Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (review)

Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horsemen to the Lenin Mausoleum. By Martin Malia (Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999) 514 pp. $35.00.

Malia's brilliantly conceived intellectual history of Europe since c. 1700 uses modern Russia as a litmus test and as a foil. Such an approach enables him not only to select the basic elements and trends in the history of ideas in the West (Enlightenment, Romanticism, Positivism, and Modernism) and consider their metaphysical nature and political impact, but, more important, to point up their immanent dynamics, as well as their consequences and ambiguities when they find application to a sociocultural context different from their original one.

Malia repeatedly stresses that in the course of the last three centuries, the overall trend has been for dynamic and creative ideas to emerge and triumph first in the "maritime" countries of Western Europe (France and Britain), while the rest of Europe received and incorporated them along a chronological "gradient" of retardation that increased from West to East. Consequently, as Malia correctly observes, since Peter the Great, Russia has been part of Europe and received all elements of its "high" culture from the West, albeit with a time lag and under circumstances that brought about an alteration in their valence. This fact is at the root of the varying responses, judgments, and contradictory attitudes toward Russia over the centuries on the part of the Western maritime and central continental (Germany and Austria) countries of Europe.

The book's focus offers a close, dialectical analysis of Western ideas--their sequence, interrelations, and implications. From this perspective, Russia's reactions and efforts at implementation of these ideas serve to illustrate, clarify, and reveal the long-term immanent dynamics of Europe's intellectual trends--at any rate, until the end of the nineteenth century. But then, thanks to the sociopolitical changes under Alexander II (emancipation of the serfs, a modern judiciary and conscript army, local administration, industrialization, etc.) Russia's intellectual elite was able to complement and modify the acquired European culture with elements of its own creation. Russia became a contributor, as well as an ongoing recipient, of the intellectual and artistic life of the West. Witness the West's enthusiastic reception of the writings of Leo Tolstoi and Fyodor Dostoevsky, of the music of Modest Mussorgsky and Igor Stravinsky, and of the works of such painters as Alexandre Benois and Wassily Kandinsky.

One may wonder, however, whether this process of importation, adaptation, and creative transformation, so subtly analysed by Malia, could have taken place in Russia (or, for that matter, in Central Europe as well) without the active input of traditional native cultural values and institutional practices. One thinks immediately of religion, church, and popular ways. Oddly, Malia makes no mention of them, even though he often resorts to striking religious and theological references and similes. The almost paradoxical result is that, for instance, the impact of Karl Marx is discussed entirely from the perspective of the inner logic and immanent force of its philosophical presuppositions, without serious attention to those native cultural and intellectual elements that made for its revolutionary dynamics in Russia--dynamics that brought forth Vladmir Lenin's Bolshevism. Yet, as the author so clearly and persuasively argues, the Leninist ideological heritage became the very essence of the Soviet system. Thus, it comes both as a surprise and as a source of dissatisfaction that in the last chapter (of more than 100 pages), about the period from 1917 to 1991, Malia does not subject the dominant ideas and ideologies in Russia and in the West to the same searching critical dissection that he had performed on those in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

There is no space to comment on the book's many insightful and stimulating remarks about the avatars of Russia's image in the eyes of Western elites from the...