Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State

The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State

Thomas Sanders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317468615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of the best new and recent work on historical consciousness and practice in late Imperial Russia assembles the building blocks for a fundamental reconceptualization of Russian history and history writing.

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Introduction:
“A Most Narrow Present”

Thomas Sanders

In its broadest outlines, the evolution of historical writing in pre-Stalinist Russia can be understood as the function of two parallel processes: maturation and alienation. Like so much else in the imperial Russian historical experience, the history of historical writing reveals a record of ever-expanding sophistication and approximation of European standards. At the same time, the academic historians found themselves continually more isolated from the other social and ethnic groups in the empire and alienated from the very government that supported them. Nonacademic historians dealt with themes and adopted political and social interpretations that more closely reflected the point of view of the empire’s diverse population. Limitations imposed by tsarist censorship and academic politics kept these perspectives from finding institutional homes in which they could be nurtured and from which they could be propagated. These factors placed an enduring imprint on the historical profession and historical writing in imperial Russia, and subsequently influenced Soviet historical practice as well.¹

Something identifiable as modern nonchronicle historical writing emerged in Russia in the eighteenth century. At first, this work was stilted, weighed down by excessively long citations from documents, dominated by foreigners, and triumphalist in relation to the state. Gradually, though, especially in the nineteenth century, state-generated demands for well-trained servitors led to the expansion of the university network in the empire and funding for students from Russia to study in European universities. In long developmental waves, historians in Russia acquired European approaches to historical study (e.g., French archival and source analysis, German-style seminars and graduate training, and the new, sociologically oriented historical analysis à la Guizot). Ultimately, it became necessary to write dissertations based on previously unutilized archival sources, and the level of analysis and interpretation was also continually enhanced.² By the end of the empire, the best historians in Russian universities—among them Vinogradov, Miliukov, Kareev, Vasil’ev—were at least on a par with their peers in European universities.

These changes in standards took root in three broad shifts. The first of these can be seen in the difference between Nikolai M. Karamzin (1766–1826) and Sergei M. Solov’ev (1820–1879). Eighteenth-century historical writing reached its apex—both in impact and in elegance—in Karamzin’s Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo, the first volume of which appeared in 1816.³ The publication of this work might be taken as a last point of cultural consensus in Russian history. Karamzin was a member of the nobility at a time when that group viewed itself as the key support base of the autocracy and had only just begun to be seriously challenged in that role by outsiders armed with education, effort, and merit. Thus, while Karamzin could and did criticize the tsar (see, for example his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia), his approach to the autocrat and his practical definition of autocracy as the identifying characteristic of Russian history differed from later historiography. Karamzin’s willingness to enter into a dialogue with the autocracy resembled the ancient Jewish relationship with Yahweh as presented in the Book of Job, in which the Covenant is treated as a mutual agreement, making it possible to take Yahweh to task or join with Him as an interlocutor, if He is thought to have violated the pact. In that regard, Karamzin’s historiography is intimate and internal.⁴ It also differed from much later historiography in the breadth and elegance of its exposition, so that in many cases later enhancement of professional standards was accompanied by dramatic reductions in the readership reached.

In the decades, remarkable and otherwise, between the publication of Karamzin’s Istoriia and the notorious lecture series of Timofei Granovsky, the government lost the moral high ground as the main representative and interpreter of the unique historical experience of Russia.⁵ From Pushkin to the Decembrists and on to Granovsky, a separation that would become an opposition had occurred; a crucial segment of the elite had begun to see progress as possible only against, in spite of, or once rid of the government. Certainly not with it. Only temporarily—in the first blush of the era of Great Reforms connected with the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 and in the euphoria inspired by the Revolution of 1905—would that conviction abate and the possibility of constructive work with the regime seem possible. Tellingly, in both those situations the government appeared sufficiently weakened to make the kind of concessions the liberal elite deemed necessary and proper.

While Granovsky embodied the oppositional, Westernizer direction within historical writing, it was the patriotic, profoundly Orthodox, and state-oriented Solov’ev who was to serve as the paradigm of the new career historian and to produce an alternative to Karamzin’s Romantic, literary, gentleman-of-leisure model. Solov’ev established historical writing as an academic specialization with strict standards. After him, writing history demanded extensive amounts of Sitzfleisch and archive time from those who would do it well and offered professional employment to those who did not violate the state’s restrictions. These objective, professional criteria made possible a much more powerful critical and oppositional historical analysis. There would be other loyalist historians after Solov’ev—Platonov and Bogoslovskii, for example. But Solov’ev’s career was an essential part of the process of disconnecting historical analysis from too close an identification with the state. By establishing independent, objective criteria for historical work, he pried the profession loose from the state as ultimate arbiter. It became possible to make of historical writing and teaching a profession in two senses: as career and as statement of oppositional principles (profession de foi). Once that had occurred, the further evolution of historical writing in a direction different from and critical of the policies of the imperial government was possible. Certainly, Solov’ev himself never wrote such history. In fact, his long, relatively undigested quotations from ancient sources and his mechanical volume-per-year publication schedule does not feel very modern.⁶

Nonetheless, his work constitutes a decided professional step forward compared to Karamzin. Continuing the biblical analogy begun above, the divide separating Karamzin and Solov’ev is the same as that separating Job from St. Paul. Like Paul, Solov’ev institutionalized the new faith. Institutionalization routinized the practice of history, but it also deprived it of some of its earlier emotional power.

The next evolutionary phase involved a synthesis of Karamzin’s vision and artistry with Solov’ev’s objectivity and scienticity. This phase was less the province of the profession as a whole than it was the achievement of a few exceptionally gifted individuals; Kliuchevskii, Platonov, and Miliukov were the most eminent among them. In this stage, historians of both insight and artistry were able to meld careful, detailed source mastery with a broadness of conception and style sufficient to attract and compel a wider reading audience. While Kliuchevskii and his school were Moscow-based and Platonov represented the self-consciously distinct Petersburg historiographical tradition, there was a great deal of cross-fertilization and mutual influence. The general distinction usually cited is that Kliuchevskii and the Moscow school tended toward greater abstraction and a broader theoretical perspective—often captured by the descriptor “sociological”—while the St. Petersburg tradition emphasized more narrowly defined topics and greater attention and closer adherence to the primary sources. Platonov was profoundly affected by Kliuchevskii’s Boiarskaia duma drevnei Rusi and by his extraordinarily influential general survey of Russian history, Kurs russkoi istorii, which circulated in student-produced lithograph long before its publication, and Miliukov brought further Muscovite influence, by participating very actively in the historians’ social and intellectual world, during his months of dissertation research in the St. Petersburg archives. Meanwhile, Petersburg historians—most notably Platonov, both in his historical works and as editor of the important Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, but also, Lappo-Danilevskii, and later, Presniakov—would exercise a wide influence on historical practice. It is safe to say that Kliuchevskii and Platonov were the doyens of their particular schools, and what they accomplished was to move Russian historical science beyond mere biography and history of tsars’ reigns to penetrating historical analysis, broadened in perspective to include the society as a whole, while avoiding stultifying tendencies of impersonal institutional and sociological treatments. Kliuchevskii accomplished the additional feat of writing approved history that was at once ardently in favor of the Russian people and mildly critical of the Russian political order, which had an additional appeal for the intelligentsia. In sum, a broadly diffused professional culture existed that in its highest practitioners combined a broadly understood structural analysis with a gripping depiction of Russian national evolution.

Echoing behind all this development and professional progress, like axes chopping offstage in a performance of “The Cherry Orchard,” is the approaching footfall of the Revolution—heavy and ominous. Given the ultimate fate of tsarist Russia, a critical observer might ask how historians, a privileged group in a society awash with poverty and hardship, whose profession most generously defined involves nothing more nor less than the responsibility of composing a satisfactory national narrative, could be considered something other than a glorious failure.

In one of his aphorisms, the eminent Russian historian Vasilii O. Kliuchevskii maintained that “a professor before his students is a scholar; before the public—an artist.” Unfortunately, far too few academic historians in imperial Russia managed this balancing act. As a consequence, clear gains in sophistication and professional standards did not result in a comprehensive, inclusive national narrative satisfying to the majority of the empire’s inhabitants. The positivist-inspired, Russocentric, vaguely oppositional nature of most academic historical writing failed to engage the imagination of most groups constituting imperial Russian society. Traced along the academic track, historical writing went from being a well-integrated source of legitimacy for the imperial government in the eighteenth century to reflecting the ideals of a relatively isolated group of elite, politically alienated intellectuals in the twentieth.

Yet the fault here lay not so much with the historians as it did with the “jagged” nature of Russian social evolution, the extremes of class and ethnic distinctiveness that had to be integrated in a single vision, and with the dominant intellectual mode, that is to say, positivism. We shall look at each in turn.

In a provocative and sadly neglected book, Russia: Absent and Present, Wladimir Weidle characterized Russia as “a people, but no nation.”⁷ He is referring, of course, to the absence of internal linkages, of a shared sense of connectedness. Neither the Romanov dynasty nor the Russian intelligentsia could craft a unifying self-consciousness strong enough to sustain the society through the chaos and crises of early twentieth-century Europe. Nearly a century earlier, Petr Chaadaev had indicted Russia for having “no charming recollections and no gracious images in our memory, no lasting lessons in our national tradition[,] … not … a single fond memory, or one venerable monument which forcefully speaks of bygone times…. We live in a most narrow present, without a past.”⁸ Russian writers may indeed have had “an obsession with history” precisely because they remained incapable of generating a binding national vision that transcended class, ethnicity, and locality.⁹

Weidle had an explanation for this failure. In his interpretation, Russian civilization was

always tending to return to its starting-point: to sink back, so to speak, to the level of the horizontal. The great creative works of ancient Russia are like the temples of Indo-China, swallowed up by the virgin forest that surrounds them. Only here it is not a question of the tropical forest, aggressive and poisonous; it is only a plain, extending far beyond the limits of the horizon, and a people of peasants. These can tell stories and sing beautiful songs; they can build white, pathetic churches, at the edge of a wood, among their fields, or beside rivers; they are a gifted people, skillful in all the manual arts, but completely indifferent to whatever may be done in Kiev, to the achievements of Moscow or Novgorod, content to adapt to their tastes what they appreciate and quietly leave all the rest alone.¹⁰

For Weidle, this repetitive return to the starting point occurred because of the failure to establish linkages between the “horizontal” popular culture of the masses and the “vertical” artistic culture of the elite. In a key passage, he asserts that

Russia has had a popular culture, both rich and homogenous, a culture we here propose to describe as “horizontal.” Their great difficulty has been to construct on this basis what may be called a high culture. Such a “vertical” culture—always complex and always more or less unstable—calls for continuous efforts of generations on end; it can be built only on foundations very carefully laid and capable of resisting the test of centuries. For these foundations to be sound, the first essential is that they should not be too vast.¹¹

But Russia did not have the luxury of a finite, circumscribed zone in which to build the vertical—horizontal linkage.¹² “[T]he whole country” was, rather, “simply a gigantic plain, furrowed by great rivers that in their wide slow course encounter few if any obstacles: a gently undulating plain that extends for thousands of miles, with it uniform fields and forests and villages and nothing to break the majestic monotony. There is a beauty in this monotony, but it is a beauty d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: "A Most Narrow Present"
• I. The Evolution of Historical Consciousness and Practice in Russia from the Eighteenth Century Through the 1920s
• Part II. The Individual Practitioners
• Part III. Non-Russian Historical Visions
• Part IV. Concluding Essays
• Index