York, 1974. ———. The Russian Revolution, 1899–1919. New York, 1990. ———. Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture. New Haven, 2007. Pisarev, Dmitrii. Sochineniia. 4 vols. Moscow, 1955–1956.

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Poole, Steve. The Politics of Regicide in England 1760–1850: Troublesome Subjects. Manchester, 2001. Powis, J. K. Aristocracy. Oxford, 1984. Pozefsky, Peter C. The Nihilist Impagination: Dmitrii Pisarev and the Cultural Origins of Russian Radicalism (1860–1868). New York, 2003. Prokof’eva, L. S. Krest’ianskaia obshchina v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII–pervoi polovine XIX veka. Leningrad, 1981. Radkey, Oliver H. The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism. New York and London, 1958. Raeff, Marc. Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility. New York, 1966. Ransel, David. The Politics of Catherinian Russia. New Haven, 1975. ———. Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia. Princeton, 1988. Réau, Louis. L’Europe française au siècle des Lumières. Paris, 1951. Rexheuser, Rex. Besitzverhältnisse des russischen Adels im 18. Jahrhundert. Nuremberg, 1971. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of RomanticIdeology. Cambridge, MA, 1954. Rittikh, A. A. Krest’ianskii pravoporiadok. St. Petersburg, 1904. Robinson, Geroid Tanquary. Rural Russia under the Old Regime. Berkeley, 1932. Rogger, Hans. National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Cambridge, MA, 1960. Romanovich-Slavatinskii, A. Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnogo prava. Kiev, 1912. Roosevelt, Priscilla. Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History. New Haven, 1995. Rosenberg, Hans. Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660–1815. Cambridge, MA, 1958. Rossi, Pietro, ed. La Storia comparata: approcci e prospettive. Milano, 1990. Sanders, Thomas, ed. Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State. Armonk, NY, 1999. Schelting, Alexander von. Russland und Europa in Russischen Geschichtsdenken. Bern, 1948. Scott, H. M., ed. The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London and New York, 1995. Sewell, William H., Jr. “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History.” History and Theory 6 (1967). Shafer, Byron E., ed. Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism. Oxford, 1991. Shanin, Teodor. The Awkward Class. Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910–1925. Oxford, 1972. ———. The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of the Century. I: Russia as a “Developing Society”; II: Russia, 1905–07: Revolution As A Moment of Truth (London, 1985–1986). Shelgunov, N. V., L. P. Shelgunova, and M. L. Mikhailov. Vospominaniia. 2 vols. Moscow, 1967. Shils, Edward. The Calling of Sociology: And Other Essays on the Pursuit of Learning. Chicago 1980.

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d Index 1905 Revolution, 69, 163, 165–67 1917 paradigm, 8, 10, 43, 51, 59, 162, 237, 242, 244, 247, 257, 261, 268n 1917 Revolutions, 59, 69, 168, 228, 247–48, 261 February Revolution, 1, 45, 54n, 72–73, 171, 179, 248, 269n October Revolution, 42, 45, 52, 54, 65, 111, 113n, 162, 171, 206, 228, 243–45, 250, 269n Peasant Revolution, 71–73, 179, 181n, 270n A Academy of Sciences, 85, 88, 113n, 157n Acton, Edward, 249, 269n Acton, Lord, 10 Adrianople, 197 Afanas’ev, Iurii, 239, 267n Aksakov, Konstantin, 29 Albee, Edward, 17 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 17 Aleksandrov, V.A., 177, 182n, 183n Alexander I, 27, 212, 217, 226–27 Alexander II, 65–66, 99, 111, 208, 217–18, 227, 244, 249, 257, 259–62, 271n Alexandrovich, Grand Duke Sergei, 219 Alexei, the Tsarevich, 29, 86, 215, 217, 225–26 Amalrik, Andrei, 75, 233n Amir, Yigal, 209, 220 Anarchists, 51, 54n, 72–73, 106, 111, 180, 206, 218–19, 221, 227, 232n

288

e Ancien Regime, 137n, 201 Anfimov, A.M., 167 Annales School, 9–10, 239 Antoinette, Marie, 216–17, 227, 230n Applebaum, Anne, 229 Archetti, Nuncio G., 196 Atkinson, Dorothy, 79n, 158n, 178, 182n, 183n Attila, 34 Austerlitz, 28 Austria, 26, 204n, 212, 215, 226–27 autocracy, 25, 43, 45–47, 49, 51–52, 53n, 89–94, 99–100, 137n, 140n, 218–19, 227, 242–48, 255 B Bakunin, Mikhail, 29, 31–32, 34, 36, 41n30, 41n33, 43, 65, 94, 114n Ballets Russe, 24 Bannour, Wanda, 249, 269n Barbarossa, Emperor Frederic, 130, 132 Basile, 49 Bater, James, 173, 182n Baudrillard, Jean, 272, 275n Bazarov, 6, 97, 114n27, 114n29, 115n Beccaria, Cesare, 27, 39n Belinskii, Vissarion, 1, 29, 31–32, 40n, 94, 114n24, 114n26, 114n30, 153n, 249 Benjamin, Walter, 12–13 Bentham, Jeremy, 27 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 44–45, 52, 53n3–4, 107, 118n Berezina, 28 Berlin, 27, 190, 226

Index • 289

Berlin, Isaiah, 23–25, 30–38, 38n1–2, 39n, 40n10, 40n13–17, 40n19, 40n21, 40n23, 41n24–27, 41n30–31, 41n34–35, 78n, 95, 112n, 114n23, 114n27, 114n31, 114n33, 137n, 139n, 153n, 160n, 210, 229n on Herzen, 30–38 Besançon, Alain, 86, 155n, 231n Bibliothèque Nationale, 3 Billington, James, 238, 267n Black Hundred, 51 Black Repartition, 67, 69, 178–80 Blanqui, Louise Auguste, 48 Bloch, Marc, 15, 16, 19n, 131, 139n, 156n, 171, 254 Bluche, François, 134–35, 140n Blum, Jerome, 5, 18n, 119, 128, 139n21, 139n26, 157n, 158n30, 158n33, 162 Bohemia, 190 Bolotnikov, 67, 149 Bolshevik Party, 111, 171 Central Committee, 72, 228, 232n Bonaparte, Napoleon, 216, 253 Boorstin, Daniel, 12–13 Bradley, Joseph, 78n, 242–43, 255, 268n Brezhnev, Leonid, 44, 168, 223, 243, 259, 264 Britain, 18n, 131, 137n, 144, 154n, 192, 204n, 275 See also England Bukharin, Nikolai, 180, 222 Bulavin, 67, 149 Bulgakov, I., 63 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 107 Bulgaria, 154n, 190, 195, 222 Burkhardt, Jacob, 251, 270n Bushnell, John, 166, 181n, 251, 270n Byron, Lord, 27, 93 C Camus, Albert, 28, 219–20 Les Justes (The Just Assassins), 219–20 Capone, Al, 24 Casanova, Giacomo, 188, 192–95

Catherine II (the Great), 2, 3, 25–26, 38n, 39n3, 39n6, 90–91, 127, 137n, 139n, 157n, 191, 194, 196–201, 204n, 216–17, 225–26, 257 Caucasus, 219, 221 Chaadaev, Peter, 44, 63–64, 93, 141, 153n, 252, 254 Apology of a Madman, 64 Champ de Mars, 28, 160n Charles XII, 193, 197 Chaussinand-Nogaret, Guy, 133–34, 137n, 139n, 140n34, 140n37 Chayanov, Alexander, 168, 181n Chekhov, Anton, 1, 18n, 106, 117n63, 117n66, 171 The Cherry Orchard, 1 Three Sisters, 1 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 30, 34, 64, 76n, 97, 116n chinovniki, 59, 170 Code of Laws (Nakaz of 1767), 26, 39n, 198–99, 205n11, 205n13 Committee of Public Safety, 34–35 Constantinople, 210, 276 Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), 73 Cossacks, 193, 234n Coxe, William, 188, 196 Crankshaw, Edward, 244, 245, 268n Crimean War, 99, 203, 204n Crummey, Robert O., 119, 204n, 257, 270n46, 270n53 Crusades, 209–10, 276 Custine, Marguis de, 128–29, 203–4 Russia in 1839, 203 D Danilov, Victor P., 79n, 177, 183n32, 183n35, 239–40, 267n Darwin, Charles, 48, 115 Social Darwinism, 48 Davis, Natalie Zemon The Return of Martin Guerre, 11 Decembrists, 26–29, 39n7–8, 64, 79n, 92, 94, 244–45 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe, 199–200, 202

290 • Index Diderot, Denis, 26, 39n, 188, 194, 196, 199, 201, 205n10–11, 205n15, 216 Disraeli, Benjamin, 203–4, 206, 225 Dobroliubov, Nikolai A., 97, 103, 116n, 117n Domar, Erseg, 145, 157n20–21, 162 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 63–64, 114n, 139n, 141, 249 Dreyfus, Alfred, 106 Dukhobory, 110 Duma, 51–52 E École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 9 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 77n, 84, 112n, 156n Eklof, Ben, 78n, 180n, 259–60, 270n Elagina, Madame, 31, 93 Elizabeth, Empress, 212, 216 d’Encausse, Hélène Carrère, 208–9, 214, 222, 230n9–11, 230n14, 231n22, 231n25, 233n44–46 Encyclopedists, 27 Engels, Friedrich, 149, 182n, 250 Engelstein, Laura, 10, 18n, 274, 275n England, 37, 54n, 57–58, 77n, 128, 130, 132, 137n, 140n, 142, 154n, 155n, 174, 182n, 188–89, 197, 200, 210–11, 214, 217, 231n19, 231n29, 253, 263 See also Britain enlightened despotism, 26, 38n, 86, 200–201 and intellectuals, 86–92 Enlightenment, 2, 3, 23–38, 38n1–3, 45, 89–91, 118n, 131, 137n, 138n, 140n, 187–204, 204n, 205n10, 205n15, 216 Counter-Enlightenment, 2, 23–41 Russian Enlightenment, 25, 29, 38, 138n Esenin, Sergei, 175 “Anna Snegina”, 175 European Community, 143 Evtushenko, Evgenii, 79n

F Field, Daniel, 78n, 119, 128, 139n Fonvizin, Denis I., 63, 64, 78n, 140n Ford, Franklin L., 208, 214, 217, 229n France, 4, 19n, 26–27, 41n, 54n, 61, 77n, 106, 132–36, 137n1, 137n3, 139n, 140n34, 140n41, 142, 154n, 155n12, 155n14, 156n, 159n, 165, 176, 182n, 188–90, 200–202, 204n, 205n12, 205n15, 210–11, 214, 216, 225–27, 232n34, 232n39, 253, 264, 270n, 274 Frederic II, Emperor, 131 Frederic II (the Great), 200, 215–16, 226, 230n, 231n Free Economic Imperial Society, 3 Freemasonry, 91, 205n French Revolution,13, 26, 121, 202, 246 Friedland, 28 Furet, François, 26 G Genghis Khan, 46 George III, 217, 230n German Romanticism, 29, 40n Germany, 112n, 142, 155n, 165, 203, 205n, 211, 241, 253, 261, 263, 270n Gerschenkron, Alexander, 4, 18n, 25, 39n, 154n, 162 Gibbon, Edward, 194–95 Ginzburg, Carlo The Cheese and the Worms, 11 Gogol, Nikolai, 5, 124 Goldsmith, Raymond, 164, 181n Gorbachev, Mikhail, 26, 76, 228, 240, 254–65, 267n, 268n, 271n69, 271n71 Göttingen, 27–28 Grand Tour, 27–28, 188, 196 Granovskii, Timofei, 29, 34, 94, 114n24, 114n30 Great War, the, 51, 59, 70, 161 Gregory, Paul, 164–66, 181n8–9, 251 Grimm, Brothers, 49 Gulag, 75, 77n, 222

Index • 291

Gurevich, Aron, 238–39, 267n Gustav III, 217 H Hamburg, Gary M., 128, 139n, 164, 180n Haxthausen, August von, 128–29 Hegel, Georg, 31–32, 34, 40n17, 40n20, 93, 225 Heidelberg, 27 Herder, Johann, 10, 30, 32–33, 189 Herzen, Alexander, 6, 23–38, 39n5, 39n9, 40n10, 40n15, 40n,17, 40n19– 23, 41n26–27, 41n30–35, 63–66, 76n, 78n8, 78n11, 90, 93–94, 97, 113n11, 133n17, 114n22, 114n24–25, 114n27, 114n29–30, 115n, 141, 153n, 206, 216, 249, 269n, 275 Isaiah Berlin on, 30–38 My Past and Thoughts, 29 Herzen, Natalie, 41, 114n, 269n Historical method and comparisons, 55–56, 119–22, 141–46, 150–51, 210 and counterfactuals, 224–28 and models, 56–57 Historical roots of 1917, 242–54 lure of, 254–65 Russian, 42–45 Western European, 45–50 History and the historian’s craft, 272–74 and historical consciousness, 14–15 and mentalitè, 2 writing of, 7–10 in televisual age, 11–14 Hoch, Steven, 177, 183n Holland, Lord, 189 Hough, Jerry, 240 Hungary, 190, 192, 212, 222, 254 I Ignatieff, Michael, 24, 38n India, 14n, 161, 176, 234n

intellectuals, 5, 29, 72, 84, 106, 112n, 113n4, 113n9, 116n, 118n, 141 and enlightened despotism, 86–92 Russian Intellectuals, 6, 17n, 60, 62–67, 73–74, 84–95, 98, 101–12, 112n1, 112n3, 113n, 116n, 169, 260 Soviet Intellectuals, 76 and traditions, 62–67 intelligentsia, 1, 5–6, 29, 34, 39n, 40n, 48, 51, 53n, 55, 64, 75, 76n, 78n, 83–84, 92, 95–98, 102–7, 109–12, 112n1, 112n3, 113n, 114n26, 114n32, 114n35, 115n, 117n57, 117n61, 117n66, 117n73–74, 137n, 138n, 154n, 221, 238, 253 in 1850s–1860s, 95–104 intelligenty, 29n, 106, 112n and modernity, 105–12 See also intellectuals Ivan III (the Great), 214 Ivan IV (the Terrible), 53n, 213–15, 237, 245, 257, 259 Ivanovna, Empress Anna, 126, 216 Ivanov-Razumnik, 115 J Jacobins, 26–27, 34, 66, 86, 216 The Terror, 27 Japan, 53, 155n, 156n, 161 Russo-Japanese War, 61, 163, 165, 240 Johnson, Robert, 174, 182n Johnson, Samuel, 189 Jourdain, Monsieur, 193 K Kahan, Arcadius, 139n, 162, 164 Kaliaev, Ivan, 219–20 Kampuchea, 77n, 222 Kankrin, Egor, 77n Kant, Immanuel, 120, 189 Kaplan, Fanny, 66, 221, 228 Karamzin, Nikolai, 27, 255 Kornilov, General Lavr, 52 Katz, Elihu, 12, 18n, 19n

292 • Index Keep, J.L.H., 4 Kerblay, Basile, 162, 168, 181n Kerensky, Alexander, 52, 264 Keynes, John Maynard, 24 Khomiakov, Aleksei, 29, 53n, 153 Khovanskaia, Princess, 39 Khrushchev, Nikita, 68, 223, 228, 233n, 255–56, 259, 264 Kiev, 165 Kievan Rus‘, 165, 195, 201, 213, 231 Kireevski, Ivan, 29, 153n Kirov, Sergei, 222, 233n Kissinger, Henry, 258 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii Osipovich, 113n, 137n, 145, 157n, 255 Kohl, Helmut, 240 Kolchin, Peter, 145, 153, 157n, 159n Königsberg, 27 Koshelev, Alexander, 29, 139n Kovalevskaia, Sophia, 100 Kozlov, Vladimir A., 238–39, 267n5, 267n10 Kraft, Joseph, 263 Kropotkin, Peter, 1, 46, 66, 72, 77n, 100, 116n46–47, 116n49, 117n, 180, 206, 225 Küchelbecker, Wilhem, 29, 92 Kulikovskii, Peter, 219 L Ladurie, Emmanuel le Roy Montaillou, 11 Lawrence, D.H., 263 Lee, Gary, 263, 271n Leipzig, 27, 28 Leipzig University, 91 Lenin, Vladimir, 1, 5, 30, 45–46, 49, 53n, 64–66, 73, 106–7, 109–10, 115n37–38, 116n, 118n69, 118n72, 178, 221–22, 228, 234n52–53, 250, 273, 275n Lermontov, 92–93 Levi, Carlo, 176 Lewin, Moshe 159n, 162, 178 Lieven, Prince K.A., 129 Liberal Party (Kadets), 108

Lincoln, Abraham, 206, 211 Litvinov, Pavel, 44 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 87, 255 Lortholary, Albert, 200 Lotman, Iurii M., 119, 137n Louis XIV, 134–36 Louis XV, 201, 217, 230n Louis XVI, 27, 201, 217, 230n16, 230n19 Lubianka, 221 M Machiavelli, Nicolo, 30, 211 Mafia, 24 Mandelstam, Osip, 76 Manning, Roberta, 119, 138n, 249, 267n Markward, 130 Márquez, Gabriel Garcia, 14, 19 Marshall, Joseph, 188–89 Marx, Karl, 24, 31–32, 48, 58, 65, 118n, 169, 178, 182n, 204, 224–25, 234n, 250 Marxism, 3, 45, 47, 96, 109–11, 117n, 118n, 120–21, 238 Marxists, 109, 177, 227 Marxist thought and theory, 9, 44, 48, 65, 109, 112n, 168, 176–77, 232n, 247 Neo-Marxism, 59, 120, 182n, 239 Soviet Marxism, 44, 239 See also Bolsheviks, Mensheviks McInerny, Peggy, 255, 270n Medvedev, Roy, 76n Mensheviks, 54n, 73, 178, 221, 232n, 246 Menshikov, Alexander, 124, 130 Meshcherskaia, Princess Sof’ia Vaslil’evna, 128 Michelet, Jules, 10, 32, 40n, 78n Middle Ages, 130–31, 133–34, 165 Mikhailovskii, Nikolai K., 5, 7, 34, 62, 96, 115n Miliukov, Pavel, 178, 255 Mill, Stuart, 37 Mironov, Boris, 167, 181n, 267n Moldova, 190

Index • 293

Momigliano, Arnaldo, 8, 272, 275n Monas, Sidney, 249, 260–62, 265, 268n, 269n Montesquieu, 26, 39n, 133n, 189, 198, 199, 201–2 Moravia, 190 Moscow (city), 40, 42–43, 70–71, 75, 78, 93, 99–100, 130, 158, 172–76, 181n, 182n, 192, 194, 219, 234n, 243, 263 Moscow Circles, 31, 34, 73, 93 Moscow nobility, 32, 39, 214, 219 Moscow University, 17, 87 mysticism, 91 N Nabokov, Vladimir, 37 Nechaev, Sergei, 249 Nakaz of 1767 (Code of Laws), 26, 39n, 198–99, 205n11, 205n13 Napoleon III, 230, 253 narod, 62, 68, 75 Narodnaia Volia, 65, 73, 208, 217–18, 227, 230n, 231n, 244, 249 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 100 Nicholas I, 27–28, 31, 34, 60, 114n, 153n, 197, 221, 223n, 259–60 Nidal, Abu, 220 Nieboer, Herman Jeremias, 145, 157n19, 157n21 Nifontov, A.S., 167 Nobility in Russia, 122–23 and heritage, 129–32 and honor, 132–36 in eighteenth century, 123–27 in nineteenth century, 127–29 Northern Tour, 196–97 Novgorod, 214 Novick, Peter, 8, 18n, 241 Novikov, Nikolai, 25, 91, 113n O Oblomov, 97 Obolenskii (family name), 39n, 124, 128, 214 Odoevskii, Prince, 93

Ogarev, Nikolai, 29, 93–94, 114n22, 114n24 Okhrana (Russian Secret Political Police), 46–47, 221 Old Regime, 77n, 78n, 119, 122–23, 134, 161, 181n, 221, 229n, 245, 249, 252, 261, 267n, 269n, 270n Ordzhonikidze, “Sergo,” 222, 223n Ottoman Empire, 193, 225, 231n P Panin, Nikita, 197 Panslavists, 29, 42 Paris, 3, 16, 26–28, 92, 160n, 208, 232n, 233 Parkinson, John, 188, 196 Pascal, Pierre, 162, 267n Patterson, Orlando, 145, 157n Paul I, 124, 157n, 217, 227, 231n Peasant Rebellions, 67, 148 Bolotnikov, 67, 149 Bulavin, 67, 149 Pugachev, Emelian, 67–68, 148, 248 Razin, Stenka, 67, 149 Peasants agrarian crisis in Russia, 162–68 agrarian history and psychology, 3–5 serfdom and American slavery, 144–51 and traditions, 67–71 Péguy, Charles, 8 Perrault, Charles, 49 “Sleeping Beauty”, 49 Peter I (the Great), 34, 36, 46, 58, 60, 62, 69, 84–88, 90, 94, 121, 123–24, 127, 130, 135–36, 138n, 148, 193, 197–202, 204n, 205n, 215–16, 225–26, 237, 259 Peter III, 68, 126, 139n, 148, 216–17, 226, 233n Petrovna, Empress Elizabeth, 126 Philip II, 214–15 Philosophes, 25–27, 188, 190–91, 194, 197–202, 216 Physiocrates, 4

294 • Index Pisarev, Dmitri, 97, 101–2, 115n 116n43, 116n52, 269n Place, Pierre Antoine de la, 196 Plumb, J.H., 11, 17, 18n, 19n Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 106, 117 Poland, 26, 75, 187–91, 193–94, 196–97, 222, 254 Politburo, 238 Politkovskaya, Anne, 229, 234n54–55, 274 Pol Pot, 77n, 222 Powis, Jonathan, 130, 132–33, 137n, 139n, 140n32, 140n36 Prokopovich, Feofan, 86 Provisional Government, 52 Prussia, 26, 53n, 77n, 137n, 176, 189, 197, 205n, 226–27 Pugachev, Emelian, 67–68, 148, 248 Pushkin, Alexander, 27–28, 92–94, 99 Eugene Onegin, 27 “Snowstorm,” 28 R Radishchev, Alexander, 25, 73, 76n, 91, 113n20–21 Raeff, Marc, 38n, 39n, 104, 112n, 113n12, 113n19, 117n, 119, 137n, 138n5–6, 154n5, 154n8, 257 Rasputin, Grigorii, 5, 24, 170, 220, 233n Rationalism, 29, 85, 117 Razin, Stenka, 67, 149 raznochintsy, 6–7, 89, 96, 100, 103–4, 114n, 115n36, 115n37, 116n Rechtsstaat, 43 Regemorter, Jean-Louis van, 7, 162 Riazan’, 129 Richardson, William, 188–89, 192 Rieber, Alfred, 252 Riurik, 124, 128 Robespierre, Maximilien, 86, 230n Robinson, Geroid T., 162, 164, 267n Romania, 77, 190, 222 Romanovich-Slavatinskii, A.V., 119, 137n, 139n Romodanovskii, Fedor, 124 Rosenau, Pauline Marie, 120, 137n Rostopchin, Count, 92

Rousseau, 36–37, 48, 188, 200–1, 204n, 205n, 241 Russia Great Russia, 4, 68, 239 Holy Russia, 99 Imperial Russia, 1, 5, 18n, 55, 59–60, 73–74, 77n3, 77n5, 89, 113n, 114n, 115n, 119, 138n4, 138n6, 139n, 162, 181n11, 181n19, 236, 249, 251, 255, 257, 269n, 270n44–45 New Russia, 84, 241, 274 Old Russia, 1, 60, 84 Russian Empire, 4, 139n, 193, 233n, 234n, 244 Russian messianism, 42, 49 Russian mind, 44, 170 Russian Orthodox Church, 99, 144, 146, 234n Russian orthodoxy, 42, 88 Russian soul, 24–25, 43–44, 155, 170, 215 Ryleev, 29, 92 S Salaberry, Marquis Charles-Marie de, 188, 192 Samarin, Iurii, 29, 68, 78n Sanders, John Thomas, 164, 180n Schapiro, Alexander, 250 Schwarzbard, Shalom, 220, 232n Serbia, 77n, 190 Sevigne, Madame de, 134 Shakespeare, William, 17, 99 Shanin, Teodor, 163, 165–67, 182n, 251, 270n Shcherbatov, Mikhail, 255 Shearer, David, 10, 18n, 274, 275n Shils, Edward, 84, 112n, 113n Shipler, David K., 75, 79 Shlapentoleh, Vladimir, 260, 262, 271n Siberia, 29, 50, 75, 91, 174, 197, 220 Silver Age, 107, 111–12 Simbirsk, 129 Simms, James Y., 162, 164, 166, 180n5–6, 251

Index • 295

Slavophiles, 29–31, 35, 43, 62, 64, 92–93, 141, 153n2–3, 178 Smith, R.E.F., 162, 168, 181n Smolensk, 129 sobornost’, 42–43, 49, 53n Socialist Revolutionaries, 54n, 65, 72–73, 108, 179, 206, 221, 227, 232n Battle Organization, 73 party, 218–19, 232n Solnon, Jean-François, 134–35, 140n Solov’ev, Vladimir, 64, 141, 255 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 45, 53n, 59, 75, 227, 273, 275, 275n Sovietology, 76, 237, 240–41, 267n, 268n12–13, 268n15, 270n Soviet Union, 8, 10, 39n, 53n, 58, 73– 76, 77n3, 77n5, 79n, 162, 176, 213, 220, 228–29, 234n, 237, 240–41, 243, 250, 258, 260, 268n, 270n See also USSR Speranskii, Mikhail, 89, 113n St. Petersburg, 26, 40, 68, 70, 100, 172–74, 182n22, 182n24, 188, 194, 196–97, 201, 205n, 216 St. Petersburg Academy, 87, 113n St. Petersburg University, 114n Stalin, 53n, 72–73, 75, 79n, 168, 179–80, 204, 221–23, 225, 228, 233n, 245 Stankevich, Nikolai, 29, 93–94, 114 Stepniak-Kravchinskii, Sergei, 101, 116n46, 116n51 Sterne, Laurence, 130, 139n Stolypin, Peter A., 50, 54n, 61, 71, 79n, 168, 179, 183n, 219, 227–28, 256 Strassburg, 27 Stuart Regime, 131 Stuart, Robert C., 163, 180n, 181n Sviatopolk, 213 T Talbott, Strobe, 263–64, 271n Talmon, Jacob L., 45, 241 Taranovski, Theodore, 255–56, 259–60, 270n50–51

Tatishchev, Vasilii, 85, 124, 255 Tito, Iosip Broz, 77, 240 Tkachev, Peter, 64–66, 78n Tolstaya, Tatyana, 249, 269n Tolstoy, Lev, 17, 25, 74, 141 Traditions and government, 60–62 and intellectuals, 62–67 and peasantry, 67–71 Treadgold, Donald, 164 Trotsky, Leon, 2, 73, 79n, 180, 222 Turgenev, Ivan, 5, 6, 29, 34–35, 63, 94, 114n, 141 Fathers and Sons, 5 Turkey, 149, 214, 227 Russo-Turkish War, 197 U Ukraine, 190, 193–94, 221 Union of the Russian People, 51 Upton, Nicholas, 103 USSR, 222, 257, 270n See also Soviet Union V Vekhi group, 107, 109 Venturi, Franco, 7, 18n, 33, 40, 78n, 97, 115n, 116n, 140n, 153n, 203, 208, 229n, 231n, 245, 268n21–22 Vernadsky, George, 213, 231n Versaille, 130 Vico, Giambattista, 10, 30, 38n Vladimir the Saint, Prince, 213 Volin, Lazar, 111, 118n, 162, 164 Vologda, 129 Voltaire, 26, 39n, 48, 86, 90, 188, 191–94, 196–201, 203–4, 204n, 215–16, 231n W Walicki, Andrei, 30, 35, 40n, 153n Walzer, Michael, 220, 231n, 232n38, 232n40, 287 Warsaw, 26, 201 Weber, Eugene, 151, 159n, 160n, 182n, 287 Weber, Max, 9, 143, 252–53

296 • Index Wheatcroft, Stephen G., 164, 166, 167, 181n White, Hayden, 272, 275n Wilbur, Elvira M., 164, 167, 181n, 251 Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling, 7, 18n, 115n, 119, 138n, 139n, 287 Witte, Sergei, 52, 54n Wolff, Larry, 187–203, 204n1, 204n6, 205n8, 205n10, 287 Y Yakovlev, Ivan, 25 Yanov, Alexander, 43–44, 53n, 168, 181n, 245, 253, 270n

Yarmolinsky, Avrahm, 116n, 231n, 244–45, 287 Young, Arthur, 189 Yusupov, Prince Felix, 220, 233n Z Zasulich, Vera, 176 Zelnik, Reginald, 172, 181n zemstvo, 6, 51, 61, 108, 259 Zheliabov, Andrei, 65 Zhuk, S.I., 239, 267n Zinoviev, Alexander, 44, 79n Zola, Emil, 106