Alexander Yanov's attitude to the past is quite different from the one and from the other. A well-known and iconoclastic Soviet journalist before he came to the United States in 1974, a victim of the regime's all-too-limited tolerance for iconoclasm, he also possesses an advanced degree in history. His journalistic assignments took him all over the USSR and into all sectors of Soviet life; his historical training provoked him to place the problems he confronted in a long-term perspective, to approach the problem of the contemporary nationalist revival in the USSR, for instance, by way of telling the long-term story of slavophilism in Russia.
His monumental History of Political Opposition in Russia, a multi- volume work resulting from many years of experience, thought, and reading, could never be published in the USSR, and it was largely on this account that he left. The present work is a product of that much vaster effort. In it he sees Russia's past as forming not a single, utterly compelling pattern, but a pattern that, while exercising certain limitations on the shape of the future, also offers a range of choices as to that shape—choices not predetermined, but informed and emancipated to the degree that they take cognizance of the shaping of the past. He also writes—and it is the subject of some of his best-written and most ironic pages—of those who, in examining the past, fell victim to it.
His work does not fit well into the tradition of empirical historiography that has dominated the American historical profession in the recent past. He has done no work in the archives, and he is extremely fond of typologies that, while they are arrived at by a method not altogether foreign to contemporary political science and sociology, have different names and are not easily traceable to the main currents of our academic thought. Some of our historians of Russia think his work is old hat, a "rediscovering of America," but I think they are much mistaken. Many emigre writers, on the other hand, are unhappy with Yanov's critical attitude to nationalism, his relative indifference to religion, his gradualist constitutionalism, and (not so much in the present work as in his controversial Detente after Brezhnev) on his seeing possibilities within the Soviet establishment for America to influence and advance liberalization.
Yanov has polemics in his bloodstream, and much of what he says needs to be and should be argued about, not simply accepted as pronouncement. He is essentially provocative and controversial. But he is serious, erudite, thoughtful, well informed, witty, and intelligent, and he has something of his own to say that we cannot afford not to hear. Not only historians and political scientists will find this book interesting, but all those who have a sense of the importance of the Soviet Union in our lives, a growing number among whom, I hope, are those who have some inkling that the Soviet Union cannot be understood merely by the face with which it immediately presents itself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I read over this book, I feel again how hard it was to write at the open and defenseless border between several genres and disciplines—between history and confession, between political science and philosophy, between historiographic investigation and a search for the origin of political evil. I can imagine how difficult it was for those who read this book in manuscript—Richard Lowenthal, Sidney Monas, Stephen and Ethel Dunn, George Breslauer, Robert Crum- mey—to make a judgment that required not only tolerance but scholarly courage. The University of California Press and my editor, William J. McClung, in risking the publication of such a book, somehow managed to combine businesslike caution and old-fashioned chivalry. Gianna Kirtley, Ellen Sheeks, Marilyn Schwartz, and my daughter Marina nurtured the manuscript into a book. Peter Dreyer performed editorial miracles, large and small, in the hope of somehow Anglicizing (if I may put it that way) this intransigently Russian work. I am grateful to all of them for their efforts.
This book has a strange history. It is the heart of a manuscript entitled History of the Political Opposition in Russia, which I began to write ten years ago in Moscow in the insane hope of guiding it across the reefs of censorship. Soviet censorship is sophisticated and merciless, but I was no novice in the art of fooling it. However, after the first chapter I began to doubt my ability to outwit the censors. After the third I realized I was taking a great risk. After the fifth I became afraid to keep the manuscript at home. After the seventh I concluded that the only way I could keep my self-respect as a writer and human being was to become a smuggler—that is, to turn my life upside down by illegally dispatching the manuscript across the border. Such things are not done alone. Many people helped me—brave people willing to take risks of the most elementary physical kind. I cannot name these people here—either the Russians or the non-Russians. But I cannot fail to be grateful to them to the end of my days.
I was also helped to write this book by my opponents who attacked my views in Moscow and continue to attack them in the West. Their attacks do not surprise me. These people refuse to recognize, as I do, that our fatherland has two faces. One of these is open to the world: the Russia of Herzen, Plekhanov, and Sakharov. I am proud of it. But I never forget that there is also another Russia: the country of pogroms, Black Hundreds, and terror, the land of Purishkevich and Stalin. Of that Russia I am ashamed. All the same, may the Lord give my opponents good health. They have given me patience and wrath, a feeling of grief and indignation, without which this book could not have been written.
I have thanked my tolerant referees, my courageous comrades-inarms, and my merciless accusers. Now I must await the verdict of readers. This book will not be published in Russian, either by a Soviet publishing house or by a Russian publisher in the West. And there is nowhere left to emigrate. There are no more borders across which I can illegally dispatch my manuscript, hoping that it can be published in Russian. Thus, I seem to have irretrievably lost the greatest thing a writer can lose—an audience in his mother tongue. Will I be able to find a replacement—in a strange country, in an alien language?
October 1, 1980
INTRODUCTION
THE HYPOTHESIS
1. From Greatness to Obscurity ?
On October 22, 1721, at the celebration of victory in the second Great Northern War, Chancellor Golovkin was merely expressing the general opinion when he declared the chief service rendered by Peter I to be that he "by indefatigable labor and leadership led us out of the darkness of nonexistence into being and joined us to the society of political peoples."' Nepliuev, the Russian ambassador to Constantinople, expressed himself still more openly in 1725: "This monarch . . . taught us to know that we are human beings too."[1] Half a century later, N. Panin, who was in charge of foreign policy under Catherine II, confirmed this opinion of the Petrine politicians. "Peter," he wrote, "by leading his people out of ignorance, thought it a great accomplishment to have made it equal to a second-class power."[2]
Over the course of centuries, the conviction that Peter brought Russia out of "nonexistence" and "ignorance" by teaching us to know that we too are human beings has become such a commonplace that it no longer enters anyone's head to ask when, why, and how Russia happened to find itself in a state of "nonexistence" and "ignorance." Why were we not considered human beings before Peter? Why was it a "great accomplishment" for Russia to become even a second-class power?
In his famous panegyric of Peter, Sergei Solov'ev, one of the best Russian historians, wrote confidently of pre-Petrine Russia as a "weak, poor, almost unknown people."[3] And even his constant adversary Mikhail Pogodin agreed with him entirely on this point. All ten century's of Russian history before Peter lay, it seems, in obscurity— were, so to speak, prehistory—out of which the Father of the Fatherland led the country to light, glory, and greatness.