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THOUGHT, CULTURE, AND POWER: REFLECTIONS OF A RUSSIANIST
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2008
Extract
Looking back on the evolution of my scholarship over five decades, I am struck both by my constant fascination with how systems of thought enthralled and inspired historical figures and by my approach to the changing subjects that became the object of this fascination. The ideas and sentiments propounded by great philosophers and writers established a necessary background for my work, but what engaged my interest and stirred my imagination was the varied ways these ideas were understood and acted upon. It was my reflection on the transformation of ideas into conscious views of the world that prompted my three research projects: the populists of the 1870s and 1880s, the legal reformers of the nineteenth century, and the emperors of Russia.
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References
1 My master's essay was on the subject of the liberal slavophiles and was the basis for my first publication, “Koshelev, Samarin and Cherkasskii and the Fate of Liberal Slavophilism,” Slavic Review (June, 1962), 261–79.
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5 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1967.
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19 For similar efforts to use the notion of political culture to understand particular Russian institutions, in this case the contemporary legal system, see Mary McAuley, “Bringing Culture back into Political Analysis: The Reform of the Russian Judiciary,” in Whitefield, Stephen, ed., Political Culture and Post-Communism (Houndmills, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Solomon, Peter H. Jr., “Informal Practices in Russian Justice: Probing the Limits of Post-Soviet Reform,” in Feldbrugge, Ferdinand, ed., Russia, Europe, and the Rule of Law (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2006)Google Scholar.
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25 When Peter the Great reformed the Russian state on a European model, he endeavored to create state institutions that operated according to law, a state that had a perpetual existence regardless of the monarch on the throne. But the Western states Peter sought to emulate observed to a lesser or greater degree a sophisticated legal distinction between on the one hand the king as ruler of the state, an abstract and perpetual embodiment of state authority, and on the other the mortal person—between the body politic and the human body of the king, described in Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). In Russia, Michael Cherniavsky, Kantorowicz's student, showed that Peter's attempt to impose such a distinction never took hold. The state never assumed the integrity of an institution with its own rules and traditions that could not be breached by the imperial will. In this situation, I observed, the monarch himself took on the role of literal incarnation of the immortal state. See Cherniavsky, Michael, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 82–90Google Scholar.
26 For a discussion of the rise and decline of the Moscow–Tartu school and its contribution see my review of Sergei Nekliudov, ed., “Moskovsko-tartuskaia semioticheskaia shkola. Istoria, vospominania, razmyshleniia,” Kritika 1/4 (Fall, 2000), 821–9.
27 Cited in ibid., 824–5.
28 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1, From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I; vol. 2, From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995–2000). Russian translation, Tsenarii vlasti, 2 vols. (Moscow: OGI, 2004). Princeton University Press published a revised and abridged one-volume paperback version in 2006: Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy: From Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II. A translation is in progress to be published by Novoe Izdate'lstvo in Moscow.
29 Other ceremonies such as parades, and court fêtes, and religious ceremonies also changed to fit the scenario of each reign.
30 See Verner, Andrew M., The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 109–10, 239–41Google Scholar; Hosking, Geoffrey, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 201–5Google Scholar.
31 Recent scholarship has made clear Nicholas II's role in insisting on the most aggressive and brutal responses and imposing his views on his ministers, whom he often hid behind. For example, he was clearly behind Peter Stolypin's introduction of the notorious field courts-martial in 1906 and the “Stolypin coup d’état”, the change in the election law in June 1907. See Ascher, Abraham, The Revolution of 1905, vol. 2, Authority Restored (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 244–59Google Scholar.