Is it surprising, after this, that the Slavophiles had nothing essentially to say in reply to Ravelin? Their revisionism was destined to choke on the same sentimental indignation toward the "fierce bloodsucker" with which we are already familiar from the works of Raramzin. This was obvious from their first sally—the article by M. Z. R. . . . (the pseudonym of Iu. Samarin) "On the Historical and Literary Opinions of the Journal Sovremennik" in Pogodin's magazine Moskvitianin. "In [Ravelin's] words," wrote Samarin,
a thought which is offensive to human dignity emerges without his knowing it. . . namely that there are times when a man of genius cannot help becoming a monster and when the corruption of his contemporaries . . . absolves the person who is aware of it from the obligations of the moral law, or at least reduces his guilt to the point where his descendants can only sympathize with him, and the heavy burden of responsibility for his crimes is unloaded onto the heads of his victims.
Those psychological exercises were laughable to a diehard like Ravelin. He had come too far from the sentimental epoch of Raramzin.
"This is not an argument against me," he parried carelessly. "One must intentionally close one's eyes in order not to see that history is filled with such situations offensive to human dignity.'[184] And he condescendingly added, "From the horror of that period there remains to us the cause of Ivan, and it shows how much higher he was than his contemporaries."[185] The polemic proceeded in this key. The Slavophiles read moral sermons to the "statists," who haughtily rejected them. Solov'ev contemptuously called the Slavophiles "Buddhists" in history. And, as though recognizing their impotence, the latter tried to avoid the theme of Ivan the Terrible. In their extensive histo- riographic legacy, we do not even find articles especially devoted to him, let alone books. There was no counterattack—only partisan raids, powerless against the regular army of the state school. Just as the conservative absolutist opposition had capitulated before Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, so its heirs and successors capitulated before his apologists three hundred years later.
5. The "Old" and the "New"
The representatives of the apologistic tendency reveal their school by open glorification of their teachers. S. Gorskii, who in Kazan' wrote a fat book, The Life and Historical Significance of Prince A. M. Kurbskii (the sole monograph on the patriarch of the Russian opposition, which unfortunately is sadly reminiscent of a poor joke), writes as follows: "Not taking upon myself the boldness to claim complete independence for my work, I will say openly that the works of Messrs. Solov'ev, Kavelin, and other prominent figures in the field of native history have guided me."[186] In fact, Gorskii has a single idea on his mind, one let fall by Solov'ev in the sixth volume of his History of Russia. It would hardly be worthwhile discussing, were it not that it became the leitmotif of all the subsequent apologetics for Ivan the Terrible. Certainly, the apologists make every effort to conceal their relationship to the most stupid of the reactionaries of the last century (as a rule they do not even mention Gorskii's book), but their language irrefutably betrays them:
Ivan was concerned that the idea of the state should triumph over the elements opposed to it, and wished to see it prevail in Russian society, because he saw in it the guarantee of the glory and prosperity of the fatherland. . . . This idea placed Ivan above the conceptions of the century; it raised him to a height inaccessible to his contemporaries, and therefore it is not surprising that they . . . began a life-and-death struggle with Ivan. . . . The old does not give way to the new without a struggle. . . . Boyardom strove to retain the old. This was chiefly what the ideology of boyardom consisted of. . . . The epoch of the creation of the Russian national state appears before us as a time of acute and tense struggle: of the old and the new.™
Gorskii wrote only part of this passage. The rest is the inalienable property of our distinguished contemporaries, D. S. Likhachev and I. I. Smirnov, and was published a century after the appearance of Gorskii's book. The reader will perhaps succeed in finding an essential difference in these quotations; I did not.
Asking whom we are to believe in the dispute between the tsar "standing on an inaccessible height," and the traitor making a brave front abroad, Gorskii answers, "It is better to believe a tsar than a traitor who is unscrupulously slandering his sovereign."[187] But what was simple for a primitive monarchist (who was, furthermore, a captive of the stereotypes of the "state school") becomes complicated for our contemporaries. And for that matter, for Gorskii's own contemporaries it was far from clear-cut. As Kurbskii's nineteenth-century successor, Aleksandr Herzen, who also fled his country and struggled in exile against its autocracy, explained: "We are not slaves to our love for our country, any more than we are slaves to anything else. A free person cannot admit a dependence on his native land which would compel him to participate in matters contrary to his conscience."[188]
Here we touch upon the most sensitive spot in Ivaniana. The "myth of the state" arose in the epoch of Ivan the Terrible, and Ivaniana—that is to say, the argument over Tsar Ivan—is the form in which it has developed. But in its hypnotic and almost mystical power, the myth goes far beyond the limits of this argument, and influences the Russian world-view itself. In no other area, perhaps, does this dictatorship of the myth manifest itself so vividly as in attitudes toward the political opposition as a whole and political emigration in particular. This is the test for freedom of thought; here lies the bad conscience of all of Russian historiography. And we must be grateful to Gorskii for having posed this question so openly—even if he did so out of stupidity.
For Gorskii and the majority of his coevals, Herzen was the same kind of traitor as Kurbskii—"the power of darkness, which undermined the most precious foundations of our state structure," as one of them put it.[189] Down the centuries, from Ivan the Terrible to Josef Stalin and beyond, whenever confrontation has arisen between the individual and the state, the majority takes the side of the state, and the political emigre is open to an accusation of treason. Herzen understood this quite well. Protesting against the bloody suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1863, he wrote:
If no one makes this protest, we will be alone in our protest, but we will not abandon it. We will repeat it in order that there be witness to the fact that in a time of general intoxication with narrow patriotism, there were still people who found the strength to separate themselves from a rotting empire in the name of the future Russia which was coming to birth, and found the strength to subject themselves to the accusation of treason in the name of love for the Russian people.[190]
Not only Herzen, but hundreds of Russian oppositionists took this stand—from the Narodniks to the Bolsheviks. The most eminent of these were Georgii Plekhanov, who spent almost his entire conscious life in exile, and Vladimir Lenin, who struggled abroad for the defeat of his own government, and therefore—by the logic of the "statists"—of his nation, in the wars with Japan and Germany. All of these people were traitors in the eyes of the majority. All of them were judged as Gorskii judged Kurbskii. Then the revolution of 1917 occurred.
Everything, it seemed, had changed. The opinions of the old majority were rejected and mocked by the new majority. Herzen, Plekhanov, and Lenin were turned from traitors into saints. Only one verdict remained in force as if there had been no revolution. And this was the verdict on Kurbskii. Even in our time, Academician D. S. Likhachev, closely following Gorskii, placidly called the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Kurbskii "correspondence between the tsar and a traitor."34 Professor la. S. Lur'e, quoting Tsar Ivan, also called Kurbskii and the entire group of political emigres in