S. M. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, bk. 3, p. 707.
Pokrovskii, bk. 1, p. 256.
I. I. Polosin, Sotsial'no-politicheskaia istoriia Rossii XVI-nachala XVII v., p. 20.
the ruling classes" (reflecting, in his own words, the "powerful influence of contemporary reality"), Polosin all of a sudden discovered in that same Oprichnina "military-autocratic communism."'2 In other words, he equated communism with serfdom. Polosin obviously deserved punishment from both above and below for his infantile sincerity and reversion to Solov'ev's rehabilitation of the Terrible Tsar. But it was the wrong time for Polosin's colleagues to punish him. The rehabilitation picked up speed. It was transformed into a competition. One respected historian hastened to overtake the next. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Solov'ev, for all his bowing and scraping before the political achievements of the Terrible Tsar, had nevertheless condemned his depravity, crying out: "Let not the historian say a word in justification of such a person!"[134] In the middle of the twentieth century, this seemed to have been forgotten. Now the "idealist-historian" Solov'ev seemed to be looking at things "from the side of the oppressed," while the Marxist historians looked at them "from the side of the ruling classes." More than this, precisely this view was declared the only scientific one. R. Iu. Vipper asserted (in the second edition of his book) that only "Soviet historical science has restored the true figure of Ivan the Terrible as the creator of a centralized state and the major political figure of his time.'"4
This "historiographic nightmare" of the 1940s was evaluated by a participant, Veselovskii, in a book written during that time but published only many years after his death, in the 1960s:
In recent times everyone who had occasion to write about Ivan the Terrible and his time began to say with a single voice that finally Ivan as a historical personality had been rehabilitated from the calumnies and distortions of the old historiography, and had risen before us in his full stature and correctly interpreted. S. Borodin, in his comment on the Trilogy [Trilogiia] of V Kostylev, praised the author for having shown Ivan the Terrible as "a progressive statesman, who transformed the life of the country, firm in achieving his goals, farseeing and bold." S. Golu- bov in a critique of a new production of Aleksei Tolstoi's play at the Malyi Theater wrote that after many centuries of calumnies and slander by the enemies of Ivan the Terrible, "we see for the first time on the stage a true historical figure of a fighter for the 'bright kingdom,' a fiery patriot of his time, a mighty statesman." Academician N. Derzhavin expressed himself to approximately the same effect. . . . "Only relatively recently have the events of the period of Ivan I V's reign received in our historical scholarship a correct and objective interpretation." Thus, the rehabilitation of the personality and political activity of Ivan IV is a novelty—the latest word in Soviet historical scholarship. But is this accurate? Can one believe that historians of the most varied tendencies, including Marxists, have been doing nothing for 200 years but confusing and distorting the history of their motherland?1'
But why should we not believe this? Didn't Solov'ev and Ravelin say the same thing about Raramzin and Pogodin? And didn't Pokrovskii and Polosin say the same thing about Solov'ev and Ravelin (and also about Raramzin and Pogodin)? In this sense, Vipper and Der- zhavin behaved in the traditional way, denying from the outset the "scholarly character" of Pokrovskii and Veselovskii (and at the same time of Solov'ev and Ravelin, and Raramzin and Pogodin).
Some of them had disclaimed their predecessors for neglecting the "factual material" and having "unnatural views." Others had attacked them for not looking at things from the angle at which a genuine scientist should. But why did the contemporaries of Veselovskii attack all of them?
In the first place, Veselovskii suggested, "the job of putting historians on the true path . . . was taken over by belles-lettrists, playwrights, dramatic critics, and film directors"—in a word, by laymen. But this was untrue. Academician Derzhavin, whom he had just finished quoting, was not a layman, but a professional historian. Academician Vipper, who four times, in the four editions of his Ivan the Terrible, sang a solemn hymn to the "major figure of a ruler of peoples and a great patriot," was likewise no layman. Professor Bakhrushin, who published three editions of his Ivan the Terrible, in which the tyrant is depicted as a democratic monarch, beloved by his people, was also a leading historian, who wrote the relevant sections in textbooks for schools and universities. The same went—and still goes—for the highly esteemed specialist Professor Smirnov, also the author of an Ivan the Terrible, who in his apologetic ecstasy went so far as to openly contrast scholarly analysis to "the power of the wisdom of the people, which evaluated and firmly held in its consciousness the truly progressive features of [Ivan] the Terrible. . . . The figure of the terrible tsar created by the people has stood the test of time."1" Even Raramzin had known enough to separate the intellect of the nation from its prejudices and, unlike the Marxist Smirnov, gave preference to the former.17 Derzhavin, Polosin, Vipper, Bakhrushin, Smirnov, the major professionals of current Russian historiography, were the ones who contrasted "the wisdom of the people" to scientific analysis. Specialists, and not laymen, exclaimed in enthusiasm that "official historiography was in sharp contradiction with the numerous popular traditions, songs, and tales" in which "the terrible tsar appears not only as a historical personage, but precisely as a hero, whose deeds are praised and glorified.'"8
The first of Veselovskii's theses is thus not confirmed by the facts. "But the main thing perhaps," he writes in advancing his second thesis, "is the fact that scientific people, including historians, have long since lost the naive faith in miracles and know quite well that to say something new in historical science is not that easy, and that for this there is needed extensive and conscientious work on the primary sources, new factual material, and that inspiration is entirely insufficient, even when it is of the most benevolent kind.'"9
But, after all, Solov'ev said the same thing a hundred years ago. And, alas, his sermons did not protect the public consciousness from the recurrence of the "historiographic nightmare." Veselovskii was a brilliant and genuine scholar. I sincerely sympathize with his confusion. The fact is, however, that he had encountered a national drama occurring again and again over a period of centuries, and tried to treat it as an accidental and temporary deviation from "science." Even his opponents suggested to him that things were not that simple. Polosin wrote that Veselovskii "studied the Oprichnina from the position of Prince Kurbskii—an unreliable position, and, to put it bluntly, rotten through and through."2" Veselovskii would never have
Karamzin ends volume 9 of his Istoriia gosidarstva Rossiishogo with these words: "Ivan's good reputation has outlived his bad reputation in the memory of the people; the groans fell silent; the victims rotted away; and the old traditions were overshadowed by new ones; but the name of Ivan shone on the law code and reminded people of the acquisition of the three Mongol kingdoms. The documents proving the atrocities lay in the archives, and the people over the course of the centuries saw Kazan', Astrakhan', and Siberia as living monuments to the tsar-conqueror; they honored in him a famous proponent of the power of our state and of the formation of our social order; they rejected or forgot the name of Tormentor, which his contemporaries gave him, and from the obscure rumors of his cruelty, Ivan is now called only the Terrible, without distinguishing him from his grandfather, also so called in ancient Russian, more in praise than in reproach. History is more unforgiving than are the people" (p. 472).