“The Encounter between Personal Commitment and Scholarly Curiosity”: A Reappreciation of Sergei Fedorovich Platonov’s Ocherki po istorii smuty

To a question he himself posed—“Why read the great nineteenth-century historians?”—the Harvard historian John Clive attempted a “short answer,” which actually turned out to be longish:

Because they wrote well; because they may be said to have reinterpreted aspects of the past in fundamental ways; because they saw themselves as prophets as well as historians, firmly believing that their role carried with it the obligation to say what they thought about the society and politics of the present and the future as well as of the past; because they usually said this with a confidence made evident in the cadence of their prose; because, along with the specific view of that segment of the past with which each of them was concerned, they also communicated a general view of the world.¹

To this list, Clive mustered yet one more justification for reading (and rereading) the “great historians”: “there is at least one other, and unique, reward to be gained from the great historians,” he wrote, “and that consists of being witness to their pioneering efforts to expand both the scope of historical knowledge and the means used to obtain it.”² We should read “the Greats,” says Clive, because they pioneered the expansion of our knowledge of the past in unique and imaginative ways—and they did it all with alluring and compelling prose. For Clive, whose biography of the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay has itself been compared to the great 19th-century masterpieces—it was, as one reviewer put it, “not only an imposing work of historical scholarship but a work of art”—³ the “great nineteenth-century historians are still worth reading because we can still feel the powerful impact of their encounter between personal commitment and scholarly curiosity which lies at the heart of all great history, from the Greeks to the present.”⁴

Clive, we can imagine, knew nothing of Sergei Fedorovich Platonov (1860–1933), but his laundry list of reasons to reread the “Greats” certainly applies to Platonov. His Ocherki po istorii smuty v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVI–XVII vv. (Essays on the History of the Troubles in the Muscovite State in the 16th–17th Centuries) is a work that has been spoken of in much the same way that Clive speaks of the great 19th-century Western historians. Platonov’s writing is clear and elegant. He offers a fundamental interpretation of a crucial period of Russian history. He may not have been (nor sought to be) a “prophet,” but Platonov did offer a bold and stubbornly enduring view of what he thought was going on in the Time of Troubles, one that appeared to be the final word on the subject for decades on end. Those who have since taken up the topic of the Troubles cannot avoid citing Platonov, even if only to distance themselves from his interpretation. In Ocherki, Platonov broke new ground in advancing our understanding of a crucial period in Russian history, and he rooted his meticulous examination in a vast range of relevant archival and printed sources. Surely, if Clive had known of Platonov, he would have thought Platonov one of the “Greats”—a Russian amalgamation of, say, a Thomas Babington Macaulay (in his elegant writing style), a Marc Bloch (in his sweeping scope), and a Leopold von Ranke (in his careful respect for sources).⁵

Originally written as a doctoral dissertation, Ocherki was defended on 3 October 1899, at St. Vladimir University in Kyiv.⁶ Its first major review was offered by Vladimir Stepanovich Ikonnikov, who had served as Platonov’s opponent at his dissertation defense. Ikonnikov praised Ocherki first and foremost for its systematic structure and its compelling style. Platonov’s “monograph is notable for its well-balanced plan and structure,” concluded Ikonnikov. “It can be said that there is nothing superfluous in it. Tangential points are not developed at the expense of the main elements of the book’s theme, and the writing is not weighed down with excessive detail. If the book...