2:; Tlw uam<' Slew i s probably derin•d from slo1•o, word. (Tr.)
Moscow, Petersburg and Novgorod 301
But history does not turn back; life is rich in materials, a nd never needs old clothes. All reinstatements, all restorations have always been masquerades. We have seen two; the Legitimists did not go back to the days of Louis XIV nor the Republicans to the 8th of Thermidor. What has once happened is stronger than anything written; no axe can hew it away.
More than this, we have nothing to go back to. The political life of Russia before Peter was ugly, poor and savage, yet it was to this that the Slavophils wanted to return, though they did not admit the fact; how else are we to explain all their antiquarian revivals, their worship of the manners and customs of old days, and their very attempts to return, not to the existing (and excellent) dress of the peasants but to the clumsy, antiquated costumes?
In all Russia no one wears the murmolka but the Slavophils.
K. S. Aksakov wore a dress so national that people in the street took him for a Persian, as Chaadayev used to tell for a joke.
They took the return to the people in a very crude sense too, as the majority of Western democrats did also, accepting the people as something complete and finished. They supposed that sharing the prejudices of the people meant being at one with them, that it was a great act of humility to sacrifice their own reason instead of developing reason in the people. This led to an affectation of devoutness, the observance of rites which are touching when there i s a naive faith in them and offensive when there is vis.ible premeditation. The best proof of the lack of reality in the Slavophils' return to the people lies in the fact that they did not arouse in them the slightest sympathy. Neither the Byzantine Church nor the Granovitaya Palata26 will do anything more for the future development of the Slav world. To go back to the village, to the workmen's guild, to the meeting of the mir,27 to the Cossack system is a different matter; but we must return to them not in order that they may be fixed fast in immovable Asiatic crystallisations, but to develop and set free the elements on which they were founded, to purify them from all that is extraneous and distorting, from the proud flesh with which they are overgrown-this, of course, is our vocation. But we must make no mistake; all this lies outside the purview of the State: the Moscow pPriod will help here as little as the Petersburg-26 Granovitaya Palata, the hall in the Kremlin in which the Tsar and his councillors used to meet before the tim� of Peter the Great. ( Tr.) 2i Village council. (R.)
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indeed at no time was it better. The Novgorocl28 bell which used to call the citizens to their ancient moot was merely melted into a cannon by Peter but had been taken down from the belfry by Ivan III; serfdom was only confirmed by the census under Peter but had been introduced by Boris Goclunov; in the Vlo
::.heni_rc29 there is no longer any mention of sworn witnesses, and the knout, the rods and the lash made their appearance long before the clay of Spiessruten and Fuchteln.
The mistake of the Slavophils lay in their thinking that Russia once had an individual culture, obscured by various events and finally by the Petersburg epoch. Russia never had this culture and never could have had it. That which is now reaching our consciousness, that of which we are beginning to have a presentiment, a glimmer in our thoughts, that which existed unconsciously in the peasants' hut and in the open country, is only now beginning to grow in the pastures of history, manured by the blood, the tears and the S\veat of twenty generations.
The foundations of our life are not memories; they are the living elements, existing not in chronicles but in the actual present; but they have merely survived under the difficult historical process of building up a single state and under the oppression of the state tht:'y have only been preserved not developed. I even doubt whether the inner forces for their development would have been found without the Petrine epoch, without the period of European culture.
The immediate foundations of our way of life are insufficient.
In India there has existed for ages and exists to this day a village commune very like our own and based on the partition of fields; yet the people of India have not gone very far with it.
Only the mighty thought of the \Vest, with which all its long history is united, is able to fertilise the seeds slumbering in the patriarchal mode of the life of the Slavs. The workmen's guild and the village commune. the sharing of profits and the partition of fields, the meeting of the mir and the union of villages into self-governing volosts, are all the corner-stones on which the mansion of our futurE', freely communal existence will be built.
2.� Nm·gorocl. the most famous city in the earliest period of Russian hislory. was to some extPnt a rPpuhlic undPr the ruiC' of its princes from Hurik onwnnls. I t wns n l most destroyed and was dPprin•d of its liberties by lvnn III in 1 -1-7 1 . ( Tr. )
�!J The Ulodzrniye was till' codC" of laws of Tsar Alexis Mikhaylovich ( fa ther of l'etPr the Grea t ) . issued in 1 6-1-9. ( Tr. )
Moscow, Petersburg and Novgorod 303
But these corner-stones are only stones . . . and without the thought of the West our future cathedral would not rise above its foundations.
This is what happens with everything truly sociaclass="underline" it involuntarily attracts into the reciprocal security of peoples . . . . Holding themselves aloof, isolating themselves, some remain at the barbaric stage of the commune, others get no further than the abstract idea of communism which, like the Christian soul, hovers over the decaying body.
The receptive character of the Slavs, their femininity, their lack of initiative, and their great capacity for assimilation and adaptation, made them pre-eminently a people that stands in need of other peoples; they are not fully self-sufficing. Left to themselves the Slavs readily 'lull themselves to sleep with their own songs' as a Byzantine chronicler observed, 'and doze.'
Awakened by others they go to extreme consequences; there is no people which might more deeply and completely absorb the thought of other peoples while remaining true to itself. The persistent misunderstanding which exists to-day, as it has for a thousand years, between the Germanic and the Latin peoples does not exist between them and the Slavs. The need to surrender and to be carried away is innate in their sympathetic, readily assimilative, receptive nature.
To be formed into a princedom, Russia needed the Varangians;30 to be formed into a kingdom, the Mongols.
Contact \vith Europe developed the kingdom of Muscovy into the colossal empire ruled from Petersburg.
'But for all their receptiveness, have not the Slavs shown everywhere a complete incapacity for developing a modPrn European political order without continually falling into the most hopeless despotism or helpless disorganisation?'
This incapacity and this incompleteness are great talents in our eyes.
All Europe has now reached the inevitability of despotism in order to uphold somehow the existing political order against the pr�ssure of social ideas striving to instal a new s tructure, towards which Western Europe, though frightened and recalcitrant, is being carried \vith incredible force.