Richard Pipes: Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Pipes remarks that the term ‘conservatism’ didn’t take hold in continental Europe until the founding of Le Conservateur littéraire in Paris during the years of the Bourbon Restoration. It is therefore anachronistic with respect to Russia, where it “emerged in the sixteenth century.” What he means by Russian conservativism is the defense of a regime, “autocracy,” consisting of a “strong, centralized authority, unrestrained either by law or parliament,” but still different from both the absolute monarchy of the France’s Old Regime and from the constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII that the French littérateurs were defending. Pipes undertakes to explain a paradox: Whereas “Russia’s post-1700 art, literature, and science were all patterned on Western models, her industries emulated Western prototypes, and so did her military,” her politics did not.
In a way reminiscent of Aristotle, Pipes begins by considering the origins of politics as such. Nomadic tribes organize themselves along ties of family instead of territory; they are ‘social,’ not ‘political.’ Equality within each tribe consists in the fact that all members share a bloodline; chiefs are often elected and wield authority temporarily, with no rights inherent in the office. Private property exists in livestock. “Once nomads settle down and turn to agriculture, they transfer the right of private property to land,” held by the tribes, as seen in the histories of the Israelites and the Greeks. In “nontribal, settled communities” such as Egypt, land was the property of kings and priests. “Throughout European history, the existence of private property constituted the single most effective barrier to unlimited royal authority inasmuch as it compelled the kings to turn to their subjects for financial support and, in the process, to concede to them a share of political power.” But European history didn’t begin that way. “Early European kings tended to treat their realm as they did their livestock and land, that is, as property: they drew no distinction between what the Romans called dominium (ownership) and potestas (authority), giving rise to what has come to be known as a ‘patrimonial’ type of regime.” It was Charlemagne in the late eighth century who began to acknowledge the separation of these kinds of rule. If “the kingdom was not the property of the king but the joint possession of the king and the people,” if “kings had not only rights but also duties” to “promote peace and justice,” then Aristotle’s definition of politics as ruling and being ruled, reciprocally, begins to prevail. Politics as understood by Aristotle came to Europe through the influence of the Roman notion of the respublica, the public thing or way; to this, the Roman Catholic Church of course added “the precepts of Holy Scriptures” to the Greco-Roman understanding of justice. If the God of the Bible restricted not only His people but Himself to the rule of law, surely human beings ought to do the same.
“One manifestation of this notion of a partnership between state and society was the convocation of assemblies throughout Europe for the purpose of consultation on grave matters of state, especially taxation.” Government by the consent of the governed, who sent representatives to speak (hence ‘parle-ment‘) in assemblies called by the monarch “ratif[ied] major political decisions” and “authorize[d] extraordinary assessments.” Throughout the Middle Ages in Latin Christendom, there was no taxation without representation, without parliamentary consent; “it was through control of the purse strings that the most successful of parliaments, the English, ultimately achieved representative democracy.” The relations between feudal lords and their vassals, which entailed mutual obligations, and the commercial relations of citizens, of city-dwellers, amongst themselves and with other cities, in turn fostered rule by consent. “The authority of European kings was thus from the earliest limited by a variety of ideas and institutions.”
In taking aim at classical and Christian ideas and institutions, Machiavelli worked to establish modern, centralized states, often ruled by ‘princes’ wielding absolute power—both of these undermining the restraints imposed by feudal oligarchs and priests while deprecating the moral laws governing both. Yet even the “absolutism” of a Louis XIV, who asserted exclusive power to legislate in France, while “certainly violat[ing] custom accepted in Europe during the preceding millennium,” did not violate the people’s “fundamental civil rights,” their rights of person and of property, much less their even more fundamental natural rights to life and property under the natural law. That is, the absolute monarchs were not quite tyrants, whatever Machiavelli might have hoped. Absolutism “cannot be said to anticipate twentieth-century totalitarianism.” And when the Bourbon monarchs, the Hanoverians, and others “came under assault” by republicans, their political enemies could draw upon “a widely shared consensus dating back to the earliest days of European civilization as to what constituted legitimate government.” To be sure (it should be added), the conceptions of what constituted natural and civil law had been transformed by ‘modern’ political philosophers after Machiavelli, especially in regard to the new conceptions of natural and divine law those philosophers propounded, but principled resistance to arbitrary power, whether tyrannical or merely ‘absolute,’ throughout ‘the West.’
Not so in the East, not so in Russia. “For a variety of reasons—geographic in the first place, but also cultural—the political evolution of Russia proceeded in a direction opposite to that of the West: from the relative freedom of the Middle Ages to a regime that in the vocabulary of western political theory would be variously defined as tyrannical, seignorial, or patrimonial.”
In terms of geography, Russian rulers faced the same problem as all others who lived on the Great European Plain, but in much more severe form. “As a rule, the stability and liberty of a country stand in inverse relation to its size and external security: that is to say, the larger a country and the more insecure its borders, the less can it afford the luxury of popular sovereignty and civil rights”; “a country that administers vast territories and is exposed to foreign invasions tends toward centralized forms of government.” What for France and Poland was a serious problem was for Russia a dilemma, being “the most spacious kingdom on earth” by the seventeenth century, with no formidable natural boundaries to protect it from nomadic raiders. “This experience contrasted with that of western Europe, which enjoyed immunity from external invasions from the eleventh century onward,” even if it hardly enjoyed such immunity from territorial encroachments by one or more states upon the others, within. “Under these conditions, there “could be no [Russian] society independent of the state and no corporate spirit uniting its members,” as “the entire Russian nation was enserfed,” with no social or political space for a titled aristocracy, for “a class of self-governing burghers,” or for “a rural yeomanry.” There was, moreover, a “virtual absence of private property in the means of production and marketable commodities” since land was so abundant that peasants simply moved around the immense forests, cutting and burning trees to make way for farming, then moving on to another patch of trees once the soil had been exhausted. “The notion that land could be owned in exclusive property was entirely alien to them: they were convinced into modern times, that land, like air and water, all equally essential to life, was created by God for everyone’s use.” If the czar “claim[ed] title to all of Russian soil,” so what? He didn’t interfere with their way of life, and the Orthodox Church taught that God owned the earth, with the czar as God’s vicar.
As for the cities, private property didn’t establish itself in them, either. “Muscovite cities were essentially administrative and garrison centers, containing sizable rural populations engaged in agriculture and lacking powers of self-government.” That is, cities were much as they had been in western Europe before Charlemagne: fortified nodes in a military-political network. Given Russia’s vast distances and harsh climate, little or no national commerce existed; residents held no property rights against the czar, and there was no credit. The Mongol conquest “destroyed such urban self-government as had existed” before their arrival, and Mongol warlords assured that no such thing would arise for the two and a half centuries of their subsequent rule. Landlords weren’t really lords, holding their fiefs “provisionally, on condition of satisfactory service to the crown.” With no independent titled aristocracy, no middle class, and no private property in land, the czars who took over after the Mongols ruled without civil-social or institutional limits to their power. Nor did the Russian Orthodox Church, heir to Byzantium, establish the idea of a standard of justice applicable to secular rulers, preferring instead the New Testament teaching that whether king or tyrant, the monarch served as God’s scourge of human sinfulness and must therefore “be unreservedly obeyed.” ‘Czar’ means ‘Caesar,’ but a Caesar as conceived in Byzantium, a secular Pantocrator in a ‘new’ Rome, unfettered by such restraints as Roman Caesars were expected to obey, even if many did not. The czars regarded their realm as “patrimonial property, property inherited from their fathers,” with no basis in consent and no obligations to their subjects. “In the eyes of the crown, its subjects had only duties and no rights, and in this sense, they were all equal.” In observing that Russian civil-social equality under despotism would rival the civil-social republicanism of democracy in America, Tocqueville founded his prediction on this longstanding fact.
One dimension of Tocqueville’s remedy to the ills of democracy, the refurbishment of an aristocracy which adapted itself to the new social condition, could not apply to Russia, which had no aristocracy in the Western sense. The titled aristocrats, the boyars, lived in Moscow, attending the czar’s court, or were assigned administrative duties in the provinces. Because the only way to bind the peasants to the land in the vastness of the Russian forests was to have the czars enforce serfdom, “the aristocracy forfeited its political ambitions” in exchange for such enforcement. “Serfdom, indeed, was the element that bound the Russian upper classes to the monarchy from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, and caused it to surrender its political interests.” Peter the Great completed the reduction of the aristocracy by opening military and civil offices to commoners, men even more subservient to their benefactor. There was indeed the Boyar Duma, but it held no public deliberations and initiated no legislation; “it was an instrument of the czar’s will,” neither “serv[ing] the interests of his subjects” nor “convey[ing] their wishes.” As for the Land Assemblies, most of the deputies were appointed by the czar in order “to strengthen the government’s control over the provinces.” The czar and his officials “neither then nor later conceived of society as independent of the state, as having its own rights, interests, and wishes, to which they were accountable.” In Russia, a social group or class could only look to the monarchy in the hope that it would protect them against the depredations of the other social groups. “It was a vicious circle: Russians supported autocracy because they felt powerless; and they felt powerless because autocracy gave them no opportunity to feel their power.”
Political thought in Russia after liberation from the Mongols centered on a controversy that wracked the Orthodox Church, the question of monastic landholding. Exempt from taxation under the Mongols, the abbeys had accumulated some wealth, the larger ones in effect becoming analogous to the secular estates of Europe. One set of the clergy, the nestiazhateli or “nongreedy” ones, charged that these possessions had corrupted the clergy, who succumbed to worldliness; another set of the clergy, the stiazhateli or “greedy” ones, begged to differ, preferring not to be reduced to beggary themselves. How could a Church without wealth perform acts of Christian charity? they asked. The more cosmopolitan stiazhateli had traveled abroad, committed themselves to the logic taught in the Western European schools; the nestiazhateli eschewed what they labeled as foreign corruption, “reject[ing] logic and reasoning” as damnable vices. Corruption had infected the establishment clergy generally, many of whose members engaged in levels of debauchery unseen since the orgies of Roman emperors. Czar Ivan III countered these squabbles by seizing church properties, with the initial support of the nestiazhateli. In this, he found support also from still another faction within the Church, the ‘Judaizers,’ reformers who translated the Pentateuch into Slavonic and called for the abolition of Church hierarchy, monasteries, icons, and the veneration of saints.
The Church establishment fought back in the Russian way, initially appealing to the czar to treat the Judaizers as the Spanish Inquisition had treated Jews but then, thanks to the arguments put forth by Joseph of Volokolamsk (“in some respects the most influential intellectual of medieval Russia”), provided the czars with “a novel (for Russia) theory of divine origin of kingship,” namely, that it was “the main task of political authority” to “safeguard the faith”—the doctrine of Caesaropapism. Having thus elevated the monarchy to a spiritual capacity, he justified clerical landholding—but with the monasteries, not the individual monks, as the landholders—as forming a strong foundation for ecclesiastical training and action, action in the service of the czar, justifying the ways of czars to men. Indeed, he took from one of the Byzantine writers the claim that the czar “in his being is like other men” but “in his authority he resembles God Almighty,” to be “unconditionally obeyed.” “He persuaded the crown that heresies, even if they did not directly touch on politics, undermined monarchical authority and that only by pitilessly persecuting them could the monarch secure absolute power.”
This gave the czars a choice. They wanted to take Church lands, and so approved of the ascetic teachings of the nestiazhateli; yet, they feared the Church establishment, especially since it offered them a degree of churchlike authority in exchange for keeping their hands off Church property. An accident concentrated the czarist mind when, in 1522, Czar Basil resolved to divorce his barren first wife and marry a Lithuanian princess. (“He anticipated Henry VIII of England by nine years.”) This violation of Orthodox canon law met with resistance from the nestiazhalteli; even the distant Greek Orthodox patriarchs weighed in with a condemnation. This enabled the Joseph’s successor among the stiazhateli, Daniel of Volokolamsk, to side with the czar, “promising to take the sin—if such it was—upon himself,” in a remarkably adroit imitatio Christi (best called an imitation imitatio Christi?) that Machiavelli himself might have admired. As Pipes drily notes, the eventual child of the loving couple was Ivan IV, a.k.a. “the Terrible.” Thus solemnized, the doctrine of “the divine nature of royal authority and its claim to unlimited power” reigned victorious, assisted by timely reforms of the Church by the now predominant hitherto corrupt stiazhateli, whose hierarchy moved to squelch the corrupt practices that had threatened to turn the Orthodox Church ‘protestant’ avant la lettre. The newly appointed head of the Church, Macarios, even managed to persuade young Ivan IV “to abandon his unruly ways and take charge of government.” If ‘czar’ means ‘Caesar’ and a Caesar is an emperor, it made sense that the Patriarch of Constantinople (“a capital which had been without an emperor for more than a century”), eventually recognized Ivan as the “only one true Christian emperor in the world.” Czars could now claim their own capital, Moscow to be the Third Rome—replacing the Second Rome, Constantinople, which had, in the eyes of the Orthodox, replaced the First Rome, the Vatican, only to be conquered by the Muslim Turks in 1453. “Implicit in” this claim to rule the Third Rome “was the belief that Russia was destined to rule the world and that the Russian czar was the czar of all humanity.” It is no wonder that Western European political observers named this sort of rule ‘Oriental despotism,’ inasmuch as the czar now asserted a universal authority similar to that long assumed by the Chinese emperors.
Russia was indeed distant from Western Europe now, not only geographically but intellectually, spiritually, and politically. The czar, as “the world’s only Christian emperor, was affirmed, with the support of theologians, as endowed with unrestrained power—his subjects were in the literal sense of the word his slaves,” rather as the Apostle Paul thought of himself in relation to God, only without the guarantees of the divine covenant. The Russian Orthodox Church acceded to domination by the czar, who appointed its officers and removed them without consultation. At the same time, the Church firmly censured “all independent religious thought” as mudrstvovanie or ‘smart-alecking, offering “no intellectual refuge from those seeking alternatives” to the regime in a manner that “startled foreigners visiting Russia, causing them to wonder whether Russians were indeed Christians” at all. This hardly disturbed the czar or his clergy, who expected nothing better from the lesser peoples, who did not understand Russia as the new Holy Land, “the only country so labeled apart from Palestine.” Understandably if fatally for Russia, “when Russia developed a class of secular thinkers known as the intelligentsia, the majority of them either rejected religion outright or showed themselves, indifferent to it, yet tended to pursue their worldly speculations with a pseudoreligious fanaticism” imbibed from their earliest schooling under the tutelage of the monks. When a prince dared to urge Ivan IV to accept counselors, citing Aristotle and Cicero (“of which” the prince wrote scornfully, “the Russians knew nothing”), the czar rejected the thought out of hand, citing the Bible as interpreted by his appointed priests. “How can a man be called an autocrat if he does not govern by himself?” he rejoined, with etymological exactness. To seek advice from others is “the rule of many,” he explained, and “the rule of many is like unto the folly of women,” who notoriously cannot make up their minds.
Ivan’s successors could only nod judiciously at the writings of the seventeenth-century Croatian emigre, Iury Krichanich, who wrote in his book, Politika, that “perfect autocracy” was the “first, most important, principal” cause of Russian happiness, maintained despite the country’s bad soil, miserable climate, and neighboring enemies. In his judgment, “only a powerful, centralized state could civilize the country. Although the contemporary Patriarch Nikon made an attempt to reverse the lines of authority by asserting “the supremacy of the church over the state,” drawing upon the teachings of the fourth century archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, he succeeded only in weakening the Church still further, making it easy prey during the next century, under the rule of Peter I.
Peter “the Great” was a great modernizer. He abolished the annoying patriarchate altogether, replacing it with the “Holy Synod,” which was no more holy than (as the old joke goes) the Holy Roman Empire. Expropriating church and monastic lands, placing clergy and monks on state salary, he made the Russian church “a branch of the state’s administration” a “powerless tool of the crown,” and proceeded to appoint “laymen, sometimes military officers,” to the Synod. Just as important in theoretical terms, Peter was “the first Russian ruler to view the state as an institution in its own right, distinct from the person of the monarch” in imitation of the modern, Western European, political philosophers, notably Bodin and Hobbes. He sent young men to European universities, the better to absorb modernity and to reinforce it upon their return to Russia. Although in theory this meant the introduction of the idea of the “common good” to Russia, in practice Peter “denied Russians any aspirations of their own and perceived themes subjects capable of functioning only within the context of the absolutist state”—a practice old Hobbes himself would have found congenial. Dissatisfied with his weak and disappointingly religious son, Peter chose his own successor, his grandson. Subsequent anti-absolutist stirrings, centered among the descendants of the boyars, were neutralized by czars who played off this elite against the newer “service nobility,” which “owed its ennoblement to Moscow’s rulers.” Absolutism was vindicated in The History of Russia by Vasily Tatishchev, a former military officer and foreign service officer who served under Peter the Great, his weak immediate successors, and finally the Empress Anna, who reigned from 1730 to 1740. “Skimming over Russian history since Kievan times, he argued that for a country like Russia autocracy was the only suitable regime,” making his the “first document in Russian history in which autocracy was advocated on purely pragmatic grounds, without reference to the Holy Scriptures or the divine origin of royal authority” citing as its justification “the unique size of Russia and the ignorance of her population,” an argument that “would be used by the Russian crown to reject proposals for constitution and public representation during the next century and a half.” Russian ‘conservatism’ conserved the regime of absolute monarchy at the price of dismissing religious justification of its rule as superfluous.
But Peter’s educational program of sending Russian innocents abroad to absorb modern ideas had long-term results unfavorable to czarism. First among these was the emergence of public opinion. With Enlightenment ideas now imported and the structure of a modern state in place, the regime began to see recognizably ‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ and even ‘radical’ movements, in something that was starting to resemble a modern civil society. It started small, under the rule of Peter’s successors, the empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II. With compulsory state service abolished for the aristocrats and the introduction of private property in land, Russia saw, “for the first time, a leisured and propertied class,” “leisured and enlightened” in its upper reaches, “able to view itself as ‘society’ (obshchestvo)—that is, as the state’s counterpart.” This small group “paid attention to the way the country was governed,” and was “actively encouraged” to do so by Catherine, herself “born and raised in western Europe.” This put the regime in a bind, as it wanted and needed elements of modernity in order to survive in its ever-dangerous neighborhood but wanted nothing to do with back-talk, let alone political resistance, from ‘the few.’ “Filled—sincerely, it seems—with the desire to benefit her adopted country and rid it of the stigma of despotism, she nevertheless reacted angrily to any suggestion that she formally limit her autocratic powers.” She admired the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire (with whom she corresponded), and Rousseau, permitting their books to be published and distributed in Russia, yet persecuted private publishers when “displeased with some of their output.” She knew what she thought but didn’t know what to do about it.
As the French would say, she had reason for her confusion. Montesquieu’s labyrinthine L’Esprit des lois scarcely commends despotism but it does maintain that countries with large territories and weak civic culture will require at best constitutional monarchy and sometimes despotism. A constitutional monarchy, upholding “the rule of law, derived from the Law of Nature and adapted to a country’s specific conditions,” needs what Montesquieu (and Tocqueville, following him) called “intermediate” powers—typically an aristocracy, although the civic associations seen in the (then) British North American colonies can serve the same function. That is, non-despotic rule of ‘the one’ limits itself by law, but it must have some elements of civil society capable of resisting monarchic encroachments upon legal barriers. Montesquieu pointed to Russia’s lack of “liberty, honor, freedom of speech, and a commercial third estate” as guarantees of a despotic regime. He thus gave several Russian factions their ‘talking points’: the aristocrats could say, You czars need us if you seek to achieve “a true monarchy”; liberals could say, To survive and prosper in modernity, we must have the rule of law; and partisans of autocracy could say, Russia is far too large to be ruled by anything but a strong hand directed by a single mind.
Neither the single mind of Catherine nor any of the minds around her could figure out “how to restrain the autocracy by law.” She wanted the rule of law but “drew no distinction between laws and administrative ordinances,” the latter enacted by bureaucrats appointed by the czar and, “implicitly, acting in [her] name.” Further, the rule of law aristocrats propounded didn’t apply to themselves, unencumbered by any “legal restraints over the serfs or their belongings” short of killing or torturing them. Reform efforts thus proved fruitless and autocracy/despotism continued. At the same time, public opinion sniped at the regime, weakening its authority and at times making it question the authority it wielded. Pipes identifies Count Nikita Panin as one such critic, “Russia’s earliest liberal in the Western sense of the word,” an advocate of constitutionalism and civil rights, including property rights. Empress Elizabeth appointed him to tutor Catherine’s son, Paul, and even promised to establish “proper limits and regulations” for “each government institution.” Paul proved a disaster as czar, Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I, who took over after the assassination, also “made no secret of his liberal sentiments” and, like his grandmother, found himself unable to bring those sentiments into practice in any consistent way.
Alexander’s chief minister, briefly, was Michael Speransky. By now, the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘enlightened’ Europeans had shifted from their adherence to natural rights to the historicism of G. W. F. Hegel. Speransky hoped and expected that Russia would evolve toward republicanism. ‘History’ would solve its problems. His intellectual nemesis, Nikolay Karamzin, a Romantic opponent of Hegelian rationalism, denied that Russia could sustain republicanism, that without an autocratic regime the country would succumb to anarchy and consequent rule by foreigners. He admitted Montesquieu’s distinction between constitutional monarchy and despotism, arguing that Russia could achieve the former without representative institutions by forming a partnership between the czar and “a gentry in possession of inviolable estate rights,” including the right to absolute rule over the serfs. Good men, not good institutions, were what Russia needed—the mirror opposite of what Publius argued in The Federalist, respecting the civil-social conditions prevailing in the United States. A far better historian than Tatishchev, he followed in his predecessor’s line as a historian, writing his History of the Russian State in twelve volumes, persuading himself, and not incidentally the czar, of the soundness of his understanding of autocracy and of its indispensability to Russia. In the dispute between Speransky and Karamzin, Russia saw the two philosophic ‘replacements’ for natural-rights theory: rationalist historicism and anti-rationalist Romanticism. Alexander waffled between reform and ‘conservatism’; as late as 1818, he announced in a speech opening the Polish Diet in Warsaw that Russia, like Poland, would have “legal and free institutions” once its people had attained “the proper level of maturity.” He likely meant reforms along the lines of Karamzin, not of Speransky, but Russian liberals took heart, hoping that this marked the beginning of the end for serfdom.
Until 1825, “all attempts to change Russia’s autocratic form of government had emanated from above,” from the czars or from persons appointed by the czars: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander I, Panin, Speransky, and in his own way Karamzin. Now, however, officers in St. Petersburg and Ukraine led a mutiny of army garrisons against the rule of the newly-crowned czar, Nicholas I. The ‘Decembrists,’ aristocratic liberal admirers of Speransky, had seen, while stationed in Germany and France during the Napoleon Wars, that civic order could be maintained without autocracy. A decade later, they hoped that Alexander’s elder son, Konstantin, would succeed to the throne. When Konstantin’s refusal of the succession became known, their surprise was complete; their rebellion amounted to an attempted palace coup against the perceived autocratic leanings of Nicholas. They were crushed, but alarmed autocrats, very much including Nicholas, leaned even more heavily toward autocracy.
Nicholas I felt the need for “an official ideology” to justify his regime—another sign that public opinion now existed and counted for something politically. Eventually called “Official Nationalism,” the doctrine was summarized in the slogan, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” or, alternatively, “Faith, Czar, and Fatherland.” While all of these terms invoked the longstanding Russian regime, reconceived in terms of Romanticism, and as such opposed what Nicholas saw as the dangerous secular-liberal, individualist elements of Western European thought and politics, Pipes distinguishes Official Nationalism from the more stridently anti-rationalist Slavophilism contemporary with it: “Peter the Great, anathema to the Slavophiles, was the doctrine’s idol.” If this sounds like an attempt to square the circle—a Hegelian synthesis without Hegelian logic—it may well have been something very much like that.
The Slavophiles themselves addressed the Hegelian problem in terms of nationalism. If ‘History’ unfolds dialectically, and world history unfolds as nations confront one another “as bearers of specific ideas,” where does Russia fit in? “The Slavophiles depicted the West as poisoned by shallow rationalism inherited from classical antiquity and racked by class antagonisms from which Russia was saved by her Byzantine heritage and Slavic spirit” as seen in the peasant commune, “a solution to the class conflicts which the West was vainly seeking in socialism.” Hegel mistakenly took a fully rational World State to be the ‘end of History,’ but the Slavophiles held up Russia as “the model for the world.” “Russia was the future,” the true end of History. Slavophiles proposed a continuation of autocracy, but an autocracy limited to the realm of the state, a state that left the private lives of its subjects alone in exchange for subjects’ refraining from citizenship, from participation in political life. As did Tatischchev and Karamzin, the Slavophiles presented a mythologized account of Russian history, this time claiming for Russia a fundamentally peaceful character in contrast with the barbaric violence of the West. Fundamentally spiritual, not political, Russians neither want nor should have anything to do with government; “their sense of freedom was inner, spiritual; indeed, true freedom can exist only there,” never in civic life. Autocracy permitted Russians to live the highest form of life human beings could achieve, confining the dirty business of politics to ‘the one’ and his colleagues. The Slavophile writer Konstantin Aksakov summarized: “To the government unlimited freedom to rule, to which it has the exclusive right; to the people full freedom of life, both outward and inner, which the government safeguards.” Russian liberals did not understand true freedom, instead pursuing the illusion of civic freedom, an illusion imported from the West. The successes of the first half of the century, beginning with the victory over Napoleonic France, fed Russian self-confidence.
Reality set in, quickly enough. In response to Russia’s invasion of the Ottoman Empire’s Danube Principalities in 1853, the Turkish emperor allied with Great Britain and France (themselves newly allied) to repel the czar’s army. If France had a powerful army and Great Britain a powerful navy, and both had the most advanced military technologies of the time, Russian Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality had none of these to the same degree, and this handicap derived from its “refusal to involve society in the social and political life” of the country. “Russia, it came to be widely believed in and out of government in the aftermath of the Crimean War, had to build up her human and material resources,” which could be done only with “far-reaching reforms” beginning with the emancipation of the serfs, who constituted eighty percent of the population. This Czar Alexander II did in short order, two years before President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, and four years before the ratification of Thirteenth Amendment. Additionally, Alexander established institutions of local self-government which enabled peasants to begin to govern themselves; he separated the judicial power from the executive, with jury trials. Autocracy didn’t disappear; it concentrated itself and invoked a more virulent nationalism even as it democratized and politicized elements of Russian civil society. What Pipes calls “conservatism,” the defense of the autocratic/monarchic regime, became increasingly “chauvinistic, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic,” as seen in some of the unlovelier passages in Dostoevsky’s writings.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a jurist and advisor to the czars, viewed Alexander’s reforms with distaste. In the wake of Alexander’s assassination in 1881, he was quick to persuade the heir to the throne to roll back many of the reforms and to reassume “the uncompromising absolutism” of the young man’s grandfather, Nicholas I. In his 1896 book, Reflections of a Russian Statesman, Pobedonostsev argued that “the modern world was on the verge of self-destruction, which only cooperation between the autocratic monarchy and the Orthodox Church could forestall.” Democratization could only lead to tyranny; such abstract principles as natural rights were anti-life, failing to account for nature’s concrete, organic quality, whether in biology or in human society; the modern-Western ‘cult of humanity’ enunciated by Auguste Comte and others would destroy the human personality, which can only flourish under the rule of God and his Orthodox Church. Man must submit to the rightful authority of Church and Czar, since “power is the depository of truth,” ordained as such by God. Pipes observes that Pobedonostsev “had a greater impact on government policy than any other Russian theorist of his time.” After he had passed from the scene, Sergei Iulevich Witte took up the mantle of autocracy, serving as finance minister then as Russia’s first prime minister at and around the turn of the century. Constitutionalism, he told the German chancellor, “will be the end of Russia”; “a parliament and the universal vote would produce anarchy and destroy Russia,” leaving it defenseless against enemies foreign and domestic. Such liberalization might occur, successfully, sometime in the indefinite future; in the interim, industrialization would protect the country from Western predation.
By this time, autocracy continued to prevail, with progressive-gradualist liberalism and revolutionary radicalism gathering strength below. “One cannot comprehend any of the three strains that have dominated Russian thought” in modernity “except in relation to one another.” Among the liberals, Boris Chicherin was “arguably the most prominent,” an advocate of laissez-faire economics and therefore antagonistic to anarchists, Slavophiles, and socialists. Marxist-Leninist doctrines were propounded by Peter Bengardovich Struve, who, unlike his contemporary V. I. Lenin, denied the claim that Russia could vault over the capitalist stage of economic production and establish socialism. But he eventually rejected Marxian notions of historically determined revolution as the issue of class conflict, a heresy which earned him expulsion from the socialist ranks. He became a reformist, convinced that autocracy’s days were numbered and that only a return to the reformism of Alexander II could ward off violent revolution.
Pipes considers Peter Arkadevich Stolypin to have been “imperial Russia’s last great statesman,” a judgment Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later affirm. Stolypin “understood the need to be rid of the patrimonial ideal by bringing society into some sort of equilibrium with the government.” This made him a lonely figure, supported neither by Nicholas II (whose liberalizing concessions were made “under duress”), nor the autocratic purists, nor the liberal advocates of parliamentarism, nor the Communist advocates of ‘proletarian’ dictatorship. Although he “tried repeatedly to bring representatives of public opinion into his cabinet” and to “lay the foundations of a constitutional autocracy” by transforming the peasant communes into villages in which private property in land was respected, and more, to enact legal guarantees of civil rights for all Russians, it was too late. In 1911, he was assassinated by one Dmitry Bogrov, a shadowy figure who was both a member of one of the socialist parties and an informer for the czar’s secret police. In a few years, the Great War would ruin czarism, soon replaced by a new, far more murderous form of tyranny claiming legitimacy not from tradition but from the supposedly ineluctable laws of ‘History’ as formulated not by Hegel but by Marx, as interpreted by Lenin and Stalin.
Pipes concludes by remarking that the Russian word for ‘sovereign,’ gosudar, “originally designated a master of slaves.” In Aristotelian terms, then, Russian regimes imitated not the political character of the family’s marital relationship, a husband and wife ruling reciprocally, but the tyrannical character of the relations between master and slave. At best, a czar might mimic the third family relationship, the parental relationship of the father (occasionally the mother) ruling children. Russian thinkers, churchmen, and statesmen never fully accepted the Western Europeans’ distinction between the person of the ruler and the state apparatus he ruled with. In the words, of Nicholas I, “the government and I are one and the same.” And as late as 1917, Nicholas II contended that the Russian people needed to regain his confidence, not the other way around. For most of its late-feudal and modern history, with the exception of a thin layer of modernizing elements, Russian minds and hearts inclined to concur.
Later, Romantic invocations of nationalism could not bind the czar’s subjects together because “Russia was an empire before she had become a nation.” Russia’s vast territorial conquests resulted in a population that was only half Russian, and ethnic Russians themselves “were widely scattered over the empire’s immense territory.” “Until quite recently most Russians, when asked who they were, would identify themselves not as ‘Russians’ but as ‘Orthodox Christians.” As such, they felt greater affinity with their coreligionists abroad, be they Greeks or Serbs, than with westernized Russians who did not observe Orthodox rituals. That is, both elements of the modern ‘nation-state’ remained incomplete in the empire of the czars. “Limited government was beyond their comprehension, and so was patriotism.” As Montesquieu saw, despots govern by fear and, as Pipes adds, in Russia they were governed by fear, fear of internal stability and external foes. The czars “were convinced—and not without reason, as the events of 1917-1920 were to show—that lacking strong central authority acting for the benefit of the whole and independently of the particular wants of the diffuse population the country would promptly disintegrate.” A regime of autocracy, and of autocracy alone, could undertake the enlightenment of Russians, liberate the serfs, rule a people “by nature apolitical,” defend that people from the degrading philistinism of modern materialism, individualism, and nihilism, and raise Russians “above selfish class interests.” Or so Russian autocrats contended, and still contend to this day.
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