Sisters under the Skin

Sisters under the SkinAuthor(s): Isabel de MadariagaSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 1982), pp. 624-628Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2496862 .

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ISABEL DE MADARIAGA

Sisters under the Skin

The periodization of history by centuries is indeed a very slippery concept - is it national, or is it notional? Should the criterion be the political history of one country or the intellectual climate of an age? The process of borrowing the basic political concepts of one type of polity in one century and making use of them in another age and place does not merely fail to reproduce the features of the original, as Marc Raeff has argued. It is bound in all circumstances to lead to a distortion, a parody, or a caricature, depending not only on what is borrowed from a previous age but also on what is being borrowed from the contemporary world at the same time.

Stimulating as Raeff's paper is, I find myself taking issue with him first on the question of the abstract model of the seventeenth-century Polizeistaat and secondly on some of his observations on its application to Russia. I agree of course that a country engaged in borrowing political or administrative ideas is likely to borrow those which can already be seen at work elsewhere. Hence when Peter I embarked on the process of mobilization of Russian resources necessary for his military purposes, it was inevitable that he should examine existing seventeenth-century models of military monarchies that had been more effective than Muscovy. But the Polizeistaat, according to Raeff's definition of the term, did not in fact exist anywhere in its full glory when Peter embarked on his reforms - or ever. The smaller German principalities could not provide a model for a ruler anxious to maximize his potential because they did not have to bear the hugely disproportionate costs of large military establishments. Peter in fact adopted the obvious course: "Know thine enemy." He proceeded con- sciously to study the administration of Sweden, which had only recently embarked on wedding the principles of the Polizeistaat to a politically medieval constitutional structure. A full-fledged military Polizeistaat began to take shape only in the Prussia of Frederick William I; it never took root in the Habsburg lands, although some of its principles were applied by Maria Theresa and Joseph II. Peter was not therefore borrowing from an antiquated or superseded model. He was picking and choosing from the very latest model, one that was still evolving under his own eyes and that reached its full maturity in theory and in practice outside Russia only after his death. The time lag implicit in Raeff's article can thus be reduced to about twenty-five years.

I would also take issue with Raeff over the way in which a Polizeistaat functions. By the second half of the seventeenth century (if not earlier), the power of sovereign rulers had indeed increased to an unprecedented degree, and the new monarchs, in order to maximize productivity in all fields, attempted to regulate activities that had previously escaped royal control. At certain times and in certain underdeveloped polities this involved cooperation with, and delegation to, constituted bodies - but I do not think that these bodies were an essential underpinning of the Polizeistaat, to the extent that it was necessary to create them where they did not exist. In the words of Emile Lousse, do not the absolute monarchs of the late seventeenth century end up creating the Stdnde- staat without the Stdnde? Do we not see the really efficient rulers undermining



Sisters under the Skin 625

the constituted bodies, emptying them of all but ceremonial significance where they do not destroy them, replacing them by their own salaried agents who eventually evolve into a bureaucracy? Is not this what the Great Elector systematically practiced in Brandenburg, Louis XIV in relation to the Etats in France, later Turgot and Charles III in Spain in relation to the guilds, and Joseph II in relation to practically everything?

My second objection to Raeff's definition of a Polizeistaat is that he sees it in terms of "rational constructivism," or the "disciplining of society." These expressions belong to sociology more than to history. They are the product of a retrospective analysis rather than of the effort to reconstruct the historical process, to set out the options as they appeared at the time. They attempt to impose an abstract pattern and clear rational choices on human beings who are in reality bounded by very narrow and immediate intellectual horizons and limited to a hand-to-mouth kind of expediency allowing very little time or space for "high time horizons." The clearest illustration of this approach is Raeff's suggestion that the themes of cameralism and the practices of the Polizeistaat "offered" themselves to Muscovy at the end of the seventeenth century and provided a "ready-made mold" for the Europeanization of institutions and culture. I find it hard to believe that one all-embracing model could "offer" itself to Peter's searching eye.

I have one more general observation to make before turning to Raeff's application of his concept to Russia. I come back to the comparative analysis of the nature of political power. To my mind there is usually too much emphasis on what separates Russia from the European pattern and not enough on the similarities. In the early eighteenth century Russia was, as Peter left her, a rude, uncouth version not of a Polizeistaat, which existed only as an abstract Utopia, but of the absolute monarchies of continental Europe. Authority was no more personalized in Russia than it was in the France of Louis XIV or, for that matter, the Prussia of Frederick II. But authority appeared to be used more capriciously in Russia because of the exiguousness of social organization there. Power could roll over the Russian plain without meeting any serious obstacle. The ruler was not limited as was Louis XIV or Frederick I or even Frederick II by the need to secure the silent consent to his policies of powerful social groups. To put it differently, Russia lacked not only corporate institutions and estates, it lacked population. Yet in Prussia as well as in Russia lawsuits could be removed from the ordinary courts and dealt with by the king in person or by other than judicial processes, particularly when actions lay against the ruler's own agents. Even where legality and legal training enjoyed a long tradition, the king could in theory reserve justice to himself and suspend the application of the laws to particular individuals (a power which William III had to abandon in England). But the more sophisticated forms in which power, or the sovereign's will, were manifested in, for instance, France should not mislead one about the nature of that power.1

1. I would like to draw attention to the observation by B. Behrens in the chapter "Government and Society" in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 5, p. 549: "Absolutism is a term which was invented at the beginning of the 19th century and is used to describe a particular form of autocracy." One could invert the phrase: "Autocracy was invented at the beginning of the 19th century to describe a particular form of absolutism."



626 Slavic Review

To turn now to specific points in Raeff's analysis: I think that he overem- phasizes the depth of the crisis in Muscovite society in the late seventeenth century and assumes that there was only one way out, namely acceptance of the Western model of the Polizeistaat. But I see no evidence that the preconditions for understanding and accepting the Polizeistaat had already been elaborated in the Ukraine. On the contrary, I would argue that the Ukraine and Poland offered an alternative model in the 1670s (the basic military weakness of Poland was not yet evident), the influence of which began to be felt in the reign of Fedor Alekseevich and during the regency of Sophia. Nothing in the political culture of the Ukraine in the seventeenth century, or in the eighteenth either, foreshadows or reflects the Polizeistaat. Indeed, the Ukrainian ideal offers a model in which sovereignty is diffused rather than centralized; it is the image, in a distorting mirror, of Polish political culture, where the Stdnde mattered more than the Staat, and its basic assumptions underlay Ukrainian attitudes well into the nineteenth century.

Peter wrenched Russia away from the Polish Catholic orientation by delib- erate choice. On his European tour he visited Prussia, a number of minor German states, the United Provinces, England, and finally Vienna. He encoun- tered an overwhelmingly Protestant environment, which he undoubtedly found more congenial. The Polizeistaat reached its fullest theoretical exposition and practical application in Protestant Europe. Perhaps it thrived there precisely because the constituted corporate bodies were on the whole less powerful than they were in Catholic Europe (France, Spain, the Habsburg lands). We cannot reconstitute exactly Peter's perception of the French political system in his own time (he did not include France in his grand tour). Louis XIV was of course described as "samoderzhavnyi" in the envoy A. A. Matveev's dispatches; but Peter may have realized the power of the great nobility, a power which modern research has shown to have survived to a greater extent than might have been apparent.

Marc Raeff pinpoints the legal, philosophical, educational, and administrative deficiencies which prevented the full implantation of the Polizeistaat in Russia. In particular, he emphasizes the rigidity of the Russian social fabric imposed by service, serfdom, and the survival of the clan structure of the family. In this context I would like to pose two questions. In the first place, does social rigidity necessarily imply physical immobility? Although everyone in Russia theoreticalty belonged to a soslovie and was bound to a place, there was evidently a great deal of "wandering" (whether legal or not). Second, there seems to me to be a very narrow dividing line between privilege and service. Where does one begin and the other end? Is there not in fact a point in the development of Russia, and of other countries, where service becomes a privilege, to the extent that particular forms of service are monopolized by particular classes?

Raeff also argues that Catherine II's attempts to complement Peter's work in setting up the Polizeistaat came too late. I remain uncertain that she ever thought in those terms. Undoubtedly there were aspects of the well-ordered police state which she endeavored to inculcate and develop, most strikingly in the Police Ordinance. But the major political influence on Catherine as reflected in the charters belongs, to my mind, to a completely different school, namely that of Montesquieu.



Sisters under the Skin 627

No one will dispute that Peter attempted a massive restructuring of the central government and administration and of the cultural climate of Russia. Raeff underlines, rightly, that these changes could not fully discipline the whole of Russian society, that most of the nation remained beyond the reach of his transformations. Insofar as he refers to the penetration of the Polizeistaat into the rural areas, I would again ask where, at the time of Peter's death, the Polizeistaat had penetrated to the peasantry? Perhaps in parts of Protestant Germany, but if so it was not thanks to the state but thanks to the Lutheran clergy.

Raeff also refers to a cultural abyss between the elite and the people, the existence of which is posited in Russian historiography and attributed to Peter's reforms, and evidence for which is remarkable by its absence. Again, comparisons may help rather than hinder. Was not the French exquisite, in his lace and brocades, stepping delicately through the stinking refuse in a Paris street, surrounded by ragged beggars, as far removed from the common people as a Russian in "German" clothes from a peasant in a shirt and bast shoes? Did a precieuse even understand the speech of a woman of the people? The abyss between the cultured and the uneducated was vast in most European countries (less so perhaps in the United Provinces, but still considerable even in England). But this gulf was bridged in Russia as elsewhere by popular culture, including, be it remembered, song and dance. In Russia, certainly in the eighteenth century, the armed forces provided a channel through which this cultural contact was kept alive, and so did the pomest'e. What mattered was not that the common people did not understand the culture of the elite but that the elite had not cut itself off from the culture of the people. It is true that the Old Believers segregated themselves, but they were a minority. One might as well regard as typical the passionate rejection of, for instance, the theater by the Puritans, and their descendants the Evangelicals, of the early nineteenth century.

To my mind Russian historians have assumed the existence of this cultural gulf but they have not proved it. They want, however, to find it - as an additional stick to beat serfdom with. They dwell on the external and somewhat false picture portrayed in romantic painting of the dainty young pomeshchik in his frock-coat surrounded by obsequious serfs in tattered rubashki. But the existence of this gulf is not reflected in the memoir literature of the eighteenth century, and it is time to lay to rest the legend that the court spoke only French. (It spoke German for a great part of the eighteenth century, as well as French - and of course in the presence of foreigners and diplomats it was only courteous to express oneself in a language they understood. How bitterly did Lord Auckland complain when he was envoy at Madrid because Spaniards spoke Spanish - which he did not understand - at court instead of French). Popular culture varies in quality and vitality in different countries Russia and Spain provide two examples of particularly vital and spontaneous popular inspiration. In eighteenth-century Spain Frenchified thought and manners provided a top dressing also, but popular manners and traditions remained alive until they were taken over by the advancing folklorists (as in Russia). Raeff himself argues that the economic mobilization introduced by Peter must have led to the dissemination of European ways of life and articles of consumption among the people. Why does he exclude cultural penetration from his argument?

I agree with Raeff's remarks on the relatively poor quality of the foreign intellectual stimulus in Petrine Russia as distinct from the administrative



628 Slavic Review

influence. In general, not enough attention is paid to the importance of the second-rate in cultural transmission. The blazing star will blind; the minor planet will gradually and steadily illuminate the scene. But let us remember that the time lag in the reception of new ideas existed everywhere. Descartes, not Newton, dominated scientific thinking in France, too, well into the eighteenth century.

The trouble with Russia's eighteenth century, in a cultural and political sense, is that it tried to cram into one hundred years (or one hundred twenty-five years if one assumes, as I do, that Russia's eighteenth century lasted until 1825) what France and Germany had experienced in two hundred. There was less leisure for assimilation before a new experience was on the way, and I would argue that the discrepancy between Russia and the West was more striking in the field of culture than in the translation of political and administrative concepts. This explains perhaps why Russia did not share in the epistemological question- ings of the Enlightenment. But the time lag became ever shorter. Is it not, after all, at the end of Alexander I's reign that the main philosophical concerns of both the Enlightenment and the new German Naturphilosophie come together in an explosive mixture?

To sum up my criticism of Raeff's paper, I would first of all reject the concept that a model of the Polizeistaat offered itself to Russia. Second, I do not think that a Polizeistaat existed anywhere. Some parts of the model failed to take root in every case: the basic concepts of legality in Russia; political absolutism in Sweden; the Standestaat without the Stande in the Habsburg lands. If the Polizeistaat did indeed offer a model, it was for a small, easily administered unit like some of the minor German states or even Brandenburg Prussia. But the rulers of the major European states made no attempt to apply it as a whole, and they selected very different policies to attain their aims. The chronological discrepancy, and the German form of Russian borrowing in the reign of Peter I and to some extent in that of Catherine II, left their mark on Russia. But the introduction of a French dynasty and of French seventeenth- century patterns of administration also left their mark on eighteenth-century Spain. There is a family likeness across the checkerboard of European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history which underlies the endless variety of particular portraits. The Russian variant of absolute monarchy came increas- ingly to resemble its European counterparts, and it suffered from similar internal stresses, however the details may differ.



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Sisters under the Skin