ABSTRACT
As noted in Chapter 2, the Russian state saw the Decembrist uprising as a Russian aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The Decembrists embodied the revolutionary thought of the new, ‘false’ Europe. Consequently, the state saw them as the ‘enemy within’. One corollary of such a view is that the Russian debate about Europe, dominated as it was by reactions to the uprising, was still being shaped by a perceived Russian need to come to terms with Europe’s double revolution. The introduction of the doctrine of official nationality did nothing to solve this dilemma. The distance between the state’s position and the other positions in the debate did not diminish. The most significant development of the 1830s was therefore not the change of positions, but rather the way public political space was redefined. The debate about Europe forced its way from the margin of public debate onto centre stage, and became the divisive political issue of the day. Things came to a head in one single event: the publication of Chaadaev’s
aforementioned letter about Russia’s historical destiny. To this day, many historians of ideas hold this event to be so central that it spelled the end of the Russian 1830s, and the beginning of what is often called the ‘extraordinary’ or ‘remarkable’ decade of the 1840s because of its unprecedentedly lively intellectual atmosphere (Berlin, 1978: 114-209).1 During this decade, the key development was the crystallisation and polarisation of two positions on Europe. As this chapter will illustrate, the romantic nationalists gathered under the banner of ‘Slavophilism’, and those who looked to Europe for political and economic models became known as ‘westernisers’. Whereas in the 1830s the Russian debate floated freely between the main discussion groups, by the end of the 1840s the Slavophiles had established their own exclusive circle and the groups were hardly on speaking terms. Aleksandr Gertsen, who together with Stankevich was the leading Russian intel-
lectual of the 1830s, once famously called the publication of Chaadaev’s letter the ‘shot in the dark’ that started Russian political thinking. Hyperbole was certainly
called for; by the standard of the day, this was ear-splitting stuff. The tsar himself responded by having Chaadaev arrested, declared mentally ill, and placed under house arrest. Leonard Schapiro maintains that the reason for the outcry was that Chaadaev had been the first to suggest that Russia might never become like the rest of Europe, and that this ‘was a startling novelty at the time – if anyone had ever thought of it, no one had ever put it into words’ (Schapiro, 1967a: 40).2 Echoing Schapiro’s assessment, Andrzej Walicki asserts that ‘[a]fter his [Chaadaev’s] famous diagnosis Russia’s future as a European nation ceased to be self-evident’ (Walicki, 1975: 86). Perhaps Chaadaev was the first to make this claim. Yet, as noted above, similar
views had already found their way into print. In 1830, the year after Chaadaev’s letter was originally written, Nadezhdin published a piece which pointed in the same direction. Since Nadezhdin was the editor of the journal where Chaadaev’s letter was eventually to appear, it is quite possible that he wrote under the letter’s influence. Interesting as the question of originality and influences may be, the concern of this book lies elsewhere. It is a general point that new ideas need not be deep, profound or even original to have an impact, and that elements which do not latch on to the main texts or positions in the debate tend to be overlooked at the time.3
Where the Russian debate about Europe as a whole is concerned, the main question is not the originality of Chaadaev’s letter. Rather, it is why its impact did not make itself fully felt before it was published. In 1836 the letter had already circulated in the salons for seven years, as had indeed Chaadaev himself, but it was only when the letter was published – and so challenged the public political space which the state saw as exclusively its own – that matters came to a climax. Context, not content, was crucial. Before that, the state chose not to take cognisance of the letter, and therefore did not have to rise to the challenge. Once the letter entered the public discourse and the state was shown up as having no means to contain it, the discursive field changed irrevocably. For our purposes, it is of minor interest that Chaadaev himself was shunted aside,
and that he subsequently changed his views.4 In a later work called ‘The Apology of a Madman’ (published in 1837), he reiterated that Russia had no past, whereas Europe certainly had one, and a bright one at that. However, whereas in his first philosophical letter he had assessed contemporary Europe’s anchoring in the past as a positive thing, he now held Europe to have lost touch with its past, and therefore to have lost sight of the greater scheme of history. Russia, on the other hand, still had the possibility of borrowing from those ideas, and thus could still find its ‘place among the civilised peoples’. In this way, Russia would not only reach par with Europe, but could also at some future stage serve to revitalise Europe. This assertion of Chaadaev’s was not new; Odoevskiy had already made it decades before. It does, however, carry some interest inasmuch as it shows how one branch of a romantic nationalist argument can simply be torn off and implanted on the trunk of a different position. In short, rearrangement of the ideas present in a debate may be as important as the forging of new ones. The rearrangement of ideas was indeed lively during the 1840s. In the so-called
‘thick journals’, that is, in the major intellectual print media of the day, the two
terms ‘Slavophiles’ (slavyanofily) and ‘westernisers’ (zapadniki) were used more and more frequently. They had initially carried undertones of ridicule, having been used only to refer to the opposition. Now, they were frequently used as terms of self-identification. Instructively, ‘Slavophile’ was originally a derogatory term used to refer to
Shishkov and his ‘Russian Tendency’. This group had devoted itself to purifying the Slav roots of the Russian language. The ‘Slavophiles’ – that new generation of romantic nationalists – were clearly the outsiders in the 1830s. The debate about Europe was embedded in a general political debate rife with Hegelian influences, and was therefore heavily universalist. In 1837, for example, Stankevich voiced a widespread sentiment when he wondered aloud:
