intellectual as missionaries

Intellectuals as missionaries: the liberal oppositionin Russia and their notion of culture

Igor Narskij

Published online: 2 October 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract The present article is primarily concerned with the imagined community

of liberal intellectuals (starting with the Westernizers, in the 1840s, and ending with

the Kadets and the participants of the October Revolution in the early twentieth

century), rather than the community that ‘‘objectively’’ existed. This imaginary

community constructed notions of the collective identity of their own group as well

as that of Russian society. For this purpose, they instrumentalized the notions of

‘‘progress,’’ ‘‘backwardness,’’ ‘‘culturedness’’ (kul’turnost’) and ‘‘benightedness’’

(temnota), thereby creating hierarchies in which the ‘‘constructors’’ of collective

identities granted themselves the important role of intermediaries between state and

society. Special attention is paid to the prominent role Russia’s liberal historians

played in this process insofar as historians possessed great power in nineteenth-

century Europe—the power to tell their states and societies about their past, present,

and future—and this transformed them into professional producers of (national)

identities. Their work combined expert knowledge and ideological cliches in a

highly complex manner. The central question posed is to what extent and in what

respect the reality constructed by Russian intellectuals coincided with the actions of

intellectuals in other European regions or, on the contrary, to what extent their

discursive activities had a specifically local character.

Keywords European intellectuals � Russian liberalism � Culture � Backwardness

Writing about liberalism in general, and Russian liberalism in particular, is an

exceedingly difficult, thankless, and nearly hopeless task. Despite the immense

research on liberalism as a philosophical and political doctrine, political movement,

I. Narskij (&)

Center for Cultural History Studies, South Ural State University, Prospect Pobedy 290, Office 602,

454138 Chelyabinsk, Russia

e-mail: [email protected]

123

Stud East Eur Thought (2010) 62:331–352

DOI 10.1007/s11212-010-9120-0

system of governance, and cultural practice, most questions surrounding it remain

extremely tangled. Fruitful progress towards understanding this phenomenon is

hardly possible without clear answers to these questions. Amongst philosophers,

sociologists, and historians there is no clarity about this phenomenon’s definition, its

substantive core, the time of its emergence and the stages of its development, its

social bases, its interactions with the state and radical political opposition groups,

and how borrowings shaped its national invariants.1

This interpretive discord is probably explained not only by scholarship’s

evolving epistemological characteristics and the political circumstances in which

liberalism is studied, but also by the ‘‘objective’’ characteristics of this phenom-

enon’s maturation and daily existence in various parts of Europe: the duration of the

use of the term itself in the pre- and extrapolitical realms, as well the variability of

the political phenomenon described by it and its adaptability to a variety of

geographic and temporal historical contexts. Even today it is hard not to agree with

the view expressed a quarter of a century ago by Marc Raeff, the well-known

historian of Russia: neither an ‘‘absolute definition which would set forth very

clearly and precisely the specific, unchangeable, and essential components and

characteristics of an ideology or political movement’’ nor a ‘‘relativistic,’’

‘‘historicist,’’ pragmatic definition, which alters its set of traits depending on the

specific situation, has proved adequate for liberalism (Raeff 1959: 220–221).

Raeff was addressing Russian liberalism, which for a number of well-known reasons

has been studied much less systematically than its Western and Central European

counterparts. The phenomenon, which was perceived by educated contemporaries in the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (according to their own ideological biases and

political temperaments) as the embodiment of either ‘‘free thinking’’ or ‘‘cowardice,’’

‘‘magnanimity’’ or ‘‘selfishness,’’ evades clear definitions and melts into the air like a

phantom when attempts are made to analyze it ‘‘scientifically.’’ Some scholars see the

origins of Russian liberalism in the reforms of Catherine the Great and the work of

Freemasons and representatives of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, while

others doubt that it existed before 1905. A number of scholars hold that the agent of

Russian liberalism was the bureaucracy, not society, as opposed to those scholars who

express fundamental doubts about the expediency of attributing ‘‘administrative

liberalism’’ to the liberal movement.

Despite the concerted efforts of western and Soviet/Russian scholars in this area,

it has ironically proved most problematic to find convincing answers to the question

of Russian liberalism’s specific character. Russian liberalism’s difference from its

western analogues is usually attributed to adverse conditions for its development

within an autocratic political regime and a complex web of unresolved issues that

were successfully solved in Western European countries in stages over a long period

of time; the borrowed nature of liberal doctrine; the weakness of its social base,

represented mainly by the ‘‘enfranchised’’ intelligentsia; the ideological contradic-

tions and radicalism of political liberal programs; and illegal activism and sympathy

1 I have had occasion to write before on this topic. See Narskij, I.V. Rossijskij liberalizm v evropejskom i

nacional’nom kontekste. In Istorija nacional’nykh politiceskikh partij Rossii: Materialy mezdunarodnoj

konferencii. Moscow: 1997, 335–355.

332 I. Narskij

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for revolutionaries. Closer examination reveals that none of the ‘‘specifically

Russian’’ parameters of Russian liberalism is purely Russian, and that each of them

has parallels in the history (at very least) of Central and East European liberalisms.

Russian liberalism is not the focus of the present article. In this case, reference to

the problems involved in studying it is not meant to underscore the complexities of

the phenomenon (along with other, more complicated problems that we will

encounter later in this article) and thus laud the author’s ‘‘courage’’ or ‘‘outstanding

services’’ to scholarship. This brief introduction to the problematic of Russian

liberalism aims to outline the content and chronological framework of the present

mini-study. The ‘‘liberal opposition’’ is understood to mean a Russian intellectual

community whose members (whether historians or lawyers, doctors or teachers,

writers or engineers) politicized their professional spheres as a means of achieving

in the near or distant future (with the cooperation of a state capable of emancipatory

reforms) the autonomy of society (the people) by enlightening and educating it to

the level of ‘‘personality.’’ Despite the schematic nature and vagueness of this

definition, it seems suitable for outlining the chronological boundaries both of the

subject we are analyzing and the questions posed in the present article. The

discussion that follows deals not with an ‘‘objectively’’ existing but an imaginary

community of liberal intellectuals (ranging from the Westernizers of the 1840s to

the Kadets and Octobrists of the early twentieth century) that constructed notions

about the collective identity of its own group and Russian society using the concepts

of ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘backwardness,’’ ‘‘culturedness’’ and ‘‘benightedness,’’ and thus

attempted to create a hierarchy in which the ‘‘constructors’’ of collective identities

reserved for themselves the important role of intermediaries between state and

society. We pay particular attention to the preeminent role of liberally oriented

Russian historians in this process. In what follows, we must answer the question of

how and to what degree this construction of reality by Russian intellectuals

(members of the intelligentsia) coincided with the actions of intellectuals in other

European regions, and what the specific features of their discursive work were.

In order to obtain ideal-type benchmarks for comparative analysis, we must turn

to contemporary sociological notions of intellectuals, of their functions and place in

European societies.

Intellectuals as complaining heroes

In the context of the task we have set ourselves, it is expedient to omit the subtle

conceptual differences that have formed within the sociology of knowledge2 and

focus on the typical features of intellectuals as systematically set out in the research

2 For further information on European intellectuals see: Geiger, T. Aufgaben und Stellung der Intelligenz

in der Gesellschaft. Stuttgart, 1949; Mannheim, K. Ideologie und Utopie. Frankfurt, 1952; Dahrendorf, R.

Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland. Munich, 1965; Shils, E. Intellectuals, Tradition and the

Tradition of Intellectuals, in E. Shils (Ed.), Center and Periphery. Essays in Macro-Sociology. Chicago,

1975; Michels, R. Masse, Fuhrer, Intellektuelle. Frankfurt–NY, 1987; Lepsius, M.R. Interessen, Ideen

und Institutionen. Oplade, 1990; Giesen, B. Die Intellektuellen und die Nation: eine deutsche Achsenzeit.

Frankfurt, 1993; Giesen, B. Kollektive Identitat: Die Intellektuellen und die Nation 2. Frankfurt, 1999.

Intellectuals as missionaries: the liberal opposition 333

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of German sociologist Bernhard Giesen, who sees his task in elaborating and

reformulating the sociological study of intellectuals. Above all, he regards

intellectuals as a purely European phenomenon: ‘‘Although other great civilizations

also brought forth significant groups of intellectuals, intellectuals occupy a unique

position within the European tradition, as a critical ‘reflexion elite’ in highly tense

opposition to the political elite’’ (Giesen 1998: 40).

Giesen’s definition of intellectuals differs from ordinary usage of the term. He

does not include such indicators as high IQ, educational status, level of erudition,

and possession of expert knowledge in his list of characteristics indispensable for

intellectuals. According to his concept, intellectuals constitute discursive commu-

nities that lay claim to the mission of constructing the collective past, present, and

future, that is, the production of collective identities—national, class, gender, etc. It

should be especially emphasized that intellectuals see themselves as the vehicles,

custodians, and heralds of ‘‘sacred’’ knowledge concerning prospects for the

development of society (whether manifested, for example, in the ideology of

nationalism or the futurology of a classless society), a knowledge that as a rule lies

beyond their professional competence. In addition, the characteristic features of

European intellectuals include an ambivalent attitude towards state and society that

combines distancing and the effort to overcome this distance, as well as the

maintenance of their own self-isolation as a group.

Giesen examines groups of intellectuals—constructors of national identity—via

the example of Germans during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At

some distance from the surrounding society, often reflecting (and constructing) their

isolation and social ‘‘rootlessness,’’ they created images of people and nation that

offered a sense of unity and wholeness amidst the uncertainty and insecurity

generated by modernity. Although they initially emerged and circulated in narrow

intellectual circles (‘‘Phase A’’ of the national movement, to invoke Miroslav

Hroch’s terminology),3 their concepts were popularized in society in simplified

form, forcing the next generation of intellectuals to distance themselves from these

trivializations and construct new national identity projects. Among nineteenth-

century Germans, Giesen distinguishes four intellectual patterns for national

identity: educational, romantic, democratic, and real-political.

The uneven development of European countries is one of the most important

factors in the construction of national identity. Thus, advanced nations have

employed political and economic markers for their national uniqueness, whereas

‘‘backward’’ nations (not only in Central and Eastern Europe) have used the idea of

the moral superiority or cultural maturity of the pure and unspoiled people. (The

opposition of cultural nations to political nations can be traced in German

philosophical thought to Herder and the Romantics.)

Giesen distinguishes the types of coding used to construct community:

primordial coding, which is based on primary, natural traits such as skin color,

sex, and other anthropological and physiological differences; conventional coding,

3 Cf. Hroch, M. Die Vorkampfer der nationalen Bewegung bei den kleinen Volkern Europas. Eine

vergleichende Analyse zur gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung der patriotischen Gruppen. Prague, 1968;

Hroch, M. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. A Comparative Analysis of the Social

Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations. Cambridge, 1985.

334 I. Narskij

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which is based on everyday peculiarities of communication that enable its bearers to

differentiate insiders from outsiders; and, finally, cultural coding, which ‘‘con-

struct[s] borders by connecting to the immutable and eternal realm of the sacred and

sublime—quite apart from whether this is defined as God or Reason, progress or

rationality’’ (Giesen 1998: 34).

Since intellectuals constitute a discursive community, the speech acts with which

they perform classifications and typologies, generate hierarchies and ascribe

qualities, are their principal weapon. The final, cultural type of coding is the main

tool of intellectuals.

As society grows and becomes more complex, cultural coding can take on

aggressive traits. In a growing community, cultural coding ‘‘opens borders to the

practice of conquest, mission, and pedagogy. The codes are reoriented to

substantiate collective identity as all-encompassing, as responsible for everything.

[…] The missionary zeal of universally constructed communities does not just open

the borders to include outsiders, but insists on overcoming all borders and

differences. Those who resist the universalist mission are not only different and

inferior, but also misled and mistaken. Unaware of their true identity, they must if

necessary be converted against their wills. Outsiders are viewed here as empty

‘natural’ objects that first achieve identity and subjectivity through the appropriate

cultural education’’ (Giesen 1998: 35–36).

Constructing a cohesive society by defining its outer limits is, however, not

enough to consolidate the status of intellectuals as its political or moral teachers. In

this connection, intellectuals are condemned to generate not only external borders

but also internal ones, using the tool of attributing cultural differences to this end:

‘‘The most important institutional mechanism to protect the sacred center is culturalstratification. Here, the universalistic openness of the boundaries is compensated by

a stratified and layered access to the center. Boundaries are thereby leveled and

multiplied at the same time. Complex rituals of initiation and education, the burdens

and toils of learning and instruction, have to be accepted in order to approach the

center of a universalist community; only the select few, the virtuosi who have

endured all hardships and have devoted themselves entirely and without reservation

to the service of the sacred and sublime, are finally allowed to enter the central core,

and to see the secrets of the sacred revealed’’ (Giesen 1998: 36–37). Thus, the unity

and specificity of intellectuals as a social group is supported by specific institutional

agreements—complex procedures of education and internal debates that impede

entry into the group (and departure from it). The forms of communication employed

by intellectuals are varied, ranging from monastic interpretation of sacred texts and

academic disputes to interactions in salons and public debate.

The contradictory task of distributing ‘‘secret’’ knowledge within society while

preserving the status of intellectuals as its custodians generates that complex

dialectic that characterizes the birth and progress of intellectual doctrines: ‘‘As soon

as the expansive movement of the cultural mission prevails against the defensive

and conservative tendencies of stratification, then the secret of the center is

communicated by education and instruction up to the periphery. Stratification itself

does not suffice to break the inclusive movement of cultural communities and to

stabilize the constitutive tension between the sacred center and the profane outside.


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In this case, the position of the center is sometimes supported by a new pattern:

mediated and constructed by the virtuosi, ever-new interpretations and imaginations

of the sacred are invented and elaborated in the center’’ (Giesen 1998: 37). Thus, the

abundance of conceptual proposals made by intellectuals (which patriotic

consciousness often proudly figures as a sign of the wealth of national thought)

perhaps, aside from other things, signals the desire of intellectuals to maintain their

distance from society whatever the cost.

Of course, other factors also lie behind the dynamics of proposals made by

intellectuals. Among these, of considerable importance, for example, is the

development of forms of communication with a public, which in turn can reflect the

relative success of intellectuals’ missionary efforts and influence the extent to which

their ‘‘message’’ to potential recipients is radicalized. Such transformations can be

observed (including in the Russian historical record) in the ideological provision of

national movements, which, according to Miroslav Hroch’s model, transit from

Phase A (academic interest on the part of limited groups of intellectuals in the

language, folklore, and history of ethnic groups), through Phase B (nationalist

agitation via periodicals addressed to a more broadly educated public), to Phase C

(mass mobilization of the population, as embodied in the formation of political

parties and democratization of the means of indoctrination).4

Cultural coding is a matter of acquiring and maintaining power. Hence, the

problem of interactions with official political elites is crucial for intellectuals: ‘‘If

the power of the intellectuals is based on the external safeguarding of an interpretive

monopoly, then their relations to political elites and counter-elites gain a critical

significance. This is all the more so in the construction of collective identity, for the

political center attempts to substantiate itself precisely by protecting and admin-

istering collective identity. The power of intellectuals can thus always be observed

in their relation to elites. This has exceptional impact upon the sociostructural

position of intellectuals, i.e., upon their relations to other social groups’’ (Giesen

1998: 41).

The inconsistency of intellectuals’ relationship with the state arises from the

ambivalence of their tasks. In order to preserve their uniqueness, they must balance

between unconditional cooperation with the powers that be and radical opposition to

them. ‘‘Admittedly, both radical dissidence and complete convergence must be seen

as extremes. Usually the simple circumstance that a political elite is never entirely

homogenous, and cannot prevent power conflicts permanently, facilitates limited

coalitions between intellectuals and fractions of the political elite. In favorable

cases, intellectuals can end up in the position of a mediating third party, whose

judgment is made in the name of God, Reason, or Progress, and determines whether

particular claims to power can be substantiated’’ (Giesen 1998: 42).

Moreover, duality marks not only the relationship of intellectuals to the state, but

also to their own public, to which the intellectual community appeals: ‘‘[On the one

hand,] intellectuals bewail the lack of understanding from a public that is unaware,

4 Cf. Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. On the evolution of this process in the

Russian Empire, see Kappeler, A. Russland als Vielvolkerreich: Entstehung – Geschichte – Zerfall. 2.

Aufl. Munich, 1993, 177–202.

336 I. Narskij

123

insufficiently aware, or even hostile to their interpretations. On the other hand,

precisely this rejection by the public typically creates the tension that can be

understood as the interpretative head start of the intellectual avant-garde. In his or

her complaint about the public, the intellectual initially constructs the basic structure

within which he or she can gain exceptionality as an intellectual. Conversely, the

adoption of intellectual interpretations by a wider public always poses a danger to

the distinction of an intellectual’’ (Giesen 1998: 43). It is this specific feature in the

relationship of European intellectuals to their public that prompted Wolf Lepenies

to dub them the ‘‘complaining class’’ (Lepenies 1992).

It should be emphasized that in order to justify their exclusive position,

intellectuals are forced to keep aloof from practical interests and thus focus on

general problems, to disclaim responsibility for details while also declaring their

willingness to assume responsibility for the community as a whole. A consequence

of this position is that they rarely have practical access to what they interpret. As

they construct and hierarchize society, intellectuals simultaneously organize their

own marginality and isolation: ‘‘Intellectuals should isolate themselves not only

from other social groups, but also from the this-worldly requirements of situation—

and thus generate their ‘free-floating’ position themselves’’ (Giesen 1998: 50).

‘‘Russia is still in all respects a sad wasteland’’: ‘‘backwardness’’ as the basisfor the civilizing mission of intellectuals

As they familiarize themselves with the ideal-type of the European intellectual,

readers with a little knowledge of Russian history will hardly be able to shake the

feeling that it has been ‘‘cribbed’’ from a portrait of a member of the nineteenth-

century Russian intelligentsia and, in places, from that of a militant Bolshevik of the

Leninist or Stalinist mold. Like their European counterparts, Russian intellectuals of

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries structured society and justified their

prominent place in it by defining its external and internal cultural boundaries. They

maintained these lines of demarcation by distancing themselves from official power,

the ‘‘public per se,’’ and ‘‘the people,’’ thus practically fortifying their marginal

position and well-balanced self-isolation.

For Russian intellectuals, the image of Russian backwardness served as the

launching pad and starting point for validating their historic mission. ‘‘Russia […] is

still in all respects a sad wasteland; it must first plow this soil, starting from the

bottom and not the top,’’ wrote Konstantin Kavelin, one of the acknowledged

founders of Russian liberalism, in 1862 (Alafaev and Sekirinskij 2001: 67).

Researching the debates within Russian agricultural cooperatives during the post-

reforms period, Yanni Kotsonis has asked why irreconcilable groups of government

officials, zemstvo leaders, and ‘‘popular’’ health and education professionals could

engage in dialogue on the peasant question. According to Kotsonis, a minimum

consensus was achievable thanks to a common belief in the backwardness of the

peasantry: ‘‘It became clear that the main reason why these diverse and antagonistic

groups could work together in cooperatives and often elide their differences was that

their understandings of peasants were strikingly similar: peasants were silent, but


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the silent peasant was their common ground for debate, agreement, disagreement’’

(Kotsonis 1999: 3).

Strictly speaking, there was nothing specifically Russian about the thesis of

Russian backwardness in general and peasant backwardness in particular. Here we

encounter a serious epistemological problem: the basis of ‘‘objective’’ judgments on

any subject is the generation of distance between the analyzed object and the

analyzing subject. In the social sciences and humanities, this operation means that

the researcher creates a hierarchy between himself and the object of his research—a

procedure typical for the intellectual. Incidentally, this procedure should be equally

applied to the study of European (including Russian) intellectuals, something that is

unfortunately often ignored by Russian scholars of the intelligentsia. The study of

this phenomenon is also impossible without self-reflection on the part of the

researcher, without some distancing from the culture to which the researcher

himself belongs.

Thus, the attribution of backwardness to Russian peasants was not an exclusively

Russian phenomenon nor it is solely something that belongs to the archived past:

‘‘Any statement about social reality requires eliding diversity in generalization, and

dissolving personality into abstraction. The resulting conclusion that ‘nothing

should be done’ as well as a proposal that ‘something must be done’ required

abstraction and generalization, and as such were commentaries on what peasants

were, what they were not, and how, if at all, they might change. Nor was the

insistent drive to define peasants in absentia and then transform them in practice

specific to any one agenda or, indeed, any one country. In this sense, the ‘othering’

that historians, literary critics, and social scientists have come to identify as an

ominous exercise in power applies to any statement on reality and change; in its

broad form, ‘othering’ is a word for defining and speaking’’ (Kotsonis 1999: 3).

The idea of backwardness is not a self-sufficient construction, but only one

element in a binary opposition that serves to validate action (or inaction): ‘‘The key

to analyzing such diverse groups lies in the one foundation on which they all rested,

a perception of ‘backwardness’—the assumption that the peasantry was ‘backward’,

and the conclusion that ‘backwardness’ necessitated the intervention or passive

benevolence of those who were not. […] If ‘backwardness’ and ‘progress’ as a

construction was pervasive among these groups, it was as an opposition and a

taxonomy sooner than as a trajectory promising universal ‘progress.’ ‘Progress’ was

used to posit that most of the population was ‘backward,’ and in the process

precluded the emergence of an ideology in which peasants might understand

themselves, and which they might use as a basis for participation as legitimate

actors in one or another vision of a political order’’ (Kotsonis 1999: 4). The idea of

backwardness thus not only reflected reality but also generated it, sweeping aside

alternative ideologies and means of solving current problems.

The formative impact of the backwardness of the ‘‘people’’ thesis on practice is

vividly illustrated by the debates among Russian doctors during the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries on the nonvenereal origins and spread of syphilis in the

Russian countryside, as researched and described by Laura Engelstein. This medical

problem still remains unresolved, and in the context of the present article the

question of whether endemic syphilis existed in the Russian village is irrelevant.

338 I. Narskij

123

Much more important is the persistence with which Russian doctors during this

period denied the origin of venereal syphilis in the countryside, moreover, by

drawing on ideas outside their professional competence.

The participants in this protracted discussion took the Slavophile view of the

peasantry, whose traditional customs had allegedly not been affected by progress.

They imagined rural women as unblemished paragons of peasant virtue. ‘‘Not virtue

but cultural deprivation was at issue. Rural practitioners blamed the prevalence of

syphilis on poverty, ignorance, and traditional customs. They called it ‘the Russian

people’s everyday disease’’’ (Engelstein 1986: 178). As befit intellectuals, Russian

doctors politicized a purely medical problem, defending their particular mission and

taking an ambivalent stance towards the state. ‘‘Physicians had insisted that syphilis

was a ‘question of state,’ a matter of national importance to be tackled by the joint

efforts of government and society’’ (Engelstein 1986: 192). At the same time they

criticized government interference in matters of public health, stressing that official

regulation should be replaced by the authority of medicine, and the police by local

government. Only the events of 1905 undermined doctors’ notions of the ‘‘simple

folk’’ as passive victims of social circumstances and disease, and their faith in the

moral purity of the countryside. Laura Engelstein argues that it was precisely in this

connection that discussions on the nature of syphilis in Russia waned (Engelstein

1986: 198).

The allegation of Russian backwardness made by many historians was not of

course an invention of the west or a product of the Cold War. Nineteenth and

twentieth-century Russian sources teem with references to the backwardness of

Russia, and the ‘‘progressive’’ authors of these texts found evidence for this

everywhere, including in the accounts of peasants, who skillfully exploited the

stereotype of their own ignorance. The problem, however, is that the cliches created

by educated subjects of the late Russian Empire became both a standard of

‘‘culturedness’’ and part of international historiography, evolving from a research

subject into a well-established ‘‘cultural’’ and ‘‘scholarly’’ argument. In studies of

Russian history, ‘‘backwardness is ubiquitous, used to lend meaning to information

which in turn illustrates backwardness. In this sense, backwardness as a framework

of explanation is circular. […] [W]hen a fact takes its place alongside the myriad of

other facts that explain and are explained by backwardness, it becomes part of an

ideology in its own right, a framework of belief and explanation, and a basis to

prescribe and evaluate action and historical phenomena’’ (Kotsonis 1999: 4–5).

The stability of the concept of ‘‘Russian backwardness’’ as a weighty ‘‘scholarly’’

argument is attested by its popularity in the literature on Russian modernization,

despite a number of publications by historians in recent years which have

convincingly demonstrated that post-reform era Russian peasants had their own

tools and motives for discovering their civic and national identity.5

Of course, the conviction that Russia was backward was a symbol of the faith not

only amongst Russian liberals, but was also a support structure for all Russian

5 See, for example, Burbank, J. Legal Culture, Citizenship, and Peasant Jurisprudence: Perspectives from

the Early Twentieth Century. In P.H. Solomon, Jr. (Ed.), Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864–1996.

Armonk, NY, 1997, 82–106; Norris, S. A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and

National Identity, 1812–1945. DeKalb, 2006.


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intellectuals: ‘‘The Marxist and populist, as much as the classical liberal and

conservative, proceed from the premise that Russia was backward, and then debate

‘what is to be done’ about a backwardness that they all perceived’’ (Kotsonis 1999:

5). But its conscious ideological application by Russian intellectuals began with the

debates of the Westernizers and the Slavophiles in the 1840s and 1850s, during

which the framework of the Russian liberal and conservative opposition was first

articulated.

The historical flesh and blood of the ‘‘backwardness-progress’’ controversy was

found in the opposition ‘‘Russia-Europe.’’ The polemics between Slavophiles and

Westernizers was a discussion between philosophers of history, on the one hand,

and historians and legal scholars, on the other. Both sides opposed Russia to Europe

and, moreover, did not reject the possibility of considering Europe as a role model.

Yet it was less a matter of ‘‘whether to adopt something generally, and more

[a matter] of what and in what order’’ (Tauber 1990: 571). This binary opposition

was entrenched in the Russian intellectual tradition for decades to come, becoming a

constant topic of discussion amongst Russian liberal ideologues. Moreover, in these

discussions the upper hand was gained by the Westernizing conviction that,

according to Pavel Miljukov, ‘‘Historical development moves us in the same

direction that it moves every place in Europe,’’ with the proviso that ‘‘the

resemblance will never reach […] the point of total identity.’’ True, it is a bit strange

to hear from this historian and leader of the Constitutional Democrats the following

opinion on the ballast-like nature of Russian history and its bearing on the country’s

present and future: ‘‘We should not deceive ourselves and others with fear of an

imaginary betrayal of our national tradition. If our past is bound up with the present,

then only as ballast pulling us downwards, although more and more feebly with

every passing day’’ (Miljukov 1992: 29, 30, 31).

Europe and Russia remained contrasting images of progress and backwardness in

public and official Russian discourse during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Generations of intellectuals, including historians, were raised on these images, and

not only in Russia and the Soviet Union. The antithesis ‘‘Europe (the west)—Russia

(USSR)’’ was transformed from a subject of historicization into a weighty historical

argument. ‘‘The whole question of ‘Russia and the west’ is hampered by the fact

that a generalized image of the ‘west’ played a significant role within Russia,’’

writes American scholar Jane Burbank. ‘‘It is difficult to give up the comparison

with the west, and particularly the idea of backwardness, when these comparisons

were and are part of Russian culture. The elite of the imperial period themselves

made use of western ideal types in order to imagine what Russia could become or to

describe their actions. This is usually a reference to their behavior in the Russian

political and cultural context. Thus, the adoption by Russian public figures

(policymakers and public intellectuals) of the idea of ‘the west’ as the model of

progress and ‘modernity’ (as opposed to ‘backwardness’) and the idea of Russia as

an object of transformation to a great extent predetermined Russia’s historical path.

The ‘imaginary west’ became a model or anti-model for an imaginary Russia, and

this binary rhetoric closed the doors to other possibilities, to other categories of

culture. From [this] point of view, the cultural concepts of ‘Russia and the west’

340 I. Narskij

123

should be an object of historical research, not a tool (theory) of historical

interpretation’’ (Burbank 1999: 63).

In Russian intellectual discourse, ‘‘Russian backwardness’’ became (and remains)

a starting point for elaborating the concept of ‘‘culturedness.’’ Within the liberal

opposition, discussions of culture resulted in a futile search for the autonomous

personality.

‘‘Culture has barely touched them’’: in search of the developed personality

The article ‘‘Personality,’’ written by Vladimir Solov’ev for the Brockhaus and

Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, published at the end of the nineteenth century,

opens with the following definition: ‘‘Personality (philosophy) is the internal

definition of an individual being in its independence, as [a being] possessing mind,

will, and a unique character unified by self-consciousness. Since the mind and the

will are (potentially) forms of an infinite content (for we can more and more fully

understand truth and seek to implement a more and more perfect goodness), human

P[ersonality] theoretically possesses an unconditional dignity that is the basis of its

inalienable rights, which are increasingly recognized in proportion to historical

progress’’ (Brokgauz and Efron 1896: 898).

The concept of the person as a conscious, mature creature endowed with reason

and will was a commonplace in the worldview of ‘‘educated society’’ in the late

Russian Empire and a matter of particular concern for Russian liberals. The

European liberal answer to the question of whether a rational political order was

possible in principle consisted in the belief that it was feasible only by assuming the

freedom of the human personality—that is, a person that has reached a certain

level of development—and not simply of the individual per se. Russian liberal

intellectuals shared this belief. According to Konstantin Kavelin, ‘‘[F]or peoples

called to universal historical action in the new world, such existence is impossible

without the principle of personality. […] The personality, recognizing in and of

itself its infinite, unconditional dignity, is a necessary condition of any spiritual

development of a people’’ (Kantor 1999: 451). Only a personality can participate

actively in historical events: ‘‘[P]ersonalities are the official or moral leaders of the

masses,’’ noted Pavel Miljukov (Miljukov 1992: 57).

Moreover, we should emphasize that in their definition of personality Russian

liberals were far from a purely elite understanding of it. Thus, Konstantin Kavelin

underscored that in his reflections on the condition of personality in Russia, he was

not referring to ‘‘moral personality in the highest sense of the word,’’ that is, as the

result of a well-developed intellectual life. This kind of personality is everywhere an

exception to the general rule. ‘‘No, I take personality in the most simple, everyday

sense, as a clear understanding of one’s social standing and vocation, one’s external

rights and external responsibilities, as the rational setting of immediate practical

aims and the equally rational and persistent pursuit of them’’ (Kavelin 1989: 314).

Thus, liberals sought out in Russia’s past and present a personality that was the

result of ‘‘rationalization’’ in the Weberian sense or the product of the ‘‘civilizing

process,’’ to use Norbert Elias’s term.


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The problem, however, was that Russian liberals, unlike intellectuals in other

European countries (in particular, German intellectuals), did not consider the Great

Russian nation ‘‘cultural’’ or even generally formed, that is, as consisting of

individual personalities aware of their own identity (including national identity).

Thus, as he elaborated the concept of the ‘‘Russian national interest,’’ Kavelin

proceeded from ‘‘the impossibly low degree of culture of the entire ‘dominant Great

Russian tribe,’ of all strata and classes of Russian society without exception…Culture has barely touched them. Even the characteristic traits of this tribe have not

yet been formed and are developing before our eyes’’ (Alafaev and Sekirinskij 2001:

75). Decades later, Miljukov also unambiguously sided with this idea: ‘‘[T]he most

outstanding features of the Russian national treasury have proven to be complete

vagueness and the lack of a pronounced Russian national appearance. Abroad, one

often stumbles upon indirect corroboration of this conclusion. Our compatriots are

frequently recognized as Russians simply because none of the pronounced national

characteristics that would distinguish a Frenchman, an Englishman, a German or,

generally, a member of any other cultural nation of Europe can be remarked in

them. If you like, this observation contains not only a negative but also a certain

positive characterization. A people on whom culture has not made a distinct

impression, a people with a wealth of all manner of inclinations, but in elementary,

embryonic form, and, moreover, with a predominance of primitive virtues and vices,

is obviously the same people in whose social order we found… so much that is

unfinished and elementary. If you wish you can interpret this as a promise for the

future. But this is already a matter of faith, not precise knowledge’’ (Miljukov 1994:

14–15).

Liberal Russian intellectuals believed that Russia urgently needed to develop the

personal element, the ‘‘individuation of the person,’’ to use Kavelin’s expression.

They saw culture—which, according to the generally accepted conviction registered

in the reference books of the day, was the ‘‘active element,’’ ‘‘the living

crystallization of human activity’’ (Granat: 173)—as the instrument for creating

personality. Moreover, the term ‘‘culture’’ was used in two senses—‘‘culturedness,’’

i.e., ‘‘a certain degree of education,’’ and ‘‘way of life or inner condition’’ (Brokgauz

and Efron 1896). And yet historians who were adherents of cultural history (such as

Nikolaj Kareev and Pavel Miljukov) as often as not regarded their approach as a

history of daily life, refusing to see any signs of ‘‘culturedness’’ in the past of the

Russian ‘‘people.’’ In other words, in scholarly and political discourse, Russian

intellectuals used different concepts of ‘‘culture’’: in support of their public mission,

they used a notion of ‘‘culture’’ (borrowed from German literature) in the narrow

sense of the word, whose meaning the British and French conveyed with the term

‘‘civilization.’’ The dissemination of culture was associated with progress, defined

(in Kareev’s formulation) as the process of the ‘‘gradual improvement of the cultural

and social life of humanity’’ (Brokgauz and Efron 1898: 351).

Thus, Russian liberal intellectuals saw their primary mission in overcoming

‘‘backwardness’’ and spreading ‘‘culturedness’’ as the main tool for the development

of personality in Russia. Analyzing the debates among the arbiters of peasant fates

in agricultural cooperatives during the last decades of the empire, Yanni Kotsonis

concludes: ‘‘Their mission was to educate peasants in one way or another, and there

342 I. Narskij

123

was nothing neutral about that education: it presumed that something was wrong

with peasant culture (ignorance that bred disease, insularity that perpetuated

indifference to ‘progress’, submission to amoral authority, or suspicion of moral

authority), and these agents prescribed an approximation of their own urban culture

to replace it (science, rationality, literacy, written law, or consciousness of one’s

position in the regime at large)’’ (Kotsonis 1999: 12).

The zeal for enlightenment permeated not only programs for the development of

public education, but also the solution of all pressing issues in Russian life,

including proposals for political and agrarian reforms. Thus, on the eve of the Great

Reforms, Konstantin Kavelin was convinced that they were ‘‘preparing and

educating the people for political representation’’ (Kavelin 1989: 153). In the early

1880s, Boris Cicerin (a principled opponent, in the 1860s, of reorganizing the

autocracy) saw parliament as a powerful educational tool: ‘‘Parliament […] is

needed more for public education than for state administration.’’ One of the

founders of Russian liberalism, Cicerin believed that ‘‘given the immaturity of

Russian society, not much will come of it; but only in this way can it be itself

educated towards political life. It is necessary to establish a body in which public

opinion and the public will can be developed. This goal can be achieved by

attaching delegates from the nobility and zemstvo to the State Council’’ (Sekirinskij

2001: 104, 106). A quarter century later, the program of the liberal conservative

‘‘Union of October 17’’ made political reform in Russia directly dependent on the

‘‘culturedness’’ of the ‘‘masses’’: ‘‘[O]nly given an increase in the intellectual level

of the people and the dissemination of education in their midst can we expect that

they will achieve political maturity and economic prosperity. […] The very fate of

the current political reform depends to a significant degree on the consciousness

with which the population reacts to the exercise of the rights granted to them’’

(October 1992: 145).

Enlightenment and the formation of the ‘‘conscious personality’’ were also seen

to have an analogous function in agrarian reform. Konstantin Kavelin, for example,

detected an educational aim in the liberal land organization of the peasants, which

‘‘without breaking or violating their way of life, would make all sorts of successes

and improvements contingent on their gradual intellectual, moral, and economic

development’’ (Alafaev and Sekirinskij 2001: 76–77).

But who could implement a civilizing mission in a country where the

development of the autonomous personality was so belated? Liberally oriented

intellectuals saw themselves in this role. Konstantin Kavelin, for example,

considered the consolidation of intellectual forces an obligatory prerequisite for

the development of national self-consciousness and other ‘‘progressive’’ changes,

stressing the need ‘‘to create a single, close-ranked Russian national intelligentsia’’

(Alafaev and Sekirinskij 2001: 76). Recalling, in the 1870s, the literary and

philosophical circles of the 1830s and 1840s in which the battles between the early

Slavophiles and Westernizers were played out, Kavelin described them as follows:

‘‘Our educated circles then represented oases amidst the Russian people in which

the best intellectual and cultural forces were concentrated—artificial centers, with

their own particular atmosphere, in which elegant, deeply enlightened, and moral

personalities developed’’ (Kavelin 1989: 333).


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Russian liberals of the following generation identified themselves with

‘‘enlightened society’’—which was likewise an imagined community, the product

of cultural coding, the antipode of Russian ‘‘backwardness,’’ ‘‘benightedness,’’ and

‘‘ignorance’’: ‘‘In this same framework—legitimacy—one may interrogate the host

of terms and binary oppositions that historical actors employed as a matter of

commonsensical and transparent language. The casual reference to a ‘benighted’

(temnyi) group referred to the writer’s ‘enlightenment’ (prosveshchenie). ‘Society’

(obshchestvo) as used in 1914 rarely meant the whole population, as it would at a

later time, but implied membership in a small educated or propertied elite that was

‘cultured’ (kul’turnyi) and ‘civilized’ (tsivilizatsionnyi), and was used in contradis-

tinction to ‘the people’ (narod) or the depersonalized ‘masses’ (massy)’’ (Kotsonis

1999: 7).

The liberal conservative Boris Cicerin, a contemporary of Kavelin, saw

preservation of the state-supported privileged nobility as guaranteeing the success

of pro-European reforms. His motives for preserving the class privileges of the

nobility stemmed from a notion of the special moral maturity of the class, which,

according to Cicerin, ‘‘consists in a hereditary political status, in the traditions that

follow from this, in constant participation in state and elected service combined with

an independent position, in the habit of power acquired through age-old domination

of the serfs, in the education that is the privilege of the highest estate, and in the

estate’s concept of honor, which combines a sense of political duty with a

consciousness of personal dignity’’ (Sekirinskij 2001: 96). Cicerin believed that

maintaining the privileged state of the nobility would constrain bureaucratic misrule

and thus, as the bulwark of the throne and the defender of freedom, the nobility

could become ‘‘one of the most useful political elements of Russia’’ (Sekirinskij

2001: 97). It is true, however, that Cicerin intended to transform the nobility into a

more obvious cohort of intellectuals. He proposed introducing property and

educational qualifications for noblemen: 500 desyatinas of land and completion of a

course of study at university.

The problem of Russian intellectuals was, however, that the search for

‘‘conscious personality’’ in Russia ended in disappointment. Not only for the

Bolsheviks did the civilizing mission turn into contempt for the ‘‘uncivilized.’’ In

the early 1860s, Kavelin enthusiastically wrote that in Russia there is ‘‘material in

the nobility, as like as two peas to [the nobility] that reigned in England in the

eighteenth century and produced its brilliant parliamentary government.’’ By the

mid-1860s, however, his mood was no longer suffused with the same optimism:

‘‘But it is not the Russian popular masses that alone lack personality. Domestic and

public life, intellectual and all other activity, even of the educated strata of our

society, exude a lack of personality and a lack of character. Living a long time

abroad, in Europe, where individuality was defined so sharply and so temperamen-

tally, you easily learn to pick out Russians by a kind of vagueness in everything—in

outward appearance, movements, conversation, and in their very views on things’’

(Kavelin 1989: 228). Ten years later, the Russian nobility seemed to him ‘‘a kind of

patina, which so long impeded and continues to impede the development of the

masses’’ (Alafaev and Sekirinskij 2001: 67, 72). A few more years later, he would

write without any hope: ‘‘Personalities face the prospect of being turned into

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impersonal human units deprived in their moral existence of any foothold and

therefore easily replaced one by the other’’ (Kantor 1999: 456).

Such also was the position of the Russian doctors who defended the hypothesis of

the nonvenereal spread of syphilis in the countryside despite the fact that this claim

called into question the very possibility of overcoming the disease: ‘‘In the vast

majority of cases with which Russian physicians dealt, traditional mores seemed

still intact and syphilis appeared not as the result of sexual promiscuity, the egotistic

search for private pleasure in disregard of the collective norm, but as the result of

social promiscuity, a reflection of collective tyranny and the weakness of self. This

was a weakness the physicians deplored, for it inspired them with a sense of their

own helplessness. Yet they persistently rejected evidence of sexual misbehavior that

testified to the crumbling of traditional bonds. Eager for signs of personal autonomy

that could be disciplined in nontraditional ways, through self-regulation guided by

medical expertise, the sexualization of syphilis was nevertheless a strategy most

Russian physicians did not willingly embrace’’ (Engelstein 1986: 177). The

civilizing mission of liberal intellectuals in Russia was blocked by their adherence

to the idea of the hopeless ‘‘backwardness’’ of the ‘‘people,’’ which deprived the

intellectuals themselves of the hope of validating their role as its leader and

educator.

‘‘In our historiography there are more opinions than scientifically valid facts’’:the role of ‘‘Sacral’’ ideologemes in the professional knowledge of liberalhistorians

I remind readers that it is characteristic of intellectuals to claim to possess certain

knowledge that, as a rule, is not within the scope of their professional competencies.

Members of the historiographical profession were an important exception to this

rule, however. The science of history was perceived in nineteenth-century Europe—

the era of the discovery of nations, the flourishing of national movements, and the

construction of nation-states—as magistra vitae; governments and societies

expected from it clearly formulated and well-founded guideposts not only for the

road traveled but also for the road ahead. Historians found themselves possessors of

colossal power—the power to tell states and societies about their past, present, and

future—and they became professional creators of (national) identity. Unsurpris-

ingly, expert knowledge and ideological cliches were intertwined in their work in

complex ways.

Of course, Russian liberal historians were aware of the intimate relationship of

their profession with life, with the political, social and cultural demands and

expectations of state and society. Konstantin Kavelin emphasized, for example, that

interpretations of the village commune were influenced by common ‘‘notions of folk

life in general and [Russian folk life] in particular’’ (Kavelin 1989: 95). Pavel

Vinogradov acknowledged the ideological nature of the idea of progress.6 As

follows from the passage quoted above, Pavel Miljukov distinguished ‘‘matters of

6 See Korzun 2000: 167.


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faith’’ and ‘‘precise knowledge’’ in his own arguments about the level of individual

personal development in Russia.

Some historians viewed nonscientific influences on professional research work as

a stimulus, whereas others saw it as an obstacle to the development of scholarship.

Thus, Nikolaj Kareev argued that the public mission of Russian scholars generated

that selfsame discursive-group autonomy that intellectuals cared so much about:

‘‘The social position of the Russian scholar, who recognizes himself as a man of the

intelligentsia, removes him from the dead learnedness of corporate scholarship, but

at the same time he is removed from the mundane bustle… which allows him to

stand not outside of life nor in the middle of its turmoil, but above it, that is, where

the very attitude to life can be more objective and peaceful’’ (Korzun 2000: 125). As

of an obvious virtue possessed by the work of Russian scholars, Aleksandr Lappo-

Danilevskij wrote about its connection ‘‘with that that we in Russia call the idea; for

the Russian scholar there is no science outside of life and without life’’ (Korzun

2000: 136).

Vasilij Kljucevskij took a different stance, stating with some irritation: ‘‘In our

historiography there are more opinions than scientifically valid facts, more doctrines

than disciplines. This part of the literature gives more material for characterizing the

contemporary development of Russian society than directions for studying our

‘past’’’ (Kljucevskij 1983: 160). Pavel Miljukov, who was both a politician and a

scholar, held an ambiguous and shifting point of view. Before the 1905 Revolution

he considered the influence of the historian on the politician beneficial and the

reverse influence undesirable. In the years of the first Russian revolution, the fusion

of history and politics (with the loss of autonomy this entailed for scholarship)

seemed invigorating to him. In emigration, he again contrasted the gaze of the

historian with the blindness of the politician.7

The historian’s inability to attain absolute objectivity, the view from nowhere,

the position of God has long been an undisputed maxim of historiographical and

general scientific self-reflection. The course and outcome of research is impacted by

numerous factors—from socialization and ideological preconceptions to personal

experience and the passing moods of the scholar. And yet there is still reason to

distinguish prescientific influences or ‘‘prejudices’’ (Gadamer) and impulses coming

from other disciplines.

The impact of prescientific preconceptions on the work of Russian historians is

perfectly illustrated by Boris Cicerin’s recollections about his acquaintance with

Slavophilism. The memoirist writes honestly that to understand Slavophile views at

a young age was too much for him. In his skeptical attitude towards them he was

influenced by his own provincial experience, common sense, and the position of his

father. For Cicerin, who had just arrived in Moscow, the preaching of the

Slavophiles ‘‘ran counter to all notions that could develop in my youthful soul. […]

They wanted to convince me that the entire upper echelon of Russian society, which

had submitted to the influence of the Petrine reforms, despised all things Russian

and blindly worshipped everything foreign—which I, living within Russia, had

never seen in my life. They assured me that the highest ideal of humanity was those

7 For more details, see Korzun 2000: 160, 162, 163.

346 I. Narskij

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same peasants among whom I lived and had known since childhood, and this

seemed to me absolutely absurd. […] All this to such an extent contradicted the

promptings of the simplest common sense, that for outsiders who had come, like us,

from the provinces, and were not clouded by the logomachies of the Moscow salons,

the Slavophile party seemed like some sort of strange sect’’ (Cicerin 1991: 20, 21).

It was precisely this skepticism about the cultural conditions of the peasantry,

acquired in his youth, that prompted in Cicerin an instantaneous, almost automatic

negative reaction to any attempt to idealize them, whether Slavophilism, populism

or the quest of Lev Tolstoy, about whom Cicerin wrote somewhat ironically:

‘‘Everything came down finally to the worship of the mind and activity of the

muzhik. The muzhik’s wisdom was passed off as the height of human wisdom;

physical labor was deemed the only useful and normal form’’ (Cicerin 1991: 153).

But prescientific ‘‘prejudices’’ could be transformed into professional knowledge.

And here, too, the example of Boris Cicerin is telling because he was hugely

influenced by Hegelianism. The young historical science of the nineteenth century

remained in thrall to philosophy, which since the mid-century had caused legitimate

doubts among historians such as Johann Droysen. In 1844, Timofej Granovskij’s

thesis that ‘‘the true meaning of history’’ lay in ‘‘the gradual development of various

aspects of the human spirit’’ (Cicerin 1991: 16) had made a strong impression on

Cicerin, who was then planning to enter university. During his student years, Cicerin

earnestly studied the philosophy of Hegel, which earned him the nickname ‘‘Hegel’’

among his peers and gradually transformed the initial symbol of faith into his own

professional knowledge, developed with painstaking labor: ‘‘At this time that

philosophical-historical knowledge which formed, one might say, the skeleton of all

my subsequent works and whose construction was the main task of my life, had

already begun to take shape in me. It arose from a comparison of the philosophical

and political development of mankind. […] The entire historical development of

mankind gained meaning for me. History seemed to me like a real image of the

spirit, which expounded its decisions in accordance with the eternal laws of reason

intrinsic to it. This was not a general idea that I accepted on faith, but a fact that

revealed itself in phenomena. The sheer variety of events and peoples composed a

general tableau vivant in which each detail became an organic member of the

combined whole. All my subsequent works have served only to confirm this view.

Of course, with ever-greater study of the sources, particularities were presented in a

different light, but each thoroughly researched detail not only did not refute the

basic principles of my views, but also provided new reinforcement for them as it

were. The meager sketch was filled with more and more content’’ (Cicerin 1991:

66, 67).

Konstantin Kavelin followed a similar trajectory, from accepting an idea on faith

to expert knowledge. With some certainty we can state that the catalyst of all his

professional work was Chaadaev’s speculative thesis (which Kavelin took on faith)

that history is moved by the developed personality, and that the absence of the latter

explains the alleged immobility of the Russian past. Kavelin attempted to affirm the

lack of the personality’s development in Russian history by citing the unprovable

(from a scientific point of view) difference evinced by the Germanic tribes, who

apparently developed a ‘‘deep sense of personality’’ early as a result of protracted


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wars and migrations, which the Eastern Slavs did not experience. ‘‘The Russian-

Slavic tribes represent a completely different phenomenon. Quiet and peaceful, they

have lived continuously on their lands. The personality principle did not exist for

them. Family life and relations could not foster in Russian Slavdom the sense of

uniqueness, of concentration, that compel a man to draw a sharp line between

himself and others, and always and in all things to distinguish himself from others.

[…] Here man is somehow blurred; his powers, not concentrated by anything, are

bereft of elasticity, of energy, and are dissolved in a sea of intimate, peaceful

relations. Here man is lulled: he gives himself up to rest and morally slumbers. He is

trusting, weak, and carefree, like a child. A deep sense of personality is out of the

question’’ (Kavelin 1989: 20, 22).

In the works of Konstantin Kavelin, all of Russian history is transformed into a

master narrative about the metamorphoses of personality, which explain ancient

Russian history, the career of Peter the Great, and the rapprochement with Europe:

‘‘We did not have the personality principle: ancient Russian life created it; from the

eighteenth century it began to act and develop. That is why we have grown so close

to Europe; for, by a completely different path, it had at this time arrived at the same

goal with us. Having developed the personality principle to the utmost in all its

historical, narrow, exclusive definitions, [Europe] sought to give free range to manin civil society and recreated this society. In [Europe] there also ensued a new order

of things that was opposite to the previous historical order, which had been national

in the narrow sense of the word. But here, along with the personality principle, man

entered the scene of historical action directly because personality did not exist in

ancient Russia and consequently had no historical definitions. The one and the other

should not be forgotten when speaking about borrowing and the reforms of Russia

in the eighteenth century: we did not borrow from Europe her exclusively national

elements; they had then disappeared or were in the process of disappearing. In both

Europe and Russia then it was a question of man; whether consciously or

unconsciously does not matter’’ (Kavelin 1989: 66).

In this regard, the specific character of Kavelin’s notion of culture should be

noted, as it is closely linked with his view of Russian history and the lack of

development of personality in modern Russia. The harshness of his remark, for

example, that when the Great Russians moved eastwards in the eleventh and twelfth

centuries ‘‘they did not bring with them any culture: neither intellectual nor civic’’

(Kavelin 1989: 197) ceases to seem strange if we bear in mind that Kavelin

considered urban communities, feudal relations, aristocratic strata, and the division

of property to be elements of culture. For him, ‘‘culture’’ was synonymous with

‘‘society’’ and was imagined as a kind of universal and cumulative process that was

inextricably linked with progress. It is not by chance that Kavelin used the phrase

‘‘degree of culture,’’ whose presence in the vocabulary of a contemporary proponent

of cultural history is difficult to imagine.

In Pavel Miljukov’s historiographical work, belief in the idea of progress was

closely bound with the notion of culture and the history of culture. He himself

admitted in the 1930s, 40 years after the first edition of Outlines of Russian Culture,

that in that work ‘‘the very concept of ‘culture’ [was] not fully clarified’’ (Miljukov

1992: 57). Following Humboldt, Miljukov separated culture into material and

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spiritual, denoting them with the terms ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘civilization.’’ In accordance

with tradition, he defines ‘‘internal’’ history as the subject of ‘‘everyday or cultural’’

history, while ‘‘external’’ history is the subject of ‘‘pragmatic, political’’ history.

The failure to define the scope of ‘‘cultural history’’ led to inevitable discord in

determining cultural history’s content. One group of historians included state

development among the objects of ‘‘cultural history,’’ a second group, social

dynamics; and a third group, economic evolution. Finally, some scholars narrowed

culture to ‘‘spiritual culture’’ and interpreted its history as the ‘‘history of the

intellectual, moral, religious, and aesthetic life of mankind’’ (Miljukov 1909: 3).

Miljukov extracted himself from a difficult situation by expanding the list of

objects of ‘‘cultural history’’ to its limit, elegantly rejecting the building of

hierarchies among individual aspects of ‘‘culture,’’ and firmly welding culture to

progress. ‘‘In light of this, it seems best of all to return to the original use of the term

‘cultural’ history, i.e., to use it in the broader sense in which it embraces all aspects of

internal history: economic, social, state, intellectual, moral, religious, and aesthetic.

This will, of course, eliminate only some of the terminological confusion; the

question of which of these aspects of social life must be considered central or

fundamental, and which secondary or derivative, remains open. Not so long ago,

historians assumed that development of the spiritual element was the basis of the

historical process; recently, the opposite view has dominated, according to which the

material conditions of production determine the entire content of history. Both these

views seem equally one-sided to us, and arguing over the primacy of one or another

element of cultural history also does not seem particularly fruitful to us. We must, of

course, distinguish the simpler phenomena of social development from the more

complex, but we consider entirely hopeless attempts to reduce the abovementioned

aspects of historical evolution to any single one of them. If simple and complex can

be distinguished anywhere, then it is not in the different aspects of human nature but

in the various stages of its development. In this latter sense, the development of each

aspect of historical life begins from the simple and ends in the complex. The closer to

the beginning of the process, the more elementary are manifestations of the various

aspects of life, material and spiritual, and the closer these aspects are bound to each

other. The farther the process evolves, the more do different aspects of the process

detach themselves from each other, and the more complicated the product of their

interaction becomes’’ (Miljukov 1909: 3–4).

Liberally oriented Russian historians professionally performed tasks that other

groups of intellectuals took upon themselves without being experts in the production

of identities. Moreover, liberal historians marshaled master narratives, coherent

messages claiming to be ‘‘the authoritative account of some segment of history—

say, the history of a nation’’ (Megill 2007: 67). The core of these narratives was

constituted by ideologemes that had themselves become an integral part of Russian

culture: belief in the irreversibility and creative power of progress, and in European

scholarship and enlightenment, which sooner or later would ensure the formation of

a full-fledged personality, worthy of freedom, independence, and corresponding

state and legal institutions. Moreover, as befits intellectuals, liberal historians

assigned their own corporation a preeminent and even decisive role in solving soci-

ety’s most pressing problems. They saw scholarly work as the highest manifestation


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of the developed personality, and historiography as the principal mentor of

personality, which according to them was so scarce in Russia: ‘‘Henceforth, only

deep study of ourselves in the present and past can balance intellectual and moral

strengths with reality, and unite thought and life into one harmonious body. There is

and can be no other way’’ (Kavelin 1989: 255). Any Russian historian of the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would definitely have seconded Kavelin’s

decisive opinion.

The characterization of the liberal in the broad sense as a ‘‘supporter of social

progress in the form of evolution’’ (Stepanskij 1999: 169) is probably sufficient for

political history and the traditional history of ideas, but can hardly be considered

exhaustive for the new cultural and intellectual history. As we consider Russian

liberalism we should not forget that it ‘‘was neither classical nor post-classical. It

was a type of intellectual liberalism that emerged and was formed primarily on a

theoretical level within an inadequate environment’’ (Selokhaev 1999: 31).

The functions and rituals of Russian liberals as an intellectual movement did not

differ from the functions and rituals of similar groups in Western, Central, and

Eastern Europe. Like their counterparts in other European societies, Russian

intellectuals constructed a national identity, structured and hierarchized an

imaginary community, maintained a distance from the state, and complained about

the public’s lack of understanding. Like German intellectuals, who were the first to

recognize the tardiness of their nation in comparison to their western neighbors and

in a certain sense ‘‘prepared the most easily adoptable version of modernizing

innovations for new arrivals’’ (Visnevskij 1998: 31), Russian liberal intellectuals

sensed and maintained their loneliness, self-isolation, and exclusion from partic-

ipation in political decisions.

However, in support of their civilizing mission, a mission that also typified

western intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Russian liberals went too far. Their

concept of Russian ‘‘backwardness’’ became a universally normative explanation

for various problems of Russian reality, and the foundation for cultural coding of

their own identity: ‘‘The fact that few stepped forward to identify themselves as

backward should alert us to some of the rhetorical and legitimizing functions of the

term. The person wielding the term in an arsenal of vocabulary posits that he or she

is ‘advanced’ and able to comment on others who are rendered illegitimate by their

backwardness’’ (Kotsonis 1999: 7).

The position of Russian liberal intellectuals was particularly vulnerable in the

late Russian Empire, when the masses of the Russian population began to stir. In

this situation, the concept of the country’s ‘‘backwardness’’ and the immaturity of

the population blocked the very idea of recruiting the population to political

activism. ‘‘It was the fact of mass mobilization that gave left and right a common

arena and a common foundation for activity in much of Europe, so that a modern

politics could emerge in the guise of conservatism and reaction as well as liberalism

and socialism, introducing mass participation if only in order to argue against it.

This crucial element, paradox and all, was beginning to make an appearance in

urban Russia, where socialist mass mobilization, as well as an unmistakable

dirigisme, was discernable in the early twentieth century. Dirigisme was certainly a

characteristic of the educated groups involved in rural affairs, but mobilization was

350 I. Narskij

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not to be found even among the one group—the professionals—that spoke about

peasants in the language of citizenship. There was little effort at enlistment of

village elites, little attempt to cultivate a new elite, and little negotiation and

compromise with rural populations’’ (Kotsonis 1999: 185).

Arguably, Russian liberals felt even more isolated than their German counter-

parts. A lack of attention from state institutions and the population’s indifference

only exacerbated their belief both in the backwardness of their potential audience

and the absence in Russia of a ‘‘cultural’’ personality in sufficient quantities to

constitute the Great Russian nation. As a result of attempts to validate their moral

leadership and civilizing mission, they sooner or later came to naught over their own

reluctance to rally the greater public to their cause, much more the masses of the

(rural) population, which they deemed insufficiently ‘‘cultured.’’

Translated from the Russian by Thomas Campbell

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