Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture, by Richard Pipes. Yale University Press, 2007. 240 pages.
There are many manifestations of authoritarian conservatism in present-day Russia – from liberal economists calling for modernization through the suppression of the backward people who do not understand progressive ideas to extreme nationalists dreaming of a return to the Middle Ages, from enlightened functionaries of the presidential administration to communist leaders attending Orthodox services.
As a distinguished American historian whose overtly conservative views have not impaired his study of history, Richard Pipes’ interest in Russian conservatives is understandable. Pipes’ studies of the intellectual history of Russia before the 1917 revolution are renowned. As he indicates in the introduction to his new book, here he turns his sights on the antipodes of radical intellectuals, in particular on conservative thinkers, proponents of autocracy, monarchy and orthodox beliefs, concentrating on ideologies and views that form the basis of the predominant political doctrines in modern, republican-by-accident Russia.
Fringe figures at the center
Early on, Pipes names conservative thinkers whose ideas, he maintains, have been underestimated, unlike those of radicals and liberals. He is right that most work by Russian and foreign historians has focused on thinkers who took critical positions, hardly mentioning conservatives, those of the 19th century anyway. But this reflects the simple and obvious fact that radical thinkers more deeply influenced political and intellectual history than proponents of the status quo. This holds true not only for Russia. If, for instance, Alexander Herzen is a figure little-known outside Russia and underestimated in this sense, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Plekhanov, let alone Lenin, featured prominently in intellectual discussions across Europe for a greater part of the 20th century. It’s no surprise that radicals and critics attracted more attention in Russia and abroad than proponents of the regime, just as it’s no surprise that scholars in France take greater interest in the enlighteners Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Montesquieu than clerical writers or apologists for absolutism who confronted them. The same would apply to Konstantin Leontiev, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Nicholas Danilevsky, and other conservative thinkers Pipes discusses.
Pipes is entitled to plump for the importance of his subject. More questions arise about the overall drift of his study as declared in its first pages.
The subtitle, A Study in Political Culture, implies a broad perspective roomy enough for conservatism and other currents of public opinion. Pipes underlines the importance of Russian conservatism, noting that Russia originally was an autocracy by nature alien to freedom and democracy. Attempts to implant Western ideas of freedom – one of his fundamental premises is that the West owns the copyright on ideas of freedom and democracy – have failed. The Russians have always sought safety in submission to a strong hand, an authoritarian rule, a government to which the citizens surrender their civil and political rights in exchange for stability and order, the author notes. Near the end of his short book, Pipes makes a quite trivial point: “The weakness of Russian society led inevitably to the growth and assertiveness of autocratic principles.” He is right, especially as far as the 18th and 19th centuries are concerned. The question, however, is not about the weakness of Russian society, or civic society, but why it was weak despite frantic efforts by the authorities and the elite to copy Western institutions – all except representative democracy, which did not emerge in the West from scratch, but developed, according to the prevalent theory, from institutions that Russia sought to mimic at the time. Even the notorious Russian bureaucracy that intervened in every aspect of life was derived from the French and Germans, not the Chinese.
Eternal returns
Throughout, Pipes asserts that every period of reform and attempt to introduce elements of democracy was followed by the strengthening of autocratic tendencies: the establishment of a police regime under Nicholas I succeeded Alexander I’s liberal efforts, Alexander III’s conservatism followed the Great Reforms of the 1860s, and Joseph Stalin’s regime was a reaction to the upheavals of the early 20th century. More recently, the remarkable liberal reforms of the 1990s gave rise to Vladimir Putin’s “controlled democracy.”
Different eras deal with different issues. Even accepting the premise that such cycles did exist, one can draw the opposite conclusion: Russia has spiraled toward greater civil rights and liberties; Putin, although an embodiment of autocracy and “screw-tightening,” is better than Stalin or Alexander III. The current Russian authorities do not sentence cyber-dissidents to labor camps in Siberia. No one is put to death. Humanism rules, in general.
One cannot deny the autocratic tradition in Russian intellectual history, especially in government practices. But it would be much more interesting to trace the origins of autocracy in Russia’s social and economic development. Pipes attempts this at the beginning of his book, but this is the most disappointing part of the work.
Larded though it is with quotes from Russian historians and parallels to developments in Western Europe, this section abounds in stereotypical assertions and conclusions mocked by historians since at least the late 19th century. For instance, Pipes alleges that there was no tradition of private property in the towns of medieval Muscovy. The poor English and Dutch merchants who set up shop there in the 16th century on the same legal grounds as in their countries must have been confused. Russian trade rules of that time were not the same as in Western Europe, but the main principles didn’t differ and they were quite satisfactory for foreign merchants, who never expressed any concern about the lack of respect toward their property rights. He claims that commerce and enterprise were absent from Russian towns, indeed he seems to believe Russia possessed few towns at the time. However, Moscow was one of Europe’s largest cities in the 16th century, and there were also other big cities like Novgorod, Yaroslavl, and Ryazan. Consult any historical reference book or atlas and you will see that Russia before the time of Peter the Great had a similar ratio of rural-to-town populations to the rest of Europe. Certainly, Russia’s population density was far below that of Western Europe, but the density varied across Europe, too. Take, for instance, Flanders and Norway.
As the narrative proceeds, the author does not abandon his reliance on ideas of 19th-century Russian historians considered absurd even by their contemporaries. In his discussion of Russian expansion, for instance, he argues that the state was forced to defend itself against recurrent invasions from the east, pressing forward from the Volga region to the Urals and later to the Pacific.
Such nonsensical stuff is still taught at Russian schools with the purpose of instilling patriotism in youngsters, but the American professor might have taken a more critical approach. Nomads controlled territories to the south of Russia, not eastward – as Crimean tribes were able to penetrate Russia up to the walls of Moscow, the czar’s warriors were approaching the Chinese border. The state was indeed blocked from expanding south until the mid-18th century, but the southward push that began under Catherine II was not a defensive maneuver against strong and dangerous enemies, rather a drive for virgin farmland and for ice-free ports on the Black Sea to boost trade with the West. The Crimean Tatars and Adygs were unlucky to be in the way of economic progress just like the American Indians.
A choice of -isms
Russian Conservatism and Its Critics might just as well have been titled Russian Liberalism and Its Opponents. In his 188-page work, the author turns to the views of Russian conservatives only on page 90, starting with Nikolai Karamzin’s famous paper critical of Alexander I’s liberal proposals. Up to that point he elaborates various currents of Russian public opinion, from the Middle Ages to the rule of Catherine II, with the emphasis on liberals or thinkers who paved the way for liberalism, thus unfolding, as he says, the cultural environment in which conservatives moved at the time. Yet much the same argument could serve to buttress the view that liberal currents, as presented in the book, were more ingrained in Russian intellectual history than conservatism, which emerged as a reaction to reform efforts. And that was logical. Conservatism emerges as an ideology with a serious intellectual content when critics question the regime and its proponents need to justify and defend it. Before that moment, the status quo is considered as something natural that does not require theoretical underpinnings.
It is not a problem that Pipes compares conservatism and liberalism, but by excluding radicals from his study he attaches greater scale and significance to liberal ideas in Russia than they had in reality. In the 18th-century context it is impossible to draw a line between moderate and radical enlighteners, yet while Pipes discusses the ideas of Nikolai Novikov in detail, Alexander Radishchev, a radical, is mentioned only in connection with the criticism of him expressed by Alexander Pushkin. In practice, however, the ideas and fates of Radishchev and Novikov were intertwined.
Secondly, conservative ideology was shaped not so much in discussions with liberals as in response to criticism from radicals, democrats, and, later, socialists. Pipes himself does not deny this, noting that “some conservatives drew no distinction between radicals and liberals.” The author himself operates within a liberal framework and shares its weaknesses. In this we may seek a reason for his overt disregard of popular movements and ideas, regardless of their political association. In his focus on elite political ideas, even those views that proved wrong and left no trace in history, he ignores mass movements – the Time of Troubles of the 17th century, the peasant uprisings led by Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev – and zemsky sobors, or Russian assemblies, which he does not regard as elected representative authorities, although recent studies and documents from provincial archives have proved the contrary. Pipes’ assertion that the palace coup staged by the Supreme Secret Council in 1730 was the only serious attempt to limit autocracy puts him in conflict with the very conservatives of his study, for they downplayed the importance of the coup as they constantly revisited the Time of Troubles and the Pugachev uprising.
Progress through repression
His analysis of the political views of literary masters such as Pushkin and Gogol is also questionable. It is beyond question that Pushkin’s letters and articles of the 1830s expose strong conservative tendencies, but that was not a departure from liberalism in favor of conservatism, but a bitter realization of the failures of the original ideology of the Enlightenment. Pushkin came to believe that Russia needed czarism in principle, but his relationship with the czar worsened in practice, and his belief was based on the premise that the government was the only element of Europe in Russia. In other words, he believed that actions that ran counter to the values of enlightened Europe were necessary to assert European values in barbaric Eurasia.
It was Pushkin who gave an accurate, sincere, and bleak explanation of the main drawback of Russian zapadnichestvo, the ideology of Westernization. As he saw it, unlike in England or France, enlightenment in Russia was something directed against the common people, because if the people were going to reject Westernization, and with it Western values like democracy, civil liberties, and human rights, then the only way to Westernize Russia was to resort to violence, dictatorship, and compulsion.
Not that the people opposed civil liberties. No, the Westernization they rejected encompassed taxes, conscription, and wars resulting from Russia’s involvement in European politics and emerging capitalism. Those novelties met with resistance in the West, too, but capitalism emerged there as an unexpected, although natural, result of revolutions carried out by the people. These new ways were introduced to Russia in the late 18th century as ready-made institutions incompatible with popular traditions and expectations. Even Russian serfdom was not an anachronism. It was proposed by reformers as a tool to force peasants to abandon subsistence agriculture and engage in production of goods for sale on the market.
The inconsistencies of the original Westernization paradigm caused the Russian intellectual community to split into radical democrats and moderate liberals leaning toward conservatism. The history of how this split occurred is the essence of Russian political culture of the 19th century. But the essence is beyond the framework of Richard Pipes’ book.
Copyright © 2007 .
