The Origins of Autocracy

Slavophiles and Westernizers stood thus on one and the same ground, proceeded from the same postulate, fought with the same weapon. However, the position of the Slavophiles was stronger, not only because it is easier for nationalists to defend the uniqueness of a nation, but also because they, and only they, had at their disposal a fully worked-out theory of the uniqueness of Russia. The Slavophile theory was based on the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population of Russia lived in rural communes, and that the social structure of Russia was therefore based not on private property, as in the West, but on a kind of collective property. The Russian people, as they understood it, was primarily a nonstate people, something like a kin group, a family bound not by political ties, as were the European peoples, but by ties of blood and religion. On the intellectual level, the rationalism of the "Western spirit" was alien to the "Russian spirit." The latter was synthetic and integral in its nature, rather than analytical and one-sided, like its opposite. Accordingly, on the moral level, Russian life was not based on individualism and atheism, but on collectivism and Orthodox faith. The Russian people, the nation- commune, the "land" (as the Slavophiles called the society in contra­distinction to the state), was an independent and self-sufficient civi­lization. What was required of the state was not to interfere in the life of the land, not to violate its integral organic character, but to let it live by its own Russian laws and not by European ones. However, since Peter's time, the state had interfered. It had violated the struc­ture of folk life, corrupting the soul of the land. And since the land had offered resistance, the state had been transformed into a despo­tism, and had established its "yoke over the land." Under these condi­tions, the nonstate nature of the Russian people could be trans­formed into an antistate feeling, which threatened to destroy Russia.

Kavelin regarded this theory with alarm. It seemed to him that by too decisively separating Russia from Europe, the Slavophiles were depriving it of the capacity to develop, and thereby making it essen­tially indistinguishable from Asia. He insistently emphasizes that,

Our history exhibits a gradual change of forms, not a repetition of them, and consequently it embodies a development, not as in the East, where from the very beginning up to the present day there has been an almost complete repetition of the same thing. ... In this sense, we are a European people, capable of self-improvement, of development, which does not like ... to remain for innumerable centuries on the same spot.[159]

But in this case, in what sense are we a non-European people? In what does our uniqueness consist? "All of Russian history is primarily the history of the state,

political history . . . the political and state ele­ment represents up to now the only living aspect of our history,"[160]Ravelin answers. In other words, if, as distinct from the East, we de­velop, then as distinct from the West, the moving agent and embodi­ment of this development among us is the state (and not the land, as the Slavophiles think). In the West society created the state, and in Russia the state created society. If we take the state away from Russia, it trans­forms itself into China. If we take away Ivan the Terrible and Peter, it "[will] stand for innumerable centuries on the same spot."

In challenging the Slavophiles on their own ground, Ravelin cre­ated the so-called "state school" of Russian historiography. Its origins are to be found in Hegelian theory, but in the debate with the Slav­ophiles Ravelin modernized and Russified this so radically that he should perhaps be called the Russian Hegel.

For Hegel, the development of mankind passes through three phases: the "familial" phase, in which the individual is completely swallowed up by the kin-collective; the phase of "civil society," in which the individual is liberated from the bonds of the family and does not recognize any authority other than himself; and the phase of the "state," in which a negation of the negative takes place, and the state establishes harmony between the individual and the collective. Accepting this triune scheme in principle, Ravelin changes the se­quence of phases in it, and also the phases themselves, as applied to Russia.