In Russia as in German lands in the late eighteenth century, debates on Pufendorf provided shelter for discussions of Hobbes (Kempe 2007). This is how Pufendorf rendered the central idea of Leviathan:
Whilst I voluntarily subject myself to the prince, I promise obedience and engage his protection; on the other hand, the prince who receives me as a subject, promiseth his protection, and engageth my obedience. . . . They who create a sovereign, therefore, at the same time promise whatever the nature of subjection requires. . . . And what can we call this but the entering into covenant? (Pufendorf 2002: 595)
This is a version of Hobbes's argument that the sovereign's violence is justified because, in its absence, the unruly subjects would foment even greater violence. In Pufendorf, this idea acquires an active, dramatized form. Subjects "create a sovereign" by exchanging "promises" and negotiating these promises in vivo. This exchange is precisely what the Primary Chronicle attributes to the Slavs and the Varangians. As in Pufendorf, the Slavs promise obedience to the Varangians, who reciprocate by promising them protection. The conquerors' need to convert their conquest into contract is well recognized in postcolonial studies. A historian of India, Ranajit Guha, explains:
The conquistador must . . . move forward from the Augenblick of his flashing sword to history, from instantaneous violence to law. . . . And the moment he does so he ceases to be conqueror and sets himself up as ruler, although the habits of thought and speech may still continue to designate him by the terms of his erstwhile project. (Guha 1998: 86)
In a theoretical chapter of his Russian History, Tatishchev referred to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Wolff, and Pufendorf. He admired Christian Wolff more than the others, but only Pufendorf was available in Russian translation and Tatishchev relied on him. Peter the Great personally commissioned this translation, which was published in Russian in 1724. Adjusting Hobbes's system to the post-Westpha- lian world, Pufendorf purged it of any reference to the divinity or other ideas that Catholics and Protestants would understand differently (Hunter 2001). To end the war of religions meant to develop a system of peace that made religions irrelevant. Now, the Orthodox could also accept it.
Tatishchev began his own political philosophy not with Hobbes's "war of all against all," which is a collective experience, but with the idea of a solitary man. By himself, man is helpless; he cannot obtain "pleasure, peace, or profit." Therefore, he creates civil unions "naturally." The first exemplary union is marriage. It is based on a free choice but after the parts sign a contract, they cannot break it and each part can force the other to follow the contract. The same is true of the state, said Tatishchev. In the family, men "naturally" dominate women and children; this is also the foundation of a monarchy, because "the monarch is the father and his subjects are children" (1994: 1/359).
In Tatishchev, a patriarchal philosophy coexisted with a fantastic history. He claimed that the Slavs originated from the Amazons, the female warriors whom Herodotus connected to the Scythians. Tatishchev argued that in ancient times, the Amazons came from Africa to the banks of the Volga and there became the Slavic tribes. He attributed this discovery to Feofan Prokopovich, archbishop of Novgorod and one of the closest associates of Peter I, and gave a specific date, 1724, when Feofan supposedly presented this idea to Peter I. These amazing Amazons, the great-grandmothers of Russians, played a peculiar role in Tatishchev's historical imagination. In line with his idea of marriage as the paradigm for contract relations, he assumed the contract between the Vikings and the Slavs was a marriage in which the Vikings played the masculine role and the Slavs the feminine role. That is why the Russians, having originated from the Amazons and the Vikings, were good warriors. Later, Catherine the Great created a cult of Amazons that included an "Amazon" outfit, an "Amazon" way of riding horseback and an "Amazon" regiment of female warriors, the wives of local gentry who greeted Catherine in the Crimea (Zorin 2001; Proskurina 2006). Catherine even told Diderot that in St. Petersburg she was missing "the first Russians," the Varangians (Diderot 1992: 123).
An elaborate speculation on the Amazons and the marriage model of the state helped Tatishchev to reconcile Rurik with Hobbes and Pufendorf. Famously, Hobbes distinguished between two types of Commonwealth, by Institution and by Acquisition. The former comes from a voluntary agreement among the insiders, the latter is imposed by force of war onto the outsiders. Both are based on fear, and the rights of sovereignty are the same in both. The terror of an occupation by foreigners helped Hobbes to explain the horrifying methods of the sovereign power. At the same time, this equation allowed him to neutralize the legacy of the Norman Conquest, which was still significant in the England of his time. "Leviathan's invisible adversary is the Conquest," wrote Foucault (2003: 98). Tatishchev knew the logic of Leviathan well enough to feel a similar pacifying intention in the Chronicle. The voluntary invitation of a foreign sovereign would combine both types of Commonwealth. The agreement is voluntary but the contractor is foreign. This combination neutralized the racial model of the Russian state as the domination of the Viking Rurikides over the enslaved Slavs. There were two ways to develop this logic. One, which was probed by later historians, was to reduce the difference between the counterparts (Varangians, Slavs, and Finns) and present the situation as a multiethnic commonwealth that was electing its sovereign in consensus. Tatishchev chose the opposite and more complex solution, exaggerating the distance between the Vikings and the Slavs by way of his gender metaphors and the marriage model.
Schlozer was skeptical about this peaceful picture. Asking himself and the reader what the Russian north looked like in the year 800, he relied on the colonial experience that his contemporaries obtained overseas. It was "a little bit like Siberia, California, Madagascar," said Schlozer; "the Enlightenment that the Normans brought to the Russian desert was not better than what the Cossacks brought to the Kamchadals some 120 years ago" (Schlozer 1809: 1/419-20; 2/180; Miliukov 2006: 142). From reports by Georg Wilhelm Steller, who explored Kamchatka in 1740, Schlozer knew that the Russian conquest was one of the bloodiest in colonial history. In just 40 years the population of the vast land had shrunk to one-fifteenth of what it was before the Russians arrived. Foreign to Russian nationalist sentiment, Schlozer applied the idea of colonization to the very origins of Russian history. Russia was an exotic, deserted land that was colonized by the Vikings.
Remembered in Russia mainly as Normanists, Schlozer and his one-time patron, Gerhard Friedrich Muller, were also the founders of the discipline that has become known as ethnology. The new ethnological discourse came out of the clash between the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment and the actual diversity of peoples of the Russian Empire, which resonated with the diversity and desolation of German lands after the peace of Westphalia (Vermeulen 2006, 2008). Later, two Prussians, Kant and Herder, ignored the Russian- based contributions of Muller and Schlozer. Though Herder's philosophical writings defined the future of anthropology, in Russia an influential trend in history, classical studies, and education drew its roots from "the great Schlozer." Preparing his ill-fated academic career as a professor of history, in 1832 Gogol wrote a fascinating essay, "Schlozer, Muller, and Herder," which portrayed these three as "the great architects of universal history." Attributing to Schlozer the gift of throwing lightning bolts, Gogol preferred him to the other two, and to Kant as welclass="underline"