Bernal attributed this early nineteenth-century revisionism to Gottingen's circle of the anti-Semitic Semitologist Johann David Michaelis, who proposed the colonization of the sugar islands in the Caribbean by the deported European Jews (Hess 2000). While Michaelis's student and Uvarov's teacher, Schlozer, was the first to describe the Semitic language family, Uvarov's one-time assistant, Klaproth, was instrumental in the construction of the Indo-German language family (Benes 2004). Schlegel and the Parisian orientalists soon took up the fateful contrast between the Semites and Aryans. Connected to all of them but unable or uneager to choose between their positions, Uvarov synthesized them in his book on the mysteries of Eleusis. Supplementing the idea of the Semitic colonization of Greece, Uvarov identified some inscriptions that were connected with the mysterious Eleusis as sacral Sanskrit words, such as the famous Om. One illustration in the book, which was created by Uvarov's friend Aleksei Olenin, then Russia's Secretary of State, showed the Greek goddess, Ceres/Demeter sitting on a pedestal that featured the images of Indian and Egyptian gods and holding a parchment bearing mystical words in Greek. It was a wonderfully inclusive image; as a historian, Uvarov was more tolerant than he was as a bureaucrat. He chose the epigraph to this book from Virgil (Eclog. III): "Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites" - "Tis not for us to end such great disputes."
Origin is Destiny
Figure 5: Demeter-Ceres, a Greek-Roman Goddess, sits on a stone which exhibits on one side the Indian gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, and, on the other, the Egyptian Goddess Isis. The inscriptions say "Demeter" and "Homer."
Source: From Sergei Uvarov's Essay on Eleusinian Mysteries (Uvaro 1817); drawing by Aleksei Olenin
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Being a colony means having a sovereign abroad. But both Russia and ancient Greece were different; at different stages of their history they were both colonized and colonizing. The potential of this system of similarities and differences was realized while Uvarov combined his duties as Minister of the Enlightenment and President of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Working in Uvarov's spirit of enlightened, even utilitarian, monarchism, the writer Nikolai Karamzin supported the Hobbesian idea that the unruly Slavs created an autocratic regime to tame themselves. Internal conflicts and long-term misery revealed for the Slavs "the danger and the harm of the ruleof the people"; as a result, they acquired a "unanimous belief in the value of Autocracy." But taking the next step, Karamzin contrasted the origins of Russia with other processes of state-building: "Everywhere else Autocracy was introduced by the sword of the strong or the cunning of the ambitious. . . . In Russia, Autocracy was founded with the general consensus of the citizenry: this is what our Chronicle says" (1989: 1/93). In Western Europe, the Normans occupied France or England, but in the east, the Normans were invited to Slavic lands. Mikhail Pogodin, a professor of the Moscow Imperial University whose father was a serf, developed this contrast just a bit further. For him, the story of Rurik amounted to the "providential and fateful text," a parable that resolves "the mystery of Russian history" (Pogodin 1859: 2; Maiorova 2010):
The history of any state is nothing but the development of its foundational event. . . . The beginning of the state is the most important part of . . . its history and it defines its fate for ever and ever. It is in the beginning that we need to find the difference of Russian history from any other, Western and Eastern histories. (Pogodin 1846: 2)
Origin and History are clearly different and the former overdeter- mines the latter.[4] For Pogodin, the invitation to Rurik, "to come and rule over us," was not a one-time event, as the Chronicles described it, but an ever-continuing romance. "In the West, everything started with the occupation; with us, everything originates from the free call, the undisputed takeover, and the loving deal." This is why the Russian sovereign has always been "a peaceful guest, a desired protector," while in the west the sovereign has been "a hated invader, an archenemy" (Pogodin 1859: 187, 218). The Origin found its place as the eternal center of the Empire.
Adjusting Rurik's story and creating a theory of Origin, Pogodin centralized his own domain, Russian history, around the concept of colonization by consent. His idea of the "loving deal" responded to the colonial doctrine of his boss Uvarov. In 1818, when Pogodin was a student, Uvarov formulated the idea that remained central for his Enlightenment and orientalist initiatives:
Hegemony cannot be established or kept only by the sword. . . . Conquest with no respect for humanity, without the new and better laws, without correcting the condition of the defeated, is a futile and bloody dream. Gaining victories by the enlightenment, taming minds by the humble spirit of religion, by the spread of arts and sciences, by education and the prosperity of the defeated - this is the only method of conquest that could be stabilized for eternity. (Maiofis 2008: 281)
If this project did not sound realistic, Rurik's example could make it digestible. After all the blood spilled in their internal and external endeavors, the statesmen of the post-Napoleonic Restoration wished to reign over the hearts and minds of their subjects. Increasingly conservative, Uvarov coined the triple slogan of "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality," which the Romanovs preached and practiced until 1917 (Riasanovsky 1959; Zorin 1997). But Uvarov was also attentive toward religious minorities, such as the Jews, expressing his hope early in 1836 for "the moral and intellectual rapprochement of the Jews and Christian society" (Stanislawski 1983: 68). Sergei Soloviev, who became a professor of history under Uvarov, quipped that his boss worshiped Orthodoxy though he did not believe in Christ, preached Autocracy though he was a "liberal," and called for Nationality though he had read "not a single Russian book" (Soloviev 1983: 268). The latter was definitely an exaggeration.
Under Uvarov, Russian historians became increasingly professional. They felt an obligation to write and teach Russian history in a worldly, comparative context that displaced bizarre and unique events, such as the story of Rurik, to the margins of scholarship. This perspective did not prevent their histories from evolving into imperial narratives of the steady, irresistible growth of Russian power. But first, they had to deal with Rurik, who opened their courses. The founding father of modern Russian history, Sergei Soloviev, closed the circle by connecting Rurik with Peter the Great and situating Rurik's arrival at the site of St. Petersburg: "The location of the great waterway that connects Europe and Asia determined the foundation of St. Petersburg: here in the ninth century the first half of Russian history started, here in the eighteenth century its second half began" (1988: 1/60). But his great student, Vasilii Kliuchevsky, retold the story of the Varangians with noticeable irritation:
What is this but not a stereotypical formula of the law-abiding power that rises out of a contract, a theory very old, but always re-emerging . . . ? The tale of the Call to the Princes, as it is told in the Primary
Chronicle, is not a popular legend. It is a schematic parable of the origins of the state, which is adjusted to the comprehension level of schoolchildren. (Kliuchevsky 1956: 1/144)
With the irony that he sometimes smuggled into his writings, Kliuchevsky attributed the contract theory of political power to the Orthodox monks of the twelfth century. He knew that this was an anachronistic hypothesis. Was it Nestor who adjusted his stories for the schoolchildren? The famous historian questioned this part of the Primary Chronicle, but confined his doubts to the notes (Kliuchevsky 1983: 113; Kireeva 1996: 424). Indeed, the idea that the story of the Varangians appeared in the Primary Chronicle in the milieu of Tatishchev and under the influence of Pufendorf and Hobbes would have made perfect historical sense. However, several versions of the Chronicle had recorded this story much earlier. A symbol of larger historiographical and ideological problems, Rurik embodies the controversies of autonomy, freedom, and modernity that re-emerge with every new turn of Russian and global history. Tired of chasing Rurik in the archive and unable to erase him, Russian historians ventured a set of creative concepts, the epistemological Rurikides, which developed their own reproductive energy.