Was it by accident that in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu predicted that France was slipping irreversibly into the abyss of despotism, there was a trend of thought one of whose representatives, the Abbe Bodeaux, considered the Chinese empire to be the ideal monarchy, contrasting it to ancient Greek democracy whose "chronicles present only a horrible spectacle of horrible violations against the peace and happiness of mankind"?3"
Confucianism as a form of absolutist opposition had practically ceased to exist as early as the 2nd century в.с. On this basis we can hypothesize, without even addressing the specialized works, that the period from the 5th to the 2nd century в.с. in China was an epoch of fierce struggle between Fa and Li—that is, between autocratic and absolutist cultures—which ended with the complete defeat and dissolution of early Confucianism in a uniform and lifeless Fa culture.[182]
French history of the eighteenth century presents an analogous model, but with the opposite result. After the collapse of the Turgot government in the remarkable two-year period 1774-76, which showed the Utopian nature of the absolutist opposition, France responded to the autocratic tendencies with a revolution.
In other words, in the Far East, the collision between Fa and Li led to the fruitless triumph of despotism; in the West, it led to revolution; and on the gigantic Eurasian continent of Russia, to a symbiosis of both cultures, which over the course of centuries generated Slavophilism. For this reason, what turned out to be only a passing episode in the political history of France and China, survived all reforms and revolutions in Russia.
For nineteenth-century Russian Slavophiles, monarchy was the natural, traditional form of political organization; on the other hand, "freedom of life and of the spirit" (or what I would call latent limitations on power) was also sanctified by tradition. The problem of the ideal political structure consequently consisted not in destroying the original harmony of both traditions in order to achieve constitutional limitations on power, but, on the contrary, in preserving their mutual trust and harmony. How was this to be done? Just as it was done in a family or in a peasant commune. Did children or peasants seek constitutional limitations on the power of the father or head man? Could a constitution be a real guarantee against the abuse of power, whether in a family, in a commune, or in a nation? Who would guarantee this guarantee?
"Look at the West," exclaimed Aksakov, "the peoples . . . have begun to believe in the possibility of a perfect government and have made up republics and devised constitutions . . . and have become poor in spirit. . . . [The societies] are ready to collapse ... at any moment."40 In a fatal fit of mindlessness, the European peoples had destroyed what Confucius called Li, and what Aksakov called "the union between the land and the state." The price exacted for this would be terrible. Nihilism and anarchy, general hostility and distrust, enfeeblement and degradation awaited the West. What was the major task of the Russian state from this point of view? Did it not consist in closing tight the doors of its fortress and not permitting into the country the fatal infection of Western civilization? The Russian state in the person of Peter I acted in precisely the opposite way. Thus the "government [was] separated from the people and made alien to it.'"" The "yoke of the state over the land" was established and "the Russian land became, as it were, conquered, and the state the con-
Teoriia gosudarstva и stavianofitov, p. 31.
Ibid., p. 38.
querer. The Russian monarch took on the status of a despot, and the free subject people, the status of a captive slave."42 As Aksakov explains it: "The state accomplished a coup d'etat, dissolved the alliance with the land and subordinated it to itself."43
How was Russia to be purified of pollution and return to the national tradition? The reader will probably not be surprised now to learn that the political recommendations of the Slavophiles coincided word for word with the "political dream" of Prince Kurbskii and the author of The Conversation of Valaam—the calling of an Assembly of the Land with which "the tsar could every day take counsel as to the affairs of the realm." The nineteenth-century descendants of the medieval oppositionists, trained in Europe (which they cursed in contemporary philosophical language, invoking Schelling and attacking Hegel), proposed the same thing as their slandered ancestors. More than this, in 1881 they were literally a step from a repetition of 1549. Only the Oprichniki of a new tyrant (this time Alexander III) prevented their dream from becoming a political fact.
Despite their new philosophical ammunition, Aksakov's Slavophiles proved weaker than their medieval ancestors. The "myth of the state" was an apologia for despotism, which they should have rebelled against and revised. But like their twentieth-century descen- dents, the new Russian right (Solzhenitsyn being a best example), they counterposed to the "myth of the state" not analysis but a myth of their own, which I would call the "myth of the land." And just as the modern Slavophiles appeal from the alien Marxist state to the prerevolutionary "enlightened authoritarianism" of the tsars, their predecessors appealed from the alien police state of the tsars to the "enlightened authoritarianism" of pre-Petrine Russia. And again, like the modern Slavophiles, who associate the origin of autocracy, i.e., serfdom and despotism, with Lenin, their predecessors, contrary to facts generally known, connected the origins of serfdom and despotism not with the time of Ivan the Terrible but with that of Peter. How indeed could Russians have enslaved their compatriots when the "land" was still firmly closed to the penetration of Western influences? As far as the myth was concerned, serfdom and despotism simply could not exist in Russia before Peter.
If Ivan the Terrible, who had no smell of Europeanism about him, had appeared after Peter, everything would have been all right, but he preceded Peter. The Slavophiles accordingly declared the Oprich-
Rannie slavianofily, p. 86.
Aksakov, p. 50.
nina to be, as it were, the first draft of an attempt to break up the union of the land with the state, a kind of rehearsal for the Petrine coup d'etat. But this meant that the Petrine catastrophe was not a freak of fate, that long before Peter, without any alien influences, the national tradition had showed such deep crevices as to compel one to doubt the very existence of the union between the land and the state. Here the Slavophiles turned to the saving "human formula" of the first epoch of Ivaniana. Ravelin had been the first to resort to it when he wrote of Ivan and Peter that "both of them were equally keenly aware of the idea of the state . . . but Ivan was aware of it as a poet, and Peter the Great as a man of primarily practical concerns. In the first, imagination predominated, and in the second, the will."[183] The Slavophiles tried to pay him back in his own coin. Yes, Ivan was an "artistic nature," they agreed. His acts were therefore dictated not by reason, for which Ravelin and Solov'ev praised him, but by the play of imagination. He was impulsive; he uttered good and evil, without plan or comprehension or system. And in the process of this spontaneous amateur artistic activity he among other things accidentally hit upon the institution of the "police state." This was the way the Slavophiles tried to avoid the connection between Ivan and Peter which was fatal for their myth, and which Ravelin emphasized.