It was asserted, for example, that Russians could be free even when enslaved (or even when subjected to what looked like slavery to a Western observer). Thus the ordinary Russian peasant was free even while being submissive to the government. Konstantin Aksakov (1817–60) expressed this paradox in 1855 as follows:
This attitude on the part of the Russian is the attitude of a free man. By recognizing the absolute authority of the state he retains his complete independence of spirit, conscience and thought. In his awareness of this moral freedom within himself the Russian is in truth not a slave, but a free man.105
According to Aksakov, Russians are essentially apolitical people who accede to authoritarian rule only because they have better things to do, namely, to develop their inner spiritual life: “And so the Russian people, having renounced political matters and having entrusted all authority in the political sphere to the government, reserved for themselves life—moral and communal freedom, the highest aim of which is to achieve a Christian society.”106
The key idea for explaining this paradox, I think, is the adjective “communal” (“obshchestvennyi”), which appears again and again in Aksakov’s discourse, as in the oxymoron “inner, communal freedom” (“vnutreniaia obshchestvennaia svoboda”).107
The Slavophiles felt that intense communal interaction, especially of a religious sort, was the way to avoid enslavement by external, governmental power. The more Russians were enticed away from their native communal interaction (e.g., by the model of popular governments in the West, or by the westernizing reforms of Peter the Great), the more likely they were to be turned into “slaves.” Only when Russians were being true to their essentially communal nature were they really “free.”
Before further elucidating the peculiarly Slavophile understanding of “freedom,” it is necessary to elaborate on the vital importance of communal action for the Slavophiles. I will begin by introducing a term which is frequently encountered in writings about Russian Slavophilism. Sobornosf (from “sobor,” “council” or “synod”) has been variously defined as “innate striving toward communality,”108 “voluntary and organic fellowship,”109 “sense of communality and unity freely acknowledged rather than externally imposed,”110 and so on. Originally the term was religious or theological in nature, that is, it was an attempt to capture the idea of the “principle of conciliarism,” or even the idea of the “catholicity” of Christ’s church. But Aleksei Khomiakov and some of his Slavophile and neo-Slavophile followers broadened the notion, making it apply to secular collectives as well. For example, N. S. Arsen’ev utilized the term to characterize the congenial group spirit of the various literary salons and other social gatherings among the intelligentsia in Moscow during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.111 Or, as recently as 1990, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn proposed that a consultative body (a “Duma”) be formed in Russia based not on mere “mechanical” voting, but on sobornosf.112
An example in Khomiakov’s own work is an open letter he penned in 1860 to the people of Serbia which, among other things, glorified the communal decision-making process which allegedly characterized all Orthodox countries:
It is no accident that the commune, the sanctity of the communal verdict and the unquestioning submission of each individual to the unanimous decision of his brethren are preserved only in Orthodox countries. The teachings of the faith cultivate the soul even in social life. The Papist seeks extraneous and personal authority, just as he is used to submitting to such authority in matters of faith; the Protestant takes personal freedom to the extreme of blind arrogance, just as in his sham worship. Such is the spirit of their teaching. Only the Orthodox Christian, preserving his freedom, yet humbly acknowledging his weakness, subordinates his freedom to the unanimous resolution of the collective conscience. It is for this reason that the local commune has not been able to preserve its laws outside Orthodox countries. And it is for this reason that the Slav cannot be fully a Slav without Orthodoxy. Even our brethren who have been led astray by the Western falsehood, be they Papists or Protestants, acknowledge this with grief. This principle applies to all matters of justice and truth, and to all conceptions about society; for at the root of it lies brotherhood.113
The passage is replete with terms for the collective that Khomiakov and the other Slavophiles were fond of using: commune (“obshchina,” roughly equivalent to “mir,” another Slavophile favorite), local (land) commune (“zemskaia obshchina”), brethren (“brat’ia”), brotherhood (“bratstvo”), and society (“obshchestvo”). What holds the Orthodox collective together, according to Khomiakov, is an individual’s submissive attitude toward it. Each member accedes humbly (“smirenno”) and with love to some mysterious spirit of the collective, that is, to a unanimous resolution of “the collective conscience” (“sobornoi sovesti”). This is sobornost’ in action.
Appropriately enough, the document from which this passage is quoted was itself signed by a collective of eleven individuals, including such well-known Slavophiles as Iurii Samarin and Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov.
Ivan Kireevsky (1806—56) was a Slavophile who described the alleged114 communal life of ancient Rus’ as follows:
You see an endless number of small communes [obshchin] spread out over the entire face of the Russian earth, each having its own manager of its laws, and each forming its own special accord [svoe osoboe soglasie] or its own small mir; these small mirs, or accords, fuse with other, large accords which, in turn, make up the regional accords which, finally, comprise the tribal accords, from which are formed one huge, general accord of the whole Russian land.115
There is much erasure of boundaries going on in this grandiose and hopelessly idealized picture. Not only is the communal mir equated with the agreement or accord (“soglasie”) which brings it into existence and maintains it, but the smaller mir merges with (“slivaiutsia”) the larger mir to which it belongs. This merging process proceeds on up the hierarchy of collectives, until all of ancient Russia is seen as one huge, harmonious collective.
Among the Slavophiles, Konstantin Aksakov was, as Walicki says, “the most ardent and uncritical admirer of the rural mir.”116 Aksakov was emphatic about the duty of the individual to submit to the will of this kind of collective:
The commune [obshchina] is that supreme principle which will find nothing superior to itself, but can only evolve, develop, purify, and elevate itself.
The commune is an association of people who have renounced their personal egoism, their individuality [ot lichnosti svoei], and express common accord [soglasie]: this is an act of love, a noble Christian act which expresses itself more or less clearly in its various other manifestations. Thus the commune is a moral choir [nravstvennyi khor] and just as each individual voice in the chorus is not lost but only subordinated to the overall harmony, and can be heard together with all the other voices—so too in the commune the individual [lichnost’] is not lost but merely renounces his exclusivity in the name of general accord and finds himself on a higher and purer level, in mutual harmony with other individuals motivated by similar self-abnegation [v soglasii ravnomerno samootverzhennykh lichnostei].117