Though many of these "vyskazyvaniia" contradict each other, time has no power over them. Marx died in 1883, Engels in 1895, Lenin in 1924. None of them were professional historians. But everything the classical authors ever said, even in their tenderest years, is immune from revision—on pain of criminal or administrative punishment (with the exception, of course, of those "vyskazyvaniia" which the authorities themselves consider to be dangerous or inconvenient at the given moment). A whole army of semiliterate hunters—who know nothing of history except the "vyskazyvaniia" currently in use, but on whom, nevertheless, the welfare of historians, their professional advancement, their status, and their publications depend—vigilantly follow every attempt at revision. Under pseudodespotism, the Gulag awaited heretics; in subsequent phases, only daily restriction and harassment. But for people whose calling consists in studying, thinking, and writing, the loss of these privileges (the autocracy considers them not as individual rights but as privileges bestowed by the regime) is sometimes equivalent to death.
When Soviet historians try to reinterpret (not revise, reinterpret) the "vyskazyvaniia," this can, therefore, be considered, if not heroic, then at least a brave act, involving serious risk. For a hunter may always turn up to whom the reinterpretation looks like a revision. In a certain sense, moreover, the situation of Soviet historians of Russia is worse than the situation of the medieval scholastics: the former suffer both from a multitude of "vyskazyvaniia" and from a shortage of them. For what was said by the classical Marxist authors for the most part does not fit Russian history.
Ask any Soviet historian what he uses as a guide in analyzing the political development of a particular country, and he will tell you right away that he proceeds from the fundamental positions of Marxism—that is, from the idea that at a given point the productive forces in their development outrun the relationships of production, that this discrepancy gives rise to a class struggle which gradually weakens the existing social structure, and that this struggle, growing sharper, leads to revolution, in the course of which the victorious class breaks up the old state machinery (as occurred in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, in England in the seventeenth, and in France in the eighteenth) and erects on its ruins a new apparatus of class rule.
This is what the "vyskazyvaniia" say. This is the law.
But what is the historian of Russia, let us say of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, supposed to make of this law? What is he to do if the productive forces here grew so slowly that over the whole course of these centuries they did not outgrow the relationships of production? If the class struggle, although supposed to shatter the structure of autocracy, nevertheless could not shatter it? If, furthermore, the autocracy rose up after each successive rebellion like a phoenix out of the flames, refreshed, and for some reason grown stronger, and, as if nothing had happened, pursued its barbarous line as before? If the old structure did not collapse and, consequently, the rubble on which the new state was to be built, according to the law, was absent? If, impudently neglecting the law, the old state persisted in all its autocratic ignorance right down to the twentieth century?
Why was it that, precisely at the dawn of modern history, when medieval serfdom was breaking up in Western Europe, this same serfdom was initiated in Russia? That when in Europe the modern mode of production was being born and modern forces of production were taking shape, the forces of production were being totally destroyed in
Russia? That while in Europe positive political experience was being accumulated which led in the end to the transformation of latent limitations on power into open political ones, in Russia a grim autocracy was enthroned which destroyed even the existing limitations? That when Shakespeare and Cervantes, Bruno and Descartes, Galileo, Bacon, and Montaigne were announcing the dawn of modern civilization in Europe, the fires and bells of the Oprichnina were announcing the triumph of barbarism in Russia?
Petr Chaadaev in the nineteenth century and Arnold Toynbee in the twentieth were inclined to explain the paradox by the fatal influence of Byzantine culture on the Russian political tradition. Pushkin explained it by the non-European character of Russian culture. The Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov cited the westernization of the country by force. Boris Chicherin referred to the Asiatic despotism characteristic of Russian institutions.[39] Georgii Plekhanov appealed to the same despotism entrenched in the peculiarities of the agrarian structure of Russia. Leon Trotsky noted that Russia was closer in its economic structure to India than to Europe. The ideologist of emigre Eurasianism, Nikolai Trubetskoi, declared that the Russians had inherited their empire from Genghis Khan.[40] Pavel Miliukov asserted that the constant encirclement of Russia by hostile peoples, and military necessity, gave the Muscovite government the opportunity to establish a centralized state of Eastern type.® Nikolai Berdiaev declared Russia to be a Christianized Tatar empire.[41] Karl Wittfogel, while admitting that in institutional terms Kievan Rus' belonged to the proto- feudal world of Europe, nevertheless came to the conclusion that the Tatar yoke was responsible for an "institutional time bomb" in Russian political culture, which exploded when the "yoke" came to its end.[42]
In short, there have been many explanations, and we will return to them again. But all of them primarily discuss cultural influences or institutional borrowings, that is, secondary, "superstructural" factors, and by no means the "base"—the relationships of production, productive forces, class struggle, and other serious matters which are supposed to be interpreted according to the law. Consequently, these hypotheses cannot bear any relation to "genuine science," as Soviet historiography proudly calls itself. For such "bourgeois" explanations, Soviet historians have nothing but the haughty contempt of specialists for dilettantes. Their mockery of bourgeois idealism has a confident, major-key ring. It is as though they had the real explanation in their pockets. But since they have nothing in their pockets except the sacred "vyskazyvaniia," this explanation must, of course, consist in the economic backwardness of Russia, in the underdevelopment of its productive forces.
And this explanation would be perfect if it were not also necessary to explain where this economic backwardness came from. And right here is where there is no escape: you have to appeal to the Tatar yoke, to the terrible slaughter of a people which blocked the path of the Huns to the West with its own breast, and paid for an ungrateful European civilization at the price of its own backwardness. This sounds very patriotic. But unfortunately the class struggle and the relationships of production have somehow dropped out of the argument unnoticed. For Aksakov, the Germans were guilty; for Chaadaev, the Greeks; and for "genuine science"—the Tatars? But this is precisely what was asserted by the bourgeois idealists: Chicherin, Trubetskoi, Berdiaev, and Wittfogel. It thus turns out that all of these explanations are different not in nature but only in name—in the names of the guilty parties. For they all reduce, in the final analysis, to the assertion that what is to blame for Russia's historical misfortune is not Russian autocracy, but someone else—whether the Tatar, the Greek or the German, you will agree, is not the essential point. What is essential is that as soon as we come to actual analysis, it is not the "vyskazyvaniia" to which genuine science appeals, but to those same poor old Tatars.