Seventeenth-Century Europe in Eighteenth-Century Russia? (Pour prendre congé du dix-huitième siècle russe)

Seventeenth-Century Europe in Eighteenth-Century Russia? (Pour prendre congé du dix-huitième siècle russe)Author(s): Marc RaeffSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 1982), pp. 611-619Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2496860 .

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_DISCUSSION

MARC RAEFF

Seventeenth-Century Europe in Eighteenth-Century Russia? (Pour prendre conge du dix-huitieme siecle russe)

Centuries are conveniently employed as units of periodization, at any rate in modern European historiography. Such a division of time implies that each century possesses a physiognomy of its own, distinguishing it from those preced- ing and those following it, and imparting some sort of coherence to all events that occurred within its limits. That the strict chronological boundaries of a century may not always be observed in such periodization (for example, 1715 to 1789 passes as the eighteenth century in French history) need not unduly disturb us. The minor chronological discrepancies do point, however, to a significant aspect of this standard as a unit of periodization. The fact that the unit varies depending on which element of past life (political, economic, religious, cultural, or any other) is chosen as the determining criterion means that the "century" differs from country to country. Traditionally, reigns have served to define a historical period, although specific political events, for instance revolutions, may have been more significant. In some instances, a century has been defined in terms of events in different realms of public life; thus, in the case of France, the eighteenth century denotes both the "age of Enlightenment" and the prodrome of "1789 and all that." I restate here the obvious in order to call attention to an aspect of historical reflection that is not always acknowledged: one may, for example, speak of eighteenth-century France or of Germany in the eighteenth century, but it is quite possible that, depending on the criteria used, features associated with one century in one country may appear in a different chronological unit in another country.

Periodization of modern European history has traditionally been based on the experience of France: politically, the seventeenth century in that country stretches from the assassination of Henry IV in 1610 to the death of Louis XIV in 1715, while the eighteenth century ends abruptly and symbolically on July 14, 1789 (or, according to some historians, on the night of August 4 of the same year). In cultural terms the seventeenth century in France is the period of classical literature, just as the eighteenth is the age of the philosophes. This periodization is inadequate, however, when we talk about the social and economic history of the country. We see, for example, that economically and socially the Ancien Regime prevailed well into the nineteenth century. Similar chronological discrepancies can be found in the socioeconomic history of other

This essay is based on a talk given at the first meeting of Harvard University's study group for the eighteenth century and on a lecture delivered at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in July 1981.



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European countries. In the case of France, separation of the eighteenth from the nineteenth century has been determined by political events, more particularly by the Revolution of 1789 - an event that had no exact counterpart in any other country. From a cultural and intellectual standpoint, on the other hand, Euro- pean history in the eighteenth century is supposedly characterized by a certain unity: in all of Europe one can see the progress and triumph of the Enlighten- ment. But as recent German and Italian scholarship has shown, there were several national kinds of Enlightenment with somewhat different chronological limits, and the Enlightenment in Central Europe, for instance, received its particular cachet from the Age of the Baroque which preceded it.

In Russian history, we find that the boundaries of the seventeenth century are defined by the end of the Times of Troubles and the accession of Mikhail Romanov in 1613 and by the beginning of Peter I's personal rule in 1694. The eighteenth century stretches from the latter date to the accession of Alexander I in 1801. Politically, the eighteenth century in Russia is a well-defined period, characterized by the institutional and cultural transformations brought about by Peter the Great. It is important to stress, however, that from the point of view of social history the eighteenth century in Russia does not constitute a separate period, for its major feature, serfdom and the socioeconomic relationships deriving from it, took shape earlier in the seventeenth century and did not disappear until the middle of the nineteenth. As for Russia's cultural development, one thinks of the Europeanization of its elites that was initiated during the reign of Peter the Great and culminated in the creation of a modern Rus- sian language and literature by Pushkin in the 1820s. With these qualifications, the chronological eighteenth century in Russia constitutes a historical period that is heuristically convenient and hallowed by custom.

Nevertheless, we should be aware that chronological discrepancies, deca- lages, may exist, depending on the area of public life considered. One realm may display features of one century while a different realm may manifest the traits of another. In short, we may find several "centuries" jostling one another in the same polity, at different levels of its society and culture. It is these chronological discrepancies, this jostling of features from different centuries that determines the particular dynamics of the polity's development. It is particularly important to single out and analyze these discrepancies in the case of a society making conscious efforts to imitate the principal features of another polity. This is precisely what is interesting about the study of the impact that the reforms introduced by Peter I had on the development of Russia in the eighteenth century.

Despite some obvious continuities in the culture and life of the people during the period, the reign of Peter I marked a caesura in the destinies of Russia's elites and central institutions. In fact, it was a shift rather than a break - a ninety-degree turn that transformed the Muscovite polity into the All-Russian Empire of St. Petersburg. The nature and cost of this reorientation were to determine the evolution of Russia until 1917, and perhaps even to our day. Although its specific features owed a great deal to the personality and ways of the "Tsar Reformer," there were two major causes for this development. In the first place, the weakness and crisis experienced by the Muscovite polity demanded a change. Muscovy's weakness and decline were due to a number of factors; suffice it to mention here only the following: the church schism which



Eighteenth-Century Russia 613

shattered the religious and cultural consensus; wars and social conflicts; acceler- ated westernization given additional force by the annexation of the Ukraine. Muscovy seemed incapable of mobilizing on its own the energy and strength needed to overcome the weakness and arrest the decline. It was in the throes of a "crisis without alternative," to use the felicitous expression coined by Christian Meier to describe the last period of the Roman republic. And yet - and here we come to the second cause for the transformation of the Muscovite polity - an alternative offered itself at the very end of the seventeenth century. It came in the form of the political culture that had taken shape in Western and Central Europe. By political culture I mean simply the sum total of ideas and institutions that provide a framework for the public life of a polity.

A few words may be in order at this point to characterize this newly developed European political culture, which, it should be noted, was the product of the seventeenth century, the baroque and classical century. As I have described and argued it elsewhere, the new political culture of Western and Central Europe embodied the theories of cameralism and the practices of the well-ordered Polizeistaat. This new culture achieved its fullest expression, and the form that Russia could most easily imitate, in the territorial states of Germany after 1648, even though its intellectual antecedents go back to the sixteenth century, and even though its forerunners are to be found in Holland, England, and, to a lesser extent, Colbert's France. This new political culture aimed at maximizing the polity's creative and productive potential by purpose- fully using the knowledge of the laws of nature as obtained through man's reason (hence the popularity of stoic philosophy). In the social realm the new culture entailed a policy of "rational constructivism," to use Friedrich von Hayek's phrase, and, more specifically, the "disciplining of society" to obtain productive work that would allow investment for the greater benefit of the polity in the future. In short, it meant thinking and acting in terms of a "high time horizon," to borrow Alexander Gerschenkron's expression. To attain the goal of maxi- mized productivity, legislation had to be initiated and implemented by the central political authority; in turn, such legislation led to the tentacular spread of the sovereign's power and competence to all areas of public life. Because of technological limitations on the actions of central institutions, however, the sovereign sought to coopt various social groups and constituted bodies such as estates and corporations - Montesquieu's famous corps intermediaires. For only with the help of these constituted bodies could the policy of disciplining society and maximizing its productivity be effectively put into practice. The attractiveness of the Polizeistaat lay in its coherence, rationality, and goal directedness. It could be copied whole to provide a comprehensive approach to enhancing the wealth, power, and glory of sovereign and nation, and in the case of "underdeveloped" countries like Muscovy, it provided a ready-made mold for the Europeanization (or "modernization") of institutions and culture.

The Muscovy of Tsar Peter was able to take advantage of this model by transplanting it to its soil. The preconditions for understanding and accepting it had been initially elaborated in the Ukraine, which served as a major transmis- sion agent for the relevant legal and philosophical literature of the West and for the needed intellectual skills, including neoscholastic thought and modern rhetoric and logic. From Kiev knowledge of these trends and techniques was brought to Moscow. In addition, a steady influx of foreigners brought Western



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notions and practices to Russia. It should be stressed that the foreigners who came to Russia, whether to stay permanently or temporarily, were rarely intellectual or scientific personalities of the first order. They were not familiar with what constituted the "frontiers" or avant-garde scholarship, science, and technology at the time. They were, by and large, ignorant of (or did not understand) the new fashions and stirrings among the West European intellectual and professional elites. Attracted by high salaries and adventure, the foreign technicians and artisans who came to Russia during the reign of Peter I brought with them the knowledge and the intellectual concerns of the middle of the seventeenth century, rather than those of the beginning eighteenth. Des- cartes rather than Newton dominated the scientific thinking of both the foreigners and their Russian pupils in Peter's time. It was not a Leibniz or Christian Wolff, but rather a Blumentrost who helped launch the Academy of Sciences. And it was no accident that the narrow mediocrities from the Pietist foundations of Halle, where the spirit of the seventeenth century still prevailed, played a prime role in the westernization of Russia's elite culture, as has been demon- strated by Eduard Winter and his pupils.

Let us not forget either that many (although we do not know either their numbers or group characteristics) among the Muscovite elites were prepared to adopt the new European political culture; they were even eager to do so, for it promised a rewarding way to apply their creative energy and enterprising spirit. All those who wanted to obtain more from life and society, all those who wanted to rise in status and improve their economic position, all those who aspired to a fuller and more satisfying intellectual life were ready to follow their young tsar in his efforts to westernize Russia in the spirit of the new political culture. All too often it is forgotten - the work of Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, Shmurlo and others notwithstanding - that Peter was not alone. He found among the Muscovite elites (in the boyar clans), as well as in the lower rungs of the service classes and among non-serving commoners, individuals willing to work for him, because he was offering not only an outlet for their energies but also a new goal for their ambitions; and he alone could hold out the promise of adequate material compensation and cultural rewards. Is not the roster of the "fledglings of Peter's nest" graphic illustration of the situation?

However, Muscovy did not possess constituted bodies or similar estate and corporate structures that could be coopted to implement the Polizeistaat - or at any rate these structures were in too weak and disarrayed a state by the end of the seventeenth century to be of any account. Peter I had to create his own officialdom, a new bureaucracy as it were. But because of technological and fiscal limitations this new bureaucracy could be created on the level of the central institutions only. Thus the Petrine state was prevented from penetrating into the very fabric of Russian society in the manner of the Polizeistaat of Central and Western Europe. The state could not fully "discipline" all of Russian society, especially not the common people, the peasantry. As a result, Peter's efforts bore fruit only among the service elites whose upper rungs he managed to reeducate and to discipline. To be more precise, Peter initiated a process that did not come to fruition until after his death. Most of the nation, including all those from the conservative elites who resisted the innovations (whether for social, cultural, religious, or personal reasons), remained within the purview of seventeenth-century traditional culture, beyond the reach of the




transformations wrought by Peter the Great. Thus the reign of the first emperor produced a confrontation between two "seventeenth centuries": that of Euro- pean political culture and that of the traditional Muscovite order. This conflict, as well as Peter's concentration on the central institutions and their officials, prevented the restructuring of Muscovite society needed to bring into being the corps intermediaires which would effectively implement the new political culture on a national or, better, imperial scale. The death of Peter the Great opened the way to a set of contradictory developments that dominated Russia's public life until the last third of the eighteenth century.

On the one hand, we observe growing effort on the part of the state to guide and supervise all aspects of public life: in the economic realm through regula- tions and the promotion of manufacturing and trade and in the cultural realm by forcing the elite to adopt a western way of life and encouraging intellectual concerns through education and the example of the court in St. Petersburg. Through schooling and through service in the "constructivist" (not to say "dirigiste") state establishment, members of the elites became involved in the Polizeistaat practices and cameralist goals of the imperial administration. It is important to repeat that this service elite was not in a position, either quantita- tively or qualitatively, to affect the whole of society. The members of the service elite were themselves too poor and too uneducated for such a role, and, most importantly, they were not numerous enough. Moreover, the preparation they received in the new educational establishments and through apprenticeship in the military was too theoretical and abstract and not sufficiently empirical and realistic, so that the transfer from principle to practice was not easily made. All too often, therefore, the state apparatus hung in mid-air, as it were, and did not significantly affect the population at large. The idea put forth by Maurice Hauriou, on the basis of his acquaintance with West European history, that "administration is the substratum of society" would not find its realization in the Petrine empire.

On the other hand, the people continued to live within the framework of their seventeenth-century culture and traditions, and they did so with a ven- geance. In opposition to the efforts of the Petrine Polizeistaat, the common people clung to their accustomed beliefs and practices. When popular culture cuts itself off from interplay - however limited - with the more aggressive and creative elite cultures, it tends to become ossified and sterile. In the case of the Old Believers, rejection of and opposition to the new culture took overt, at times violent, forms. The massive revolts that rocked the imperial administration throughout the eighteenth century resulted from their alliance with Cos- sacks, non-Russians, and other minority groups. This explains also the fact that in the late nineteenth century, when popular culture rejoined the mainstream of national culture, it bore all the characteristics of its seventeenth-century heritage.

On a parallel plane, we observe another apparently contradictory trend which is still inadequately understood. The Petrine state assisted and supported energetic groups and individuals in their drive for material progress and profits. The large modernized military establishment, the increasingly lavish style of life at the imperial court and among the nobility, the constantly expanding administrative apparatus all increased the demand for goods and services. This demand could not be met by imports from abroad; it had to be satisfied from domestic



616 Slavic Review

sources and so required the active participation of enterprising individuals and groups. Contracts and deliveries, whether state or private, involved merchants, artisans, even peasants, sometimes on a large scale, and payments of huge sums. This in turn fostered more active exchanges between regions and between town and countryside, bringing about greater mobility of goods and persons. Both service nobility and serf peasantry moved between rural and urban milieus, and this mobility presumably led to the dissemination of Euro- pean ways of life and articles of consumption in the countryside, as well as to the adoption by some strata of the serf peasantry of a new, western style of life and outlook (a process some may call forcible cooptation). To what extent the new ways took root in the rural world is hard to say. Surely some development must have taken place, or else Russia's rapid modernization in the nineteenth century would have been quite inconceivable. This important problem requires a new approach in our investigation of published documents and archival sources.

Such developments, quite modest in the first half of the eighteenth century, but certainly of major significance in its second half, required regularity and predictability in interpersonal relations as well as security of property. The state had to offer the protection the laws provided, as well as the security of regularized administrative and political authority to promote expansion of exchanges and mobility. In the West a form of institutionalization allowing for "high time horizons" had been a reality at least since the reception of Roman law in the sixteenth century. The elaboration of modern legal procedures and the efforts at unification of customs and law undertaken by the Polizeistaat in the seventeenth century culminated in the codifications of the eighteenth. The strategic role played in this crucial development by the legal profession has been amply documented. Russia, however, had not known any of these earlier developments, and it did not succeed in the eighteenth century (and not, in fact, until well into the nineteenth) in bringing about a "modern" legal consciousness and culture, with regularity of procedures, security of person and property, and respect for the law and its application by autonomous institutions.

These urges toward mobility were in sharp contradiction to the seventeenth- century fetters and rigidities of the Russian social fabric. More so than Western and Central Europe before the advent of cameralism and the well-ordered Polizeistaat, Russian society was immobilized by the restraints of state service (affecting the upper class), the bonds of serfdom (involving the peasantry), and the perpetuation of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century structures of family and clan, which resulted in a narrow clientele system within the government establishment. Besides tying the peasant to the land and to his owner, serfdom also strengthened the controlling power and rigidity of the village community (mir), thus preventing individual peasants from taking full advantage of the mobility and opportunity that the well-ordered police state of Peter I offered them. By the same token, these rigid social patterns precluded the use of existing social formations in reeducating and disciplining society, as had been possible in the case of the constituted bodies of the West.

Of particularly great importance - and of negative impact on rapid "modernization" - was the preservation of the traditionally personalized character of authority in Russia. As had been the case in the seventeenth century, authority in the eighteenth century remained attached to the person who




exercised it rather than to the institution or formal structure the individual represented or embodied. This entailed the perpetuation of arbitrary, capri- cious, and tyrannical behavior on the part not only of the autocrat who set the example, but also of all officials and persons of authority. The full implementa- tion of the Polizeistaat was thus checked by the survival of seventeenth-century Muscovite social structures and political culture. Most important of all, person- alization of power meant that a genuine officialdom, not to speak of a bureaucracy, could not take root in Russia. Without a comprehensive and adequate legal code, without an integrated and well-trained corps of officials, and without the possibility of making appeal to and using constituted bodies, the central government could not bring seventeenth-century European political culture to Russia. Here we see another form of the conflict between the two different aspects of the seventeenth century. Here we also see clearly the basic paradox and dilemma of the well-ordered police state, namely the difficulty or impossibility of bringing about, through the agency of state regulation, a creative society whose members would be possessed of the spirit of enterprise and initiative. The dilemma faced by enlightened despotism in the West, when progress and productivity had become ends in themselves, was magnified in the case of Russia where central institutions seemed to hang in mid-air and to stifle the social initiative and individual enterprise of men who, on the whole, still lived in the seventeenth- century cultural and psychological environment.

Awareness of these contradictions, and of the problems they gave rise to, informed Catherine II's legislation. Realizing that the framework of central administrative institutions which Peter had set up had not become adequately established on the local level, Catherine endeavored to give Russian society a structure which would bring into being the estates and intermediate constituted bodies essential to the proper functioning of the well-ordered cameralist Polizei- staat. This was the purpose of the charters to the nobility and to the towns (1785), the Ustav blagochiniia (1782), and the project of a charter for the state peasants (partly implemented in the Ukraine). Whatever Catherine's success in this principal endeavor, her legislation, administrative practice, and cultural policies quite clearly promoted the emergence of a civil society based on culture and education. Such a civil society might offer a countervailing and alternative focus of authority in the cultural realm and at the same time help the state reach its goal of westernization and modernization.

Most significantly, Catherine II allowed, even encouraged, the ideas of the Enlightenment to spread. Here again, mutatis mutandis, we find ourselves confronted by the paradox stemming from chronological discrepancies, just as we did in the case of westernization under Peter the Great. In the case of Peter, we saw that Western cultural accomplishments came to Russia mainly in their seventeenth-century and German guise: Leibniz, Wolff, the Pietists had been the main purveyors of this intellectual westernization, and their pupils had participated actively in the institutional materialization of this culture in Russia.1 Thus Russia received the natural law of the seventeenth century in its German form, which stressed obligations and duties to the collective rather than individual rights. Moreover, the German expressions of seventeenth-century juridical-

1. I should also remind the reader of the continuing role played by seventeenth-century styles ("baroque") in the artistic creation of the St. Petersburg empire in the eighteenth century.



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philosophical concepts were far from unsympathetic to church and religion. Partly as a result of the influence that Pietism and Protestantism exerted on the Petrine ecclesiastical establishment, Russian educated society also became re- ceptive to the personal, mystical, inner forms of religious life that were to inform its thinking on social and political matters.

The process of assimilation of this seventeenth-century German heritage was a long and arduous one. It is not surprising that Russia did not participate in, or follow, the Western evolution from the seventeenth-century intellectual modes to the genuine lumieres, in their Anglo-French garb, as they triumphed by the end of the first third of the eighteenth century. The individualistic, empiricist, liberal aspects of the Enlightenment largely passed Russia by, at any rate until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in favor of the acceptance and thorough assimilation of the German forms of natural law jurisprudence and philosophy that led to the reception of the German Aufklarung with its emphasis on religion, community obedience, and emotion. Consequently, when the Russian elites under Catherine II turned to the ideas of the philosophes, they discovered the more radical late Enlightenment of Rousseau, Mably, and Raynal, whose ideas were also community-oriented and sympathetic to the affective aspects of human nature. The reception of the radical French Enlight- enment occurred, therefore, within the mental framework of the German Aufklarung (or more precisely, to use Winter's classification, Fruhaufkldr- ung) and led to the ready acceptance of sentimentalism and early romanticism. Moreover, Russia did not share the main philosophical concerns of the Enlight- enment, its epistemological and critical questionings, which were bound up with ethical individualism, anticlericalism, and the advocacy of those rights and liberties that would permit the full unfolding of the individual human personality. The legacies of Leibniz and Wolff, alongside with Pietist Protestant inclina- tions, predisposed the Russian elites to favor the Naturphilosophie with all its gnostic implications. And these, as we well know, provided fertile ground for the ideologization of utopianism and progress by an intelligentsia cut off from practical sociopolitical action.

The dialectical interplay between two "seventeenth centuries," Muscovite and West European, as well as two sets of Enlightenments (late and early, German and Anglo-French) dominated the social, cultural, and even political scene in Russia throughout its chronological and historical eighteenth century, that is from the accession of Peter I to that of Alexander I. We have briefly noted in what way this interplay handicapped, nay paralyzed, the full integration of the political culture of the well-ordered police state of Western Europe in eighteenth-century Russia, and how at the same time it created those special problems that, to a large degree, predetermined the range of options for the Russian polity in the nineteenth century. Catherine II's efforts to structure society so as to enable Russia to incorporate the well-ordered police state came too late - and in any case, it remains an open question whether such a structuring could have been accomplished by legislation. Catherine's efforts came too late in the sense that by her time "seventeenth-century" norms and practices had become outmoded in the West. But they were also too late in the sense that the empress' efforts at structuring society along estate lines coincided with the reception of more radical and emotionally laden late Enlightenment (and Aufklarung) ideas. For this reason, Russia did not develop in time a




genuine Standestaat with intermediate bodies to provide the solid foundation for a Rechtsstaat; nor did it fully absorb the scientific, liberal, and individualist messages of the Enlightenment, which was immediately displaced and "per- verted" by the ideologization of Naturphilosophie, utopianism, and religious mysticism.

On the other hand, it may be justifiably argued that this very dialectic interplay provided the creative impetus and energizing force necessary for the development of modern Russian culture. The clash between the norms and values derived from the seventeenth-century heritage and the realities and intellectual modes of the late eighteenth century provided the stimulus and the precondition for raising the question of Russia's identity, which in turn released artistically creative efforts.

I hope that my remarks have indicated the importance of chronological discrepancies in accounting for the specific path of Russia's cultural evolution. Much work is still needed before we can confidently ascertain and assess the process by which Western norms, values, ideas, and practices were transferred to Russia in the eighteenth century, or at any other time. The chronological discrepancy and the particular form of the borrowing (the German form in the case considered here) had profound implications for subsequent developments. Seventeenth-century European ideas, practices, and norms received by Russia in a "later century," and in a different context, had a dynamic of their own and brought about results that were quite at variance with what was foreseen by those who imported them as well as by those who had originated them in the West. We cannot understand the history of Russia after the eighteenth century unless we keep this basic fact in mind.



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Seventeenth-Century Europe in Eighteenth-Century Russia? (Pour prendre congé du dix-huitième siècle russe)