Russia through the looking glass BOOKS

TIBOR SZAMUELY

Foreign travellers' reports on Russia have an importance all their own, quite apart from the general value of historical sources. Unlike nationals of other countries, no Russians (ex- cept Archpriest Avvakum) proauced memoirs, nor (except for the odd defector) did they com- pile descriptions of their country's social and political order, or even of its physical and economic features, until well into the eighteenth century—and most of these latter contained only the officially approved version. Foreigners' notes, however skimpy, remain to this day a basic and indispensable source of information, much used by every Russian historian (and far better known in Russia than in their authors' native lands). For this reason, I can unre- servedly welcome and recommend Messrs Frank Cass and Company's new series of re- prints, Russia through European Eyes,* the first eight titles of which have now appeared.

For the general reader, brought up on the idea that modern Russia really began in 1917, that her great military might and leading world position were created by the Bolshevik Revo- lution and that Russia became an object of in- tense interest to the outside wurld only since then, these volumes will come as a revelation. He may be surprised to learn that exactly 200 years ago a British resident in Russia wrote: 'ihe Russian army is reckoned inferior to none in Europe,' or that 125 years ago it was gener- ally accepted in Europe that 'in point of military force no other state has so great an armed power.' In fact, under Nicholas I, perhaps also under Catherine the Great, Russia cut an even more conspicuous figure in the world than today.

Many other misconceptions about Russia will be corrected by these volumes. For instance, it has long been the custom in the West to write of Russian peasants before the emancipation of 1861 as 'serfs.' You will never find the word used in any of these memoirs: peasants are al- ways described (with a good deal of horror) as 'slaves.' And very properly so since that is what they were called in Russian (raby) and that is what they actually were: chattels, to be bought and sold, bartered, given away, lost at cards— with or without their families—unable to own property, even deprived of life at their master's whim. Being in addition obliged to pay taxes and to serve in the army, their existence prob- ably compared unfavourably with that of the American negro slaves.

The popular transmogrification of real Rus-

* The. State of Russia under the Present Czar John Perry (84s); The Present State of Russia Friedrich Christian Weber (two volumes, 84s each); Passages from the Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries (90s); The Russian Empire: its People, Institutions and Re- sources Baron von Haxthausen (two volumes, 105s each); Anecdotes of the Russian Empire William Richardson (95s); England and Russia Dr J. Hamel (75s); Contemporary Memoirs of Russia from 1727 to 1744 C. H. von Manstein (90s); Diary of an Austrian Secretary of Lega- tion at the Court of Czar Peter the Great Johann-Georg Korb (120s). (All published by Frank Cass and Company.)

sian slaves into imaginary 'serfs' links up with the invention of 'feudalism' in Russia. This is especially important for the Marxist- Leninists, with their rigid universal vision of five consecutive 'modes of production. But it is hardly less vital for our levelling social scientists, with their 'patterns' pro\ ing the fundamental similarity between the ways in which all civilisations have developed. are de- veloping, or should have developed —were it not for the intervention of extraneous forces. In keeping with this. the concept of feudalism —i.e. of a socio-political system confined to Western Europe within certain time limits --has been expanded and rendered meaningless enough to embrace practically all non-savage, pre-industrial traditional societies, from the Andean Indian to the West African Hausa to the Tibetan. Somewhere in this comprehensive structure Russia, too, is snugly ensconced.

Yet all our authors explicitly state, on the basis of extensive personal study that no such thing as feudalism ever existed in Russia. It is with a very different kind of system that they compare the Russian state. William Richardson, a resident of St Petersburg, wrote in the 1770s: 'The great empires of Assyria, Chaldea and Persia, present nearly the same appearance with the sovereignty of the Czar.' Almost all foreign observers were invariably struck by the parallels between Russia and the great oriental despotic empires. Johann-Georg Korb, the Secretary of the Austrian Legation, recorded in 1699: 'The Muscovites obey their sovereign less like subjects, than bought slaves looking upon him more in the light of a god than a sovereign ... The whole Russian race is rather in a state of slavery than of freedom. All, no matter what their rank may be, without any respect of persons, are oppressed with the harshest slavery.'

The complete enslavement of every Russian, of whatever rank, the total and unlimited power of the state over its subjects and over all the country's resources: this was the essence of the traditional Russian system—a tradition quite alien to that of Western Europe, even in those remote times. This tradition existed for about 500 years, until the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was revived after 1917, with a new ideology and an immensely powerful techno- logical base.

These volumes convey the rich and varied flavour of the life of a great and unusual nation: the hardships and the gaiety, the suffer- ing and the nobility, the cruelty and the high spirits. Almost all of them deal, in one way or another, with Peter the Great, undoubtedly one of the most remarkable men known to history. Peter is, to the best of my knowledge, the only human being whose life forms the pivot of his nation's whole chronology: to this day Russian history is divided into pre-Petrine and post- Petrine epochs. This is as it should be, for he transformed his country as no other country has ever been transformed. Compared with him, figures like Atatiirk or even Stalin seem almost pygmies. Yet, contrary to popular belief, Peter did not 'Europeanise' Russia; he only introduced European techniques, methods, ways of life. His reforms did not destroy the tradi- tional Russian system—they strengthened it.

One of Peter's closest collaborators was General Patrick Gordon, a dour courageous Scotsman, a stern disciplinarian and an excel- lent field commander, who spent nearly forty years in the Russian service. As on any other country to which they migrated, the Scots have left their mark on Russia. Peter probably owed more to Patrick Gordon than to any other man: the incorruptible and indomitable old soldier twice saved his throne—and once at least, his life--in the early, turbulent years of his reign, by putting down army revolt, almost single- handed. Whether Gordon realised it or not, he had changed the course of world history.

But Gordon's diary is not the most important among these eight titles: that distinction belongs unquestionably to Baron von Haxthausen's Russian Empire It is one of those books the significance of which lies not so much in what they actually say as in the effect they produce. 1 he appearance in 1847 of Haxthausen's learned treatise on Russian agrarian relations became a turning-point in the country's politi- cal development. Haxthausen had 'discovered' the village commune, the obslichina or mir, with its distinctive system of communal land tenure, collective responsibility and regular re- distribution of land:

'The Communes present an organic coherence and compact social strength which can be found nowhere else, and yield the incalculable advan- tage that no proletariat can be formed so long as they exist with their present constitution ...

As every Russian belongs to a Commune, and all the members are entitled to equal shares in the land, there are no born proletarians in Russia. The Utopia of the European revolu- tionists already exists here, fully incorporated with the national life.'

As soon as Haxthausen's book appeared, each ideological tendency claimed the commune for its own. The government triumphantly adver- tised it as the key to the striking stability of Russian society, which no amount of subver- sive agitation would ever be able to undermine. The Slavophils. for their part, were greatly en- couraged by this testimony to the virtues and the staying-power of pre-Petrine patriarchal institutions. But it was upon populist ideology that the book made the greatest impact. Alex- ander Herzen saw in the existence of the com- mune the decisive proof that Russia could avoid the capitalist path and the horrors of prole- tarianisation, and could achieve socialism— because of her backwardness—earlier than the developed nations of the West. This thesis be- came the corner-stone of the populist doctrine --it was to exert a profound influence upon Lenin and his theory of proletarian revolution in a backward country. Today the Russian populist thesis is going from strength to strength in numerous countries of the globe—even, in the form of 'New Left' posturing, in some of the most highly developed ones. How horrified

the conservative Prussian baron would be to see the results of his scrupulous scholarly inquiries!

Apart from Haxthausen, the most notable foreign writings on Russia are yet to come (I hope): Herberstein, Olearius, Fletcher, De Custine. I particularly look forward to the re- printing of Giles Fletcher's Of the Russe Com- mon Wealth, probably the most incisive and penetrating of all books about Russia. So pene- trating, in fact, that when it first appeared (1591) the merchants of the Muscovy Company pro- tested to Sir William Cecil that it 'will turn the Companie to some great displeasure with the Russe Emperour, and endaunger bothe theire people and goods nowe remayning there, ex- cept some good order be taken by your lord- ships honorable consideration for the callinge in of all the bookes that are printed.' Sir Wil- liam Cecil complied with the request, and the book was duly suppressed; a remarkable in- stance of the lengths to which British govern- ments would traditionally go in their age-old heroic struggle against the dread Trade Gap. Nothing can be more gratifying for an historian than to see some such familiar beacon lighting up from afar his course through the treacher- ous seas of the past.