Makiavelli v Rossii: Moral' i politika na protiazhenii piati stoletii (review)

Machiavelli's fame is special: it is nearly impossible to find another Renaissance figure who has called forth such contradictory opinions from those who followed. In hundreds of books and innumerable articles, he has appeared as a revolutionary, as the Antichrist, and as the epitomy of a Copernican revolution in political theory. It is obvious that all of these readings of the great Florentine reflect constantly changing historical, cultural, sociological, political, and ideological circumstances. Yet society always turns to him in its search for answers to vital questions of the day. Why specifically to him? That, indeed, is the mystery of Machiavelli's genius.

What about Russia, with its abrupt changes in historical direction? Who were Machiavelli's readers there, and what did they find in him (or how much did they understand)? How did his image and the evaluation of his works change in various periods of Russian history? Based on a wide range of archival sources and earlier scholarship,¹ Iusim's book was written specifically to answer these questions. However, this book is not just an analysis of how Machiavelli was read in Russia, but also a "summary of Russian history over five centuries through the prism of Machivelli," i.e., "through the tragedy of political life enunciated by the Italian thinker and manifested with such force over centuries of Russian history" (5, 175). This focus is reflected in the structure of the book (chapters are devoted to specific periods in Russian history delimited by a turning point: the Time of Troubles, the reign of Peter the Great, the October Revolution) and in the author's special attention to the most important figures in Russian and Soviet political history; the same tendency is reflected in the individual topics selected.²

It should be noted that Iusim's work is not "pure" historiography, nor is it "just" historiography. Rather, it has an interdisciplinary character, making use of various approaches: political history, cultural history, source criticism, and history of the book. What we do not find here, however, is a systematic exposition of Machiavelli's political ideas or an analysis of his epistolary output. But it is important to note that this is the work of a scholar who knows his hero extremely well; he has written a number of articles on him as well a monograph, Etika Makiavelli (Moscow: Nauka, 1990).

The first two chapters ("Vokrug Makiavelli. O nekotorykh putiakh i provodnikakh zapadnogo vliianiia v russkoi publitsistike XVI v.," and "XVII vek. Otgoloski mnenii chuzhezemnykh eruditov") carefully trace the paths by which Machiavelli's name might have penetrated pre-Petrine Russia. (This particular interest in the 16th and 17th centuries is quite understandable for an author who has devoted numerous studies to the Italian Renaissance). As a result of his painstaking analysis of a great variety of sources, Iusim comes to the conclusion that Machiavelli was unknown in 16th-century Russia and, indeed, that there was not even any demand for his political thought (41). And it was pretty much the same case in the 17th century; that era, too, brought no serious acquaintance with Machiavelli to Russia (58). The time for weighing the problem of good and evil in politics or the permissibility of amoral actions for the common good had yet to arrive for the Russian reading public (71).

Iusim asserts that Machiavelli's name first appears in print and in personal correspondence in Russia only in the 18th century (ch. 3). In this period, it most often serves as a political tag and even figures in court cases. But this is only what appears on the surface. Here the author does not limit himself to direct evidence in his search for traces of the teachings of Machiavelli (at this point still not translated into Russian), but instead conducts a very detailed analysis of descriptions of the most important Russian collections of books: the libraries of the Academy of Sciences, Prince...