The following generation of historians became involved in passionate arguments between Westernizers and Slavophiles, in abstract disputes about the relations between the "state" and the "land" in Russian history. The second epoch of Ivaniana was destined to carry the dispute about Ivan the Terrible far from Pogodin's hypothesis. In this second epoch, the tsar would find defenders more prestigious than Lomonosov and Tatishchev—defenders who would need the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible to bring meaning and order into Russian history. These people would laugh at the bombast of Karamzin and the naivete of Pogodin, supremely confident that where these antediluvian moralists had been defeated, they would succeed in turning history into a science. This epoch was marked by such major names in Russian history as Kavelin and Solov'ev, Aksakov and Khomiakov, Chicherin and Kliuchevskii, who await us in the following chapter.
CHAPTER VIII
THE HYPNOSIS OF "THE MYTH OF THE STATE"
1. Absolute and Relative Uniqueness
When Kavelin spoke of the "unnatural character of the views" introduced into Russian history by Karamzin he had in mind, among other things, the "impossible task of setting forth Russian history . . . from the point of view of Western European history.'" In the 1840s, the uniqueness of Russia was the last word in historical scholarship. For the ideologists of Nikolaian autocracy, this conviction seemed naturaclass="underline" nationalism was the official ideology of the "gendarme of Europe." It was also natural for the powerful clan of nationalist dissidents of that time—the Slavophiles. But Kavelin was not one of the Slavophiles: on the contrary, he was perhaps the most influential and prestigious of their opponents, the Westernizers, unless we count Herzen and Belinskii. Belinskii, incidentally, also did not doubt the uniqueness of Russia for a minute. "One of the greatest intellectual achievements of our time consists in the fact," he wrote, "that we have finally understood that Russia has had its own history, not at all similar to the history of any other European state, and that it must be studied and be judged on the basis of itself, and not on the basis of the history of other European peoples which have nothing in common with it."[158] True, Belinskii was not a historian. As the saying is, he ate out of Kavelin's hands. And Kavelin simply could not recall his naive predecessors without a smile: "They looked at the ancient history of Russia from the point of view of the history of all kinds of western and eastern, northern and southern peoples, and no one understood it because it was not in fact like any other history."
Slavophiles and Westernizers stood thus on one and the same ground, proceeded from the same postulate, fought with the same weapon. However, the position of the Slavophiles was stronger, not only because it is easier for nationalists to defend the uniqueness of a nation, but also because they, and only they, had at their disposal a fully worked-out theory of the uniqueness of Russia. The Slavophile theory was based on the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population of Russia lived in rural communes, and that the social structure of Russia was therefore based not on private property, as in the West, but on a kind of collective property. The Russian people, as they understood it, was primarily a nonstate people, something like a kin group, a family bound not by political ties, as were the European peoples, but by ties of blood and religion. On the intellectual level, the rationalism of the "Western spirit" was alien to the "Russian spirit." The latter was synthetic and integral in its nature, rather than analytical and one-sided, like its opposite. Accordingly, on the moral level, Russian life was not based on individualism and atheism, but on collectivism and Orthodox faith. The Russian people, the nation- commune, the "land" (as the Slavophiles called the society in contradistinction to the state), was an independent and self-sufficient civilization. What was required of the state was not to interfere in the life of the land, not to violate its integral organic character, but to let it live by its own Russian laws and not by European ones. However, since Peter's time, the state had interfered. It had violated the structure of folk life, corrupting the soul of the land. And since the land had offered resistance, the state had been transformed into a despotism, and had established its "yoke over the land." Under these conditions, the nonstate nature of the Russian people could be transformed into an antistate feeling, which threatened to destroy Russia.
Kavelin regarded this theory with alarm. It seemed to him that by too decisively separating Russia from Europe, the Slavophiles were depriving it of the capacity to develop, and thereby making it essentially indistinguishable from Asia. He insistently emphasizes that,
Our history exhibits a gradual change of forms, not a repetition of them, and consequently it embodies a development, not as in the East, where from the very beginning up to the present day there has been an almost complete repetition of the same thing. ... In this sense, we are a European people, capable of self-improvement, of development, which does not like ... to remain for innumerable centuries on the same spot.[159]
But in this case, in what sense are we a non-European people? In what does our uniqueness consist? "All of Russian history is primarily the history of the state, political history . . . the political and state element represents up to now the only living aspect of our history,"[160]Ravelin answers. In other words, if, as distinct from the East, we develop, then as distinct from the West, the moving agent and embodiment of this development among us is the state (and not the land, as the Slavophiles think). In the West society created the state, and in Russia the state created society. If we take the state away from Russia, it transforms itself into China. If we take away Ivan the Terrible and Peter, it "[will] stand for innumerable centuries on the same spot."
In challenging the Slavophiles on their own ground, Ravelin created the so-called "state school" of Russian historiography. Its origins are to be found in Hegelian theory, but in the debate with the Slavophiles Ravelin modernized and Russified this so radically that he should perhaps be called the Russian Hegel.
For Hegel, the development of mankind passes through three phases: the "familial" phase, in which the individual is completely swallowed up by the kin-collective; the phase of "civil society," in which the individual is liberated from the bonds of the family and does not recognize any authority other than himself; and the phase of the "state," in which a negation of the negative takes place, and the state establishes harmony between the individual and the collective. Accepting this triune scheme in principle, Ravelin changes the sequence of phases in it, and also the phases themselves, as applied to Russia.
First of all, he describes not a model for the development of mankind, but a model for the development of Russian state structure. This begins with a "clan" phase, in which the country belongs to a single princely clan, which provides it with political unity, but shuns the "element of the personality." It then passes into the "familial" (or "patrimonial") phase, destined to "destroy the political unity of Russia,"[161]though still, however, without—as distinct from the phase of "civil society" in Europe—liberating the individual from the bonds of the family. And, finally, this is replaced by the "state" phase, destined both to recreate the political unity of the country and to "create the personality."