The censorship was not always efficient, and some of the censors were liberal. It became possible to express political ideas in the form of philosophical arguments and literary criticism. Thus, it was partly in intellectual periodicals and partly in discussions in the private houses of Moscow noblemen that the controversy between “Westernizers (Westernizer)” and “Slavophiles (Slavophile)” developed. It began with the publication of a “philosophical letter” by Pyotr Chaadayev (Chaadayev, Pyotr Yakovlevich) in the periodical Teleskop in 1836. One of the most brilliant essays ever written about Russia's historical heritage, it argued that Russia belonged neither to West nor to East, neither to Europe nor to Asia:
Standing alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have learnt nothing from the world, we have not added a single idea to the mass of human ideas; we have made no contribution to the progress of the human spirit, and everything that has come to us from that spirit, we have disfigured.… Today we form a gap in the intellectual order.
Nicholas declared that Chaadayev must be mad and gave orders that he should be confined to his house and regularly visited by a doctor.
It is misleading to represent the Westernizers as wishing to slavishly copy all things Western or the Slavophiles as repudiating everything European and rejecting reform. The chief Slavophiles—Aleksey S. Khomyakov (Khomyakov, Aleksey Stepanovich), the brothers Ivan (Kireyevsky, Ivan Vasilyevich) and Pyotr Kireyevsky, the brothers Konstantin (Aksakov, Konstantin Sergeyevich) and Ivan Aksakov, and Yury Samarin—were men of deep European culture and, with one exception, bitter opponents of serfdom. Indeed, as landowners they knew more about the problems and sufferings of the serfs than did many Westernizers. The leading Westernizers—Aleksandr Herzen (Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich), Vissarion Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich), and Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich)—were for their part profoundly Russian. Belinsky was ill at ease with foreigners, and Herzen and Bakunin, despite many years' residence in France, Germany, England, and Italy, remained not only hostile to the world of European bourgeois liberalism and democracy but also strangely ignorant of it.
The difference between Westernizers (Westernizer) and Slavophiles (Slavophile) was essentially that between radicals and conservatives, a familiar theme in the history of most European nations. It was the difference between those who wished to pull the whole political structure down and replace it with a new building, according to their own admirable blueprints, and those who preferred to knock down some parts and repair and refurnish others, bit by bit. Another basic difference was that the Slavophiles were Orthodox Christians and the Westernizers either atheists or, like the historian T.N. Granovsky, Deists with their own personal faith. Belinsky described the Orthodox church in his famous “Letter to Gogol” (1847) as “the bulwark of the whip and the handmaid of despotism.” He maintained that the Russian populace was “by its nature a profoundly atheistic people” and that it viewed the priesthood with contempt. These were but half-truths: the church was indeed subject to the government and upheld autocracy, and priests were often unpopular, but this did not mean that the peasants and a large part of the upper and middle classes were not devoted to the Orthodox faith.
The Slavophiles idealized early Russian history. They believed that there had once been a happy partnership between tsar and people: the tsar had consulted the people through their elected spokesmen in the zemsky sobor. This had been changed by Peter the Great when he sought to copy foreign models and interposed an alien bureaucracy, staffed largely by Germans, between himself and his people. The Slavophiles held that Russia should return to the way from which it had strayed under Peter. They asked not for a legislative body of the Western type, still less for parliamentary government, but for a consultative assembly to advise the emperor. This was quite unacceptable to Nicholas, who was proud of Peter the Great and believed himself his political heir. To the Westernizers, on the other hand, Peter the Great was a symbol of radical change, not of autocracy.
The Russian Empire
Russia in the 19th century was both a multilingual and a multireligious empire. Only about half the population was at the same time Russian by language and Orthodox by religion. The Orthodox were to some extent privileged in comparison with the other Christians; all Christians enjoyed a higher status than Muslims; and the latter were not so disadvantaged as the Jews. The basis of legitimacy was obedience to the tsar: Nicholas expected all his subjects to obey him, but he did not expect non-Russians to become Russians. Admittedly, he detested the Poles, but that was because they had been disloyal subjects and revolted against him.
The idea that Russians, as such, should have a status superior to that of other peoples of the empire was distasteful to Nicholas. Russian nationalism nevertheless received some support from Count Uvarov (Uvarov, Sergey Semyonovich, Count), who, in his famous report to the tsar in 1832, proclaimed three principles as “truly Russian”: Orthodoxy (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality), autocracy, and the national principle ( narodnost). In 1833 Uvarov set up a new university in Kiev to be the centre for a policy of spreading Russian language and culture through the schools in the western provinces, at the expense of the Polish. Nicholas approved of this, for the Poles had been guilty of rebellion, but when the attempt was made to Russify the Germans of the Baltic provinces, he objected. The Baltic Germans were loyal subjects and provided admirable officers and officials; they were therefore allowed to preserve their German culture and to maintain their cultural and social domination over the Estonians and Latvians. The young Slavophile and landowning nobleman Yury Samarin, a junior official in Riga, was severely reprimanded by the emperor for his anti-German activities.