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Social Sciences
Vol. 29, No. 2/April 1998
Violence and Civilization Breakdowns in Russia
By Vladimir Kantor *
The end of a century and the eve of a new millennium is a natural time for forecasts, apprehensions and worries. In modern Russia, the situation is aggravated by cruel wars on its periphery and large numbers of refugees, a direct consequence of the collapse of the Soviet empire, which came as a surprise top most of its citizens. The papers are full of news about hostages, contract killings and endless brushes between mafia groups. At first sight, the 20th century in Russia is ending the way it began, under the cloud of impending catastrophe.
In his last book, Three Conversations (1900), the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov predicted that the 20th century would be the epoch of the last great wars, conflicts and coups. His prophesy seems to have come true. After the Second World War many philosophers and publicists tried to pinpoint the sources of the evil rampant in our century. Who is to blame, the West “through Marxism and Nietzscheanism” which generated the cult of “darkness as substance capable of breeding light out of itself”? 1 Or is it that at the beginning of our century, in 1917, there occurred a discharge of some Russian substance (which gave the first terrorists in the 19th century) hostile to civilization? It was not far from the bomb thrown at the Russian Emperor Alexander II and the shot fired by the Serb terrorist Gavrilo Princip at the Austrian Erzherzog Ferdinand. But, whatever the source of evil besetting our world, one thing is clear: the West has managed to curb it yet again. As for Russia, violence here has changed aspect but not disappeared. What is more, it has come into the open, which is contrary to the Russian tradition, it has become public knowledge, and this has never happened before.
I believe that to assess the current situation, we must discern the constants of being behind our daily experience, abandon the level of daily, humdrum consciousness and rise to that of historiosophic discourse. Stunned by the eruption of various deadly conflicts, modern writers are inclined to consider them anti-historical. Standing out among the works on this subject is B. Didenko’s Civilization of Cannibals. 2
Svetlana Aleksievich, one of our best publicists, thinks that although a long time ago, at the beginning of human history, violence may have been inevitable, in this day and age its use is immoral and unjustifiable: “When nations, religions and states were being established, history may have had its reasons. But now one can no longer find excuses for politicians who launch a civil war in their own country...” 3 Well, maybe not excuses, but there should be a clear view of the situation in which we happen to be living and its place in history: it took centuries for the currently operating monstrous mechanism to shape.
Russia, however, is not alone in its inclination to use violence as a means of social organization. The history of many Western and Asian countries witnessed more than enough violence, wars, coups, revolutions, uprisings and revolts. Kant wrote that human history was stimulated by nature through wars, vigorous and never-slackening preparation for wars, through need, which should, in consequence, be felt inside each state even in time of peace. 4
However, the repeated failures of civilization attempts in Russia are probably creating an image of Russian history as a blind-alley process, and violence is beginning to seem an attribute peculiar to us alone. This is why a discussion of the role of violence in Russian history should begin by stating that proneness to aggression and violence are constants of both prehistoric and historical existence of mankind at large. “It is more than probable that the destructive intensity of the aggression drive, still a hereditary evil of mankind, is the consequence of a process of intraspecific selection which worked on our forefathers for roughly forty thousand years, that is, throughout the Early Stone Age,” wrote Konrad Lorenz, an outstanding Austrian ethologist. 5
So aggression is a trait of man as a product of nature. However, in various communities this inborn instinct filters through consciousness and metamorphoses into violence, which is one of the major factors of either establishment or demise of a sociocultural entity. A constant threat to the very existence of man, violence forces homo sapiens to devise various forms of protection against it, thus improving human relations. Unfortunately, all attempts to agree to lead an existence free of violence have so far been either pious wishes or public movements which have no decisive effect on historical evolution. This mystery cannot be unraveled from the moral-ethical stand alone, because this approach does not explain the culture-forming role of violence in human history. And unless one understands the specifics of one’s own culture and the type of violence accompanying it, one would never be able to assess the current situation clearly enough either.
The most general analysis of the historical process seems to highlight three types of violence, which were the most clearly manifest over the past three or four millennia and are still with us, albeit in a less obvious form.
The first type, which I would call barbarously destructive and predatory, is the fundamental one: virtually all tribes known to us from historical sources passed through the stage of barbarian conquests: Assyrians, ancient Hebrews, Ancient Greeks (Achaeans and Dorians), Romans, Germans, Slavs, Normans, Turks, etc. Subsequently, having assimilated the civilization of the conquered peoples, most of them contributed to the evolution of human civilization. But there were also barbarian tribes known as “the scourge of God”, like Huns or Avars: these swept through the world leaving nothing but destruction in their wake, and then disappeared not only from history but also from the face of the Earth.
The subject of barbarity and barbarism always occupied the minds of Russian thinkers, who were aware of its breath even in the course of their daily life. The rule of the barbarian Tartar–Mongol hordes was too long and too recent: in the mid-16th century, they set Moscow on fire.
Barbarians were the savage tribes which had departed from purely natural life and created primitive land cultivation and animal husbandry; they were able to appreciate the achievements of major civilizations when these came into being but were incapable of creating a civilization through an effort of their own. This is why their only chance of “partaking” of the benefits of civilization was conquest. A somewhat crude, in the style of the epoch of Enlightenment, but very graphic description of the barbarian life style was made by Chernyshevsky: “Upon the conquest of a Roman province each member of the conquerors’ tribe plunders, loots and kills whoever he feels like, be it somebody from the conquered population or one of his own fellow-tribesmen, until somebody stabs him, and in the meantime the leader chops off the heads of everyone he can lay his hands on.” 6 Suffice it to read Gregoire de Tours’s Histoire des Francs (4th cent.) to realize that this is a faithful description. Even when it comes to ancient Greeks, with whom we habitually associate the beginnings of European civilization, historians justly noted that at the earlier stages, their advent to Peloponnes and the destruction of the Crete–Mycenaean culture, these tribes had not known the meaning of guilt or sin. Having paid a ransom, a murderer felt blameless. The notions of guilt and sin are shaped in any culture at the stage when an environment for civilization is being built.
Even when peoples begin building a civilization, barbarity remains a permanent factor of their lives. Evolution takes place through constant struggle with one’s own savage past.
The second type of violence can be called destructive-creative, dynamic and productive; it dispenses with the past for the sake of the future. This is overt violence, which is capable of self-determination through contract, court trials, certain sociocultural mechanisms which promote the development of legal structures and other norms of civilization. It is found, above all, in European history. Promoting the disintegration of traditional societies through war of all against all (class struggle, internal European wars, etc.), just as Kant saw this issue, violence was used to combat violence and lead the Western world up to the idea of a contract-based alliance among the peoples that would settle all conflicts through law. Historian T. Granovsky wrote that among the barbarian tribes, “religion was a folk thing, a product of nationality... Hence the fierce enmity among the peoples of the ancient world, where not only humans but gods fought with great gusto. The community of the religion adopted by the Western peoples (Christianity. —V.K.) paved the way for an integral European civilization. Despite the schisms and reforms, Western civilization, to which each nation made a contribution, has retained features common to the various ‘ethnic’ civilizations”. 7 This is why any war or conflict between countries tied genetically or by religion sooner or later produced an awareness of common values that united and not alienated the belligerents. “The history of the European West,” writes Wolfgang Kraus, a modern Austrian culturologist, “is tragic and bloody enough, but more often than not it was made among one’s kith and kin, among close relatives, and this in the end facilitated reconciliation, mutual understanding and life and work as a community, as well as trade, while the need for self-assertion and constant defense against peoples of alien cultures did not afford this alleviation.” 8 But, of course, even in the west of Europe violence has not disappeared; it remains a factor that agitates society and obliges it to look for new forms and methods of self-defense...
And, finally, the third type of violence can be defined as provocative-protective. It restrains the advancement of society, conserves it, regards tradition as the ideal and constantly provokes or imitates violence so as to suppress it by super-violence and thus block all possible ways out of stagnation. Needless to say, provocation in this instant has cultural-genetic and not police-informer sense. For Plato, this provocative role belonged to constant violence in the Greek polises, which led to tyranny and motivated the thinker to create a grandiose model of a pro-totalitarian state (Karl Popper), which precluded evolution and, therefore, the possibility of spontaneous violence uncontrollable by the state. Wholesale violence seemed to Plato the most reliable guarantee, which made impossible the endless democratic war of all against all. It is interesting that, given this approach, violence seems to acquire a “forced” character and relations inside society become idealized, appear essentially peaceful, almost idyllic. For example, the Slavophils thus described the Slavs’ “patriarchal way of life, in which the tyrant slave-owner became a benefactor, the slave became a free laborer, and a chain of love linked the rulers and the subjects.” 9 It is amazing that the relations based on open coercion are presented as peaceful and harmonious, and that overt violence is not designated as such. But this is precisely the specific quality of this type of violence: while any attempt to change society is viewed as a crime, the lawless coercion practiced by the top echelon is regarded as beneficial because it is supposed to consolidate the state and advance public well-being. A. Khomyakov discerned such relations (elevated to the status of idyll) in the medieval West, too.
The last two types of violence perform a productive historical role; in any case, it is their influence that promoted the emergence of powerful states which made an impact (both good and bad) on the evolution of mankind. They also determine the uniqueness of the cultures and the mode of the latter’s existence. But there is also a possibility of combinations of the three types of violence, especially as the first one constitutes the foundation of the latter two. History keeps providing such examples even inside one time-period and one culture. But, of course, the determinative type can always be identified. While Western Europe inclines towards the second type, our history seems to favor the third. Since the time of Muscovite Rus, it has constantly made itself felt (although with interruptions and inclusions), especially in the Bolshevist–Soviet period. But this type of violence is also typical of other societies (suffice it to recollect Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany).
Awareness of our link with the Moscow Principality still exists at almost the physiological level, and this is by no means a chance. As G. Fedotov justly noted, both Peter I’s empire and Stalin’s dictatorship were built by a Russian of the Moscow type with his mentality of a creature bound by obligations to the state and deprived of any rights. Such people were bricks from which the foundations of great empires were built.
Muscovite Rus was a traditional society, which, however, had features all its own and differed from Asian or West European traditional societies, although it did share with them the sluggishness of change in the sphere of production, the tendency to conserve cultural and religious traditions, and reproduction of the established social structure and way of life over many centuries.
In Western Europe, such societies emerged on the ruins of Ancient civilization as a result of the barbarians’ conquest of Rome (the first type of violence); the establishment of Western European states took place through the struggle of very nearly equal forces, the king and the big feudal lords, with participation of a third force, the cities, i.e., the emerging third estate, the burgers, the bourgeoisie, who made a strong impact on the outcome of this struggle. When incorporated into a large state, the counts, barons and princes retained many of their rights and freedoms; what is more, such rights and freedoms were also acquired by citizens of humble origin. The factual balance of forces required official regulation of relations in society. By the 14th century, England already had a parliament and France had estats-generaux, which paved the way for the subsequent bourgeois reform and a relatively painless dismantling of the old traditional society without the emergence of a totalitarian state on its ruins.
The Church acted as a political force in its own right; it not only put ideological pressure to bear on the state but made it clear it had economic and power interests of its own. This necessitated compromises between the Church and the state, the Popes and the kings, the Popes and the cities; this confrontation gave shape to the rights of the state and the Church, with the latter refusing to side with any one state by laying claim to domination over the whole European world. As K. Kavelin said, in Europe, “both civilian life and politics from bottom to top were based on contract, on a system of mutual balance of rights. Europe had passed through a long struggle, a series of profound cataclysms before it finally managed to cope with fragmentation and the closed-in character of hostile alliances, to confine them within certain boundaries and make them accept the terms set by a competently organized state. Until the state principle was shaped, the connecting link had been the Roman Catholic Church and dogma, which were a vehicle of the influence and power of Christianity in the fragmented European world”. 10 As a result of the established contract principle of historical evolution, even England (after it had cut itself off from the Pope and the king had become the head of the Anglican Church) had an alternative to monarchy: parliament, which had strong roots in folk life, a strong bourgeoisie, strong cities and the Magna Charta, the foundation of English law.
In short, the part of Europe that can be called the core of the West (shakily and temporarily as regards the Italian city-states, then Holland and England and, gradually, other Western European countries) evolved and established contract-based relations; this was tantamount to the restoration of the principles of civilization destroyed by the reform and a relatively painless dismantling of thebarbarians. This is how the European civilization arose out of war of all against all, an outcome of the second type of violence, that is, violence that promoted enterprise, intellect, the sciences, knowledge and law; it arose at the time when the advantage was on the side of private initiative and stimulation of production: in the legal space the advanced, the educated and the talented prove the strongest.
At the time of the great migration, the Slavs, who had been pushed by the German tribes to virgin lands in the north-east, were first involved in world trade through Khazars and later the Varangians, who became assimilated on the Slav–Finnish soil and established political, diplomatic, cultural and religious relations with Byzantium, the only civilized state of the time. Taking their cue from Byzantium but maintaining dynastic and other ties with all Western Europe, Medieval Rus began to catch up with its neighbors. Operating here was the same type of violence as in Europe of the early Middle Ages, the very one which gradually produced the rudiments of legal relations and the signing of contracts both with the western neighbors and among the Russian city-states or, as they are sometimes called, “semi-states”. In Kievan Rus, the enmity was among roughly equal adversaries (principalities); in this, it resembled Ancient Greece divided into independent city-states and then Renaissance Italy and, strictly speaking, the whole of Europe, which now fell apart into small states, now united into large ones. In other words, Medieval Rus developed within the paradigm of European civilization.
Unfortunately, just at that time it sustained a blow typologically similar to that dealt by the barbarians at the Roman Empire. Kievan Rus was conquered and plundered, its natural evolution was interrupted by the Tartar–Mongol invasion in the mid-13th century. At that time, to put it figuratively, the trunk of its development, although not broken altogether, began to grow sideways and obey a different set of laws. While having settled across the former Roman Empire the barbarians adopted the religion of the conquered state, Christianity, and tried to emulate the conquered Romans; while living in cities they willy-nilly shared in the benefits of Roman civilization, such as piped water and paved roads, the Tartars had dealings with conquered Rus only through their baskaks, khans’ representatives and tax collectors, or during yet another plundering raid or punitive expeditions. They did not mix with Russians and received Russian princes on their territory—princes who had been granted a yarlyk, title to a principality, and not on the basis of contract but through the khan’s whim: the khan was as likely as not to take it back any moment. As a result, wrote Georgy Fedotov, an outstanding Russian thinker, “on the territory of the Moscow Principality, Tartar ways as regards administration, the court procedure and tax collection were introduced. Not from the outside but from the inside, the Tartar influence reached the Russian’s soul, invaded his flesh and blood. This spiritual Tartar invasion went hand in hand with the Horde’s political decline. In the 15th century, thousands of christened and unchristened Tartars went into the service with the Moscow Prince joining the ranks of persons subject to service, the future aristocracy, and infecting them with oriental notions and the steppe mode of existence”. 11
In other words, Muscovite Rus was formed in conditions that were in no way conducive to the establishment of legal relations: this process was strongly influenced by violence of the first type, that is, non-historical, barbarian violence. This is why Russian traditional society differed on many counts from European ones despite the common origin and initial development paradigm (Christianity). The phenomenon of violence marking all human communities acquired specific forms in Muscovite Rus, forms typical of the third type of violence designed to restrain social evolution.
Muscovite Rus is sometimes perceived as a symbol of all that is stable, truly Russian and, most important, non-violent. It is forgotten that Moscow, like the Western states, came into being through cruelty and perfidy. It is at the time of Muscovite Rus that the “Mongol land title” which abolished private land ownership was established. There also appeared the specifically Moscow type of relations, which implied that the state’s subjects had plenty of responsibilities towards it but no rights, a fact noted by historians from S. Solovyov and V. Klyuchevsky to G. Fedotov and L. Gumilev.
The state of the new type was rested on violence as the chief, if not the only means of regulating the relations both inside the country and with the neighbors, as an instrument of protection, expansion and consolidation. To be more precise, the state experienced a constant “cultural-physiological” need for keeping the people in a state of permanent fear of the external and internal enemy, readiness to suffer and give up their lives for the sake of collective and not private goals and interests. Hence Dostoyevsky’s idea (much admired by the Europeans) that suffering is indispensable to moral growth. Hence also the low value set on human life in Russia. Life under constant threat of violence became the fate of all Russian subjects. This principle greatly benefited the state, became a sort of norm and has survived, with a few historical intermissions, until the present. Says S. Aleksievich: “We are, of course, a military society through and through as regards our mentality, our idea of martyrs and heroes, of good and evil, everything. We were either fighting, or preparing for war, or thinking back to one... Military literature was the best kind of literature. We needed it, living as we did in a state of emergency. Even Chernobyl was a gift to this state. Through it, the state of emergency found a continuation, gained a chance to survive. Once again we were in for distribution of meager benefits, for life in a labor camp, for an emergency situation.” 12 This principle, however, was not formulated today or yesterday, it came into being gradually, and its cultural-historical nature is complex enough. The point at issue is not war, Romans also fought in wars, but the attitude to violence and the ends it is used to achieve.
Probably for the first time, the “Moscow type of relations” manifested itself in the conflict between Moscow and Novgorod under Ivan III. In 1477, when the Moscow Prince and his troops approached Novgorod having devastated that principality’s lands as they crossed it, the citizens of the last free Russian city agreed to become the subjects of Moscow, but only on the basis of contract, that is, on certain terms. Ivan III’s reply showed that the old contract principles of Novgorod–Kievan Rus were no longer effective and that a new order would henceforth be established: “Haven’t I told you that I want Great Novgorod to be the same kind of state as the one in the Lowlands, in Moscow; so why are you now telling me what kind of state you will have? What manner of state would I have after this?” 13 What did this mean? Just one thing: any state coercion was recognized as unlawful but legitimate. Man was defenseless before violence, for even “everyday-life” crime was not controlled by enforceable laws and attempts to combat it began only when criminals formed large groups that threatened the state itself. Private life and property had value only insomuch as they were able to serve the needs of the state. The rulers’ power, on the other hand, knew no bounds.
The adopted mode of development at the expense of one’s own people paved the way for unlawful, essentially criminal mentality at national scale and, consequently, national catastrophes.
The people were being corrupted in moral and religious sense. They were getting used to any form of violence that came from its own and not from a foreign government and accepted it as a norm of social-state relations, for the upper strata had absolutely the same rightless status with respect to the autocrat. Sigmund von Herberstein, a 16th-century German diplomat who visited Moscow under Vassily III, Ivan the Terrible’s father, wrote about the power in the hands of the Moscow Prince: “He applied his power to the clergy as much as to the laymen disposing at will of the life and property of each... They (Muscovites. —V.K.) directly declare that the will of the prince is the will of God and that whatever the Prince may do, he does by the will of God... It is difficult to say whether the people need a tyrant ruler because of their crudeness, or whether they become crude, insensible and cruel because of the ruler’s tyranny.” 14
The most vivid manifestation of this life behavior, the system’s acme of a kind, was the rule of Ivan the Terrible. Noting that he had both political and ideological power, N. Berdyaev wrote: “The Moscow Orthodox kingdom was a totalitarian state (my italics. —V.K.). Ivan the Terrible, who was a magnificent theorist of autocratic monarchy, taught that the czar should not only rule the state but also save souls.” 15 Maybe it would be a trifle premature to call Muscovite Rus a totalitarian state, although like any traditional society it exercised total control over its subjects, but that it was a pro-totalitarian country is indisputable.
Participants in our recent philosophical discussions devoted to totalitarianism said more than once that in traditional society, any individual accepts his unconditional subordination as natural. However, even in the Moscow Principality there were people who refused to do so. Contemporary historians note that political centralization around 16th-century Moscow took place within the framework of autocracy. However, the expanding contacts with Lithuania and Poland and the emerging trade relations with England introduced Russians to other state regimes, and this must have made a contribution to the evolution of the domestic political conflict in Russia. Under Ivan the Terrible, quite a few boyars tried to move to Lithuania, often not unsuccessfully. In other words, there emerges an outline of a conflict between personality that seeks independence and the state that suppresses it—a conflict typical of totalitarian society.
After the reforms implemented by Ivan the Terrible at the outset of his reign—convocation of the Assembly of Land, revision of the Law Code, and introduction of the Code of Family Life, the state itself in the person of the czar invalidated the effect these innovations had in terms of civilization. In December 1564, Ivan the Terrible left Moscow for Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda and issued two edicts to the people, acting behind the backs of the boyars. The first dealt with the perfidy of the boyars and the clergy, and the second stated that the czar was harboring no grudge against the common people. Shortly afterwards, he was more or less authorized by the public to annihilate the boyars, that is, provoked the establishment of oprichnina, a special administrative elite, which later made several comebacks in Russia in the guise of the notorious Third Department, the Extraordinary Commission, etc. “The victory of oprichnina,” Fedotov wrote, “of the new ‘democratic’ class of state servants, over hereditary aristocracy meant barbarization (my italics. —V.K.) of the ruling stratum, the spread of servile mentality among it, and even exploitation of the toiling population.” 16
Why did this happen? It became clear that as a result of reforms, the boyars may acquire some rights and, in consequence, access to state administration. The still unformed power of the czar could have been threatened: this became obvious during the czar’s illness, when boyars began having thoughts of replacing him. Those were only thoughts, but the punishment for the intention proved immeasurably harsher than the Western European rulers’ punishment for their vassals’ reprehensible actions. “What exactly displeased Ivan the Terrible in the boyars?” asked Khomyakov. “We know the struggle of kings in the West against great vassals; but we also know what the latter fought for and against. We know not only of the vassals’ constant disobedience and claims to independence, but also of the surveillance imposed upon kings by the armed hand and alliances for the common good (du bien public). There is not a trace of revolt, not a trace of conspiracy, not even a trace of disobedience. Where, then, were the rights, the forces against which Ivan armed himself, not with a sword, which he had never learnt to nor dared wield, but with stakes, bonfires and boilers.” 17
The similarity to Stalin’s totalitarian tyranny is striking; while promising to make Russia a part of Europe, the Bolsheviks, as far as their methods are concerned, went back not even to the time before Peter I but to Rus before the Romanovs. This did not prevent them from swearing by the name of Marx, a Western European—how like Ivan the Terrible, who called himself a German and corresponded with Elizabeth, the Queen of England! Doing away with a class that could retain at least a memory of its former rights, the czar formed an alliance with people to whom the European concepts of law, property and freedom were totally alien; as a result, the country gradually evolved a life-style that affected public mentality.
According to Jacob Reutenfels, Roman ambassador to the Moscow Principality, Ivan the Terrible said that Western kings “ruled over people, while he—over brutes”. This approach could not but affect public self-appraisal, deprived the people of independence, thus forming a vicious circle. As Klyuchevsky wrote ironically, when a break occurred in the dynasty, there was no longer anyone to obey; so there was nothing to it but to revolt. Having no effective laws, Moscow’s subjects were left to their own devices and succumbed to the people accustomed to an unlawful, semi-criminal, brutal system of relations. In the early 17th century, they spread all over Russia. Russian historians explained the “horrible phenomena of the Time of Trouble... by the seepage of the poisoned juices accumulated in the dreadful epoch of Ivan’s tortures”. 18 The national organism began to show signs of a serious disease, which had been hidden from the outside observers but which only worsened as a result of the actions of the Moscow princes.
Introducing some European innovations designed to promote closer contacts between Muscovite Rus and Western Europe, Boris Godunov tried to act in the spirit of “late Ivan the Terrible”, without support of the boyars, suppressing them, removing them from reforms. But the boyars were not ready to excuse in “one of themselves” the cruelty they had excused in the lawful czar Ivan the Terrible. Klyuchevsky observed that it was the boyars who fomented unrest and that “the first Impostor was their creation”. As Fedotov aptly noted, “Russia’s recent development is a dangerous race: who will come first, liberating Europeanization or the Moscow revolt, which will overwhelm and sweep away our young freedom in a wave of public wrath?” 19
The rebellious lower strata, on the one hand, had nothing against European freedom (which is why they supported Pseudo-Dmitry, a vehicle of Western influence), which, however, they interpreted as arbitrariness, as a chance to live amidst total anarchy and lawlessness. On the other hand, they could not but realize, purely intuitively, that Europeanization would make their condition worse. Assimilation of the ABC of Europeanism became a condition of survival of the Russian state, which came to a rendezvous with Europe from behind the “iron curtain” of the Mongol yoke. It is, however, clear that a civilized, “European-style” social stratum could not appear unless considerable national wealth has been accumulated. In such a poverty-stricken country as Russia, this could be achieved only by enslaving the people. The 17th century was the time of the final establishment of serfdom: from Boris Godunov’s edicts to Czar Alexei Mikhailovich’s Law Code of 1649. The situation was fraught with profound contradictions.
Revolts were a reaction to the state’s Europeanization, which made the load pulled by the people even heavier. The model of Russian culture is complex. According to Yuri Lotman, it is determined by the “distance between already none and none yet”. 20 As applied to the issue of interest to us, this means that, although the third type of violence was no longer barbarian, neither was it able—yet—to help develop structures that would protect people. The crucial condition of the establishment of civilized relations was absent: awareness of the value of personality, the value of the other, the possibility of reaching accord with him. This happened because people had no awareness of the value of their own personalities. There was no “You exist” because “I exist” was also absent.
Like the early Slavophils 150 years ago, the so-called patriotic publicists, our contemporaries (neo-Eurasians, neo-Slavophils, neo-back-to-the-soil writers, and even neo-Stalinists) name Peter the Great as the prime mover of Russia’s violence-propelled evolution (allow me to remind in passing that history knows no other mode of evolution), which was supposed to lead to unheard-of cruelty towards the people and to produce, later, the model of Bolshevist totalitarianism. Admittedly, Peter I provided an excuse for these accusations, having dropped once that he considered himself a follower of Ivan the Terrible. Let us note, however, that the violence of Peter I, who “flogged” Russia into European civilization, was essentially different, although Peter used the same techniques as his predecessors, the Moscow czars. First, historically Peter’s violence was a response to the Strelets uprising of 1682, which tried to overthrow the lawful czar and destroy the rudiments of Europeanization. Second, since Peter made one of the most resolute attempts to break down the established traditional society and return Russia to Europe, he tried to change the very type of violence.
As we know, the outcome of his efforts was highly positive. Peter I set up a regular army patterned after European armies and, in consequence, began to demilitarize the country—not in the ideal but in the concrete European sense. Despite their numerous justly criticized faults, the recruitment system and the long term of military service built, if not a hired army, then at least a military social estate that stood apart from the people. The country ceased to be one big army camp, and the change of the type of violence set man free: from then on, he was able to talk and act without fear for his nearest and dearest, as had used to be the case in the proto-totalitarian Muscovite Rus. After Peter I, the state often was, as Pushkin put it, the only European in Russia. But along with the strata displeased with Europeanization and opposed to it, the state itself was sometimes “displeased”, aware as it was of its semi-barbarian nature and viewing West European influence as undermining its authority.
It is interesting that after the peasant wars (Razin, Pugachev) were over, the Russian state began to fear European revolutions, which could instigate anti-governmental action among the educated aristocracy, which was looking for ideals in the West more closely than the state did and which began to shape personal relations and ideas of law. This is why Catherine II reacted to the French Revolution and Nicholas I to the European events of 1848 by tightening the screws, launching reprisals and engineering anti-European, anti-civilization coups.
At the same time, the contact between “educated” (proto-civil) society and the state could, and later did lead to Alexander II’s great revolutionary reforms, which gave the Europeanization process an impetus of almost Peter I’s might. It is no accident that, aware of the duality of Russia’s evolution, Chaadaev viewed the Decembrists’ uprising as a kind of provocation, which pushed Russia almost half a century back, interrupted the country’s Europeanization and rendered more brutal the reign of Nicholas I, whose methods put his contemporaries’ strongly in mind of the habits of the Moscow princes familiar to them from history.
As Herzen noted, Nicholas I wanted to be, not an emperor but a czar. His entire reign was spearheaded against the supra-national, imperial idea of Peter I, whose chief objective was, according to Herzen, to secularize the czar’s authority and to use European civilization to soften the extremes of nationalism. Nicholas I made a new attempt to turn the people into an army and the country into barracks drawing on an extreme nationalist ideology, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality”. Contemporaries commented on his “barrack aversion to book learning”. The routing of the universities and literature executed by him in the last seven years of his reign provoked protests from the enlightened part of society, which discerned “the spirit of Muscovite Rus” in his endeavors. S. Solovyov thus described the situation: “Ignorance, arbitrariness and plunder reigned... That was a Strelets uprising of a kind; crude soldiery gloried in its triumph and took no mercy on its weak unarmed adversaries” (my italics. —V.K.). 21 Like Ivan the Terrible, Nicholas I laid primary emphasis not on state needs but on consolidation of power as such, regarding autocracy as the goal and meaning of Russia’s development. Herzen thus summed up his reign: “He achieved nothing, created nothing but autocracy for the sake of autocracy.” 22
However, the rules introduced by Peter I continued to operate. The Decembrists’ families were not stripped of their property, the wives followed their convicted and exiled husbands as free citizens. The nobility’s freedoms and the economic independence of this estate were not abrogated either. But police surveillance tightened, letters, even private ones, were screened, and, the most important “achievement” of the regime, there appeared a certain type of agent-provocateurs who did not expose plots but created and initiated them, turned perfectly harmless literary-philosophical groups into anti-governmental organizations. They propelled “like-minded people” towards revolutionary talk and then applied to them Ivan the Terrible’s practice of penalizing a thought, an intention, a literary text. A typical case was Petrashevsky’s group, young men who dabbled in literature and philosophy and studied Fourier’s doctrine. “Surveillance over Petrashevsky’s group had been going on for a long time, the Ministry of the Interior had sent a young man to take part in the gatherings, and he ... punctually attended them, encouraged others to voice radical ideas and then wrote down everything that had been said and passed on this information to the relevant authorities” (my italics. —V.K.), A. Milyukov, member of the group, later wrote. 23 That young man was one P. Antonelli, son of a member of the Russian Academy of Painting. He even introduced his comrades to “savage Circassians” who were supposedly ready for a coup d’etat but were, in actual fact, Nicholas I’s guards. The would-be conspirators were arrested, tried and, although no proof of a revolutionary plot was discovered, convicted. What was the verdict, then? Here is an extract from the sentence given to Fedor Dostoyevsky, the great Russian writer, who was also a member of Petrashevsky’s group. It may well be regarded as a herald of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s “court sentences”: “The military tribunal sentenced Dostoyevsky, retired Lieutenant of the Engineers, for failure to report the circulation of a criminal...letter by writer Belinsky...on the basis of the Code of Military Regulations,... to the stripping of all the rights of his estate and to death by firing squad” (my italics. —V. K.). 24
When a man of letters is tried by a military tribunal, the country must be under martial law, must be trying to isolate itself from the rest of the world in an attempt to retain its social immobility. In other words, features of Muscovite Rus were strengthening and making themselves felt in the St. Petersburg empire. These trends also determined the life of the opposition, which happened to replace the Russian autocracy. Allow me to remind you of Herzen’s curious prophesy: “Communism is the Russian autocracy in reverse.” Despite society’s fresh breakthrough to Europeanism, it was after the reign of Nicholas I that there finally appeared a mechanism that precluded a reform of traditional Moscow society lurking behind the façade of Peter I’s empire.
The process was brilliantly described by Klyuchevsky. Summing up the country’s history and trying to foresee the future, he wrote in his diary in April 1906, at the time of the First Russian Revolution: “Throughout the 19th century, since Alexander I’s coming to the throne, the Russian government was engaged in provocation (my italics. —V.K.), pure and unadulterated: it gave society just as much freedom as was required to bring to life its first manifestations, and then bore upon and punished the unwary simpletons... While Arakcheev’s blatant policy (which came to replace Speransky’s bashful, diffident one) did its best to lead conspiracy up to an armed uprising, Nicholas I’s perfidious Benkendorf-style behavior tried to lead public discontent up to conspiracy.” 25 As a result, the nascent society was led up to opposition by the government, which qualified each manifestation of free thinking as a crime. A struggle for Russia between society and the state began. While before, the state had been viewed as the pivot of Russia and these two notions were almost identified, by the 1870s they became complete opposites. The task now was to save Russia from the state. But to accomplish it, the radicals used just those instruments that were suggested to them by the government. The opposition instigated to revolutionary action was easy to punish. And, of course, the government’s instigation to violence finally awakened the Vendee proclivities dormant in the people, readiness for revolts and unrest of anti-European nature, which viewed civilization as strictly evil, a threat to the people’s well-being.
This atmosphere was conducive to a marriage of secret police and revolution—take Degaev, Sudeikin, Azef, Malinovsky, possibly Stalin. The never-ending provocation to violence was, in fact, provocation to nihilism in public mentality. It should be noted that, since “Europeanization of Europe” or, to be more precise, “Westernization of the West” was not yet over, the West also had a taste for nihilism and, in a measure, assimilated its ideas: its philosophical aspect had appeal in Germany and aesthetic—in France and Austria (Wolfgang Kraus). The nihilist movement against civilization assumed a broad scale in Europe at the turn of the 19th century, possibly as the last attempt of barbarian forces to stop the civilization process. The movement was headed by the most archaic country, Russia, later joined by Europe’s marginal members—Italy, Germany, Spain. Russia was, however, the first to use violence as a radical means to stop civilization processes making headway.
Police provocation inspired revolutionary terror: the ideologists of the autocracy needed it for suppressing European freedom and open society, which were beginning to take shape in Russia. Karakozov’s shot at Alexander II was from start to finish orchestrated by the secret police to provide an excuse for folding up reforms. Constant provocation of unlawful violence produced a whole large group of people who psychologically accepted it as justified and legitimate. As Johan Huizinga justly noted, “if the authorities preach violence, the next step is taken by the ‘users’ of violence themselves... They would consider themselves justified by this principle and would not stop at the most extreme forms of cruelty and inhumanity.” 26
The authorities and the aristocracy tried to create a counterbalance to the revolutionaries (also on the basis of the principles of unlawful violence), the notorious “black hundred”, which Fedotov called “the Russian edition or the first version of national-socialism”. However, at a time of trouble victory usually goes to the opposition force whose hands are not tied by loyalty to the state but whose tradition is also rooted in archetypal depths. The Bolsheviks expertly used the barbarian methods of the policy developed by the autocracy and openly disregarded the norms of civilization. Lenin exclaimed: “But how can the revolution be completed without shootings? ... What other repressive methods are there? Imprisonment? Who would use it at the time of a civil war which each side is hoping to win?” 27
Implementation of this policy called for people who would be capable of cruelty not moderated by law, that is, people with a criminal-barbarian mentality who had no notion of the value of human life. And such people—quite a large number of them—were found. Their atrocities went beyond the boundaries of the notions held by civilized humanity and resembled those of the barbarians of ages long past.
Where did such people spring from? Were they “new men” produced by the Bolshevist regime? Who were they, and what were their origins?
police to provide an excuseBut what about the origins of the Russian revolutionary terrorists, all those Nechaevs, Tkachevs, Zhelyabovs? K. Pobedonostsev noted once that after the reforms of the 1860s, self-employed craftsmen were “burnt out” by the factories and turned to revolution, usually to terror. Nechaev was just such a one. It is important that the burgeoning capitalist relations pushed large numbers of people from traditional society, turned them into proletarians, deprived marginal elements, destroyed their traditional public mentality. A similar process was under way in Germany and Italy, much more Europeanized states, which gave the Russian radicals an excuse to give their revolutionary aspirations European status. Anti-bourgeois revolutionary theories (anarchism, communism, etc.) were tremendously influential.
The future fascists, nazis and communists came from a background that had lost its integrity and wholeness at the time when the past was being destroyed and the future not yet certain, they found themselves in a situation which Lotman defined as “already none and none yet”. And so, heralding the construction of something new, these enterprising dreamers of the 20th century in fact imbued new concepts with old familiar meaning. It is they who proved the most cruel protectors of the status-quo resurrected by them, who used every violent method at their disposal to conserve the fossilized social structures.
In Russia, totalitarianism is often viewed as a purely 20th-century phenomenon that has no precedent in world history. But a historical phenomenon of such dimensions must have roots, a past. Of course it had ideological predecessors and structural prototypes. It is not for nothing that Karl Popper named Plato as the first enemy of “open society” (in other words, the first champion of totalitarianism). Karl Wittfogel, an American scholar of German extraction, wrote in his book Oriental Despotism that the founders of the totalitarian states of the 20th century (from Lenin and Stalin to Mussolini and Hitler; incidentally, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot also belong in this company) consciously or unconsciously drew on the political structures of the early Oriental despotic states, Ancient Egypt, Sumer, Assyria, India, China. But each country and each culture has a Sumer of its own, traditional society whose ideals determine the spirit of the builders of the “new order”. The German nazis appealed to “blood and soil”, the communal traditions of ancient Germans. The Russian Bolsheviks, who were building communism largely spontaneously (as in Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur) in conformity with their ideas and notions were in fact restoring the pre-civilization archaic structures of communal life, multiplied by the ages of communal life imposed upon them by the state. Discussing the types depicted by Andrei Platonov, a modern researcher inquires: “What is the meaning of Platonov’s characters’ speeches, what do they tell us, which type of mentality do they represent?” The answer is: “This is basically semi-archaic mentality, a mentality of people who are totally unused to adult logical thinking (phrases similar to Platonov’s can be heard from children and found in myths and legends written down by ethnographers).... These people did not live in the 20th century, they did not even live in the Middle Ages, culturally, they lived in the Antiquity; they are encountering 20th-century thinking only in the form of Marxism, whose lingo is intricately interwoven into the fabric of their ‘pre-logical thinking’”. 28
However, the structures that came into being as a result of their efforts differed from the strictly traditional ones in that they, first, originated at a time when there already was a fair number of people with advanced individual consciousness, which had to be eradicated by mass-scale and not antediluvian methods; second, they arose in the context of technological progress, whose achievements were used to ... stop its advancement. That is, 20th-century totalitarianism is a reaction of traditional society to technogenic civilization, with all the achievements of this civilization used to resurrect the past. It is also important that traditional society is the first layer of civilization formed above barbarity. Laboring under too heavy a pressure from the new structures, this layer ruptures, and the cave bear of barbarism peeks through the rents. It rises to the defense of traditional society and traditional values capitalizing on the primitive fear of everything that is strange and unfamiliar, on tribal and ethnic discord, and destroys independent personality as the chief essential enemy able to stand up to collective madness. As for the main goal, it is still banal plunder executed with the help of war. As the nazis appropriated the property of the Jews they had annihilated and later the wealth of the conquered countries, so the Bolsheviks seized the property of the emigre nobility, bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, and rewarded the informers with apartments and property of their victims. Outwardly, totalitarian barbarity does not resemble the barbarity of the epoch of migration, but typological similarity is apparent. It is no accident that Thomas Mann viewed fascism as a return to barbarity resting on the ideals of tribal paganism. Typical in this context is the hatred of totalitarianism towards Christianity, for Christ remains the great target of mankind, who beckons to man, urges him to move forwards, to personality, from “we” to “I”.
Totalitarianism strengthens the third type of violence, which conserves socio-historical development. Civilization, which is personified by “aggressive” and at the same time “rotting” West, is viewed by traditional and totalitarian societies as something alien, a threat to ethnic and back-to-the-soil ideals and therefore as a destructive force. This means that the vehicles and principles of this civilization should be combated by violence, by provocation of spontaneous forces capable of interrupting the civilization process. This is why violence in all traditional, as well as totalitarian and fundamentalist (invariant of totalitarian) societies was always ideologically justified. Suffice it to recollect the endless political trials in Bolshevist Russia, Nazi Germany and fundamentalist Iran. In that world, the man who personifies violence is a hero. His chief virtue is that he acts outside the norms of civilized law. “‘No need for a court hearing.’ ‘If you are not a communist, a machine gun is court enough for you,’”—this is how the principal vehicle of Soviet justice (Krylenko. —V.K.) and a representative of the Russian Extraordinary Commission voiced one and the same bloody idea. 29
But, as later developments showed, membership in the ruling party was not enough. To survive, one had to completely accept this criminal mode of behavior, the mafia as the way of life, which prescribed annihilation of any enemy of the “family”, removal of everyone who thought and felt differently and, consequently, did not share the criminal credo. Fighting began inside the party which had seized power; it ended in a mass-scale shooting of the losers, as well as hundreds of thousands of those who were connected with the losers, or could have been connected with them, or were suspected of such connection. For a cutthroat, suspicion is sufficient grounds for murder. However, the life of society does not support this overload of unlawful violence, which the ruling elite declares legitimate. A civilization breakdown occurs. The country either destroys itself and plunges into chaos, as was the case with Russia after Ivan the Terrible’s terror, or begin to look for ways to modify the type of violence.
In the mid-19th century, Mikhail Katkov, a Russian conservative, prophetically wrote about the communist utopias of the Russian radicals in his article “The Russian Village Commune”: “If some magic force, having succumbed to the enticement of these utopias, decided to translate them from fantasy into practical terms, the outcome would have been contrary to all expectations: there would have occurred an instantaneous return to the state from which mankind evolved through such slow and painful effort; not the disease but only what feels this disease, the organism that seeks health, would have disappeared, and the elements whose not quite peaceful presence in modern society constitutes the whole might of its disease would have become ubiquitous. A forcible redistribution of property would have renewed the entire barbarity of conquest and resurrected the epoch of peoples’ migration; mankind would have had to traverse the old route...” (my italics. —V.K.). 30
By the “old route” Katkov implied the evolution of civilization. But would our society be able to embark on this route once again?
Thankfully, the answer to this question is a subject for another article.
Translated by Natalia Belskaya
Endnotes
*: V.Kantor, D. Sc. (Philosophy), author of a number of works on the history of Russian literature and philosophy. The article was published in the journal Druzhba narodov, No. 6, 1997. Back.
Note 1: S.L. Frank, Light in the Darkness, Paris, IMCA–PRESS, 1949, p. 58 (Frank’s spacing) (in Russian). Back.
Note 2: Boris Didenko, A Civilization of Cannibals. Mankind As It Is, Moscow, 1996, p. 41 (in Russian). Back.
Note 3: S. Aleksievich, “We Were Taught for Such a Long Time to Love the Man with a Rifle”, Izvestiya, 1996, Feb. 29, p. 5. Back.
Note 4: I. Kant, Works in German and Russian, Moscow, 1994, Vol. 1, pp. 101–103. Back.
Note 5: Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, N.Y., 1967, p. 39. Back.
Note 6: N.G. Chernyshevsky, Collected Works, Moscow, 1950, Vol. 7, p. 659 (in Russian). Back.
Note 7: T.N. Granovsky, Lectures on Medieval History, Moscow, 1987, p. 6 (in Russian). Back.
Note 8: Wolfgang Kraus, Europe of the Future, SPb, 1995, p. 61 (in Russian). Back.
Note 9: A.S. Khomyakov, Works in two vols., Moscow, 1994, Vol. 1, p. 111 (in Russian). Back.
Note 10: K.D. Kavelin, Our Intellectual Structure. Articles on the Philosophy of Russian History and Culture, Moscow, 1989, p. 311 (in Russian). Back.
Note 11: G.P. Fedotov, The Destiny and Sins of Russia in two vols., Vol. 2, SPb, 1992; Vol. 2, p. 282 (in Russian). Back.
Note 12: S. Aleksievich, “My Only Life”, Voprosy literatury, 1996, Jan.–Feb., p. 206. Back.
Note 13: Quoted from: S.M. Solovyov, The History of Russia from Ancient Times, Works, Moscow, 1989, Book 3, p. 29 (in Russian). Back.
Note 14: S. von Herberstain, Notes about Muscovite Rus, Moscow, 1988, p. 74 (in Russian). Back.
Note 15: N.A. Berdyaev, The Sources and the Meaning of Russian Communism, Moscow, 1990, p. 10. Back.
Note 16: G.P. Fedortov, Op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 282. Back.
Note 17: A.S. Khomyakov, Op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 530. Back.
Note 18: N.I. Kostomarov, Russian History Through the Lives of Its Protagonists, Issue 3, SPb, 1874, p. 565 (in Russian). Back.
Note 19: G.P. Fedotov, Op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 296. Back.
Note 20: Yu.M. Lotman: Yu.M. Lotman and the Tartu–Moscow School, Moscow, 1994, p. 408 (in Russian). Back.
Note 21: S.M. Solovyov, Works, Moscow, 1995, Vol. 18, pp. 619, 620 (in Russian). Back.
Note 22: A.I. Herzen, Collected Works in 30 vols., Moscow, 1957, Vol. 12, p. 130 (in Russian). Back.
Note 23: F.M. Dostoyevsky Through Contemporaries’ Reminiscences, in two vols., Moscow, 1990, Vol. 1, p. 266 (in Russian). Back.
Note 24: F.M. Dostoyevsky, Complete Works in 30 vols., Leningrad, 1978, Vol. 18, p. 189. Back.
Note 25: V.O. Klyuchevsky, Op. cit., Vol. 9, p. 341. Back.
Note 26: Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens. In the Shade of Tomorrow, Moscow, 1991, p. 328 (in Russian). Back.
Note 27: L.D. Trotsky, Apropos the History of the Russian Revolution, Moscow, 1990, p. 213 (in Russian). Back.
Note 28: D.E. Furman, “Creation of a New Earth and a New Heaven”, Voprosy filosofii, 1989, No. 3, p. 35. Back.
Note 29: The Dawn of Soviet Justice, London, 1991, pp. 27–28. Back.
Note 30: M. Katkov, “The Russian Village Commune” Back.