Ravelin's theory aimed both at confirming the uniqueness of Russia and refuting the Slavophile validation of this uniqueness. On the one hand, he attaches all of the negative elements in Russian history (including the disintegration of the state and the denial of the "element of the personality") to the "familial" phase, dear to the heart of the Slavophiles. On the other hand, the Hegelian phase of "civil society," which showed that in the West the personality existed before the state, is omitted from Russian development. Hence, in Russia, the personality was created by the state. The Western peoples "were destined to develop a historical personality which they had brought with them into a human personality; we were destined to create a personality. For us and for them, the question is posed so dissimilarly that comparison is impossible."[162] I understand how murky such language may seem to a contemporary reader, but this was how they talked at the time.
Both "over there" and "among us," however, it is precisely the state which is the crown of history, its magnificent finale. Neither Hegel nor Ravelin even touches on the question of the political nature of this finale. The state as such, in the abstract—with no political specifications whatever—is for them both the goal of history and its demiurge. Everything which furthers its growth is progressive, all the sacrifices offered it are redeemed; all the crimes committed in its name are justified. The needs of the state (which coincide in some mysterious and inexplicable way with the "element of the personality") become the password which resolves all mysteries, all moral doubts, all contradiction.
And if there were still some holes and inconsistencies in Ravelin's theory, such first-class intellectuals and experts as S. M. Solov'ev, B. N. Chicherin, A. D. Gradovskii, N. P. Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, P. N. Miliukov, and G. V. Plekhanov came to the rescue. They thought up explanations for things which the Russian Hegel was unable to explain, resolved contradictions which he was unable to resolve. To non- specialists—and to specialists as well—their arguments seemed irresistibly convincing. "Stone," Solov'ev would say,
—for so mountains were called among us in the old days—stone split up Western Europe into many states. ... In stone the western men built their nests, and from stone they held possession of the peasants; stone gave them independence, but soon the peasants also began to surround themselves with stone and to gain freedom and independence; everything firm, everything definite is thanks to stone. . . . On the gigantic eastern plain there is no stone . . . and therefore, there is one state of unheard-of extent. Here men have no place to build themselves stone nests. . . . The cities consist of wooden cottages; one spark, and in their place—a pile of ashes. . . . Hence the ease with which the ancient Russian abandoned his house. . . . and hence the striving of the government to catch and settle down and attach the people [to the land].[163]
"It is enough to look at its [Russia's] geographical position, at the huge areas over which the scanty population is scattered," Chicherin would say,
and anyone will understand that life here must develop not so much the element of rights ... as the element of power, which alone can fuse the inconceivable distances and the scattered population into a single political body. . . . The social structure which in the West was established of its own accord by the activity of the society ... in Russia received existence from the state.[164]
"In studying the culture of any Western European state," Miliukov would say, "we have had to proceed from the economic system first to the social structure and only then to the organization of the state; relative to Russia it will be more convenient to take the reverse order [since] among us the state had a huge influence on the organization of the society, whereas in the West social organization determined the structure of the state."[165]
"The basic element of the structure of Russian society during the Muscovite period was the complete subordination of the personality to the interests of the state," Pavlov-Sil'vanskii would say. "The external circumstances of the life of Muscovite Rus', its stubborn struggle for existence . . . demanded extreme exertion from the people. . . . All classes of the population were attached to service or to the tax rolls."[166]
"In order to defend its existence in the struggle with opponents, economically far superior to it," Plekhanov would write,
it [Russia] had to devote to the cause of self-defense ... a share of its strength which certainly was far greater than the share used for the same purpose by the population of the Eastern despotisms. [If we compare] the sociopolitical structure of the Muscovite state with the structure of the Western European countries [and the Eastern despotisms], we will obtain the following result: this state differed from the Western ones by the fact that it enserfed to itself not only the lower agricultural, but also the upper service class, and from the Eastern ones, to whom it
was very similar in this regard, by the fact that it was compelled to place a far more severe yoke on its enserfed population."
All of these people argued fiercely among themselves. Some asserted that in Russia there was no feudalism, and others that there was. Some said that stone and wood lay at the basis of the political difference between Europe and Russia, and others denied this, pointing to the "woodenness" of medieval London and the "stoniness" of medieval Novgorod. Some said that Russia was "struggling for its existence" with its eastern neighbors, and others that it struggled with its western ones. However, despite their arguments, they all came out of Ravelin's school—in the sense that none of them had challenged his fundamental thesis that the Russian state, in the form in which it developed historically (i.e., the serf-holding autocracy), was the sole possible form of the state under the given historical (geographical, demographic, ecological, or economic, depending on inclination) conditions.
A wooden country with sparse population, scattered over a relatively infertile plain; a poor country, which had dozed away its youth in the "familial" phase, and had not developed a "historical personality," and had been the "patrimony" of its princes; a country like a besieged fortress, surrounded on all sides by enemies, which struggled for its national survival unceasingly over the course of centuries. What kind of state could develop here, other than serf-holding autocracy? There was no alternative to this autocracy. And therefore—however cruel and terrible it may have been—it embodied progress.
These writers did their job inventively and with brilliance. The conceptions they presented were remarkably well-ordered and artistically perfect. Only one reproach can be leveled at them: they were proving what was required to be proved by the assignment Ravelin had set for them in 1846, which was not to explain why serf-holding autocracy was the form of the Russian state structure, but why this autocracy was historically necessary.
2. A Symbol of Progress
It is not hard to guess that it was precisely at the fatal intersection between the "state" and the "familial" phases that Ivan the Terrible found his place in Ravelin's theory. It is also clear that boyardom occupied the negative pole of it (as the defender of obsolete "patrimonial" relationships), and the tsar the positive (as the first defender of the national state structure and of the "element of personality"). For
Ravelin, the tsar became a key figure—the first step of progress on Russian earth. Could one, in the circumstances, resist the temptation of comparing him with Peter the Great? Ravelin could not. His pen distinguished "two extremely great figures of Russian history—Ivan IV and Peter the Great." And why not, indeed, if "both of them perceived with equal vividness the idea of the state and were its most noble and worthy representatives? . . . Separated by an entire century . . . they are remarkably similar ... in the tendency of their activities. Both of them pursued the same goals. They are connected by some sympathy. Peter the Great deeply respected Ivan IV, called him his model and placed him higher than himself."