Russian History: To Sense the Subtle Is to Understand the Whole

This essay was written to mark the publication of the authors’ new collaborative work, Русь. От племенных союзов к единому государству [Rus’: From Tribal Unions to Unified State (Ninth Century to 1613)], which traces the evolution of the Russian nation-state from its earliest tribal foundations to the accession of the Romanov dynasty. What follows is not a summary of that book, but a reflection drawn from it—on how the past can be known, and on why the way history is written matters as much as the facts it records.

Authors: 

• Anatoly V. Torkunov is Full Member of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations’ (MGIMO) Rector.

• Vladimir V. Degoev is a Professor in International Affairs and Russian Foreign Policy at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). He also holds the position of Director of the Center of Caucasian Studies.

This essay was written to mark the publication of the authors’ new collaborative work, Русь. От племенных союзов к единому государству [Rus’: From Tribal Unions to Unified State (Ninth Century to 1613)], which traces the evolution of the Russian nation-state from its earliest tribal foundations to the accession of the Romanov dynasty. What follows is not a summary of that book, but a reflection drawn from it—on how the past can be known, and on why the way history is written matters as much as the facts it records.

A mystery sensed in Isaac Levitan’s painting “Above Eternal Peace” captivates the eye, the mind, and the imagination. Art scholars have long sought to unravel it, each offering an interpretation of their own. Such is the fate reserved for great works of art. It can sometimes come as a surprise to an artist—who draws inspiration from soul and intuition—to find that the single meaning they were moved to convey takes on a multitude of interpretations in the eyes of others. All of these interpretations are valid, for they are born in the deepest recesses of the human mind and may reach beyond the artist’s original intent.

Levitan’s painting is generally believed to depict infinite time dissolving into Russia’s imposing and rugged landscape, itself just as infinite and boundless. This cosmogonic backdrop makes the transience of existence feel all the more poignant and tragic. And yet, people can stand firm even in the face of this mighty force, overcoming their own insignificance and loneliness, if they live by faith and hope—which Levitan rendered as a tiny, eternal light flickering in the window of a small church, a sanctuary offering refuge from the bleak cold of the universe. The painting’s seemingly strange title is, in fact, a metaphorical paradox: “eternal peace” stands for the powerful forces of existence, forever in motion, though not always visible.

All this allows us to read Levitan’s landscape as an allegory fully applicable to Russian history, which is every bit as enigmatic as the many symbols in this masterpiece. While we readily admit that studying the past has always been an extremely challenging task, we do not intend to cloak it in mystery, or to proceed on the assumption that the secrets of existence lie beyond our grasp. As a science—albeit not an “exact” one—history is undoubtedly knowable. Among the reasons for this is its compatibility and affinity with other disciplines, both in the humanities and in the natural sciences. History forms a creative and fruitful alliance with them as part of a comprehensive, interdisciplinary methodology, one that yields results scholars could scarcely have imagined before the early twentieth century. That said, this approach had in fact been used, inadvertently, long before the term for it was coined.

Since ancient times, history is well known to have been linked to philosophy, philology, psychology, geography, and economics; but it took time for this relationship—which came to encompass many other disciplines, including the natural sciences—to develop into a comprehensive, synthetic body of knowledge, and to render the notion of “pure history” obsolete. Even before that happened, however, a question would pose itself: who, or what, is the subject of history? A fully accurate answer is as impossible today as it ever was. Whatever the object of study—a civilization, a state, a society, a spiritual culture, or a great historical figure—each must be examined through a multi-faceted lens and subjected to systematic analysis. Yet this does not guarantee unquestionable credibility either, for there is limited scope to verify empirically a substance that no longer physically exists, as is the case with the past; and so the researcher’s subjective judgment often prevails in the end.

The authors of this book did not aspire to pristine objectivity—which is found nowhere in the realm of the humanities—nor did they seek to rely solely on their own interpretation of the pivotal chapters of Russian history. It has always been our understanding that whenever contemporary researchers succeed in contributing original insights to historiography, it is only because they stand on the shoulders of giants: great predecessors who accomplished the tremendous and meticulous work of the “anatomical” study of sources and the “physiological” investigation of historical processes, as Vasily O. Klyuchevsky put it. These dedicated scholars acted like powerful icebreakers, crushing the great ice ridges in their path to clear the way for the widest possible range of ideas, knowledge, and insight—a channel along which researchers from a variety of academic schools advance today, not always aware of whom they have to thank for their expanding horizons.

The history of Russia owes its magnificence to an inexhaustible potential for interpretation and reinterpretation, as well as to an abundance of facts and their epically dramatic force. While this potential encourages the development of the discipline itself, it also poses certain threats to the moral well-being of our society—a society particularly vulnerable to contemporary postmodernism, which swiftly fragments meaning into disarray, and in which the loss of humanistic guiding principles gives rise to the triumph of the grotesque and the absurd, and thus to destructive, socially deviant norms and extremist sentiment.

Extreme forms of postmodernism in historiography transform the reappraisal of values into a self-serving methodology, one that pursues primarily political and ideological ends: the redefinition of the Russian people’s national identity. Ample evidence can be found simply by looking at what sits on the shelves in bookshops. Indeed, the more flamboyant and colorful the presentation of the content, the more reason both readers and fellow historians have to be wary. Expressive means should be reserved for creative purposes and for the protection of moral values.

We admit that the issue described above matters to us just as much as the book’s purely academic significance. The tendency to reinterpret historical material in various ways, indulging in idle and fruitless speculation, has become a popular vehicle for self-promotion among authors who write about historical events of contemporary relevance yet know little of scholarly rigor or of the methods used to research complex phenomena. Their eclectic—though not entirely harmless—musings invite comparison with those sporting contests that forbid players from imitating others, even the foremost experts who have devoted their lives and talent to the advancement of science. Such speculations of a mind hungry for fame might be tolerated were they not spawning an astonishingly ignorant literature—textbooks included—promoted as “innovative” and “unbiased.” This so-called objectivity is designed chiefly to instill in young people a sense of shame, and a willingness to accept that their country’s history is a monstrous aberration in the evolution of humanity: meaningless, and “not like that of other nations.”

The Russians are seen as incapable of creative endeavor. They have nothing of their own. They owe their statehood to the Varangians, their autocracy to the Mongols, and their culture to Europe—the last of these gifts having, alas, been vulgarized and reduced by the Russians to a poor imitation. Chaos, savagery, and servility—with its flip side of bloody and merciless revolt—are said to be the natural state of this wholly irrational people. Rather than through intellect, strategy, or tactics, they defeat their enemies through barbarism and an “incomprehensible stupidity” that baffles even the strongest armies and forces them to retreat. Their rulers are, by turns, unimpressive halfwits, puppets, paranoid tyrants, or greedy and haphazard imitators enamored of all things foreign, vices included.

For want of anything else, the Russians boast of their “mysterious soul” and revel in a martyrs’ cult of suffering, which they regard as a distinctively Russian trait. Given such “civilizational” baggage, can they aspire to a future at all, let alone a great one? This absurdly Russophobic narrative found its ultimate expression in the Nazi racial theory, which demanded that the Russian people choose between physical annihilation and enslavement to the Third Reich. A similar dilemma is being imposed on us today by the West as a whole, which threatens to resolve it with the full weight of its military, economic, and technological might—this time without recourse to soft power.

Such narratives about Russia are integral to the contemporary global ideological war between humanism and a “new barbarism,” a war that assumes the most sophisticated, high-tech forms. To avoid losing this war, it is high time that historical works reclaimed their formative role, without being bluntly and reductively didactic. This book has been shaped, in particular, by the authors’ desire to stand with those scholars who have already recognized the full danger of improvised experiments with an explosive substance of immense destructive power—something that might be termed an “ideological weapon of mass destruction.” It is vital to deactivate this weaponry before it causes still greater harm.

Historians must do this work within their own professional field. It can no longer be entrusted to amateurs in search of mere intellectual pleasure. If we are to prevail in the battle forced upon us, our adversaries must be confronted with the outstanding achievements of our nation’s finest minds in the field of historical—and, more broadly, humanistic—thought. This rich and versatile intellectual legacy, imbued with love for Russia, with empathy for the nation’s sorrows and joys, and with an unrivalled literary style, was a source of inspiration for the authors of the book now presented to the reader. The book traces the evolution of the Russian nation-state from its earliest stages to the accession of the Romanov dynasty. We have sought to cover every aspect of this lengthy process as fully as possible, presenting it as the development of a Russian multi-ethnic civilization with imperial traits—traits that had begun to manifest themselves, in varying degrees, even before the empire itself came into being.

Had it not possessed a strong capacity to maintain sovereign power, Rus’-Russia would in all likelihood not have survived the internecine conflicts between its princes, the Mongol yoke, the feudal war of the second quarter of the fifteenth century, and the Time of Troubles. Another crucial factor in its survival was Russia’s early-formed ability not only to defeat its enemies but to find common ground with them, and ultimately to integrate them as subjects—a fate they would never come to regret. Russia would become a Noah’s Ark for many peoples who had lost the capacity to survive the war of all against all and faced the prospect of annihilation. Consider the surnames of the Russian nobility in the sixteenth century: many were of Tatar, Caucasian, Polish-Lithuanian, Greek, German, or Swedish origin. Later, the Russian onomasticon would grow more diverse still.

The book’s time frame was chosen deliberately. It encompasses the eventful and critical chapter of history marked by the foundation of the Russian nation-state under an autocratic form of government—a foundation laid amid relentless external attack and internal strife, accompanied by heavy losses and by immense efforts to recover from them. Despite the disastrous Time of Troubles, these foundations were already strong enough to withstand any adversity, whatever dynasty might eventually come to power. The centuries that followed would furnish ample proof of this. One such proof was the Schism of the Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Nikon, which also triggered an acute political crisis: the country then witnessed what might be described as a repetition of the Time of Troubles, with long-term consequences. Even so, the framework of the state did not waver in the slightest.

The book presents a portrait gallery of the prominent figures whose efforts contributed directly to the construction of this monumental edifice. Neither angels nor villains, they were men of their time, who lived by its harsh political laws—laws that, in any moral sense, did not differ from those prevailing in “civilized” Europe. And yet, the Russian world was ruled not only, and not chiefly, by vice. Countless were the spiritual, self-sacrificing, and heroic deeds performed by the Russian people for the sake of their fellow beings and the prosperity of their homeland, in the name of faith and love. Not all who performed such deeds were numbered among the saints—though they were often far holier than officially canonized religious and political figures.

It falls to philosophers and sociologists to determine the specific laws at work in Russian history, and how these differ from the laws of the natural sciences. But one thing can be asserted with certainty: the driving force in Russia’s history was its people, who passed through a long process of self-organization within a succession of proto-state communities, eventually evolving beyond the “proto” stage. For a time this was a semi-spontaneous process—until those primitive social entities began to acquire tribal leaders, who at later stages evolved into princes, tsars, and emperors. Autocratic though their rule was, and exercised through a system of transmission mechanisms, in the final analysis it was always constrained by the will of the people, to whom sovereigns would turn, in desperation, for help in times of adversity.

The alliance between ruler and people—held together by many bonds, including the collective instinct for self-preservation—played an exceptional role in the history of Russian civilization. To live, to work, and to ensure the continuity of future generations, the people always needed an order that was at least minimally acceptable to them, and guaranteed by the sovereign: the ultimate authority, embodying justice and protection against external threat and internal strife alike. The sovereign’s authority was held to be sacred, as the proverbial expression attests: “That is known only to God and the Tsar.” The textbook explanation, according to which the autocracy rested solely on the bureaucracy, the nobility, serfdom, the army, and the Church, seems credible only until we ask ourselves why, in times of crisis, the sovereign appealed directly to the people, as the people did to the sovereign—and why the two looked to one another, much to the consternation of their intermediaries.

This owes a great deal to the difficulty of determining the social foundations of the Russian autocracy, and whose interests it truly represented. The distinctive Russian civilization derived its integrity and resilience from this very alliance, which remained invisible in times of prosperity and revealed its life-saving power only when adversity struck. Far from wholly idyllic, the relationship nevertheless saw mutual attraction prevail, in the end, over the forces that divided it.

The medieval Russian state managed to strike a balance between beneficial centralization and ruinous hyper-centralism—the latter having destroyed many empires that failed to control and effectively govern their vast territories. The rapidly expanding territory required strong military protection and might have become a curse for Rus’-Russia as well, had it not been for a sensibly arranged relationship between core and periphery, in which the core wisely abandoned a rigid and uniform mode of administration in favor of extensive local autonomy suited to the specific conditions of people’s lives. Just as the peripheries differed from one another, so too did their forms of autonomy and models of governance—which nonetheless remained invariably flexible. It may seem counterintuitive, but this is precisely what made their relationship with the state’s core so strong.

As a result, the periphery strengthened the empire rather than weakening it, serving as a powerful means of consolidating the empire’s resources and, with them, Moscow’s authority. The country’s vast size was transformed from a hindrance into a source of development, and the periphery from a burden into an outpost of colonization. Russia, therefore, was never the Oriental despotism or tyranny that even Western historians confidently take it to have been.

A cursory glance at the book will suffice to convince the reader that it is not a new edition of our previous 2024 work, Russkaya istoriya: Gosudarstvo. Tsivilizatsiya. Vneshnii mir (Russian History: State. Civilization. The External World). It is a standalone publication, even though we have outlined a number of its ideas before. Those ideas are now explored in far greater detail, drawing on a broader historiography and a wider range of historical events.

The title page still bears the subheading “A Book for Reading.” This time, however, it carries no plea for leniency from the discerning reader—the reader who expects a work of history to be, above all, thoroughly scholarly, a quality often measured by the sheer number of footnotes and by a jumble of sentences containing scarcely a single Russian word. The authors have not sought to shield themselves from criticism in this particular way. Nor do we shirk the professional responsibility of the historian for the scholarly quality of the work—which only stands to gain when its subject is presented in an accessible and engaging manner. This book is, above all, a tribute to those eminent historians who avoided the dry, lackluster, and unimaginative accounts so often taken, even today, as almost synonymous with fundamental research. Russian history is full of drama, and that drama cannot be conveyed in all its depth within the narrow confines of the conventional academic style.

The past, when studied and described within a rigid conceptual framework that excludes intuition and what R.G. Collingwood termed “historical imagination,” is transformed into a lifeless space—a dead collection of facts, sometimes arranged into a flawlessly logical paradigm that explains very little. Taken to extremes, academic language becomes a parody of itself and lulls the reader to sleep before they can reach the heart of the matter. The conventional academic approach demands, above all, that the historian provide a “credible” account of “what happened, and why it happened this way and not otherwise.” The result, more often than not, is a rather simplistic depiction of history as a linear, inexorable, unalterable sequence of events. Causal determinism banishes creative subjectivity—any conjecture, doubt, or heuristic discovery—from historical science. And when ideological dogmatism enters the picture, it suppresses any scholarly departure from the imposed “rules of good conduct,” still granting pride of place to the theory of socio-economic formations, coupled with the idea of class struggle as history’s principal driving force.

These constructs demand that Russian history be treated as similar to that of the West, the two viewed as parts of a single process, with direct analogies drawn between European feudalism and its institutions—suzerainty and vassalage, benefices, lordships, fiefs, homage, immunity, and the rest—and their supposedly belated Russian “version.” To be fair, Soviet Marxist historians broke no new ground here; they had been preceded by Nikolai P. Pavlov-Silvansky, who had advanced these ideas earlier in his book Feodalizm v Rossii (Feudalism in Russia)—ideas bold and innovative for their time, even ingenious in their way, though by no means entirely convincing. They drew immediate and justified criticism from Nikolai I. Kareev, who reproached his colleague for allowing himself to be carried away, and for mistaking the outward similarity of the institutions in question for an essential sameness that was simply not there, given Russia’s uniqueness.

After the evident failure of the attempt to apply the concept of feudalism artificially to ancient and medieval Rus’, attention turned to another Marxist theory—that of the “Asiatic mode of production”—in search of a new lens through which the Russian historical process might be viewed. Yet this proposed route out of the conceptual impasse was resolutely rejected by the Kremlin as a blind alley, even though the theory had been devised by Karl Marx himself. In the post-Soviet era, a number of inventive historians proposed regarding Russian history—and civilization—as a unique synthesis of European feudalism and the Asiatic mode of production. What is troubling about this intriguing hypothesis is its speculative character, which is more pronounced still in the recently fashionable and much-debated assertions that Russian civilization carries an embedded Mongol “matrix,” and the Russian soul, a Mongol “gene.”

The idea is not new, nor was it first proposed by the “Eurasianists,” who were almost fanatically devoted to shifting the focus of the Russian historical narrative toward the East. It can in fact be traced, at least in part, to Nikolai M. Karamzin—who could at times be inconsistent, but who never regarded the Mongol yoke as a source of creative influence. Today’s proponents of Eurasian determinism, by contrast, have developed the idea into a politically and ideologically charged, if not frankly opportunistic, doctrine. Certainly, this construct does not suffer from the Procrustean constraints of the theory of socio-economic formations. But it is rigid in its own right and leaves little room for any idea that might contradict it.

More important still, it is a futile exercise to seek a single cultural and ancestral code applicable to every period of a Russian history that is boundless in time, space, and diversity. Rather than quibble over terminology, let us put it plainly: ancient Rus’ was neither feudal Europe nor despotic Asia—it was unique. This innate distinctiveness will be passed on to future generations; however hard they may strive to be ‘like others.’ The inner, elusive nature of Russian history refuses to be forced into the mold of any methodological system. Our history has been searched through and through, yielding findings of every kind—including what seemed, at times, to be the one true key to understanding it.

Yet this has always been an illusion, for no single key exists. There is, rather, a whole bundle of them, each opening one door or another into the depths of the centuries, which are far from wholly discernible. Much remains to be illuminated in this occasionally impenetrable darkness, with the help of scientific knowledge and “historical imagination”—and we may accept, or even take heart from, the knowledge that the process will be an endless one. A prominent role in this endeavor has always belonged, and will continue to belong, to the narrative method, which is inconceivable without rich, evocative language and the capacity to enter into the heart of the material—to imagine oneself in the thick of the events being described, centuries after they occurred.

Such was the approach of the outstanding Soviet historian Yevgeny V. Tarle, who was at once a rigorous scholar and an unrivalled master of the written word. Narrative history spares one the need to conform to any pre-established framework from the outset. In place of the sociological structure of a historical formation, it describes the reality of the past—a world full of life and human passion. There is sometimes more science in this than in the obsessive application of mathematical methods to the study of history. Used excessively and pursued as an end, literary flourish ceases to serve the scholarly endeavor and becomes empty affectation, verging at times on tedious graphomania.

Another flaw of the “purely academic” approach is that it leaves the historian unable to engage meaningfully with the past—to compare it with the present, and to understand the thoughts, feelings, and ideals of those who lived many centuries ago and who may not have been so very different from us in their joys, sorrows, reflections, and doubts; or, if they were different, to understand in what way, and why.

At the same time, when working with a vast array of diverse sources—a task that demands specialized scholarly methods—one cannot achieve much by relying on intuition alone. Intuition tempts us to attribute to our distant ancestors the habit of perceiving the world exactly as modern Russians do; and, unsupported by a knowledge of the sources, it becomes useless. It can benefit the analysis of historical material only when combined with professional academic rigor.

It is the authors’ hope that readers will discern the perspective outlined above throughout the book now offered for their consideration. Our work is inspired by the distinguished Russian and Soviet historians who came before. They belonged to different schools of thought and held different conceptual frameworks for understanding the past. Yet they were equally devoted to their discipline and its principles, ethical standards among them. Even in the midst of heated debate, they continued to show deep personal and professional respect for the achievements—and even the “misconceptions”—of their scholarly opponents. This posed a certain difficulty for us in determining which of the vast array of historiographical facts would best align with our own view of Russian history.

Since such a selection is subjective in itself, it is clear that we can hardly claim to be objective. The authors were not afraid of falling into the trap that typically awaits historians who claim to offer a wholly accurate account of “how things really stood.” We were unafraid because we harbored no such ambition. It can be aspired to but never achieved. This did not prevent us, however, from seeking an interpretation of Russian history that those who share our views might perceive as a fairly close account of “things as they were.” That, in turn, will help us better withstand our opponents’ likely verdict that “it was not like that at all”—after which we shall look forward to their own “truthful” history of Russia.

First published in the CIRSD Horizons.