- Before the Deluge
Both sides loved Russia: the Slavophiles as a mother, the Westernisers as a child
N. Berdiaev, The Russian Idea, London, 1947, p. 39.
Laura Engelstein's volume of interrelated essays (most of them previously published) advances a deceptively simple argument, namely that for much [End Page 301] of the nineteenth and twentieth century Russia failed to adopt the tenets of Western liberalism and instead fell sway to the powerful forces of anti-liberalism. Brief glimmers of hope - the aftermath of the February 1917 revolution and the period immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - were extinguished, ensuring that the liberal aspiration for the rule of law and a flourishing civil society would be a false dawn. At certain other times too (and to adopt a different metaphor), the instruments of autocratic rule were blunted. The 1905 revolution forced Tsar Nicholas II to accept an elected parliament and some civil rights, but the promise of liberal government quickly faded as conservative forces regained the initiative. One consequence of the heavy hand of authoritarian rule was, Engelstein argues, the attractiveness of revolution for many members of the Russian intelligentsia whose liberal credentials were also in doubt. This broad argument is made primarily in relation to the final decades of the Russian empire, so neither Prince Georgii L'vov, the first prime minister of the Provisional Government, nor Yegor Gaidar, the embodiment of post-Soviet liberal aspirations, make an appearance in this book. We are offered instead a thoughtful account of the trials and tribulations of the tsarist state, its defenders and its critics, as well as insights into underlying ideas about the proper place of religion, science and morality in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia.
According to Engelstein the tsarist state faced the challenge of how to develop Russia whilst at the same time managing the social and cultural consequences of its development. No sooner had Catherine the Great appeared to adopt Enlightenment tenets of scientific reasoning in the course of modernization than Russia had to grapple with the implications of this new ethos for the Orthodox Church, a basic prop of autocratic rule. Nor were these dilemmas the exclusive preserve of the monarchy, government officials and Church leaders. The Russian intelligentsia confronted the same issues. But while some 'Westernizers' entertained hopes of greater civil rights and a respect for secular opinion, others - 'Slavophiles' - maintained that Russia had a distinctive mission that was built upon non-Western legal norms and Orthodox religious belief, setting Russia apart from the legacy bequeathed to the West by Roman jurisprudence and the Catholic tradition. Part of that distinctiveness was supposedly enshrined in the peasant land commune, which was thought to embody collective rather than individualistic ideas and practices. Not for nothing did the philosopher Konstantin Aksakov describe the commune as a 'moral choir' that required peasants to sing from the same hymn sheet. The Slavophiles detected and celebrated an authentically 'Russian' adherence to customary law. Their antipathy towards Western law was shared to a degree by arch-conservative officials who resented the restrictions imposed on the Tsar's autocratic rule. This body of opinion and constellation of forces allowed little space for liberalism to establish itself in Russia.1 These themes recur in a series of chapters on law, religion and culture. [End Page 302]
There is of course a more complicated story to tell, and Engelstein is too subtle and knowledgeable a historian not to acknowledge these other elements. The tsarist state engaged with rather than ignored its critics, at least those of a liberal rather than an uncompromising radical persuasion. The state was also a dynamic entity and demonstrated a capacity to embrace reform at a philosophical as well as a practical level, such that 'the Enlightenment became the language of legitimacy as well as opposition' (p. 39). In addition, the emergence in the later nineteenth century of what was discursively constructed as 'educated society', tsenzovoe obshchestvo (as distinct from the Russian narod or plebeian society), pointed to a tendency for...