65-448

DILKES, J r . , Thomas Pancoast, 1926-

VALUES IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF VASILH
OSIPOVICH KLIUCHEVSKIL

State University of Iowa, Ph. D ., 1964

History, modern

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan

 VALUES IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY

OP

VASILII OSIPOVICH KLIUCHEVSKII

*>7

Thomas Pancoast Dilkes>sW.

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of History in the Graduate
College of the State University of Iowa

August 19 61j.

Chairman: Assistant Professor Patrick Alston

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Paige

Introduction...................................... ill

The Variety and Scope of Kliuchevskii’s Historiography. 1

Kliuchevskii's Concept of Causation.......... 64

Russia and the Vest................................. 11#

The Historian as Moralist............................170

Concluding Remarks................................. 233

Bibliography...................................... 24#
 INTRODUCTION

The thought of Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii defies

the neat characterizations and specific theses which are
the traditional realm of the doctoral dissertation. The
necessity to impose order and coherence on a variety of
writings ranging from specialized scholarly monographs,
through a synthesis of national history, to random essays
in literary criticism may suggest philosophic unity where
no such unity exists. Unfortunately, V. 0. Kliuchevskii*s
work cannot easily be described in terms of any school of
historiography. His appeal and his values cut across
ideological lines, while both his theoretical statements
and his concrete narrative express inconsistencies. In
view of these facts I hope I shall not be considered
fainthearted if I begin this introduction with a mention
of two of the difficulties which I faced in writing a
study of Kliuchevskii*s values.
First, those questions about Kliuchevskii which are
most interesting are those questions on which he was most
silent. As I finished writing the chapter on Kliuchevskii
as a moralist I was increasingly conscious of the in­
adequacy of source material on his life and actions.

iii
Originally I had wanted to relate his personality to his
ideas. I had conceived the dissertation in terms of
a study in intellectual behavior, rather than a formal
history of ideas. The lack of biographical material made
this task difficult. In an attempt to meet this difficulty
I compiled a list of all the men who knew or studied under
Kliuchevskii and then searched in contemporary memoir
material for references to him. The results were not
rewarding. Random comments in memoirs or the panegyrics
of Festschrift did little to reveal the sympathies of this
singularly reticent scholar.
Secondly, a more basic difficulty arose from the fact
that the study of a man like Kliuchevskii has merit in
proportion to the degree that it is related to the intel­
lectual currents present in his society. One might argue
that only a senior scholar fully conversant with the
traditions and nuances of Russian intellectual history and
historiography should undertake a study of Kliuchevskii.
Of course, such a statement could be made about any
monograph on a major national writer; but the elusive
quality of Kliuchevskii?s thought make a knowledge of his
times more necessary than would be the case with a more
precise or clearly defined writer.
In building up a background for the dissertation,

iv
I relied oh general works on Russian historiography and
social thought which are cited in the bibliography.
These works together with my general training in Russian
history form the basis for the by no means original
introductory generalizations to which I now turn.
One of the main characteristics of nineteenth-century
intellectual life was the great variety of historical
speculation. Russian thought shared in an extreme degree
this characteristic of the times. During the first part
of the century a number of historical journals were
founded. The gathering of source materials, which in the
eighteenth century had largely been the work of private
groups and organizations, became increasingly supported
by the state. Accompanying this spirited collection of
documents was an important growth in historical syntheses
and schemes of Russian history, often constructed under
the impact of German romantic philosophy. Central to these
syntheses and schemes was the search for a national
typology. The main setting for this search was the famous
Slavophile-Westernizer controversy of the 'forties. The
Slavophiles were a rather closely knit group of young
Moscow noblemen well versed in German philosophy who
set out to develop an historical definition of the Russian
national character. They emerged with a theory which
v
emphasized the non-warlike nature of Russian history, the
importance of Orthodox Christianity with its emphasis on
feeling as opposed to logic, and the simple communal spirit
inherent in certain Russian agricultural institutions.
The political ideal of the Slavophiles was the union of
a paternal loving tsar with a people enjoying freedom of
opinion.
The Westernizers, a more diverse group than the Slavo­
philes, shared in common an admiration for the relative
political freedom of the western European states, a faith
in rational explanations for contemporary problems, and
an admiration for the reforming activity of Peter the Great.
The point to be emphasized for our purposes is that both
the Slavophiles and the Westernizers were seeking broad
generalizations within which they could understand and
evaluate Russia's past and future. For the Slavophiles
the essential generalization was the fundamental difference
between Russia and Europe. For the Westernizers the
essential generalization was the universal unity of human
social development and the identity of Russian history with
that of other countries in Europe. The details of this
controversy need not concern us. Neither the Slavophiles
nor the Westernizers were academic historians. They were
representatives of the newly emerging Russian intelligent­
sia seeking to formulate ideologies in conformity with
their political and social values. Nevertheless this
controversy had its influence on the development of
Russian historical thought. As one student of Russian
historiography has put it,
The frequent rebuttals carried one feature parti­
cularly worthy of notice: both sides used history
as their chief weapon. Seldom had the past been
studied more intensively to illustrate the points
each ideological camp wished to drive home. What­
ever ends each side pursued, history meanwhile made
gains, being intensely studied, written and rewritten
by an agitated generation.1
At the very time that the broader field of the intel­
ligentsia were caught up in the romantic polemics of the
Slavophile-Westemizer controversy, Russian academic
historiography was in the process of formation. The
gentleman scholar and man of affairs was being joined
in scholarly labor by the university professor. From the
first, most academic historiography tended to favor the
Westernizer tradition. The professional historians
avoided a fundamental distinction between the Russian path
of historical development and that of the other countries
of Europe. The professionals shared in common with the
IT Anatole Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography (New
York, 195$), p. 39:---- ----
vii
amateurs a desire for some overall scheme or philosophy
of Russian history. They sought to pass beyond the con- .
fines of political history and to generalize about Russian
social development.
The first and most influential of such general schemes
of academic history was that presented by Johann Philipp
Gustav Ewers (17$1-1$30). In his main work, Ancient
Russian Law Historically Revealed. Ewers advanced the idea
that all human societies follow a natural path of develop­
ment from the family through the tribe to the state.
This premise served as a suggestive basis for the most
important Russian school of historiography in the first
half of the nineteenth century, the State School of
historical writing. As represented by its chief theore­
tician, B. N. Chicherin (1&23-93), the State School of
historiography involved an avowed attempt to apply the
teachings of Hegelian philosophy to a synthesis of Russian
history. Chicherin held that the history of a people is
best understood by studying the formal evolution of the
state. The state for Chicherin is the highest expression
of the national spirit. The state exists above special
groups and can reconcile conflicting interests. Moreover,
in Russian history more than in the history of any other
viii
European nation the state has played a decisive role.
His argument was that the vast expanses of Russia had led
to the development of autocracy which alone could weld
the separate Slavic tribes into one national entity. As
a result of this theory Chicherin saw all Russian economic
and juridical institutions such as legal classes, the
agricultural commune, the medieval representative body
of the Zemskii Sobor. and serfdom as the result of state
action. Chicherin accepted the Hegelian idea of the slow
progression of political forms from the clan through the
family to the state and he applied this scheme to the
concrete facts of Russian history. For example, Ivan the
Terrible is portrayed in his work as a patrimonial land­
owner whose political ideas have not yet reached the
higher level of the civil state.2 On the other hand,
Peter the Great represents the full fruition of the modern
fiscal state.
With differences of degree in detail and emphasis most
of the State School adhered to this scheme. Thus, K. D.

2~. For my discussion of the State School I am drawing on

N. L. Rubinstein, Russkaia itoriografiia (Moscow, 1941)»
pp. 290-311; V. E. Illeritskii. eel.. Isoriografiia
lstorii SSSR (Moscow, 1961), pp. 237-304; and Paul
Miliukov, rtluridicheskaia shkola v russkoi istorio-
grafii," Russkaia Mysl. VI (Moscow, 1336), pp. 30-92.

ix
Kavelin (1818-85) was particularly interested in the
development of private estates among the Russian princes
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Kavelin felt
that the way in which these new private estates destroyed
the former communal loyalties of the Russian princes was
an example of the breakdown of clan feeling, in accordance
with the Hegelian progression. Kavelin disagreed with
Chicherin on the role of the Mongols in Russian history.
Where Chicherin had emphasized the fact that the Mongols
accustomed the Russians to tyranny and gave Russia an
authoritarian tradition, Kavelin passed them by almost
in silence. However, the two men were in basic agreement
on the two primary theses of the State School, the unique
role of the state in Russian history and the Hegelian
scheme of social evolution.
In the period immediately before and after the great
reforms of the ’sixties the practical scope and the
theoretical conceptions of Russian historiography began
to change. As the century progressed there was an increase
in the study of historical geography, social classes, and
folklore.^ in 1S65 the first Russian historical atlas was

3TI Rubinstein, pp. 353-58.

x
published. ^ In 1359 the Russian Archival Institute was
opened modeled on the Ecole des Chartes.5 Between 1360
and 1330 there was a rapid increase in popular historical
journals^ There was a new interest in ethnography, and
the role of the masses in history. Looking back on the
period since 1360 the most prominent of the Russian
historians of historiography wrote in 1390,
This thirty year period can in all justice be
called an epoch in our historical consciousness
and in the development and editing of historical
materials.•
An outstanding example of the new climate in histori­
ography was A. P. Shchapov. Shchapov argued that the
Russian state had resulted from the colonization of the
Russian people moving along the great rivers of Russia.
In the course of these wanderings the Russians had estab­
lished local societies only nominally linked with the state.
In times of crisis, such as the Polish invasions of the
seventeenth century, the people had rallied and saved
the state.^

__ jki(i>< p; 133. “
5. Ibid.. p. 363.
6. Ibid.. p. 366.
7. V. S. Ikonnikov, Opytrusskoi istoriografii (Kiev,
1391), I, 97.
3. Illeritskii, pp. 260-61.

xi
 A transitional figure in the new historiography was
S. M. Solov'ev (1820-79). Solov'ev, who was Kliuchev­
skii 's teacher and mentor, began in 1851 the publication
of his monumental twenty-nine volume History of Russia.
This work reflects the conceptions and political emphasis
of the State School, but joins with these some of the
characteristics of the materialism which was to dominate
the second half of the century. Solov'ev had studied
Hegel carefully. He held to the general evolutionary
scheme of Hegel and was particularly interested in the
work of Ewers whose writings he called an "epoch" in his
own intellectual life.9 Nevertheless, Solov'ev added to
the Hegelian scheme a new geographic element. The geo­
grapher Karl Ritter (1779-1859) had stressed the role of
geography in the development of separate nations and
Solov'ev used this idea to modify the State Scheme. He
argued that while the general path of Russian development
was similar to that of other European countries, the
speed and facility of that development was retarded by the
unusually arduous physical conditions of Russia. The open
steppes and the lack of natural defences had forced Russia

^ S. M. Solov'ev. Istoriia Rossii (Moscow. 1959-). I. 9.

xii
to become a military state. In a famous phrase which
became a cliche of Russian historiography, "nature was a
stepmother to Russia, a mother to Europe.
Although Solov'ev's periodization was Hegelian he
attempted to work out a theory of historical causation
which combined romantic and materialist elements.
According to this theory the history of any people consists
of the interaction of three basic factors: the geographic
setting; the inherent characteristics of the race; and the
force of external political circumstances. In this com­
bination of a Hegelian theory of social development with
an emphasis on geography Solov'ev reflected the changes
taking place in Russian historiography at the time he wrote.
The new materialism in historiography corresponded to
a general shift in the mood of the Russian intellectual
world after i860. There seems to be agreement among
scholars that, with notable exceptions, the immediate post­
reform period saw the rise of a dominant positivism in
Russian universities. If we take the term positivism to
mean not a set of specific doctrines but rather an avoidance
of explicit metaphysics, a general scientism, and a

10. Rubinstein, p. 323.

xiii
tendency to make analogies between the natural sciences
and history such a judgment seems valid. The 1860*3
saw the translation of the work of the English historian,
11
Henry Thomas Buckle, into Russian. Buckle's History of
Civilization in England claimed to be a search for general
regularities in history and held out the hope for a
science of history; this idea was enthusiastically received
in Russia. Writing in 1870 the noted British traveler
Donald Mackenzie Wallace described the pervasive influence
of Buckle.
I rarely had a serious conversation without
hearing Buckle's name mentioned; and my friends
always assumed that he had created a genuine
science of history on the inductive method....
In books, periodicals, newspapers and professorial
lectures his name was constantly cited.12
Describing a slightly earlier period in the 1860's, the
Russian authority on intellectual history, R. V. Ivanov-
Razumnik, has written that the "majority of the men of
the 'sixties were partisans of Buckle and inclined toward
13
determinism," while L. Martov has called an interest
and faith in natural science the overwhelming passion of

ITT Rubinstein, p. 351.

12. D. M. Wallace, Russia (New York, 1878), p. 110.
13. R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriia obshchestvennoi
mysli' (St. Petersburg, 1911), I, 76.

xiv
the period.^ It was a time for the "scientific resolu­
tion of questions of art, morality, and philosophy."*^
That this mood continued to prevail in the ’eighties is
attested by Paul Miliukov who described the attitude of
the students in his own day as follows;
Our generation had completely rejected the
conception of history as a recitation of facts....
Rejecting any kind of scientific importance for
narrative history, no matter how beautifully set
forth, we expected from history something else,
something that would approximate experimental
science.3-6
And, writing of the days when Kliuchevskii was teaching at
Moscow University, Miliukov says that Russian students
wanted to study history
from the point of view of a general scientific
problem - the internal organic evolution of
human society....We hunted for laws in history.1 '
The testimony of a partisan of positivistic history
such as Miliukov might be suspect on the grounds that the
wish was father to the thought. However, even those who
opposed the prevailing positivism bear witness to its

14". D. N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, ed.. Istoriia russkoi

literaturv (Moscow, 1909), IV, 21.
15. Ibid.. III. 52.
16. P. N. Miliukov, Vospominaniia (New York, 1955), I, 90.
17. Ibid.. I, 43.

xv
prevalence. Thus, Prince E. N. Trubetskoi says that
positivism ruled in the Teighties to such an extent that
it was characteristic for professors to start a lecture
with a tribute to Comte, although there might be little
positivism in the lecture itself.
It would seem safe to say, therefore, that with the
decline of the earlier Hegelian tradition which took place
after 1860^9 the general climate of opinion in Russia
could be characterized as materialistic and positivistic.
It would be well to emphasize, however, that this general
scientism was put to diverse uses; social theorists and
writers may use the language of the natural sciences in
unusual ways. G. Fedotov has called Russian historical
writing the most "materialistic in the family of Clio."
Yet, such a general statement is of little value unless
one describes the nuance and temper of this materialism
in different writers in detail. The actual manner in which
this type of thought was reflected in the work of Kliu­
chevskii will be one of the subjects of this study.

1ST E. N. Trubetskoi. Vospominaniia (Sofia. 1922). p. 22.

19. D. I. Chizhevskii, Oegel v Rossii (Paris, 1939)* p. 319.
20. G. Fedotov, "Rassia kliuchevskago," Sovremennyi
zapiski. (Paris, 1932), XLIX, 362.

xvi
The post-reform period leading up to 1905 was one in which
social and historical questions impinged with particular
force upon the consciousness of the educated Russian.
Plagued by the problems of internal reform and the defini­
tion of Russia's relationship to the European culture and
the European state system to which Russia belonged, the
Russian intelligentsia asked endless questions about the
domestic and international future of their nation.
Paradoxically, these concerns about the present and fu­
ture involved much discussion of Russia's past. The stri­
ving for the development of "personality" led to
discussions of the role of the individual in history.
In a country where the state closely restricted the role
of the individual the problem of the "hero in history"
became a focal point of personal aspirations as well as
philosophic speculation. Such representative figures of
the intelligentsia as N. A. Dobroliubov (1836-61), P. L.
Lavrov (1821-1900), and N. K. Mikhailovskii were tortured
by the search for a science of society which would not

2lT For example, P. L. Lavrov sought to combat the

determinism of the time by emphasizing the role of the
individual in history. On Lavrov see: D. N.
Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, IV, 103-28; and N. I. Kareev,
Sobranie Sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1912), II,
153-208.

xvii
overwhelm the individual in a nexus of determinism.^2
Historical problems became the subject of polemics in the
popular educated press. The question of whether the Rus­
sian people or the Russian government was the source of
Russia's historical development aroused passions in a
period which saw the two moving farther and farther
apart on the road to revolution. The question of Russia's
future and, in particular, her relationship to_the coun­
tries of western Europe was the "model problem" of the
period^ around which contemporary thought revolved.
S. M. Solov'ev had insisted that only through a knowledge
of history could Russia's future progress be assured.^
The generation which came after him agreed with him
although they may not have accepted his interpretation of
that past. It was not just the "agitated generation" of
the Slavophiles which framed its hopes and fears in
historical terms. The historical cast of thought was
pervasive through the entire century.
It was in this milieu that V. 0. Kliuchevskii spent
his life. His active years coincided almost exactly with

22. Ivanov-Razuronik. Istoriia. p p . 37-3#. and passim^

23. Rubinstein, p. 211; and Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, III, 52.
24- Solov'ev, I, 15.

xviii
the period from the great reforms to the 1905 revolution.
He wrote in a society in crisis. Under such circumstances
the view of Russia’s past and future and the values in
the work of such a popular and influential historian as
Kliuchevskii stand as a major example of the academic
culture of the Old Regime on the eve of its dissolution.
Finally, I would like to anticipate a criticism which

might be made of this dissertation. The lack of complete

biographical material on Kliuchevskii has deprived this
study of an essential chronological element. It is not
possible to trace in detail the sequence of his thought
in a manner which will convincingly document the chronol­
ogy of his intellectual life. Although standard Soviet
works on historiography assert that he became more ideal­

istic later in life, I have found no evidence for this

assertion. Consequently, the dissertation is an extended
e
explication dtt texte rather than a narrative history;

of one man’s thought. I hope that a future visit to the

Soviet Union may provide material for a more chronological

approach.

xix
 A Note on Transliteration

In general I have used the system of transliteration

employed by the Library of Congress, with the following
exceptions. The tenth letter of the Russian alphabet has
u
been written i instead of i. The twenty third letter of the

alphabet has been written ts instead of <ts‘. The twenty

sixth letter has been written shch instead of shch*. The
thirty first letter has been written iu instead of iu.
I hare written the final combination made up of the
twenty eighth and tenth letters as yi rather than y. The

terminal combination of ii has been written ii. The soft

sign has been omitted at the end of a word, but written as

1 in the middle of a word.

xx
 1

CHAPTER I
THE VARIETY AND SCOPE OF KLIUCHEVSKII*S HISTORIOGRAPHY

Future generations will read Kliuchevskii as one

of the most important and original representatives
of Russian culture who united in himself the
personality of a scholar-historian, a historian-
poet, and a historian-citizen.l
It is impossible to pass over him in the history
of Russian social thought...Whole generations of
the Russian intelligentsia have been nurtured
on his works in Russian history.2
In the life of a scholar and writer the chief
biographical facts are books — the most important
events are thoughts.3

The name of Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii is a major

one in the history of Russian historical writing. A whole
school of historians and a particular interpretation of
Russian history is linked with this name. From the day
when his defence of the doctoral dissertation was greeted
as an event in the academic world^ to his death over thirty
years later in 1911, he was a dominant influence in the

1. A. A. Kizevetter, Istoricheskie otkliki (Moscow, 1915).

p. 90.
2. S. I. Tkhorzhevskii, "V. 0. Kliuchevskii, kak sotsiolog
i politicheskii myslitel," Dela i dni (Petrograd,
1921), p. 154.
3. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev,"
Sochineniia (Moscow, 195o-59), VII, 143*
4. M. Liubavskii, ed., Chteniia v imperatorskom obshchestve
istorii i drevnostei (Moscow. 1914). I. 17. Hereafter
cited as Chteniia.
 2

formation of Russian thinking about the national past and

the meaning of Russian history. His fame spread beyond the
confines of the university and his name appears in the
memoirs of artists,5 scholars,6 statesmen,7 and revolu-
tionariess^ His work and his thought are the subject of
this study.
V. 0. Kliuchevskii was born to the family of a poor
priest in the province of Penza on the sixteenth of May,
1341. His father died at an early age, and dependent
upon the charity of the state church, he early began
training for the seminary. We are told that the province
from which he came was an unusually poor one, 9 and it is
certain that his early years were spent in great poverty.^
Although several commentators on Kliuchevskii have attempt­
ed to link his background with his alledged closeness to
the people and the interest in the fate of the peasantry

JT. P. A. Zaionchkovskii and A. N. Sokolova, eds., Moskov-

skii universitet v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov
(Moscow, 1956). p. 338 ; and F. I. Chaliapin, Pages
From My Life (New York, 1927), pp. 194-5*
6. A. A. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Prague,
1929), passim; and P. N. Miliukov, Vospominaniia (New
York, I955), I, passim.
7. A. F. Koni, Na zhiznennom puti (St. Petersburg, 1912),
II, 170-32.
3. L. Trotsky, My Life (New York, 1930), p. 564.
9. V. A. Artobolevskii, ”K biografii V. 0. Kliuchevskago,"
Golos Minuvshago (Moscow, 1913), No. IV, 161.
10. Ibid., p. 159.

J
 2

formation of Russian thinking about the national past and

the meaning of Russian history. His fame spread beyond the
confines of the university and his name appears in the
memoirs of artists,5 scholars,^ statesmen,7 and revolu-
tionariess^ His work and his thought are the subject of
this study.
V. 0. Kliuchevskii was born to the family of a poor
priest in the province of Penza on the sixteenth of May,
1&41. His father died at an early age, and dependent
upon the charity of the state church, he early began
training for the seminary. We are told that the province
from which he came was an unusually poor one, 9 and it is
certain that his early years were spent in great poverty.^
Although several commentators on Kliuchevskii have attempt­
ed to link his background with his alledged closeness to
the people and the interest in the fate of the peasantry

Y. P.' AT Zaxonchkbvskii and A. N. Sokolova, eds., Moskov-

skii universitet v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov
[Moscow. 1956). p. 338; and F. I. Chaliapin. Pages
From My Life (New York, 1927), PP* 194-5*
6. A. A. Klzevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Prague,
1929), passim; and P. N. Miliukov. Vospominaniia (New
York, 1955)', I, passim.
7. A. F. Koni, Na zhiznennom puti (St. Petersburg, 1912),
II, 170-32.
3. L. Trotsky, My Life (New York, 1930), p. 564*
9. V. A. Artobolevskii, "K biografii V. 0. Kliuchevskago,"
Golos Minuvshago (Moscow, 1913), No. IV, 161.
10. Ibid., p. 159.
which characterized his later writings,"^ there is little
direct evidence of what these early associations with the
peasant milieu meant for the future scholar. It is true
that there is more than a hint of regional and class loyal­
ty in letters which he wrote home while a young student at
Moscow University,but the exact nature of the influence
of his class and region cannot be reached except through
the indirect evidence of his writings. The reasons for
this are the lack of direct biographical data for most of
his life, particularly for his adult years, combined with
his unusual reticence concerning his personal history.
Moreover, Kliuchevskii's philosophic and political
loyalties are equally difficult to define. This is
illustrated by the various and conflicting opinions con­
cerning his conception of the nature of the historical
discipline, and general world-view. According to some he
was an "historian-sociologist" whose views were in agree­
ment with the scientism current in the last decade of the
century in Russian university life*^ Others, however,

XT. A. E. Presniakov. "V. 0. Kliuchevskii." Russkii

istoricheskii zhurnal (Petrograd, 1922), Book VIII,
223; and Chteniia. p. 1.
12. S. A. Golubtsov, ed., Pis'ma V. 0. Kliuchevskago k
P. P. Gvozdevu 1866-1870: Trudy rossiiskoi publichnoi
biblioteku im. Lenina (Moscow, 1924). V. passim.
Hereafter cited as Pis'ma.
13. A. Lappo-Danilevskii, ’*Pamiati V. 0. Kliuchevskago,"
Vestnik Evropy (August, 1911), p. 352; and A. A.
Kizevetter, "Kliuchevskii and his Course of Russian
History." Slavonic Review (1923), I, 504-22.
 4

declare that he was at odds with the basic intellectual

temper of his day and that he stood aloof from the current
positivism.^ According to some he was the reconciler and
synthesizer of the earlier Westemizer-Slavophile controver­
sy;^ others assert that he belonged to neither of these
t r a d i t i o n s S o m e claim to find within his work a
complete historical system and philosophy, while others
say that the search for such a philosophy in his writings
is fruitless .-*-7 Equally diverse are opinions of his
political sympathies. On the one hand, he was considered
safe enough to be chosen as a tutor to a member of the
imperial family and an adviser to the government. Yet, he
was also noted for his popularity among the progressive
students, ° and in 1905 his works were published and sold
by the middle class liberal Union of Liberation to obtain
IQ
funds. 7 He was a difficult man to label, a fact attested

14. G. P. Fedotov, "Rossiia kliuchevskago," Sovremennye

Zapiski (Paris, 1932), XLIX, 344j and E. N. "Trubet­
skoi, Vospominaniia (Sofia, 1922), p. 73.
15. P. N. Miliukov, HKliuchevskii," Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences (New York, 1932), XVIII, 577*
16. Presniakov, p. 233.
17* Ibid., passim; and Tkhorzhevskii, passim.
1&. ?. N. Miliukov, nV. 0. Kliuchevskii." V . 0. Kliuchev-
skii Kharakteristiki i Vospominaniia. M. Liubavskii,
ed., (Moscow, 1912), p. 1$9. Hereafter the main work
will be cited as Kharakteristiki.
19. P. Pascal, ed., B. Klutchevsky, Histoire de Russie
(Paris, 1956), Preface, I, S.
 5

to by remarks of contemporaries that "people were seldom

admitted to his heart"^ and that he was a puzzling figure
to the authorities and to his colleagues.^
Faced with these problems this study has chosen to
adopt as the basis for its approach the remark that forms
the concluding quotation with which this chapter begins.
We must treat his writings as his chief biographical facts
and his thoughts as the chief events of his life, however
lacking in completeness such an approach may be.
In such an attempt to use Kliuchevskii"s works as a
source for a study of his thought and values this disserta­
tion will examine a number of questions relating to his
historiography. Some of these questions could be asked
o o
about the work of any historian. /See note7 For example,
what was his conception of the scope and variety of histori­
cal study, what did he write about? What were the implica­
tions of the organization of his work, and what explicit
or implicit goals did he think of the discipline serving?

20. Iu. IT Eichenwal ’d,” ‘’Kliuchevskii : myslitel i

khudozhnik," Kharakteristiki. p. 120.
21. N. A. Kotliarevskii, Kholmy i Rodiny (Berlin, 1923),
p. 90.
22. I am indebted for the general questions in terms of
which I have written this study to the suggestions
made by Professor Wallace K. Ferguson, who early
aroused my interest in historiography as a source for
intellectual history and who taught me to examine the
work of historians within this conceptual framework.
What was his concept of historical causation and the funda­
mental sources of change in society? What social and
political values were implicit or explicit in his work,
what social classes, particular figures and events did he
admire and which did he dislike?
Some of these questions, however, could be asked about
only a Russian historian of Kliuchevskii’s time and place.
For example, what was his view of the relationship of
of Russia and the West in historical development? What
was his attitude toward the autocracy and the government?
How is his thought related to Populism and the Slavophile
tradition? If, as Arnold Toynbee has suggested, historians
tend to illustrate rather than correct the ideas current in
their age then the asking of these questions may tell us
something about Russian historical thought in the second
half of the nineteenth century. In view of Kliuchevskii’s
acknowledged importance, popularity, and influence the
answer to these questions may not be unimportant in Rus­
sian intellectual history.
If one reads the works of V. 0. Kliuchevskii in the
order in which they were written, one notices a gradual
widening of the subject matter of his writings, but a
consistent interest in certain kinds of problems as
particularly important. The first monograph which he
 7

published has a title which indicates its limited nature,

The Economic Activity of the Solovetskii Monastery in the
White Sea R e g i o n . This work traces the expansion and
growth of the monastery from the original settlement of a
hermit in the Solovetskii region to the period of its
great land-holding and its role in the economic develop­
ment of north eastern Russia from the beginning of the
fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century.
While enumerating in considerable detail the kinds and
quantity of economic activity into which the brothers of
the monastery entered,^ the study is not limited to
questions of purely economic history, but touches on the
close relationship of the religious and moral activities
of the monks to their agricultural activity,^ the taxes
and duties imposed by the monastery on those living on the
land owned by it,^ the cooperation of the state in the
growth of the monastery, 27' and the importance of the
geographic position of the monastery as a determining
factor in the nature of its development. Thus, in this

ZT. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, ^Khoziaistvennaia deiatelrnost Sol-

ovetskogo monastyria v Belmorskom krae,” Sochineniia v
Vos*mi Tomakh (Moscow, 1956-59), VII, 5-32. Hereafter
the main collection of Kliuchevskii*s works will be
cited as Sochineniia.
24* Ibid.. passim.
25. IbidL. pp. 12-13.
26. Ibid.. pp. 29-31.
27. Ibid., p. 15.
 8

early work there is evident an intent to treat the history

of a religious organization of old Muscovy in terms of its
secular importance in economic and social history, a sub­
ject which will continue to interest Kliuchevskii in his
later works.
In the last years of the ’sixties and the first of the
'seventies this interest in church history set within the
broader context of the social and economic history of Rus­
sia is predominant in Kliuchevskii's work. Indeed, the
secular significance of church history interested him to
such an extent that early in his student years he wrote
28
A Comparative Sketch of National Religious Attitudes.
Although this work was never published, we are told that in
it Kliuchevskii attempted to link differences in national
religious attitudes to the influence of natural surround-
ings, 29 an argument to which one of his professors
objected.3® However, it is not necessary to speculate on
the uses to which he put the study of religious attitudes
for in 1872, he published a work which was his first essay
in what might be called intellectual history. In The

2#. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Sravnitel'nyi ocherk narodno-

religioznykh vozzrenii,” unpublished seminar paper
written in the seminar of F. I. Buslaev in 1862-63.
Cited in Sochineniia. VIII, 460-61.
29. Ibid., p.“4SIT
30. Ibid.. p. 461.
 11
Disputes in Pskov, he examines the various controversies
both with the Latin Christians and with their own church
leaders which characterized the tumultuous religious life
of the Pskov community in the fifteenth century. Kliuchev­
skii strives to give this essay a broad scope, linking
these disputes to the history of the growth of the Moscow
State. He dwells upon what he considers the typical
attitudes of Russian religious thinking in the period and
connects these attitudes to the growing nationalism, the
idea of the Third Rome, and the history of the break with
the Byzantine Church.32 jn order to establish the histori­
cal context of his work he devotes twenty two out of a
total of seventy two pages to a general consideration of
Russian church society and Pskovian church society of the
time. In this section he treats such questions as the
social and moral habits of the clergy, the relations of
Pskov to the emerging centralized state, and the reasons
why Pskov was unable to follow a path of development
separate from the rest of Muscovy. 33 ^e defines his topic
in the following broad manner:
The history of Russian thought, and particularly of
ancient Russian thought, seems a somewhat artificial

317 V". 0. Kliuchevskii, ”PskovIkie~spory,H Sochineniia.

VII, 33-105.
32. Ibid.. pp. 36-40.
33. Ibid.. pp. 33-54.
 10

term. It refers to phenomena which, seemingly,

in themselves would provide material only on the
acquisition by the Russians of foreign ideas to
which the Russians added nothing except mistakes
and distortions. However, the history of thought
does not only concern itself with new additions
to the capital of human culture. It deals also
with the history of thinking, of the formal
development of popular thought working on pre­
pared foreign materials. The study of Russian
attitudes toward such materials provides much
data for the elucidation of the Russian national^,
character, the structure of the national spirit.-^
If we leave aside for the moment the interesting
implications of the above statement concerning Kliuchevskii’s
national pride and consider only the statements relevant
to the scope of his history, it appears to express a broad
definition of intellectual history, a definition slanted
more toward the history of attitudes than toward the
history of ideas.
Kliuchevskiifs insistence on the intimate connection
between theological ideas and the broader social history
of the church and the society to which it belongs is well
expressed in a passage which follows a detailed discussion
of the fifteenth-century controversy over certain questions
of church ceremonial, particularly over the question of the
repetition of the exclamation alleluia twice instead of
three times. Kliuchevskii says of these controversies:

34. Ibid.. p. 33.

 11

Considering this quarrel in general, as a fact

of the intellectual life of Russia in the fif­
teenth century, it is difficult to find anything
in it which does not correspond to the character
of the epoch and the society. The second half
of the fifteenth century was particularly a
time of casuistical questions in our spiritual
life, and we have tried to point out the causes
of this phenomenon in the cast of Russian church
society in that time.35

While this monograph is exceptional in Kliuchevskii*s

early work by nature of its subject matter it illustrates
a characteristic common to most of his work, that is, the
desire to give the broadest possible scope to any subject
on which he is writing.
Kliuchevskii!s tendency to consider a limited mono­
graphic subject in terms which lead to an examination of
the total social and historical milieu relevent to the
subject is illustrated again inthe work which he wrote for
his admission as a candidate tothe historical faculty of
Moscow University on the twenty-fifth of June, 1&65,
entitled Tales of Foreigners Concerning the Moscow
S t a t e For this work he examined thirty five separate
accounts of the Moscow state written by foreigners from the
fifteenth through the seventeenth century. In the begin­
ning of this essay he explained that foreign accounts of

35. 'Ibid.. p. 35.

36. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, Skazaniia inostrantsev o Moskovskom
Gosudarstve (Petrograd, 191$), p. 311.
 12

Muscovy have specific merit and shortcomings as historical

sources. The merit consists in the fact that the minutiae
of life which often escape the native observer are parti-
37
cularly striking to foreign observers. Contrastingly,
however, foreign eyes cannot judge the ’’moral condition
of society” since ’’this side of life is less open to their
e y e s . Consequently, Kliuchevskii strives to limit his

use of these sources.

In the present survey we will limit ourselves
to foreign accounts of only those sides of
ancient Russia the portrayal of which is
least likely to suffer from the arbitrary judg­
ments of the writer.39
With this reservation, Kliuchevskii then proceeds to
discuss foreign descriptions of the geography, administra­
tion, trade, diplomatic ceremonial, Isize and nature of
the army, demography and financial structure of the Rus­
sian state. ^ Not content, however, with an enumeration
of the views of foreigners on these matters, he interjects
his own asides on the social and political structure of
Muscovy. He devotes large space to a discussion of the
administrative structure of the sixteenth century, and
the growth and evolution of the administrative organization

37~ Ibid..pp. 6-7.

3d. Tbl§., p. 9.
39. rbid.. p. 9.
40. Ibid..p. 11.
 13

of the new state.^ On several occasions he points to the

changing relationship of the Prince and his druahina.^2

In other words, here is no mere compilation of foreign

accounts, but in addition, a running commentary on the

growth of the Muscovite State.

This early essay deals with a number of problems which

will interest Kliuchevskii throughout his career. The

change from "private" to public law in the first part of

the sixteenth century,43 the development of new government

departments and officers, and changes in the legal customs

and practices. In this relatively short work of 306 pages

over twenty five are devoted to the details of the physical

growth of the town of Moscow.44 The longest chapter in

the work is devoted to the details and vicissitudes of

Russian trade with foreigners, an emphasis which may stem

from the fact that many of the foreign reports were natural­

ly concerned with this problem.

In this work Kliuchevskii strives to penetrate

beyond the facade of formal sources into an assumed true

historical reality. He refers to a contrast between the

true nature of judicial and administrative practice and

VT. Ibid..passim.
42. Ibid.«pp. iJl-59*
43. IIbid.
E 0 . ,,pp.
PP.62,
62,67—
67-66, 110-11.
44*
44> Ibid.
Ibid.. . Chapters V and VI.
45. T H d .. pp. 214-39.
 14

the formal institutional description arising from a study

of documents. He contrasts what is "on paper" with what

is true "in actual fact."^ Indeed, he finds that

What gives the fleeting and fragmentary accounts

of foreigners particular interest is that they
introduce us to the real practice of judicial
administration; they show us the face and cir­
cumstances of law as it appears in actual fact
and not on paper.*'

And in another place he writes that foreign descriptions

"describe not so much the structure of administration as

they do its real activity.

This desire to transcend the limitations of written

sources to understand the actual workings of government

organs is a main object of Kliuchevskii*s function as an

historian. His most famous monograph, The Bova^

Ancient Russia^ and his notable essay on the Composition

of the Representation in the Zemskii Sobors of Ancient

Russia^ are both avowed attempts to go beyond the formal

documentary sources for the history of an institution and

to understand its historical role by studying the social

46. I b i d .. p. 1 3 6 .
47. i s i a .. p. 136.
4*. T5I3.; p. 152.
49. 7. d. Kliuchevskii, Boiarakaia Duma drevnei Rusi (St.
Petersburg, 1919)* Hereafter cited as Boiarakaia Duma.
50. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Sostav predstavitel1atva na
zemskikh soborakh drevnei Rusi," Sochineniia. VIII,
5-112. Hereafter cited as "Sostav...soborakh."
 15

classes participating in it as well as the historical con­

ditions under which they developed. Late in his career

he gave a lecture course in The Ose of Sources in which

he warned his students to beware the "innate conservatism of

c h a n c e l l o r i e s " ^ which leads them to repeat formulae and

phrases which no longer correspond to actual practice. He

warns the young scholars that to

take the formulae of a particular period for the

actual attitudes is to be very often mistaken.52

and more generally, of the historian's task he writes that

the historian "strives to read between the lines, to guess

those things about which /the documents/ are silent.

Since most of Kliuchevskii's early works deal with

some portion of church history, several commentators on him

have linked this interest to his social origins as the son

of a village priest and to the fact that he was teaching

during his early years at the Moscow Seminary.54 Kliuchev­

skii himself has suggested that in dealing with early Rus­

sian history the history of the church and of the society are

so closely linked that it is not possible to treat them

Jl~. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Kurs Lektsii po Istochnikovs-

deniiu," Sochineniia. VI, 5-123. Hereafter cited as
"Kurs...1stochnikovedeniiu."
52. Ibid., p. 13.
53. jSI3.. p. 475.
54. Rubinstein, p. 443; Miliukov, Kharakteristiki. p. 204;
and Chteniia. p. 1.
 16

separately.55 This approach to church history is further

illustrated in his Master's thesis on a subject suggested

to him by S. M. Solov'ev,56 Ancient Russian Saint's Lives

as an Historical Source. He turned to an examination of

these works as a source for the colonization of north

east Muscovy in which process the church played an import­

ant part. The use of hagiography as an historical source

57
was a popular theme in Kliuchevskii*s student days, and
his work was among the recent trend of dealing with the

North East in contrast to the previous emphasis on Kievan

hagiography.5& But his study was unusual for its negative

opinion of the worth of the sources. He considered their

format to represent stylized panageryic rather than actual

biography.59

Although Kliuchevskii considered the minute research

he carried on in preparation for this work unrewarding,^

55. Y. 0. Kliuchevskii. wfrskovskie sporv." Sochineniia.

, VII, 3«.
56. Y. 0. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii (Moscow,
1937)* It Introduction, v.
57. Chtenia. pp. 54-55.
56. A. 1. Iakovlev, "V. 0. Kliuchevskii," Nauchnoe-
issledovatel'skii institut ori Sovete MLnlstrov
Mordovskii ASSh: 2aoiski No. 6: istoriia i arkheoloaiia
T)fo¥covrmsT, p .' 105.—
59. Y. 0. Kliuchevskii, Dreyneruaskie zhitiia sviatykh
kak istoricheskii istochnik (Moscow. 1871). p. 170.
60. Kliuchevskii did not enjoy his work on this subject
and on finishing it remarked that he felt "resur­
rected" after spending so much time working on a mass
of unrewarding sources. See Chteniia. p. 57.
 17

he was aware that it introduced him to conceptions of old

Russian life in concrete detail, and so stated in his
opening defence of the thesis.^ This is not surprising
in view of the fact that he studies over five thousand
Zl O
copies of saints’* lives in preparation for the work. c
Careful research coupled with a desire to give a broad
scope to the subject under study was not only beginning to
show itself in the first works of Kliuchevskii, but also
appears as one of the points he emphasized early in his
teaching career. For example, in the reviews which he
wrote of the dissertations of his students in the
'seventies one of the most consistent kinds of criticism
which he makes is in terms of the inadequate scope of the
work.63 Thus, he took one student, I. Znameskii, the
author of a dissertation entitled The Condition of the
Clergy in the Reigns of Catherine II and Paul I. to task
for the fact that he
did not keep in view the general condition of
the state, the moral and economic situation
of society in the second half of the past
century.64

61. Ibid.. pp. 65-66.

62. Fascal, p. 13.
63. N. A. Zaozerskii, "V. 0.Kliuchevskii v egoretsenzi-
iakh dissertatsiina uchenyia stepeni professorov i
studentov Moskovskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii," Chteniia,
pp. 72-122.
64. Ibid.. p. #5.
In particular Kliuchevskii felt that in order to adequately

discuss the position of the clergy as a social class it was

necessary to explain the relations of other classes to the

state .65 Nor was it just students of idiom Kliuchevskii

was critical on the grounds of inadequate scope of their

research; he voiced similar criticisms of other scholars

in church history.66 This is particularly interesting in

view of the fact that one of the few criticisms launched

against Kliuchevskiifs own Master's dissertation by his

generally approving professor, S. M. Solov'ev, was that

Kliuchevskii did not adequately trace the social and

political background of the society in which the Lives of

the Saints were written .^ Kliuchevskii replied that the

content of these works was not affected by changes in the

social order.^ Certainly, it would be difficult to level

a similar criticism of inadequate scope against his

doctoral dissertation, The Boyar Duma of Ancient Russia.

The Bovar Duma is a landmark in Kliuchevskii's histori­

ography. In it we see the culmination of his desire to

give a large scope to his work. But more importantly,

it represents a departure from his earlier concentration on

65. Ibid.. P. 73, 65.

66. T S U .. p. 73.
67. Chteniia. o. 66.
66. ISTsT T p ! 66.
 19

church history. The sub-title of the original version of

this work which appeared in the journal Russian Thought

for the years 1381-82, indicates both the method and the

scope of the study; it reads, "An examination of the

history of a governmental institution in its relation to

the history of s o c i e t y . W h a t Kliuchevskii attempts in

this work is to reach an understanding of the historical

significance of the Boyar Duma by examining the history

of the changing class composition and function of those

bearing the title of Boyar and others associated with the

Duma in its history. In his introduction to the work he

explains that it is difficult to examine the actual day to

day procedure of the Duma since there is no record of the

proceedings, and we usually know of its work only through

the end product of that work, the decrees issued by the

prince. Moreover, says Kliuchevskii, we usually approach

the study of such institutions from the wrong center of

focus by concentrating attention on the question of whether

or not the decisions of the Duma were advisory or binding on

the head of the state. This is an error, for "the people

70
of past centuries did not make such subtle distinctions."'

furthermore, there is another way in which to approach the

$9. Quoted in Rubinstein, p. 449* This subtitle does not

appear in the edition of the work which was available
to me. Boiarskaia Duma. Title Page.
70. Ibid.. p7T»

*
 20

history of the Duns.

Mors rewarding and more curious is the social
history of the Duma. Through the course of
centuries we meet in it persons bearing the
Identical title of Boyar: councilors of the
prince-monarch; but wnat variety of features
and roles these boyars have. The Russian boyar
of the tenth century, half merchant half warrior,
who remembers well that he was a Varangian, a
sea-faring Viking who has now become a knight,
and who has not quite succeded in changing his
boat for a horse and thus becoming a steppe-
far er. ...The Kievan boyar of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, a free comrade of his prince
and like him a political vagabond who sinks firm
roots in no place and is linked firmly to no
local society; the Galician boyar-rebel of the
thirteenth century standing midway between being
a prince's man and a simple inhabitant of the
land.•.; the northern Great Russian boyar of the
fourteenth century, like his southern ancestor
a serving nomad, yet existing in the midst of
a host of prince-proprietora,...and placed between
the prince cultivating his domain-estate and a
mobile floating population, he ends by becoming
a landowner like his prince; the Novgorodian
boyar of the fifteenth century, apparently
helpless and submissive before the popular
assembly, often murdered and plundered by it,
yet a wealthy capitalist holding tightly in his
fist the reins of the national economy...; the
Moscow boyar of the sixteenth century, recently
transformed from an appanage prince, bemoaning
his past in Rostov or Jaroslav and the lack of
political and economic freedom of his Moscow
present, yet unable to get along without his
sovereign. Finally, the Moscow boyar of the
seventeenth century, abasing himself before the
prince, or fawning on commoners, renouncing his
political dreams..., submissive and devoted to
his sovereign and gathering into his outstretched
palms the fruits of the peasants labor...Bach of
these types imparted a particular style and
character to the Duma in which he dominated; yet,
each of them reflected the style and character
 21

of society in the various regions of Russia and

in the various centuries of her history.71

I have quoted this extensive passage in some detail

since, in addition to its interesting stylistic personifi­

cation of social classes and epochs, it contains the heart

of both the method and argument of the Boyar Duma. Obvi­

ously, the scope of this work is almost as broad as the

social and economic history of Russia itself. In his

attempt to understand one institution Kliuchevskii extends

his work to include a whole scheme of Russian history.

The Boyar Duma almost deserves the remark of one critic who

called it "not just a specialized research project but the

exposition of a whole course in ancient Russian history.^

In part, this approach to the Duma arose from Kliuchev­

skii Ts feeling that a more direct study was not possible.

In the introduction he writes:

Turning to the study of the Boyar Duma the

author could not hope to portray with suf­
ficient chronological exactness and fullness
the history of its political importance and
governmental activity. Therefore, he has
turned all the more attention to those matters
in which were reflected the immediate ties
between the institution and society, to the
social composition of the Duma. 73

By using this approach to a study of the Boyar Duma

vi. ibid'.; p p T p r : - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
72. H. Liubavskii, "Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii,"
Chteniia. n. lit..
73. P: 2.
 22

Kliuchevskii extends the subject matter of the dissertation

greatly. For example, the first chapter of the work deals

ostensibly with the composition of the Boyar Duma in the

tenth century, but considers as related subjects the origin

and composition of the first Slavic communities in the Rus­

sian land, the breakdown of clan organization of the Slavs

with the movement into the Russian plain,74 the origin

and functions of the administrative officers of the first

75
Russian towns,'' and the problem of the meaning of the term

Rus, which Kliuchevskii admits is still not solved in Rus­

sian h i s t o r i o g r a p h y . M o r e o v e r , in his effort to under­

stand the Duma within the context of Russian social and

economic changes over five centuries he discusses the

evolution of different popular conceptions of the state,77

kinds and type of landholding,7& the uses to which the land

was put, the origins of serfdom,79 and the evolution of the

centralized autocracy.^

Tracing the changing composition of the Duma, Kliu­

chevskii enters into the most exact kind of detail. For

example, he examines deeds, documents and wills in order

ppTT7-2j.
pp. 27-32.
32- *
pp. 85-*7, 143.
pp. 164, 167, 179
Chapters III, IV.
pp. 101 ff.
 23
»

to be able to precisely define the significance of the

social and class nomenclature of past ages. Thus, on the

basis of a fourteenth century manuscript showing that a

certain wealthy merchant and government paymaster, one

Taras Petrovich Novosiltsev, was ransomed from the Tartars

and subsequently given boyar rank, he concludes that at

that time admission to the boyarstvo was open to wealthy

merchants. And he contrasts this case with the fact

that the merchant hero Minin, who helped spark the national

revival two and one half centuries latex; was only rewarded

by being named a state councilor. With almost philologi­

cal exactness Kliuchevskii gauges the social significance

of various terms such as "town elder" and "leader of the

thousand."^ When he is unable to give a direct answer

to a problem he advances hypotheses based on inferences

from the general social and political history of the peri­

od. Thus, he admits that it is a difficult problem to

decide how much the administrative organisation of appanage

Russia was a carry over from practices in the old southern

principalities and how much they were innovations. He

explains that the sources for the later period are bad

since the Duma is scarcely mentioned in them at all.

 24

Faced with this situation ha argues that one must study the

"changes taking place in the whole structure of Russian

life with its flow into the North East from the middle

Dnieper,"*^ and argues that a knowledge of these changes

will show "in which direction this administrative insti­

tution had to c h a n g e . T h i s attempt to argue from the

total social, economic, and political conditions of the

time in order to arrive at conjectures concerning the

function of the Duma for which specific documentary evi­

dence is lacking is typical of Kliuchevskiifs histori­

ography. We shall examine his reasoning in more detail

when we discuss Kliuchevskii's concept of historical

causation and his general synthesis of Russian history.

It is in the Bovar Duma that the outlines of this general

periodisation and scheme of Russian history first appear.00

A question which appears explicitly but not often in

the Bovar Duma is the comparison of Russian medieval

institutions to those of feudal Europe. In general the

work emphasises the uniqueness of Russian class relation-

<
ships and the necessity to avoid over-facile identifica­

tion of the boyarstvo with the gentry of medieval Europe

34. Ibid.. pp. 124-25.

d5. & l d . i p. 125*
&6. M. Karpovich, "Klyuchevsky and Recent Trends in Russian
Historiography," The Slavonic and East European Review
/American Series/ iXl (March, 1^43) , 32.
 25

or of the prince with the feudal overlords of the West.

For example, while discussing the evolution of the adminis­

trative organization of the court of the Muscovite grand

prince he notes the similarity between the titles of certain

87
French court officials and those of the grand prince,

but he hastens to point out the essential differences

between the administrative councils in the two societies.

A comparison of the north Russian Boyar Duma

of appanage times with the administrative
council of the French kings will help us to
see more clearly what the former was not and
could not be.88

The work contains several general statements dwelling

on the way Russian historical experience and the society

evolving therefrom differed from those of western Europe

and the importance of the problem in Kliuchevskiifs mind

is suggested by the fact that he raises the question in the

go
introduction to his work. 7
Kliuchevskii*s contemporaries and his examiners for

the doctoral degree were greatly impressed by the Bovar

Duma and both in his own time and later some hailed it

as a major event in Russian historiography and a new de-

WT. Boiarakaia Duma. n. 1A5.

88. n O T ; t" p T O T 7
89. Ibid.. p. 12.
 26

parture in method.90 Within a few years of its publica­

tion it was cited to gymnasium students as a model of

clarity of exposition.^ It impressed Kliuchevskii's

examiners so much that it was recognized that the defence

of the dissertation was a mere formality.92 The journal,

The Voice, described this defence in the following glowing

terms:
A truly eventful day in the present week was the
dispute of the well known scholar V. 0. Kliuchev­
skii who has for several years occupied the chair
of national history at the university vacated by
the death of S. M. Solov’ev. Not for years, and
possibly never, have the walls of our local alma
mater witnessed such noisy and unanimous enthusi­
asm as that with which great numbers of the
general public and student body greeted the ele­
vation of Mr. Kliuchevskii to the doctorate.93

With the publication of the Bovar Duma Kliuchevskii

began his career as a major figure in Russian historio­

graphy and a popular academician. Nevertheless, the work

which was so remarkable for its broad scope did contain

some striking ommislons. Had it been merely a research

paper, and had its method and aim not required the total

$0. S. Kotliarevslcii, HChto daet ’Boiarakaia Duma' V. 0.

Kliuchevskago dlia gosudarstvovedeniia," Sbornik
statei posviashchennvkh Vaailiu Oaipovichu ftlluchev-
skomu (Moscow. 1909). p. 253: Rubinstein, p. 449;
3 T T 7 Golubtsov, "Teoreticheskie vsgliady V. 0. Kliu­
chevskago,11 Ruaakii Istoricheskii Zhuraal (Petrograd,
1922), VIII,""p. "205.
91. Chteniia. p. 123.
92. Ibid” p. 119.
93. Ibid.. p. 17.
 27

synthesis which it did require it would not be relevant

to cite these ommisions. But since Kliuchevskii had sought

to paint such a wide canvas, the subjects he left out are

of interest. The work was criticized by contemporaries

for neglecting the influence of Polish and Lithuanian

traditions on the political ideas of the Moscow boyars,

qjl
and for making too little use of comparative history.

In subsequent editions of the work Kliuchevskii met this

criticism by devoting more time on the influence of

Galicia, using new source material which had been published

in the 1eighties, and incidentally, extended the chrono­

logical limits of the work to the times of Peter the Great

95
and the end of the Boyar Duma. More significantly,
however, in a work whose main thesis was that the Boyar

Duma of Muscovite times was created from the very same

conditions which created the Moscow state, there is almost

no mention of the Tartar invasion or influences, or of the

role of individual rulers and their political decisions.

Political narrative^history is largely absent from the

work, as are the famous word portraits of rulers for which

Kliuchevskii subsequently became famous.

^4^ U n si g ne d Book Review/, "Boiarskaiia Duma drevnei Ru-

si,” Russkaia Starina. XXXVI (September, 1382), 622.
95. D. Korsakov, nPo povodu dvukh monografii V. 0. Kliuchev-
skago," Istoricheskii Vestnik (St. Petersburg, 1911),
CXXVI, 2JF.
 28

In general, Kliuchevskii*s work in the 'eighties

continued the emphasis upon social and economic history,

evolution of class relationships and the concentration on

pre-Petrine Russia as well as the method of close philo­

logical analysis of legal and state papers which character­

ized the Bovar Duma* The subject matter of his writings

during this period was influenced by his work with students

and led him into questions of general methodology and the

handling of sources. As a direct result of seminars which

he gave came two works of commentary and translation of

ancient Russian legal documents.^ In 1B84-S5 he read a

course on the methodology and terminology of Russian

history.^7 The first part of this course consisted of a

general review of the nature of the historical discipline

and was one of the earliest detailed explicit statements

Kliuchevskii made of his general theoretical views. Un­

fortunately, and perhaps significantly, the first part of

this work has been omitted from the new Soviet edition of

his works on the grounds that it "does not have any

interest from the scientific point of view" since it

"represents the simplified views of Kliuchevskii and the

92T! V. 0. Kliuchevskii. riRusskaia oravda." Sochineniia.

VI, SB-10L; and "Pskovskaia pravda," Sochineniia.
VI, 105-2S.
97* V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Terminologiia russkoi istorii,"
Sochineniia. VI, 129-275* Hereafter cited as "Terminol-
ogiia."
 29

bourgeois* historians of his time on the methodology of

history."^ In the second half of this course Kliuchev-

skii continued his interest in the minute careful analysis

of old Russian social and economic terms and documents

which remained closely connected with his broader interest

in social and economic history. For example, throughout

the 'seventies and 'eighties he was compiling material

for an historical dictionary, although it was never

published.^

It is a reflection of the scope of Kliuchevskii's

interests that neither the work on the terminology of

Russian history or a course which he gave on the analysis

100
of sources went beyond the seventeenth century. Never­

theless, although throughout his life his major works

dealt primarily with the pre-Petrine era, there is no

reason to suppose that he was opposed to the study of

modern Russian history on any general grounds. He taught

a course in modern European history at the Alexandrovskii

Military School which was so successful that even his fel­

low faculty members attended i t . ^ ^ Although he was

9$. Sochineniia. VT.Komentarii. 476.

99. Ibld.,'_p7"472.
100. Ibid.. p.,469*
101.. N. P. Nechaev, "Vospominaniia o zaniatiia V. 0.
Kliuchevskago v Aleksandrovskom voennom uchilische,"
Chteniia, p. 435.
 30

dissatisfied with this course on the grounds that it was

not based on original source work,102 his students

credited him with destroying the current prejudice against

modern history as a subject of historical investigation.1®^

These specialized advanced courses which Kliuchevskii

gave contain explicit evidence of his view of the scope of

historical study. In the Course on the Use of Sources.

he defined his goal.

To see how we have understood in various ages

the task of the historical critic, and what
kind of methods have been applied to source _n,
analysis in conformity with that understanding.10*

He further points to the necessity for Russians in

particular to pay attention to the development of sources

due to the lack of extensive research material, and he

argues that this task must proceed the more popular school­
room synthesis.10^ Then he proceeds to a fairly broad

definition of an historical source. An historical source,

in the accepted sense of the term deals with
verbal written documents in which are recounted
the events or the relations of past times.
They transmit worldly phenomena (events,
thoughts, feelings) in words find not through
graphic signs or art forms.10^

102. Iakovlev, pp. 105-6.

103. Liubavskii, Chteniia. p. 12.
104. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Kurs...istochnikovedeniiu,"
Sochineniia. VI, 20.
105. Ibid.. o. 474.
106. E H . , pp. 475-76.
 31

But beyond this specific kind of historical source, Kliu­

chevskii with the pride of his craft defines almost all

branches of human knowledge as, in some sense, ancilliary

to history. Thus:
Any discipline, any branch of knowledge,
has the significance of an ancilliary
science to history because from one side
or the other it clarifies the condition
and path of human life.l°7

The Course in the Use of Sources consists of a number of

general comments and warnings on the proper procedure in

dealing with the archaic terms and usages of older docu­

ments, combined with numerous specific examples of common

errors. As usual, Kliuchevskii points to the fullness of

historical background as a prerequisite for accurate inter­

pretation of sources. He points out that the composition

of ancient Russian chronographs gradually changed and says

that in these changes could be seen the gradually changing

historical world-view of old Russia.^*

Closely related to the course on archival technique and

illustrating again Kliuchevskiifs abiding interest in the

legal and social nomenclature of the past is the work on

the Terminology of Russian History. As was usual with him,

he defines in general terms the task of this course at its

109. ftlcT.. pp. 478-79.

108. TbU .. p. 55.
 32

beginning. It is
The study of the everyday terms met in our
historical sources. We will deal only with those
terms the sense or origin of which is not clear.
In keeping with our practical goal...we will take
up only those items which are most often found in
the basic sources of our.history or in our his­
torical investigations.109
The approach in this work is topical rather than

chronological. The chapter headings are divided according

to whether the terms of old Russian usage are political,

economic, or juridical. Under the first heading Kliuchev­

skii considers such terms as Rus and its use as a tribal,

territorial, and class designation.110 He proceeds to an

examination of the various phrases used to designate the

supreme political authority in Russian history.

The scope of his remarks in the Terminology is much

broader than the title of the work indicates. For example,

after citing the various terms used for the rulers of Rus­

sia, excluding the title of emperor which he says is a

contemporary term still in use,111 Kliuchevskii devotes a

four page summary to a "scheme of the development of the

supreme authority in ancient Russia." This "scheme" is

a very brief summary, .of the periodization and synthesis

109. V. 0. Kliuchevskii. "Terminologila.w Sochineniia.

VI. 129.
110. Ibid., pp. 130-34.
111. TST3.. p. 139.
 33

of Russian history found in detail in the Course of Rus­

sian History and The Boyar Puna* Consequently, we will

leave a detailed consideration of this synthesis to a

later time. However, it is germane to our understanding

of the scope of Kliuchevskii*s historiography that he

justifies his general remarks in a specialized course such

as the Terminology in the following terms:

Such a scheme might be called the course of

the development of the supreme authority in
Old Russia....One can see why such schemata
are needed. They gather together the known
similarities of phenomena in a formula which
shows us the internal connection of these pheno­
mena and which separate the necessary from the
accidental, that is removing the conditional
causes and leaving the necessary causes. His­
torical 3 chemea...represent a particular pro­
cess and in order to understand the sense of
that process it is necessary to find its causes
and point to its results. Facts are not intro­
duced into these schemes if their consideration
would involve one in a confusion of which little
scholarly use could be made.112

Such a methodological aside indicates the extent to

which Kliuchevskii, even in such a specialized work as the

Terminology, extends the general import of the subject

matter with which he is dealing.

One of the peculiarities of Kliuchevskii*s scholarship,

which has been noticed by several critics is the extent to

which all his separate monographs are closely related to

TIT. Ibid.. p. 143

 34

each o t h e r . I f we make a possible exception of the minor

essays which he wrote late in his career, there is much

evidence to support this point of view. His major mono­

graphs such as The Boyar Duma and The Lives of the Saints

all deal with pre-Petrine history and all concentrate on

the social and economic growth of the Muscovite state. A

striking example of this unity of interest underlying his

different studies is the close connection between the

special courses we have been discussing and one of his

major contributions, The History of Legal Classes in

Russia. T h i s work is unique among Kliuchevskiifs

writings for its emphasis on the general conditions and

characteristics of class formation in both Russia and

western Europe and for its attempt to formulate general

hypotheses concerning the evolution of class structure.

Tet, in many respects it deals in broader terms with the

same kind of subjects mentioned in the courses on archi­

val studies and on terminology. The introductory chapters

of the History of Classes enter into a general discussion

of the nature and origin of legal classes or estates and

HJI Presniakov. pp. 2l7-18: Liubavakll. OnteriilaT

p. 23.
114* P. 0. Kliuchevskii, Istoriia soslovii v Rossii
(Petrograd, 1913). Hereafter cited as Istoriia
Soslovii.
115. Ibid.. Preface, p. iv.
 35

advance the general thesis that there has been a "notice­

able" and "constant" equalisation of classes taking place

in European history since the fifteenth c e n t u r y . T h e s e

introductory chapters are filled with a kind of generalisa­

tion unusual in Kliuchevskii*s work. For example:

The sharper are class inequalities, then the

simpler is class division; the feebler the
inequalities then the more complicated, that
is minute, are class divisions.11?

In fact, this particular monograph was the closest

that Kliuchevskii ever came in a purely scholarly work to

expressing his own social values. At one point he suggests

that there have been successive stages in the development

of the state. According to this "formula representing the

equalisations of estates," the first social unions were

organized along blood lines on the analogy of the family,

the second, contemporary type is organized on the basis of

the stock company, and this contemporary stage may possibly

give way to a class organization based on the principle of

scientific knowledge.^0 The generalizations contained

in the History of Classes contain interesting material for

the explication of those personal social and political

ideals about which the author was usually so reticent, and

H57
117.
lid.
 36

we shall return to thsm when we take up this subject.

Despite the unusual theorizing contained in the

History of Classes, the work primarily reflects Kliuchev­

skii 's usual careful examination of the social and economic

changes which have taken place in Russian history. He

devotes considerable time to the development of various

forms of bondage resulting in serfdom,11^ and the last

lecture contains a brief consideration of the effect of

the fiscal, military, and administrative reforms of Peter

the Great on the class structure of Russia.120

The emphasis on social and economic history which

characterized Kliuchevskii's work in the 'eighties was

expressed in a particularly important work which he did

at the very end of the decade. In the Composition of the

Representation in the Zemskii Sobors of Ancient Russia

he returns to the approach toward analysis of an institu­

tion which he had used in The Bovar Duma. He tries to

understand the real nature of the Zemskii Sobor by a

careful and minute analysis of its class membership and of

the social, political, and economic history of those classes

whose members sat in the Sobor. There is the tendency to

argue from the general social conditions of the time on

119. Ibid.. Lectures VII, XVII, and XIX.

120. Ibid.. Lecture XXII.
 37

points where specific evidence is skimpy. The Zemskii

Sobor has a particularly revealing and clear statement of

his approach to political institutions. He argues that a

lack of concrete material on the Zemskii Sobor has led

Russian scholars to attempt to study this institution by

analogy with western medieval assemblies. But, he says,

this is an error since the history of Russia is unique and

different in many respects. Consequently, if the Zemskii

Sobor is to be truly understood different kinds of questions

about it must be asked. A new "point of view" is

needed.This point of view is to be found by studying

the membership in the Sobors and the local social milieu

from which it came. He chides other scholars for their

lack of historicism in approaching the Sobor.

In these studies one notes a tendency to

distinguish the Sobors by political cate­
gories and not by historical moments.122

and again,

Some times they set forth a few details of the

procedure of choosing of representatives. But
they say little, or are almost silent, about the
composition of the societies which made these
choices and the relations of the representa­
tives to the social worlds which sent them to
the Sobor. What were these social worlds, when
did they develop, how were they constituted?
Who were these representatives and why were they

121. V. 0. Kliuchevskii. "Sostav soborakh." Sochlneniia.

VIII, 5-19.
122. Ibid.. p. 15.
 3*

chosen? Because they had at that moment the

greatest confidence of the choosers? Or was.
it because of some less capricious reason?12-*

and finally,
If these Sobors had a history, a basis for
their development, it must first of all be
noticed in the composition of the repre­
sentatives. ..in their relation to the worlds
which chose them.124

Using this approach, Kliuchevskii by a careful col­

lation of government records with lists of the members

present at the Sobor, and by analysis of the meaning of

the terms used to distinguish these members, comes to a

general conclusion concerning the origin and function of

that institution. He argues that it was not a representa­

tive institution, but a calling by the newly organized

Moscow autocracy of its local servants for purposes of

consultation and to gain knowledge of the country.12^

Kliuchevskii was aware that this conclusion was contrary

to the hopes of those who wished to see a truly repre­

sentative institution in ancient Russia, and he scoffed

at those whose national feelings led them to exaggerate

the importance of the Zemskii Sobor. However, it is a

striking example of his sense of scholarly propriety as

well as his conception of the limits of his work that he

ia: ibia.-; s h e :--------------------------

124* Ibid., p. lo.
1 2 5 . Tbia.. pp. 1 0 7 -1 1 .
 39

put his scoffing remarks in a post-script to the monograph.

Kizevetter has written of this post-script:

This post-script lifts the veil from those

intimate ruminations which the well known
historian experienced as he mused on our
historical past and which, with the wise
integrity of the objective scholar, he did
not consider possible to introduce into the
body of his work.126

If we were to define the general caste of Kliuchev­

skii *s conception of the scope of history on the basis of

the works mentioned thus far we would reach the conclusion

that he was primarily a social and economic historian

interested in institutional analysis. There is little

straight political narrative history in these works and

their organization is not strictly chronological. But if

such a judgment is to stand, it is difficult to reconcile

it with that of critics who have seen in Kliuchevskii a

unique literary talent, a painter of remarkable word

portraits, and a subtle p s y c h o l o g i s t T h e explanation

of this conflict is that Kliuchevskii's writings contain

a whole series of studies quite different in type from

those we have discussed thus far. Throughout his life,

but particularly in the period after the 'nineties, he

126. A. A. Kizevetter, Appendix to the edition of "Sostav

...soborakh" in V. 0. Kliuchevskii, Onktv i issledo-
vaniiarnerwi sbornik statei (Petrograa, l9I^), p. 11.
127. /Unsigned Article/, *V. 6. Kliuchevskii," Busskaia
Starina. CILII (November, 1910), 155-53; Fedotov,
p. 34$; Eichenwal'd, pp. 119-21.
 40

wrote a number of essays on a wide variety of topics

ranging from reminiscences and studies of his great tea­

chers Buslaev and Solov'ev to interpretive studies of such

major figures in Russian intellectual history as Lermontov,

Pushkin, Fonvizin, Granovskii, Boltin, and St. Sergius.

In contrast to the usually carefully documented generaliza­

tions of his major monographs, the minor studies were of a

generally impressionistic nature. In these works the

careful research scholar of the major monographs is seen at

a different task. For example, in an article entitled

Melancholy he links the tragic quality which he finds

in Lermontov's poetry to a unique Russian attitude formed

noA
by the sad circumstances of Russian history.*" In

another essay written on the eighteenth-century dramatist,

Fonvizin, he treats the play, The Minor, as a mirror of

the cultural level and confusion of the intelligentsia of

the time.^ 9 He argues that "through this play we can
see our grandfathers"^® and

In the Minor of Fonvizin the spectator sees

the well to do gentry family of the Catherine
epoch in an unbelievably chaotic condition.1-^1

128. Y. 0. Kliuchevskii. "Grust." Sochineniia. VIII.

113-32.
129* V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Nedorsl Fonvizina," Ibid..
pp. 263-87.
130. Ibid.. p. 265.
131. Ibia.. p. 278.
 41

These minor works expressed a fundamental side of

Kliuchevskii!s talents and interests. If we remember that

in his early days he had shown interest in general ques­

tions of cultural history and the "structure of the

national spirit,nl32 then the interest in Geistesgeschichte

which appears in these later works will not seem so sudden.

For example, even in the Bovar Duma there is a hint of

interest in the development of the national mind in the

careful attention Kliuchevskii devotes to the slow emer­

gence of the national consciousness among the Russian

people. The careful attention he gave to the development

of the concept of the prince as national ruler in contrast

to the prince as local landowner and his feeling that the

appanage period was a necessary preliminary to the new

national unity attest his underlying interest in an

evolving national spirit.*33 Certainly, the evocative

personification of the various stages in the history of

the boyar class is also an expression of such a feeling.*^

However, it is primarily in the lesser essays and in

the Course of Russian History that the element of Geistes­

geschichte becomes overt. Thus, in his works on Pushkin he

returns time and again to the spirit of Russian culture and

132. S u p ra , pp. 9-lU.

133. Boiarskaia Duma, pp. 256 ff., and passim.
134. Ibid., pp. 4-5.
 42

the relationship of Russian culture to that of western

Europe.1^ In a speech which he gave at Moscow University

in 1880 on the occasion of the opening of a monument to

Pushkin, he discussed the impact of Western culture on

Russia in the eighteenth century, and pointed to the

figure of Eugene Onegin as an historical figure as well

as a poetic one, a theme which he will later develop in

one of his most famous minor works.*^6 At another time,

late in the 'nineties, he points to Pushkin and Peter the

Great as the two fundamental landmarks in the development

of Russian self-knowledge and says that the two figures

were linked by "the logic of history. " ^ 7

There is a moralistic, speculative note in the minor

essays as if Kliuchevskii feels more free to ruminate on

and to evaluate the meaning of his nation's past than was

the case in the major research monographs. At times, he

will express his love for certain moral types in Russian

history, as in a paen to the good Christians of ancient

135. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Rech, proisnesennaia v torshest—

vennom sobrani moskovskogo universiteta 6 iiunia 1680
g.," Ocherki i rechi:vtoroi sbornik state! (Petrograd,
1919). passim: wEvgenii Onegin 1 ego predki." Sochi
neniia. VTI. 403-22; and "Pamiati A. S. Pushkina,h
Sochineniia. VIII, 306-13.
136. HEvgenii Onegin i ego predki," Sochineniia. VII,
413-22. Hereafter cited as "Onegin.*
137. "Pamiati A. S. Pushkina," Sochineniia. VIII, 307.
Russia, entitled The Good People of Old Russia. o r in

an essay on a famous holy man and monk, Father Sergius,

where Kliuchevskii tries to associate Sergius with the

spiritual history of the Russian people.

If it were possible for letters to reproduce

everything that is united with the memory of
this holy man, everything that has been silently
felt and thought by the hearts and minds of
those millions that have stood before his tomb
through five centuries of our history then that
description would be full of the deepest contents
of our national political and moral life.-5^

and in another part of the same essay he writes of

Father Sergius:
Such people become for future generations, not
simply the honored dead, but eternal companions.*40

A number of little asides, generalizations about

Russian history and society, in the smaller essays give

voice to Kliuchevskii1s emotions and values. Thus, he

permits himself such remarks as "Russian women are born

with a sympathy for the poor and needy,"141 "national con­

ceit like national self-abasement is but a substitute for

13$. V. 6. kliuchevskii, "Dobrye liudy drevnei Rusi/

Ocherki i rechi:vtoroi abornik statei (Petrograd,
191^), pp. 137-54* Hereafter the main work will be
cited as Ocherki.
139. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Znachenie Prep. Sergiia dliia
russkogo naroda i gosudarstva, Ocherki, pp. 194-209.
140. Ibid., p. 196.
141. V. 6. Kliuchevskii, "Dobrye liudy," Ocherki, p. 142.
 44

national self-understanding."*^ He writes that the

phrase "God's will be done" reflects a characteristically

Russian attitude or explains that the staking of

comparisons between Russia and Europe is a "particular

category of Russian thinking."1^ His didacticism shines

forth in the use of such metaphors as "the anemia of the

145
social sense and of moral feeling," and in his treatment

of one of his favorite objects of scorn, the superficial

westernized culture of the upper classes. The following

is one of his comments on the influence of the enlighten­

ment ideas on the eighteenth-century gentry:

Philosophic laughter freed our Voltarian from

the laws of God and Man, it emancipated his flesh
and his spirit, it shut him off from feeling any
kind of awe except that of the police and any
torments save those of the flesh. In a word,
this laughter became for our free-thinkers what
the papal indulgences had once been for western
European man in that they relieved man of any ji «$
kind of guilt, any kind of moral responsibility....

Since many of the lesser essays use literary works as

an historical source they illustrate a particular charac­

teristic of Kliuchevskii's thought; that is, his pervasive

historicism. Among his literary friends he was noted for

142. "Pamiati A. S. Pushkina.11 Sochineniia. VIII. 306.

143. "Grust," Sochineniia. VIII, 132.
144. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Zapadnoe vliianie i tserkovnyi
raskol v Rossii XVII. v.," Ocherki. p. 3&6.
145* V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Vospominanieo N. I. Novikove i
ego vremeni," Sochineniia. VIII, 230.
146. Ibid.. p. 230.
 45

the way in which he brought an historical approach to

artistic q u e s t i o n s T h i s was, however, not a facile or

simple dismissal of literature as a reflection of the

milieu out of which it developed. He could understand and

value other approaches to literature,1^ but his own

insights were usually linked to a sense of time, circum­

stance, and change. An unusual illustration of this is

a curious and interesting lecture which he delivered at the

Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, in

the fall of 1*97 entitled, Concerning the View an Artist

Takes of the Surroundings and Dress of the Sub.lect of his

Portrait. In this work Kliuchevskii developed the thesis

that the modern artist does not have to pay great attention

to the dress and surroundings of the subject of his por­

trait since in the modern world, these elements do not

reflect much of the true nature of the subject. But,

In the olden days personality was not permitted

such openess or freedom. A person was immersed
in society, in a legal class, a corporation, a
family and his appearance and surroundings had
to express and reflect those tasks and to support
those interests which were his by virtue of his
social and civil position, and not his personal
feelings, tastes, views, and aspirations.149

147. ElchenwaITd, “pp. H I a S T lW ------------------------------------

14*. Ibid.. p. 144.
149. V. 6. Kliuchevskii, "0 vzgliade khudoshnika na obstan
ovku i ubor izobrazhaemogo im litsa," Sochineniia.
VIII, 29*.
 46

The essays which we have been discussing pose a

problem to the student of Kliuchevskii*s work. Since they

are small in number and different in kind from the majority

of his work it is difficult to asses'their value as evi­

dence for the nature of his historiography. There are

those who claim that the intellectual and moral life of

society was the main subject of Kliuchevskiifs interest

and that he placed great emphasis on political and economic

history only because of the inadequate sources of intel­

lectual history.^-51 However, the main body of his work as

well as some of his explicit statements on the nature of

history seem to belie this judgment. For the moment let

us merely note this side of his work as expressing with

particular force those talents for literary-historical

analysis with which Kliuchevskii was so highly endowed.

His talents as a stylist were sufficient to have him admit­

ted to membership in the Academy of Literature, an unusual

honor for an historian. When his work on Lermontov, Melan­

choly. was anonymously published, the authorship of the work

was immediately recognized by the public.^ 2 Even as a young

man in the seminary his literary talents were acknowledged

1J>0. Presniakov, p. 216; Eichenwal’d, pp. 1 4 0 -4 1 .

151* Presniakov, p. 216.
152. Eichenwal’d, p. 1 4 4 .
 47

and a great future was predicted for him as a literary

critic and "psychologist,n although not as an historian.1 ^

There is little question, therefore, that the literary

essays are an important facet of his talents and it may

even be true, as some have argued, that it was in these

works that he most openly revealed his true feelings and

sympathies.^54 This question can best be considered at

the end of our study rather than in the beginning.

It is in Kliuchevskii*s major and most famous work, The

Course of Russian History that the literary talents found

in the minor essays are combined with the scholarship of

the major monographs. Both the genesis and nature of this

work,on which contemporaries lavished such great praise,

are unusual for a great work of national history. It is

not a textbook, nor is it a formal history undertaken from

the first with the object of preparing a written synthesis

of the history of Russia. Rather, it is the final version

of a number of lecture courses in Russian history which

Kliuchevskii gave at various schools of higher education in

the years from 1873 to the first decade of the twentieth

century. As the popularity and renown of his lectures

grew a number of unauthorized lithographed copies of the
lecture made from the notes of various students began to

3L53• Llubavskii. Chteniia. p. "5~j

154. Trubetskoi, p. 178.
circulate throughout the Russian educated world. Eventually

a "multitude"^ 5 of Russians were familiar with his work

in this form. In the years between 1904 and 1910 Kliu-

chevskii revised and reworked his lectures into the work

known as the Course. The decision to publish this work

was taken reluctantly by Kliuchevskii since he was never

satisfied with the total series of lectures. In particular,

he disliked publishing a general work some parts of which

were not based on original research. Nevertheless, in view

of the number of unauthorized versions of the lectures

which were in circulation, a number in excess of twenty

versions,^6 Kliuchevskii finally decided to prepare his

own edition of the work, using for this purpose various

versions of student notes which he carefully worked and

reworked. In testimony to his lack of satisfaction with

the Course in terms of the high standards which he set for

himself, he described the final work in the following

words:

My general Course is a compromise between my

scholarly conscience and mv recognition of the
obligations of a t e a cher.1 '/

Although he was not satisfied with the work, it

represents the nearest he ever came to a general synthesis

15$. Llubavskii. Chteniia. p . 30.

156. See the listing in Sochineniia. V, 470-72.
157. Presniakov, p. 210.
 49

of Russian history. It was in a very particular sense the

culmination of his life work in that it represented the

final expression of a general study in which he had been

engaged since the first days of his teaching. Since the

recent publication of the new Soviet edition of the

Course we are able to trace in some detail the development

of Kliuchevskii1s thought. This new edition contains a

quite admirable appendix listing different versions of

specific paragraphs and pointing out the notations in Kliu­

chevskii fs own hand made in various manuscript copies of

different lectures. In addition only the Soviet version

contains detailed references to the sources on which the

Course was built. This edition of the work consists of

eighty six lectures or chapters.

The most striking initial impression of the work is

the extent to which it concentrates on institutional)

social) and economic history and the relatively small

space devoted to political narrative, biography, and foreign

affairs. The following is an approximate tabulation of

the relative number of lectures devoted to different

subjects:

V. 6. Kliuchevskii. Kura russkoi istoriil Sochi-

neniia, Vols. I-V. Hereafter cited as Kurs.
 50

Subject Matter Humber of Lectures

General Methodology of History.............. 2

Analysis of Documents and Sources........... 3

Economic History including forms of Land
Tenure and the Development of Serfdom..... 11

Analysis of Class and Social Relations.......17

History of Administrative and Institutional

Developments............................... 24

Primarily Intellectual History................4

Geography.................................... 2

Foreign Affairs............................... 4

Chiefly Biography........................... 7

Ethnography.................................. 3

Church History (usually institutional

approach).................................. 2

Taxation and Finance....................... 2

General Chapters Containing a Variety of

Subjects (These refer to the nineteenth
century)................................... 5

While this tabulation is not very exact due to the

fact that some chapters overlap categories in their sub­

ject matter and also to the lack of sophistication in

defining the concepts under which I have placed various

subjects, it nevertheless presents the general scope of

the Course of Russian History with a fair degree of

accuracy. Since the general length of each chapter does

 51

not vary between a minimum of eleven and a maximum of

thirty three pages there is no one chapter which domi­

nates the Course. Of course, only a detailed analysis of

the Course can give any true understanding of its variety

and scope. However, this list illustrates the extent to

which the work was an analytic study of society and insti­

tutions rather than a narrative history.

One of the most interesting characteristics of the

Course is the extent to which it concentrates on the

period before 1613, a point to be remembered when we

discuss Kliuchevskii1s fundamental sympathies and interests.

The first forty lectures are devoted to the period before

the coming of the Romanov dynasty to the throne, and of the

remaining forty six, eleven are on Peter the Great's reign.

Equally striking is the extent to which Kliuchevskii

concentrates on domestic history. While he will refer to

the importance of Russia's international position in her

domestic history, he says little of the details of foreign

affairs.^59

The Course of Russian History is given unity through

Kliuchevskii's scheme of the periodization of Russian

history. According to Kliuchevskii, Russian history is

divided into four basic periods and each of these periods

159* See for example, Kurs, III, 12.

 52

is dominated by certain predominant political and economic

characteristics. Moreover, each of these periods is linked

with the colonizing movement of the Russian people across

the Russian plain. Well known to all students of Russian

history, this division of the subject into four basic

periods is still influential and may be found in the

classic English account of Russian history by Sir Bernard

Pares who acknowledges his debt to Kliuchevskii.^®

Briefly, this scheme is as follows: The First Period:

approximately from the eighth century A.D. to the beginning

of the thirteenth century. During this period the mass

of the Russian population was concentrated in the region

of the middle and upper Dnieper River and its tributaries.

The ruling political characteristic of this period was the

city state and the major economic basis of the society was

foreign trade in the products of the forest. Summing up

this era, Kliuchevskii calls it "The Dnieper Rus of Towns

and T r a d e . The Second Period: from the thirteenth

century to the middle of the fifteenth century. During

this period the mass of the Russian population is concen­

trated on the upper Volga and its tributaries. The major

form of political organization is the development of the

160. Bernard Pares. A History of Russia M e w fork. 1953).

XV, and passim.
161. Kurs. I, 3JI
local principality or "appanage," and the main economic

activity is agriculture carried on through free peasant

labor. This is the Rus of "the upper Volga appanage

principality and free a g r i c u l t u r e . The Third Period;

from the mid-fifteenth century to the second decade of the

seventeenth century. In this epoch the mass of the popu­

lation moves from the upper Volga to the east following

the Don and the middle Volga. The key political fact of

this period is the gradual unification of the land under

the leadership of Moscow and the chief economic facts are

the gradual restriction of free labor and its conversion

into serfdom while the land passes into the ownership of

a military service nobility. This is the "Great Russia of

Muscovy, the tsar and the boyars and of military land-

holding. "1^3 The final and Fourth Period; from the start

of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.

The Russians colonize the vast Eurasian plain and move into

the South. The ruling political fact of this period is the

unification of this territory under the leadership of one

authority, while the main economic characteristic is a

definitely serf-agricultural society with the growth of

some industry. Kliuchevski calls this the era of the

"All Russian Imperial and Gentry Society."^*

The attempt to define four distinct periods in Russian

history corresponding to certain movements of the popula­

tion and to certain institutional and economic characteris­

tics illustrates the extent to which Kliuchevskii concen­

trated on domestic and socio-economic history. The rich

and detailed knowledge which he possessed of much of

Russia's history and the lifetime he spent in developing his

own periodization make it a difficult one to criticize; to

adequately judge the worth of his periodization would

require that one make an original synthesis of Russian

history. Nevertheless, certain flaws in this scheme seem

noticeable to anyone even generally familiar with the

literature and facts of Russian history. For example,

there is a striking lack of concern with the period of

the Mongol yoke. Indeed, Kliuchevskii specifically rejects

the period of the Tartar conquest as representing any

break in the continuity of Russian history.^'* Secondly,

while his scheme rejects any linking of dynasty or perso­

nality with the basic periodization it is worth noting that

the "third period" ends in the second decade of the seven­

teenth century, that is, at the precise moment when the

 55

Romanovs came to the throne. One might ask why Kliuchev­

skii did not date his fourth period from the promulgation

of the Law Code of 1649. He acknowledges that this was

a major transitional event which both summed up the

legislative and social practices that had evolved in the

Muscovite state and also pointed the way toward future

developments.1^6 would seem more consistent with the

emphasis of his work to have picked the date 1649 rather

than 1613 as the start of the fourth period. Finally, the

so-called "fourth period" combines a host of major changes

in Russian life, including the reign of Peter the Great,

the start of industrialization, the movement into Europe

after 1612, and the decline in the economic power of the

nobility, to mention but a few. Kliuchevskii himself

acknowledges that the fourth period is not simply an

historical period but "a whole chain of centuries."167

One gets the impression from the Course that Kliuchevskii

is not at home in the post-Petrine period of Russian

history. Indeed, it has been pointed out that most of

the figures which he admires in Russian history belong to

166
the earlier epoch, and he once commented in one of his

minor articles on the difficulty of studying the

166. ibia,:;,nr,T 3 j-45 :-------------------------

167. IEI3.. p. 5.
166. dhteniia. p. 50.
 56

eighteenth century.
Our eighteenth century is more difficult to
study than the preceeding ones. The chief cause
of this is the greater complexity of life.
Society becomes more diversified. Accompanying
the social divisions there is an increase in
cultural levels and types. People become less
similar to each other in the degree that they
become less equal to each other. To reproduce
this process of moral division is much more
difficult than it is to do so for the political
divisions.1®^

For an historian who has been called "the historian of

social classes"^0 to hold such a view and for there to be

no indication of it in the basic periodization of his major

work indicates some lack of precision in his thought. It

is a problem to which we shall return when we discuss the

general outlines of Kliuchevskii*s total view of Russian

history.
Although the Course of Russian History is primarily

socio-economic in emphasis, some of its most famous sections

are word portraits of great men and lyrical comments on the

"personality” of the great Russian people. Much of the

popularity of the Course came from such passages as the

following in which Kliuchevskii is speaking of the disper-

sian of the Russian people from their old home in the

region of the Dnieper River.

169. Ocherkl. p. 66.

170. Presniakov, p. 218.
 57

The chief maas of the Russian people retreated

from the Dnieper and the South-West to the upper
Volga and the Oka in the face of the unbearable
foreign threat. There they gathered their
sundered forces. Protected in the forests of
central Russia, they salvaged their nationality
and armed with the strength of a closely knit
state they again went into the South-West in
order to rescue that feeble part of the Russian
people who remained there from an alien yoke and
influence.171

Another famous example of the lyrical and impressionistic

writing found in the Course is to be found in Kliuchevskiifs

description of the national character of the Great Russian,

which he strives to link with the natural environment

in which the great Russian lived.

Together with the influence which nature exer­

cised on the national economy of Great Russia
we can note its powerful influence on the tribal
character of Great Russia. The Russia of the
thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries with its
forests, marshes and swamps to be found at each
step by the traveller confronted him with a
thousand small dangers, unforseen difficulties,
and hardships, which forced one to be quick
witted, and with which it was necessary to
carry on a constant struggle. This forced the
Great Russians to spy on nature closely, to
look on both sides, in his own expression. He
learned to walk carefully watching the earth,
to never rush on heedlessly....There was
developed in him a resourcefullness in the face
of minor difficulties and dangers, and he was
accustomed to carry on a patient struggle with
bad luck and privation. There is not a people
in Europe who are so dtoic and unspoiled, who
are more accustomed to expect little from nature
and fate and to bear more than the Great Russian.1 '2

171. fcurs. I. 272.

172. IEI3.. pp. 310-11.
 5*

Speaking of passages such as this one, one of his

fellow scholars remarked,

His lectures, as we know them from the printed

Course, are full of a strong feeling for the
motherland's antiquity, for past events and
* people; he does not want to reveal it and folds
himself in the strict objectivity of the scholar,
let, each of his pages is infused with the warmth
of his feeling and since it is hidden from open
view, it produces an even stronger impression on
the reader, just as the restrained sympathy of
a friend affects us more strongly than would an
open expression of that sympathy.

Mich of the lively style of sections of the Course

may stem from its origin; an audience was the sounding

board against which the original Course was projected.

For example, there were places in his lectures where his

speech took on a particular slow, whisper-like quality

and he used this mode of speech when discussing certain

dramatic events such as the nervous fever which seised

Ivan the Terrible when he returned to Moscow after his

flight to the Alexandrovskii monastery.*74 This tech­

nique of Kliuchevskii1s was linked to the fact that he

had a slight stammer which he learned to convert into

pauses in his speech which he used for dramatic effect.

While this particular quality is not present in the

173. M. M. Bogoslovskii, nlz vospominanii o V. O. jfliu-

chevskom,” Chteniia. p. 130.
174* A. P. Lednitskii, nV. 0. Kliuchevskii kak istorik
slavianin" Izvestiia Obshchestva Slaxianskoi
Kul'turv (Moscow, 1^12), I, 4.
written Course the flavor of Kliuchevskii1s irony is
unmistakably transmitted by the written version. Thus,
in referring to the prohibition on a person selling him­
self into slavery which was introduced into the Law Code of
1649 Kliuchevskii remarks "consequently personal freedom
had become compulsory and was enforced by the knout
What better way to point to the ironic forbidding of slavery
by a state which held its subjects in such tight control!
Or, at another time when speaking of the tax policies of
Peter the Great and his use of the military as collectors
of the tax he speaks of Peter’s "invincible faith" in the
officer class. This phrase appearing in the midst of an
account of the devastation wrought by using the military
in this capacity has a quiet bitterness typical of Kliuchev-
skii's irony. ^ 6 The Course is replete with this irony and
we shall have occasion to speak of it in some detail. The
policies, values, classes and men against which Kliuchev­
skii directs his barbs tell us much about his own values.
Another source of the popularity of the Course and a
facet of its brilliance which much attracted contempor­
aries was the word portraits of the famous and the great
of Russian history. One of Kliuchevskii’s contemporaries
referring to these character studies has written

TfF. Kurs. III. 144.

176. IbI3.. IV, 98.
 60

Not only history, but Kliuchevskii himself is

the author of Alexei Mikhailovich or Peter the
III. These figures are the joint creation of
the objective facts of history and of Kliuchev­
skii. These factors together created that
lively book which we call the Course of Russian
History.177

Certainly, as much might be said of any historian but

these words have a particular cogency and relevance when

applied to Kliuchevskii whose stylistic and literary

abilities won him membership in the academy of Literature.

Despite the scientistic slant of his approach to history

and the subject matter of much of the Course, he worked

painstakingly to acquire and polish the unique style for

which he became known. Concerning the importance of style

Kliuchevskii once wrote:

It is an easy matter to write and speak heavily,

but to write and speak with ease is a difficult
matter...sometimes we clothe poor thoughts in
such resplendent form that the idea becomes lost
in a mass of words...while at other times a
strong and healthy thought is so expressed that
it fades away...like a flower crushed by a
heavy foot.176

Closely connected to Kliuchevskii's irony and aphorisms

is the didacticism both open and covert which runs through­

out the Course. He is not opposed to taking the measure

of the past, and he praised his own great teacher, Sergei

177• Eichenwal'd, p. 121.

176. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, nS. M. Solov'ev kak prepodovatel,"
Sochineniia. VIII, 256.
 61

Solov'ev, for passing moral j u d g m e n t s . I t was his

view that the legal documents and practices of a society
point to its moral level, as he wrote in The History of
Legal Classes in Russia:
Society as a thinking and living being speaks
with its particular language different from that
in which the individual mind expresses itself.
The latter expresses its ideas in logical concep­
tions and artistic models, but the former speaks
through juridical norms.150
With this view of legal documents Kliuchevskii will pass
judgment on the laws and conceptions of the past, and
one of the most consistent implicit values in his work
is a respect for a society of laws and scorn for arbi­
trary government. One of the acknowledged purposes of
the Course was the preparation of an enlightened
, ,
citizenry. iai

Kliuchevskii was aware of the Course's limitations

which he described in the following manner:
A history course is far from being all of history.
Confined within the narrow limits of the academic
year and the class hour, a course cannot encompass
in all its width and depth the historical life
of a people. Within these borders the teacher
and his listeners can trace only those currents
of history which seem to him the ruling ones....
If you are able to extract from my exposition,

I79T Ibid.. pp. 260-61.

130. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Istoriia soslovii v Rossii,"
Sochineniia. VI, 29 6. Hereafter cited as Istoriia
soslovii
131. Kurs. I, 42-44.
 62

with all its omissions, the general outlines of

the Russian people as an historical personality,
I shall consider the scholarly goal of my
Course has been achieved. 02

This general task makes the Course a particularly important

work for the students of Kliuchevskiifs thought. Forced

as he was to select and generalize in the interests of

pursuing the "ruling currents" of Russian history the

nature of the Course implicitly contains the heart of

his view of his nation's role in European society. let,

as we shall see, it is not an easy work to categorize.

Although the Course changed some in the years during

which Kliuchevskii worked on it, the basic scheme of peri­

odization, and the emphasis on economic and institutional

history remained consistent. Professor A. A. Kizevetter

has done a study of one of the first examples of the

Course given in 1673* On the basis of this manuscript

edition of bine lectures preserved from the first Course

he reaches the conclusion that the earlier lectures were

characterized by a more abstract psychological terminol­

ogy in analyzing individuals and by a more detailed

analysis of certain forms of land tenure. Moreover,

there were more indirect passing references to the

contemporary political and social scenes. Kizevetter

182. Ibid.. p. U1
 63

reached the conclusion that these sections could be

ascribed to "the youth of Kliuchevskii’s soul.n However,

Kizevetter's essential conclusion is:

Comparing his lectures of 1873 with the final text
of his Course. we nowhere encounter a break withjgo
either the structure of the Course or his ideas.

Wide ranging in its subject matter, with a style

varying from quasi-scientific terminology to beautiful

lyricism, the Course of Russian History combines the

merits of an individual scholarly monograph and a general

survey. It is almost as if Kliuchevskii strove to be

both the Russian Buckle and the Russian Macaulay. This

was not an easy synthesis to make and the relationship

of these two facets of the Course will be one of the foci

of this study.

I8 3 . A. A. Kizevetter, "Pervyi kurs V. 0. Kliuchevskago

1873-74 g.»" Zaniski russkago nauchnago instituta
v Belgrad (Belgrad, 1930), Part I, 3^5.
 6i+

CHAPTER II

KLIUCHEVSKII*S CONCEPT OF CAUSATION

At the center of any major historical synthesis is

a style of explanation and a more or less explicit concept

of historical causation. V. 0. Kliuchevskii*s concept

of causation is diverse, and at times, contradictory.

His work combines an explicit materialism and scientism

with a less explicit but pervasive idealism. The tensions

which result from this difficult combination will form the

main theme in this chapter.

In the first two introductory lectures to the Course

of Russian History Kliuchevskii set out to define his con­

ception of historical study in general, and more specific­

ally his conception of the study of Russian history. In

this section of his work materialism and positivism pre­

dominate. History is a "process'* and he defines this

process in the following way:

Human social life expresses itself in multi­

farious human unions which may be called his­
torical bodies and which rise up, flower,
multiply, pass from one form to another and
finally are destroyed. In a word, they are
born, live, and die just like the organic
bodies of nature. The development, growth
and succession of these unions with all the
consequent conditions and results for their
life is what we call the historical process.’1

1. Kura, I, 14
 65

In keeping with the biological imagery used in the

above paragraph Kliuchevskii tries to identify certain

fundamental characteristics of all human unions. He calls

2
them "basic forces," and identifies them as "human
personality, the human community, and the nature of the

c o u n t r y . By human personality he seems to mean the

natural fund of passions which all men share in common.

He names "envy, imitation, and rivalry"^ as examples

and argues that the extent to which such particular

individual traits are revealed is dependent on the social

organization within which personality develops.5 The

second element is "society," and consists of those

predominately ordinary conditions of daily life

and those spiritual peculiarities which masses
of humans develop under the obvious influence
of the natural environment, and this combina- /•
tion makes up what we call national temperament.

This definition of "society" is somewhat unclear since

Kliuchevskii does not explicitly say whether he refers to

the "national temperament" as the end product of one

kind of society or as the essential and most important

universal expression of society as an historical force.

No such confusion arises in Kliuchevskiifs definition of

2. Ibid.. p* '215. " ----- ----- "

3. Ibid., p* 20.
4« Ib^LcTe• p* 20.
5. Tbia., p* 20.
6. ibia., p* 21.
 66

the third "force," the "nature of the country," since he

does not bother to define this term. He seems to mean

the geographic and geological setting within which a

society develops.?

From the basic forces thusly defined arise what Kliu­

chevskii calls "elements of social life" such as "labor,

capital, and credit” which are "economic" in origin;

"authority, law, and equity" which are "political" in

origin; "religion, science, arts, and the moral sense"

which are "spiritual" in origin; and "sex, growth, and

g
consanguinity" which are "physiological" in origin.

Unfortunately, he does not further define these "elements"

beyond remarking that their particular action in any soci­

ety is conditioned by the local concatenation of the

"basic historical forces." Indeed, he seems to have had

different conceptions of the elements at various times in

his life. In a lithographed version of his Course he

compiled a longer list including "language, feeling,

9
custom, and knowledge" among the basic elements.

T* His conception of this idea is well illustrated in the

third lecture of the Course where he deals in detail
with the climate, geology, botany, and geography of
the Russian plain.
6. Kura. I, 21.
9. Ibid.. Komentarii, p. 3#1.
 67

The above scheme and its introduction at the start of

his general Course is illustrative of Kliuchevskiifs desire

to make history conform to a nomothetic discipline. He

identifies certain factors in history which are nunchangingn

and then imagines the historical discipline as analogous

to chemistry where one elicits propositions on the basis

of the various combinations of invariant parts. This

becomes clear from a distinction he makes between two

branches of historical study. The first type he calls

"history of culture or civilization."^ The historian of

civilization records the accomplishments of different

societies and traces the cumulative growth of human culture.

The second type of history is "historical sociology."

This science of society can be distinguished from

general historical study under the name historical
sociology. Its essential distinction from the
history of civilization is that in the latter the
subject of study is the result of the historical
process, while in the former the subject of
observation is the forces and means of the ...
historical process, its kinetics, so to speak.*L*L
/Italics original/
The language in this passage is somewhat obscure but

Kliuchevskii1s meaning is made clearer when he immediately

points out that the distinction which he has made is an

abstract one and that in actual practice most historians

both set forth the record of human achievement (i.e. history

10. Kurs. I. 15.
11. IbI3.. p. 15.
 12
of culture) and analyse the dynamics of social change.

Moreover, he suggests that in national history the analytic

function predominates. Each nation represents a kind of

historical experiment wherein one may observe unique

combinations of the historical "elements." In national

history the various peoples of the world are studied

not as consecutive /posledovatel'nie7 moments

in civilization, not as stages in human develop­
ment, but in themselves as separate ethnographic
instances in which are repeated modifications of
well known social processes.1*’

Through the study of national history we learn more about

"human nature" for we see it reveal different possibilities

under the different influences which characterize the

history of different nations.^

Kliuchevskii wishes to emphasize that the differences

between different nations are the result of an almost in­

finite variety of natural circumstances. These differences

are not rooted in any a-historical or a-priori principles.

The endless variety of unions which have been

compounded in humanity1s social life stems from
the fact that the basic social elements have
appeared in various places and at various times
in different assortments and combinations.1 5

As an illustration he points to the fact that the same

 69

nation may exhibit quite different characteristics at

different times in its history. Thus, Germany in the
eighteenth century was "peaceful," "idyllic" and

"philosophic" but less than a hundred years later had

proclaimed the "right of might as a principle of inter­

national r e l a t i o n s . R e f l e c t i n g on this sad state of

affairs he writes:
This means that the secret of the historical
process is inherent not in countries and peoples,
at least not exclusively, not in some eternal and
constant peculiarities established once and for
all, but in those multiform, changing, fortunate
and unfortunate combinations of external and
internal conditions of development such as are
compounded in particular countries for one people
or smother over greater or lesser periods of
time. It is these combinations which are the
subject of historical sociology.17

From the study of various societies there may emerge in

time a

general sociological element, a science of the

universal laws governing the structure of human
societies. This will be the triumph of histori­
cal science.1**

Despite the turgid language and thought which character­

ize these introductory lectures of the Course, it seems

clear that history is therein conceived as an empirical,

naturalistic discipline which may give rise to general

16. Ibid., p." 18"."

17. ISIS., p. 19.
16. IEI3.. p. 19.
 70

propositions. There can be little doubt that the main

cast of the ideas and language set forth in this section

of his work places Kliuchevskii within the mainstream of

the materialism and positivism which characterized the

Russian historiography of his period. Paul Miliukov's

remark that the methodological introduction to the Course

was a antidote to the earlier tradition of "Weltgeschichte

19
ist Weltgericht" seems on first glance to fit the case.
Closer scrutiny suggests however, that Weltgerichte was

not so much abandoned as forced underground in Kliuchev-

skii's work.

For example, Kliuchevskii at times assumes the

existence of general laws of social development and speaks

as if there were a universal teleology revealed in history.

Thus, he lists five stages of social union through which

all societies pass. These stages are the family, the clan,
20
the tribe, the nation, and the state. It is difficult

to say where he got this idea, although he acknowledges

it as a "well known general scheme of the historico-social

process."2^ It has been suggested that he adopted the

outline from Giraud-Teulon's Les Origines du marriage et

l« familla. but I have been unable to verify this

19. P. H. Miliukov. Kharakteristikl. p. 190.

20. Kurs, p. 22.
21. TSIcL. p. 23.
 71

statement.22 Some such scheme of the general evolution

of society was a commonplace in nineteenth-century Russian

social thought, as in the rest of Europe. For example,

Kliuchevskiifs teacher, 6. N. Chicherin, held to the

Hegelian view that society passed from a blood union to

a civil society to the state.2^ The point of interest

is that Kliuchevskii asserts this general scheme side

by side with a sociological description of the historical

discipline which affirms the extreme variability of social

development and holds out the hope that general laws of

social growth mav be elucidated at some future date.

The idea of a universal teleology appears in various

forms throughout his works. Thus, he assumes that the

nation state is the end point of historical development.2^

At times he will employ phrases and imagery which suggest

a moral purpose in historical development. The state is

the form in which a people become an "historical person­

ality with a more or less clearly expressed national

character, and an awareness of their world significance."2^

We are told that people have a "role on the stage of the

world,"2^ and that nations have an "historical calling."^

Tkhorzhevakil, p. 15$.
23. Rubinstein, pp. 294-310.
24. Kurs» I, 23.
2 5 . isia.. p. 23.
26. TEI3.; p. 42.
2 7 . ibia.. p. 4 2 .
 72

The most clearly worked out expression of his view that

there is a general path of social evolution is found in The

History of Legal Classes in Russia, written in the late

1880's. He suggests that as the state evolves it becomes

the reconciler of private interests and the needs of the

community and he equates the victory of the state with the

triumph of individual freedom.2** Echos of this idea may be

found in the Course. In one version of an introduction to

the Course which he wrote in 1895 he speaks of the "normal"

development of a free society. This "normal society"

exists where there is a perfect balance between the needs

of the individual personality and the needs of society.

For such a society to develop, a particularly favorable

combination of geographic and historical conditions must

exist.29

He further suggests that history is the scene of an

eternal struggle between the principle of egoism which finds

its main expression in economic activity and the cooperative

principle expressed in political life.

Political and economic life are distinct areas of

life with little essentially in common. In each
of them govern principles which are diametrically
opposed to each other: political life is the
realm of the general welfare and economic is the
area of personal material interest. One principle

2$. Istoriia soslovii. p. 2^1

29. Kura. I. 383.
 73

demands constant sacrifice for others and the

other is nurtured by an insatiable egoism.30

The end of the state is the reconciliation of the demands

of individual personality and public need and the moral

level of a state can be judged by the degree to which it

achieves this goal.^1

An ambiguity arises from the fact that at one point

in the introduction to the Course Kliuchevskii places

qualifications on the emphasis which he assigns to politics

and economics in that work. He acknowledges the relative

absence of material on

domestic life, morals, the achievements of thought,

art, literature, spiritual interests, the facts
of intellectual and moral life - in a word all
that we customarily call ideas....32

but then he moves on to explain this absence of ideas:

I wish to say that I have placed political and

economic facts at the base of this course not
according to their importance in the historical
process but according to their importance in the
study of history. The importance is purely
methodological. Intellectual labor and moral
deeds will always remain the best builders of
society, the most powerful movers of human
development...The order of study does not
correspond to the order of life; it goes from
consequences to causes, from.phenomena to the
forces from which they stem.3'

It is difficult to judge this statement coming from an

30. Ibid.. p p . 3d-39.

31. S H . , p. 39.
32. Kurs. I, 34.
33. M . , P* 40.
 74

historian who callod geography the "basic condition"

guiding the succession of social forms in Russian history;

who based his periodization on the same element, and who

held that ideas do not become "cultural-historical factors"

until they undergo a process of socialization and become

institutionalized and the property of the community.^

Furthermore, this apologia for the "methodological"

emphasis on political and economic history and the extended

discussion of the role of ideas in history was added to the

second edition of the work prepared in 1906 and is not

35
found in the first edition. It has been argued that the

scientism and nomothetic cast of the first part of the

Course were not serious expressions of Kliuchevskiifs own

convictions. However, the slight evidence I have been able

to collect indicates that in private conversations he

expressed views in conformity with the spirit of the intro­

duction to his work. For example, he once argued with an

astronomer that there were laws of social life more absolute

than those of astronomy, although he did not essay the dif­

ficult task of defining these l a w s . ^ At another time
34. Ibid., p. 36.
35. Miliukov, Kharakteristiki. p. 191 However, the edi­
tors of the new Soviet edition of the Course say that
the reservations were added to the lithographed
edition at the time of the first printed edition.
See Kura, I, 362, note 12.
36. Basil Maklakov, "Klyuchevsky,"
 75

while talking with a friend who was a chemist he became

very interested in the interaction of groups of atoms and

expressed the view that "chemical reciprocity" might serve

as an analogue for the study of the interaction of social

groupsAs early as the academic year Idd3^d4 he read

a course on the general field of historiography which

has been described as "sociological and methodological in

3d
c h a r a c t e r . M o r e o v e r , Kliuchevskii was a careful and

painstaking scholar who worked and reworked his Course

in preparation for publication, and the general tenor of

his work belies the probability that he would take such

care with an introduction merely intended as a bow to the

prevailing climate of opinion.

To be sure it is possible that he never successfully

worked out an abstract definition of causation which he

found satisfying. As late as 1902-3 when he was working

on the lithographed editions of the Course in preparation

for the first printed edition he decided to remove a very

interesting and extended passage in one of his lectures

in which he discussed the nature of historical causation.

TT* Chteniia. p p . 434-35.

3d. Ibid.. p. 20. This work has not been available to me
and is excluded from the new Soviet edition of the
works on the grounds that it "represents the simpli­
fied" views of the "bourgeois historiography of the
time." See Sochineniia. VI, 470.
 76

In this omitted passage he argued that the concept of cause

and effect in the strict sense is drawn from the realm of

natural sciences and that history follows a different

pattern.

Causation in the exact unconditioned sense of

the word demands the laws of necessity and in
the phenomena of human life we must admit a
mitigating limitation to causality, the so
called law of sufficiency,...which permits
accidental phenomena.39

He goes on to say that the historian deals with "mysterious

capacities and movements of the human soul" and that there­

fore if the historian wishes to adopt his language to his

subject matter he should speak not of cause and effect but

of the "consequentialness" of movement and growth. History

is not a logical but a "popular-psychological” study. Con­

sequently, the historian, knowing the "precariousness" of

his observations should limit himself to what he sees and

not indulge in contrary to fact speculation.^ I do not

know why this reference to the ideographic nature of

historical explanation was left out of the first and

subsequent editions of the Course. Either Kliuchevskii

was swinging away from these views or he considered it

inappropriate to introduce them in the Course.

Thus, there is a contradiction in the first sections of

19. Kurs. t. Kommentarii. o. All

40. ISial. pp. 410-12.
 77

the Courae between a rather explicit positivism and a more

subtle but pervasive idealism and moralistic teleology.

Any evaluation of this contradiction must go beyond the

methodological sections of his works and look at his actual

historical explanations•
In order to avoid discursiveness I should like to

begin this discussion by concentrating on three major prob­

lems of Russian history with which Kliuchevskii deals and

then pass to a more general discussion of his causal

explanation. The first of these problems is in political

history; that is, the rise to power of the principality of

Moscow. The second problem is primarily economic and social

in nature; that is, the origins of serfdom. The third and

final problem is the most awesome and cogent form which

the problem of the hero in history could take for a Russian

historian; that is, the significance of Peter the Great in

Russian development.
Any adequate explanation of the rise of the obscure

principality of Moscow to dominion over the Russian land

requires historical synthesis on the grand scale. More­

over, the lack of any detailed documentation for some

phases of this problem provides a special opportunity for

the controlled imagination of a great historian. In pre­

senting his explanation Kliuchevskii assigns primary

importance to impersonal general conditions. In brief his

argument is that the geographic position of Moscow com­

bined with the conditions which the Russians faced as a

result of the Mongol invasion, led to Moscow becoming the

ethnographic center of the Russian land. As a result, the

princes of Moscow possessed greater demographic and

financial resources which enabled them to triumph in their

struggles with rivals. The relative importance of geo­

graphic and political factors is not always clearly

established and while the whole scheme of the Course rests

upon the geographic shift of population the primacy of this

element is often mitigated. For example, we are told that

the ngeneological position of the princes of Moscow,” a

political factor, made it unlikely that they would ever

succeed legitimately to the older suzerain throne of

Vladimir and that therefore they became more original,

flexible, ruthless and selfish in aggrandizing their own

domain.^-

The diction Kliuchevskii uses in describing the

growth of Moscow suggests a kind of geographic determinism.

We are told that "the very soil of Moscow nurtured in its

princes a scorn for the former conceptions and relations of

s e n i o r i t y . " ^ Nevertheless, he will later describe both

 79

the "geneological" and the "geographic” conditions as the

"two original conditions of the quick growth of the Moscow

1
principality."^*7 He does not distinguish between these two

factors in causal priority.

There were two of these original conditions: the
geographic position of Moscow and the geneologi­
cal position of its prince. The first condition
was accompanied by economic benefits which placed
in the hands of the Moscow prince abundant
material resources. The second condition
showed the prince how to put these resources to
the most profitable use and aided him in elabor­
ating a unique policy based not on tribal feeling
and memories but on the most artful use of immedi­
ate circumstances. 44

At times Kliuchevskii will write that the rise of

Moscow can be ascribed on "the primary level" to the

activity of its princes thus calling into question his

earlier emphasis on the geographic factor.45 However, he

will also admit that little is known of the individual

qualities of the Muscovite princes,46 and he will describe

them as men "without great virtues and great vices."4?

Claiming not to know the character of the individual

princes he is quite willing to describe their collective

character and policy. These latter traits are the result

of their geographic and political situation,4^ and he

43. IbiH." P* 15.

44* |bid. P. 15.
45. Ibid. P* 29.
46. Ibid. P‘ 49.
47. Ibid. P. 49.
46. Tbld. PP . 42-47.
 ao
specifically warns against exaggerating the princely role
in Moscow's triumph. ^9

In an attempt to maintain his geographic and "socio­

logical" explanation of Moscow1s rise and at the same time

acknowledge the importance of political factors Kliuchevskii

is forced into the most arbitrary establishment of causal

priorities. For example, he lists the influence of the

Tartar yoke as a condition which "reinforced the action of

the primary causes for the rise of Moscow." Tet, he

acknowledges that the favoritism of the khans toward the

Moscow princes prevented endless feuds among the rulers of

north east Russia and he particularly calls attention to

the fact that the Muscovite rulers owed their primary

50
position among their peers to the support of the Tartars.

The possibility of the khans supporting another prince is

never considered, yet this is precisely the question which

would have revealed the contingent nature of the Tartar

influence in Russian history. Moreover, he points to the

fact that the relative immunity of Moscow from Tartar

attack led to the growth of the population of that region

with all the benefits; for Moscow which that entailed.

Kliuchevskii never considers that had there been no Tartars

49. Ibid.. p. 49.

50. Ibia., pp. 21-23.
there would have been no need for such immunity from their

attack.
The very language employed by Kliuchevskii in describ­

ing the growth of Muscovy suggests the onward movement of an

inexorable natural process. In enumerating the slow

addition of lands and estates to the control of the

Muscovite prince Kliuchevskii says these new territories

appear in the documents in the most "unexpected manner”

as if b o m by some "constant but hidden p r o c e s s . H e

seeks to enclose both the motives of individuals and

political events within a context of inevitable historical

development. In speaking of the failure of the princi­

pality of Tver, a rival of Moscow's, to maintain leadership

over the Russian land there is a striking example of this

characteristic. He acknowledges that Tver made -.a.mistake

in concluding an alliance with Lithuania which offended

the growing nationalism of Great Russia and in failing to

adopt the wisest attitude toward the khans. He points out

that prior to these mistakes Tver was particularly powerful

as a leader of north eastern Russia. He emphasises,

however, that the victory of Moscow over Tver was the

victory of "money and the ability to use circumstances”

over "personal valor, and seniority."52 Yet, in a sense
 &2

the reference to the mistakes of Tver's rulers and the

wisdom of Moscow's is beside the point since the whole
weight of the'course is designed to show the inevitability
of Moscow's triumph.
Curiously enough Kliuchevskii's account of the victory
of Moscow through the triumph of material circumstances is
not without a hidden moral grandeur. For all its materi­
alism, his tough-minded description of Moscow's rise
contains an essential core of romantic nationalistic
lyricism. Although he never uses the Hegelian term "the
cunning of reason," the inevitable triumph of Moscow fits
the concept perfectly. In the first place Kliuchevskii
views the appanage period of Russian history as having a
special role in preparing the way for Moscow's rise.
Despite his very sharp differentiation between the economic
and social structure of the appanage period and that of
periods preceeding and following it, he sees appanage Rus­
sia as the necessary preliminary to the rise of Moscow.
Indeed, he generalizes about the "quiet epochs of history"
as essentially "transitional."
Under the influence of the appanage order of
society northern Russia was broken into smaller
and smaller political units loosing its former
feeble ties of political unity....the princes
became more and more impoverished and immured
in their separate estates cut off from each
other....All these consequences had important
significance for the future political history
of northern Russia. They prepared favorable
 conditions for its political unification....old
kievan Russia was not built on any firm political
unity but was held together by the territorial
unity of the land. In appanage Russia these
ties were strengthened. The process of the
colonization led to a mixing of local peculi­
arities and welded together the Great Russian
tribe. On the other hand, there was a final
sundering of political unity. However, the
appanage order which destroyed this unity was
by its very character much less able to defend
itself than the proceeding Rota system and it
was much easier to destroy it in order to
build on its ruins a unified state. Therefore
the appanage order was a transitional political
form through which the Russian land passed from
national unity to political unity.53

This passage with its inner dialectic of change through one

kind of unity to a "higher" political form illustrates the

essential purposefulness and teleology underlying Kliu­

chevskii *s analysis. It is related to the holism of the

Course which specifically affirms the favorite thought of

Kliuchevskii1s teacher, S. M. Solovfev, that the organic

thread of Russian historical development has never been

broken.^ In keeping with this holistic teleology is the

way Kliuchevskii describes the origin of a new type of

ruler in the person of the Moscow prince. The political

innovations of Andrew Bogoliubskii arose, we are told,

from the conditions b o m of the colonization of north

east Russia and the new socio-economic order of the region.

!>3. Ibid.. 1. 363.

54. IHI3.. p. 16.
He says that with Prince Andrew the "Great Russian” entered

the historical stage and he underscores the importance of

that prince as a representative moral figure, an expres­

sion of the progressive national Zeitgeist.

Not everything in the character of Prince Andrew1s

actions was a chance phenomenon, a matter of his
personal character and exceptional temperament.
We may consider that his political ideas and
administrative habits were derived from the social
milieu amid which he was born and acted.“

Much later in his account of the rise of Moscow Kliu­

chevskii will underline this sense of the fulness of time

when he remarks, parenthetically, that Prince Andrew was a

great man whose talents were wasted on "little deeds” since

the proper historical conditions were not ripe for his

56
talents to have their full effect.
In order to appreciate the particular flavor of Kliu­

chevskii fs teleology it is illuminating to compare it with

that of his great predecessor and teacher, S. M. Solov'ev.

Many of the factors in Kliuchevskiifs explanation of

MoscowTs rise are found in Solov1ev, but the burden of

emphasis and the diction are quite different. Solov1ev

speaks of geography, and the movement of the population as

significant in the rise of Moscow. He writes that "nature

57
prepared Moscow to be a leader"" in the Russian land;

55. Ibid., p. 324.

56. Tbicl.. II, 53.
57. S. M. Solov1ev, Istoriia Rossi. I, 70.
he mentions the differences between the north and south

Russian population; but the order of priority between

political and geographic factors is reversed in Solov1ev.

In contrast to Kliuchevskii Solov1ev will spend the greater

portion of his vast work on an ennumeration of the details

of political history and add the geographic circumstances

as an addendum. In part this was due to the fact that

Solov•ev^ work was a full blown history and Kliuchevskii^

a synthesis in the form of a "course." Nevertheless,

Solov1ev will speak of Prince Andrew as an "innovator!*- <in

political ideas. His "action was an event of the greatest

importance, a turning point at which history entered a new

pat h . ”^3 while he will acknowledge that conditions in the

north east of Russia led to a withering of old traditions,59

his emphasis is voluntaristic rather than deterministic.

Instead of geography being called an original cause of the

rise of Moscow, it is a condition "facilitating"^ the

actions of the Muscovite princes. It is difficult to see

this difference in language and emphasis as a mere reflec­

tion of the different objectives of Solov1ev!s History of

Russia and Kliuchevskii^ Course. The style of reasoning

is also different.
 66

Several years ago Professor Morris R. Cohen suggested

in an article on causation in history that it is necessary

to distinguish between absolute and qualified determinist

systems.^1 In a sense Kliuchevskii1s treatment of the rise

of Moscow involves both kinds of determinism. In an attempt

to establish the element of necessity in his causal explan­

ation and to escape the mere enumeration of a number of

anterior conditions he suggests a limited kind of determ­

inism emphasizing geographic and economic factors.

However, in his unwillingness to deal sufficiently with the

alternative possibilities of the rise of other principal­

ities, in his somewhat contradictory treatment of the

importance of the princes and the Mongol invasion, and

in his idea of the national state as the natural culmina­

tion in time of historical development he reveals what

62
Professor Mandelbaum has called a "hidden hypothesis."

This hidden hypothesis, that is, the inevitability of

Moscow's rise and the triumph of the great Russian Nation

State, is more absolute in its determinism and at the same

time less specifically spelled out and less integrated within

the factual historical matrix. I would argue that in these

SIT Morris ft. Cohen, "Causation and its Application to

History," Journal of the History of Ideas (New Tork,
1942), Ilira?:
62. Maurice Mandelbaum, "Causal Analysis in History,"
Ibid., p. 42.
two levels of determinism Kliuchevskii reveals himself as

caught in an unreconciled conflict between the views of his

own generation of the 'sixties with its emphasis on the

factual, concrete, and specific materialistic forces in

history and the earlier idealistic tradition which dominated

the historical controversies of the 'forties. This led to

the paradoxical fact that Kliuchevskii was at one and the

same time the historian who most emphasized the unique and

special character of Russian history and yet he thought of

Russia as undergoing a process of development similar in

essentials to that of the western European countries.

Throughout his career one of the most abiding interests

of Kliuchevskii's historiography was the problem of the

origins of serfdom. In addition to his analysis of this

problem in the Course, he devoted several articles to the

subject which have been said to constitute an epoch in the

history of serfdom.^ Such an interest would naturally

follow from the fact that Kliuchevskii was a social and

economic historian whose main work was chronologically

centered on precisely those periods of ancient Russian

history when serfdom arose ■

, in that time which Professor
Michael Florinaky has called "the darkness of the ages in
which the origin of serfdom is l o s t ."^4 of course, no
63. Liubavskii. Chteniia. p. 33 1
64. Michael.Flonnsky, Russia: A History and an Interpre­
tation (New York, 1947), I, 2l5*
 88

Russian historian can avoid the problem of serfdom, but in

Kliuchevskii*s case there was a more personal and immediate

interest in the fate of the peasantry which transcended

the academic chamber. This interest was felt by his

contemporaries. During the fiftieth anniversary of the

liberation of the serfs in 1901, Kliuchevskii was hailed as

"the peasant historian."^5 one emigre writer reflecting

on the character of Kliuchevskii's work has described a

"deep interest and sympathy in the life of the lower

classes"^ as one of its salient features, and the late

Professor Karpovich has echoed this judgment.^7 Even in

the early letters which Kliuchevskii wrote as a student

there appears a feeling for the tragedy which serfdom

represented in Russia.^

Kliuchevskii*s analysis of the origins and growth of

serfdom involves the slow cumulative interaction of two

processes; one is the gradually increasing debt indenture

of the peasantry on private lands; the other process is the

increasing attempt of the government in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries to attach the peasantry to the land for

tax paying purposes. At first glance it seems that Kliu-

Liubavskii. Chteniia. p. 33.

66. Fedotov, pp. 342-343*
67. Karpovich, p. 34.
68. Pis'ma. pp. 70-71.
 S9

chevskii is arguing that the fundamental and necessary

cause of serfdom is the economic impoverishment of the

peasantry. He argues that the mass of the peasantry on

private lands had lost the practical possibility of leaving

their landlords estate long before a legal definition of

serfdom was worked out. Thus,

The huge mass of the tax-paying peasantry no

longer possessed the right of removal not because
it was abolished by some general law but because
the peasants had deprived themselves or been de­
prived by private measures of the possibility
of using that right. This deprivation was tne
result of a long and complicated process by which
were formed the basic and original conditions of
serfdom.

Among the conditions which Kliuchevskii lists are the

fact that as the Muscovite empire expanded the increased

financial needs of the state led to the increasing impov­

erishment of the peasantry. In addition he attaches

importance to the extension of a special form of land

holding, the pomestie. or military estate, the number of

which rapidly increased as the defense needs of Muscovy's

frontiers grew.

We may reason that in the trans-Oka pomestie

we encounter earlier than anywhere else those
conditions which tie together the first knots
in the cord binding the peasant.70

gQ.-KursTTmii:
70. Ibid., p. 243
 90

An additional important factor in the growing limita­

tion of the peasants1 freedom was the widespread growth of

t*\ rn ftfT> c
monastery estates. Kliuchevskii argues that as the extent

and wealth of these communities grew they removed more and

more land from taxation. Consequently, the government was

forced to make good its financial losses by increasing the

burden on the peasantry in other types of estates. The

government sought to limit the peasant's right of migration

to the more lenient laboring conditions of monastery lands.?1

Thus, a number of social and historical conditions

determine the decline of the free farmer of old Russia. In

the penultimate lecture which he devotes to the origins of

serfdom Kliuchevskii places the social and economic changes

of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century Muscovite state

within a broader context of military struggle with sur­

rounding enemies. He points to an "internal" connection

between these two facets of Russian history.

External wars became more frequent and more

burdensome, demanding ever heavier sacrifices
from the people. Social relations developed
under the yoke of ever increasing state obliga­
tions and the increase of service and financial
imposts became the chief means by which society was
divided into legal classes.72

This reference to the peculiarily arduous struggle

717 m -
a., p7w.
72. T E H .. p. 329.
 91

for survival of the Russian state removes the problem of

serfdom from the moral to the descriptive realm. While

there is never any doubt that Kliuchevskii loathed peasant

bondage one suspects that he was more comfortable viewing

it as an historical tragedy. In particular such a view

mitigates the state's responsibility for serfdom. In this

connection it is interesting to note that in an open

letter written to the Slavophile reformer, Yury Samarin,

on the origin of serfdom Kliuchevskii reiterated the point

made in the Course that the state participated in the

development of serfdom but did not create i t I n d e e d he

points to the state as attempting to limit the harsher

features of serfdom. Nevertheless, he does not leave his

analysis of serfdom with a discussion of its de facto

creation, but passes on to its subsequent de .lure elabora­

tion in old Muscovite law.

This portion of Kliuchevskii1s treatment is revealing

for its subtlety and irony. While he establishes the

causal priority of the actual economic and social condi­

tions creating serfdom his discussion of the evolution

of serf law, avoids the oversimplification of finding in

serf law a mere rationalization of these conditions. After

iy. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Pravo i fakt v istorii krest’ian-

skogo voprosa," Sochineniia. VII, 156. Hereafter
cited as Pravo i fakt.
 92

summing up the practical bondage of the peasantry in the

first two decades of the seventeenth century he writes that

"there had not yet been discovered the juridical norm

which would fortify that practical bondage and convert it

into serfd o m . "74- While acknowledging that the juridical

expression of the serf law was dependent upon the prior

economic conditions which created serfdom as a fact,

Kliuchevskii treats the sources and evolution of the legal

formulization of serf law as, in a sense, independent of

these conditions. In seeking the origin of the serf law

Kliuchevskii goes back in Russian history beyond the actual

economic and social conditions creating serfdom. In an

article first published in 1SS5 in the journal, Russian

Thought, "Origins of Serf Law in Russia," Kliuchevskii

presents an analysis of various legal definitions of

slavery and other forms of bondage in ancient Russian law.

In fact, he argues that in order to properly understand the

origin of the personal legal bondage of the peasant the

question must be removed from the sphere of the actual

economic binding of the serfs.

Serf Right over the peasant and the manorial

servants, as it was established in the law code,
has a direct juridical connection with ancient

74* Kurs. IIV 32#.

 93

Russian law of slave bondage. Therefore, the

question of the origin of serf law is actually a
question of what constituted bonded slavery in
ancient Russia, how this law was grafted onto the
free peasantry and how it was altered as a result
of this transplanting to alien soil.75

Kliuchevskii now proceeds to examine the evolution of cer­

tain old Russian forms of debt bondage and the approxima­

tion of the ancient legal norms of debt slavery with the new

types of bondage arising in the nineteenth century.?^ This

analysis is found in somewhat less detail in the C o u r s e .^7

In his own words the economic "proximity of barstchina pairing

peasant and the bonded debtor led to a juridical proximi­

ty."^

On the basis of this analysis of the evolution of the

legal definition of serfdom it can be argued that Kliu­

chevskii granted a certain autonomy to different spheres

of human activity, avoiding thereby any simplification

of the historical process. This view is supported by the

uses to which he later put his disjunction between the

evolution of the economic and legal binding of the pea­

santry. In the polemic which he carried on with Yury

Samarin in the press,^ Kliuchevskii argued that some of

75. "Proisknozhdenie krepostnogo prava v Rossii," Sochi-

neniia. VII, 246.
76. Ibid.. pp. 247-317.
77. Kura. Ill, Chapter XLIX.
76. Ibid.. p. 169.
79. Pravo i fakt. Sochineniia. VII, 153-62.
 94

the weaknesses of the serf reform of 1361 were a result

of the fact that the economic side of the reforms was

neglected in favor of a concentration on the question of

the serf’s legal freedom. Kliuchevskii linked this over­

sight of the reformers to the fact that the land of the

peasant had come to be looked upon as the complete civil

property of the serf owner. His argument in this case was

that legislative oversights in the development of serf law

had led to the false idea that the land the peasant worked

was the private inalienable property of the landowner.

In other words, Kliuchevskii assigns an important histori­

cal role to a legal misconception which developed separate­

ly from the economic origins of serfdom.

Underlying the presentation of the development of

serfdom is the motif of a hidden "force of circumstances,"

a kind of logic of historical necessity which forces

Russia into the adoption of a tragic social institution.

This sense of the logic of circumstances also colors and

conditions Kliuchevskii*s treatment of the reforms of

Peter the Great. In this case, however, he is forced to

balance an unusual will and personality against the

conditions under which the great tsar acted. The problem

of the contingent and accidental factor in history cannot

be avoided as easily as it was with serfdom.

 95

Kliuchevskii was writing about Peter when Russian

historians were trying to escape the overevaluation of the

tsar*s importance which had characterized the Westernizer-

Slavophile controversies of the 1forties,^ and he con­

sciously expressed his distrust of the earlier tradition.

Thus he introduced his summation of Peter's importance by

questioning those views of Peter which proceeded the

pioneer revisionism of his own great teacher, S. M. Sol­

ov'ev. He calls the earlier writing a time of "noisy journ­

alistic and salon controversy" when "historical perspective

was replaced by philosophico-historico structures."^ Tet

in his attempt to achieve balance in treating Peter, Kliu­

chevskii becomes involved in ambiguity and contradiction.

Two of the essential themes in the fourth volume of

the Course, which is largely devoted to Peter and his times,

are that of the necessity for a struggle against hostile

foreign and domestic forces, and the theme of the essential

continuity of the Petrine reforms with earlier Russian

institutional and social history. In the first lecture

which takes up the reforms he begins:

There is a tendency to think that Peter was born
and grew up with a prepared program of reforms,

30. BV"TT."'5umnir. "Peter th'e’grear.^ i s t o r v . n i H ’TKarch.

1947), pp. 39-50.
81. furs, IT, 204.
 96

which was all his own work, the creation of his

own genius....In completing my review of the work
of his predecessors, I showed that, on the con­
trary Peter's very program had been outlined by
the men of the seventeenth century. It is nec­
essary to make a distinction between the problems
confronting Peter and the reforms through which
he mastered and dealt with these problems.
These problems were state and popular necessities
of which the people of the seventeenth century
were conscious. However, Peter's reforms were
governed by conditions of his own time, conditions
not operating heretofore. In part these condi­
tions were created by Peter himself and in part
they thrust upon him from the outside. His
program was not inherited and owed nothing to
tradition, but was born of the state's needsg2
which were very pressing and obvious to all.

Kliuchevskii places in the forefront of these pressing

necessities the war needs born of the threatening inter­

national situation, and the concomitant need for financial

resources. Peter is "not seeking citizens, but tax­

payers."^ Throughout the fourth volume of the Course,

he will return again and again to this theme. let, in his

attempt to simultaneously acknowledge the great historical

role of the reforming monarch and still maintain the

essential relationship of Peter's reforms with past

institutions and contemporary circumstances Kliuchevskii

is not always clear or consistent.

On the one hand he argues that the Petrine reforms

were hampered, perverted, and retarded by the backwardness

fl2. Ibid.. IV. U9 .

63. ibia.. p. 105.
 97

of Peter's countrymen and their institutional heritage.

Often, this argument is used in a context which would miti­

gate too harsh a judgment on the failure of the reforms as

stemming from the actions of the Tsar himself. For

example, in a lecture discussing the tax and fiscal poli­

cies of Peter, Kliuchevskii points to the corruption and

backwardness of the civil servants and the nobility, and

he suggests that Peter knew that justice and equality were

essential to a proper tax system, but was never able to

develop such conditions due to two enemies, the gentry and

the bureaucracy.^ He blames the failure of the Senate

to develop an independent and efficient role not just on

Peter's arbitrary behavior but on the corruption and the

quarrelsome nature of the government personnel themselves .^

The lack of the success of a municiple reform is blamed

on the abfeence of a skilled and responsible middle class.

Evidently Peter glimpsed the distant dream of a

wealthy and influential bourgeoisie of the
western European type. Unfortunately, he was
disappointed...but this was not Peter's fault . 0

In attempting to sum up the importance of the great

ruler Kliuchevskii pictures him as a "ruthless,1* "practical”

statesman who performed necessary deeds forced on him by

the constant military and financial necessities of his

84. Ibid., 143-U.

85. 1513.. p. 180.
86. 1515.. p. 190.
time. Peter
Did not disturb old foundations or build new
ones but altered existing arrangements by
changing, dividing and combining classes.°7

In keeping with this effort to show the fundamental

continuity in development of Russian social institutions

under Peter, Kliuchevskii continues in the Course an idea

which he had expressed in his earlier History of Legal.

Classes..?0 This is the argument that in his social and

class reforms Peter was merely extending and completing

the development of different service classes which had

originated in pre-Petrine Russia. Kliuchevskii was to

somewhat modify this view on considering the research

findings of some of his own students.^

In his effort to picture Peter as an agent of a

continuing process Kliuchevskii emphasizes Peter's links

to the past in the smallest of detail. For example,

concerning the building of a Russian fleet under Peter he

points to the previous interest in the building of a Rus­

sian fleet at the court of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. It

is interesting to note in this connection that a foremost

modern scholar on Peter has pointed to the building of the

w . ibid.. p. nr:
88. Istoriia soslovii v Rossii. (Petrograd, 191#),
on. 267-bd. Sochineniia. IV. 212.
89. Ibid., pp. 267=53:------
of tho fleet as on* of the few reforms of Peter which had

"nothing leading towards*1 it in the "immediate past or so

very little that it scarcely counts."^0

However, Kliuchevskii will sometimes make statements

difficult to reconcile with the emphasis on continuity

generally characteristic of his treatment of Peter. Peter

is credited with introducing new institutions "like a care­

ful mother who makes clothes too large for her children so
they can wear them when they grow l a r g e r . "9* More funda­

mentally, we are reminded that Peter "was the first monarch

to give his unlimited power a moral and political defini­

tion."^ Moreover, in the lecture discussing the subse­

quent influence of Peter*s reign on Russian history,

Kliuchevskii goes very far in emphasising the discontinuity

and newness of the Petrine influence. For example, he

directly links the period of palace revolutions with

Peter*s failure to establish a proper method of succession. 93

Peter is credited with evoking the "first” critical politi­

cal thought in Russia and we are told that this activity

was "uncustomary," that it is "impossible to exaggerate" the

influence of the introduction of foreign political concep­

SOT Sumner, p. 4?.

91. Kura. 17, 195.
tions produced by the books newly printed under Peter.94

In these instances the personality and actions of the Tsar

are given great weight. Tety as if in an effort to stress

an "organic unity," Kliuchevskii ends his chapter summing

up the effects of Peter*s reforms with an analogy drawn

from the natural world. Peter the violent autocrat is

likened to a violent spring storm which strips the trees

of branches, but "brings on the new seedtime."95

Kliuchevskii never satisfactorily expresses his concep­

tion of the extent to which the Tsar*s personality was an

accidental factor which altered or changed the course of

Russia*s history. He will admit that Peter was a talented

and strong leader "one of those accidents of nature which

from unknown reasons appear from time to time among

humanity,"96 but the reforms themselves come from the

needs of the state. However, he does not hold consistently

to this view. In the third volume of the Course he writes

that without the powerful development of productive forces

"accomplished" by Peter, Russia would not have played the

role in European affairs which it came to play after his

death.97 He admits that Peter accomplished more in six

W i Ibid., p. 269.
95. Tbia.. p. 222.
96. T E H .. p. 220.
97. T5Ic[.. Ill, 14.
 101

years than other rulers in "the proceeding or subsequent

six decades,"98 but never faces the problem of whether

this change in the tempo of development altered the nature

of the development.

In sum then, Kliuchevskii1s treatment of Peter the

Great, as his treatment of the rise of Moscow and the

origins of serfdom, conceives of history as a kind of

massive river of circumstance destined to move along a

fixed channel, occasionally disturbed or ruffled by the

eccentricities of personality or the vagaries of politics,

but never altering its necessary movement toward the auto­

cratic service state. In actual practice his historical

explanations have little in common with the emphasis on

variety and the concatenation of the "basic elements"

suggested by parts of the introductory section of the

Course.

Further illuminating light is thrown on Kliuchevskii1s

conception of the role of the individual in history by

his treatment of figures other than Peter the Great. Para­

doxically and intriguingly, Kliuchevskii combined his

essential determinism with an intense interest in the

mystery of personality. His portraits of the great and

near great of Russian history were bywords among the

53. Tb1d.."lV.""I9r
 102

literate public of his day.

Kliuchevskii1s characteristic interest in personality

and ability to delineate character is illustrated by an

entire lecture of the Course devoted to Ivan IV. He

writes that the Tsar's political and social policies

disrupted the state, and that the Time of Troubles which

followed Ivan's reign developed on the "favorable soil,"

prepared with "lack of foresight" by Ivan the Terrible.^

Moreover, Kliuchevskii implies a particularly significant

role to Ivan the Terrible when he says that the end of the

old dynasty initiated the Time of Troubles. It was Ivan's

murder of his eldest son in a fit of anger which deprived

the dynasty of a more healthy heir than the sickly Feodor

Ivanovich. Thus in what might be termed both the immedi­

ate cause and the necessary conditions of the devastating

Time of Troubles, Kliuchevskii specifically mentions the

contingent role of Ivan the IV. His actions converted

a political question of the state order into a

cruel feud with individual persons, into an
aimless and indiscriminate massacre. He intro­
duced into the community through his Oprichina
a dreadful disorder and through the killing ot
his son prepared the way for the end of his
dynasty.100

Despite this judgment he ends his discussion of Ivan IV

with the remark that

99. Ibid.. III. 19.

100. m . II, 197-9$.
 103

The terrible Tear was a thinker rather than a

doer. He acted on the nerves and imagination
of his contemporaries more than on the state
order. Without Ivan the life of the Muscovite
state would have developed just as it was doing
before him and after him, although it would have
developed more easily and more smoothly....101

Nothing better illustrates Kliuchevskii1s attempt to

immerse the contingent and accidental factor of personal­

ity within an assumed social and political determinism

than this approach to IVan IV. As professor Sidney Hook

has pointed out,^®^ in order for a particular hero to

have a significant historical role one must presuppose the

possibility of true alternatives at some critical point in

the scheme of historical explanation. The tacit assumption

behind Kliuchevskii*s treatment of Ivan IV is that there

were no alternatives to the development of the social and

political structure of Russia.

Very often certain figures are seen as premature and

therefore frustrated servants of the Zeitgeist. We have

already noted his tendency to treat the appanage prince

Andrew Bogoliubskii in this manner. There are a number of

other figures viewed in a similar manner. The Slavophile

Serb Turii Krizhanich of the early seventeenth century is

seen as a precursor of Peter the G r e a t . Prince I. A.

101. Ibid.. p. 198.

102. Hero in History (New York, 1943),
103.
 104

Khvorostinin, is a "spiritual ancestor" of the early

nineteenth century critic of Russian life, Chaadaev.104

Several of Kliuchevskiifs most notable short essays are

based on the artful presentation of some figure in Russia's

past as typical or representative of a class or mood. Thus

even the evasive mystery of literary genius is viewed in

broad social terms. In an article on Lermontov, that

poet is seen as expressing a particularly unique type of

"Russian melancholy;" his poetry is seen as "a phenomenon

of the national life, an historical fact."^i> similarly,

on two occasions Kliuchevskii devoted essays to Pushkin

the central theme of which was the extent to which Pushkin

expressed certain dilemnas of the intelligentsia.^^

In a similar vein the moral and intellectual quali­

ties of prominent political and social leaders are repeat­

edly placed within a context which emphasizes their depend­

ency on the milieu. In discussing the early Westemizers

of the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, Kliuchevskii

takes pains to point out that these men consciously felt

the new conditions.

104. Ibid.. p. 242.

105. "Grust," Ocherki, p. 42 and passim.
106. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Rech proiznesennaia v tor-
zhestvennom sobrani moskovskogo universiteta 6
llunia 1660 g.," Ocherki, pp. 57-65; and Onegin.
Sochineniia. VII, 4g?-22.
 105

in the case of certain individuals those feelings

and aspirations became clearer and were converted
into conscious ideas and came to represent practi­
cal problems. These typical and representative
persons help us to better study the sort of life
which nurtured them. In them we see collected...
all those interests and characteristics proper
to their milieu....107

In his treatment of Tsar Alexei and his advisors Kliu­

chevskii is applying concretely a position which he had

voiced abstractly earlier in the Course and elsewhere in

his writings. As we have seen in the introductory sections

of the Course he points to the necessity for ideas to be

linked to historical reality and elsewhere in his writings

he repeatedly affirms the necessity for the isolated

thinker to be in tune with his times if he is to be

effective. For example, in his Disputes in Pskov when

discussing the mentality of the Russian church leaders of

the fifteenth century, he takes occasion to make the

general remark that,

In the practical awareness of the best minds of
a period the action of a general historical law
usually is reflected in the form of a free
theory, a personal attitude. This justifies
the philosophic parable of the stone which,
while falling, found it convenient to argue that
it had completed this movement by its own wish
as a result of its own self-determination.108

It is curious to note that there are two instances in

which Kliuchevskii mitigates the intensity of his determinism.

107. Kurs, H I , 319.-----------------------

103. Pskovskie a>porv. Sochineniia. VII, 41.
 106

In the first instance he seems to hold that certain

figures stand above or beyond history in that they personi­

fy some timeless quality of the national spirit. Thus, he

writes that St. Sergius of Radonezh was typical of a kind

of man whose work goes beyond the age in which he lives and

whose

beneficent influence has so deeply penetrated the

life of succeeding generations that in the
consciousness of these generations all in their
personality that is purely of time and place has
fallen away. From being historical figures they
become a national idea, and their work becomes
what we are accustomed to call an ideal. These
men are for future generations not merely the
great ones of the past, but constant companions or
even guides....such a name as that of St. Sergius
represents not merely an instructive and con­
soling page in our history, but a brilliant -nQ
feature of the spiritual life of our people.

The essay in which this passage appears has been

called one of the few instances in which Kliuchevskii

openly expressed his own moral i d e a s . C e r t a i n l y he

expresses here great feeling for the moving force of moral

greatness in history, for he calls St. Sergius the moral

inspiration of the overthrow of the Tartar y o k e . ^ - Yet,

these moral educators are directed by "secret historical

forces"1^*2 and elsewhere Kliuchevskii had written that

£09. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Znachenie Prep Sergiia,"

Ocherki. pp. 195-96.
110. Trubetskoi, p. 7$.
111. Ocherki. p. 205.
112. Ibid.. p. 200.
 107

The moral level of society is as little dependent

upon the perfection of its individual members as
is the temperature of the atmosphere on the heat
of a hand forcing up the mercury in the ther-
mommeter which it holds.

If there is the possibility that some figures escape

their historicity and become timeless in their moral force,

there is also the possibility that the institution of the

state itself may express more than the sum total of social

relations it represents. For despite his belief in the

logic of history and the rationality of the real,^^

Kliuchevskii seems to have at times conceived of the state

as standing beyond immediate and concrete historical .con­

ditions. The most complete expression of this in his work

is in The History of Legal Classes in Russia. As we have

seen, he argues herein that there are progressive stages

of political evolution. But his argument goes further and

holds out the hope that the political organization of

society may someday be based on the force of "knowledge”

rather than on "capital" or "blood relationships" as

h e r e t o f o r e . I n this possible future stage of social

evolution society will be like a classroom with the most

profound and talented making the decisions. We may smile

UT. "Vospominanie o K. I. Novikove i ego vremeni,"

Sochineniia. VIII, 245.
114. SSei " O . Boltin," Sochineniia. VIII, 150-51.
115. Istoriia soslovii. pp. 24-2$.
 108

at this typical schoolman's dream, but it illustrates Kliu­

chevskii fs ability to conceive of the state as existing

above contemporary class relationships. He had not the

slightest tinge of Marxism in this respect. There is no

reference in any of his works to Marx, and it is probable

that he had never read Marx.11^ While the general cast of

his explanation is materialistic it is not exclusively

economic nor does it rely primarily on the theme of class

struggle. Kliuchevskii's definition of class is not exclu­

sively in terms of its relationship to the means of produc­

tion. He will acknowledge that there are various ways

in which a ruling class may arise. There is perceptible

in his works an increasing ecclecticism and a diminution of

the economic and class element. For example, a comparison

of the original lithographed edition of the Course given in

I 884 - 8 5 with the final reworked first printed edition

indicates that Kliuchevskii modified the economic element

to some extent in describing the origin of the Rota system

of rule in Kievan Russia. In the first version of this

lecture emphasis is put on the economic unity requiring an

equal political unity and thus leading to the Rota system.

In the printed version of the course less time is spent

on the economic factor. The enumeration of specific

ll6. Tkhorzhevskii, p. 57
 109

articles in foreign trade is left out and there is a

sentence which ascribes the origin of the Rota system to

the desire of the princes to avoid a "haphazard" method of

rule. The whole burden of the first version is the influ­

ence exercised on princely conceptions by the economic

interdependence of the various Russian city-states.^^

Although economic conditions may influence political

conceptions, Kliuchevskii is equally capable of arguing that

certain conditions of the mind or psychological states

may lead to fundamental economic developments. One of his

first works, The Economic Activity of the Solovetsky

Monastery in the White Sea Region, traces the economic

development which arose from the original missionary zeal

of the earliest hermits and settlers in the White Sea region

and he writes that "in the history of this cloister the

material activity of the monks is so closely related to

their moral activity that the two are everywhere found

lid
indistinguishably accompanying each other." The

important point to remember in this particular work is

that the original motive for the colonization of the

White Sea region is a religious desire for isolated contem­

plation.

117. Kurs,'1,175-78 i£d ’ m - W . --------------------

lid. rtKhoziaistvennaia deiatel'nost," Sochineniia. VII,
12.
 no

Like most historians, Kliuchevskii spent his entire

creative life in an effort to combine the general and the

specifio, analytic history and narrative history. Despite

his attempt at a general theory of social change, he never

set forth a clear and unambiguous approach to historical

causation. He sought a style of explanation rather than

a rigorous philosophy. He implied his awareness of the

difficulties of explanation in history when he referred

to history as a "national-psychological process," and

admitted that the nomenclature of history could not

119
possess the rigor of science. 7 The actual historical

explanations which he made are characterized by ambiguity

and at times, contradiction. Nevertheless, it is possible

to describe certain constant elements in his theory of

causation.

The first general assumption of Kliuchevskii!s work

is the unbroken continuity of national history. This

assumption is found as early as his Boyar Duma of Ancient

Russia where he sees the Duma as the institution which

created the conditions necessary for the reforms of Peter

120
the Great. Despite his tendency to emphasize the

contrast between the different epochs of Russian history,

in which he departed from his teacher S. M. Solov’ev,

H9" Kurs, f, 410-12.-------------------------------------

120. Bolarskaia Duma, p. 1.
 Ill

Kliuchevskii held to a fundamental connection between

different epochs.

Furthermore, his view of history was historistic in

the sense that men and institutions reflected the general

character of the age in which they functioned. But histor

icism did not imply in Kliuchevskii1s mind any necessary

relativism. It was saved from this by his apparent assump

tion that an increasingly accurate accumulation of historl

cal knowledge is producing increasingly accurate history.

This assumption stands at the heart of his references to

121
the history of Russian historiography. It appears also

in his assumption of a kind of unilinear progress of the

mind. He will write of assumptions of Russian medieval

religious conceptions with an air of confidence in the

relative progress of Russian social intelligence since

those days. ^2

Thirdly, Kliuchevskii1s history is deterministic in

the sense that personality and accident nowhere exercise

decisive influences on the course of events. Moreover,

this determinism is closely related to the circumstances

of geography. An outstanding example of this is his

121. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Lektsii po russkoi istoriograf-
ii," Sochineniia. VIII, 396-452 and passim; and
"I. N. Boltin,” p. 475* The historiography course
is hereafter cited as Istoriografii.
122. "Pskovskie spory," pp. 32-35, 86.
 112

unusual description of the nGreat Russian type” of man.^ 3

The national type is considered to have a capacity for

short concentrated work, but to lack the fortitude for

"long sustained systematic toil.” In addition, the Great

Russian is "self-centered and retiring, cautious and

T Oi,
reserved, diffident in public and reserved in speech."
In thus describing the Great Russian character Kliuchevskii

is considering the peasant as the prototype. Certainly

the characterization and context suggest this. Tet, Kliu­

chevskii could refer to Prince Andrew Bogoliubskii as the

first representative of the Great Russian type on the

stage of history and he evidentally intended the stereotype

to have a national pan-class quality. Moreover, it is

interesting that in discussing origin of the national

character in the Muscovite period he seems to conceive of

the national type as extending beyond the period of its

origin. It is in a sense a spiritual essence which be­

comes a fixed and relatively timeless national property.

One wonders what Kliuchevskii would have thought of the

new Soviet man.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Kliu­

chevskii 's historiography was his simultaneous and frequent

assertion of the unique and individual in the life of

123. Sunra. p . 57.

124. gSriT pp. 313-14.
 113

nations and persons and of the universal regularity of the

historical process. In this respect his work is a web of

contrast between the quasi-scientific terminology which he

used when speaking of society and history in the abstract

and the rich and colorful language of his essays and por­

traits. To understand the manner in which he combined

these elements is to describe his literary personality.

Lack of adequate biographical information makes it dif­

ficult to posit any fundamental attitudes of his personali­

ty which would provide insight into his writings. The link

between the man and his work, between his emotional

loyalties and ways of reasoning, is difficult to trace.

Conjecture under such circumstances is dangerous. Tet, a

glimpse of the man appears in the records of his contempor­

aries. According to many, Kliuchevskiifs own portrait of

the great Russian national character could serve as a

description of its author. He too was retiring, somewhat

diffident, reserved in public.125 We are told that he

was not at home among abstractions. * One writer acknow­

ledging that Kliuchevskii's work contains "contradictory

tendencies" sums up his historiography by saying that

"realism" and "populism" were the marks of his work, but

12$. Trubetskoi, p. 78: Miliukov. Vospominaniia. p . 93;

Eichenwal'd, p. 20; and Kizevetter. Jstoricheskie
otkllki. p. 363.
126. Eichenwal'd, p. 130.
 114

then explains the particular sense in which he applies

these terms to Kliuchevskii.

Realism in the conception of that time was an
anti-idealism, a returning to the land...to the
lower natural spheres of life, to matter, to
physiology, to economics, to ethnography. Pop­
ulism, not in the revolutionary sense, but in
the wider sense of the term was...a transcrip­
tion of this naturalism; /It was7 a deep interest
and sympathy in the life of the lower classes.1 2 '

However, as we have observed, naturalism and the

feeling for the minutiae of history which reinforced and

accompanied it walked side by side in Kliuchevskii's

historiography with two kinds of abstraction. The first

is found in the use and attraction for "sociological,”

schematic history which characterized the History of Legal

Classes in Russia, the introduction to the Course of Rus­

sian History, and certain portions of his lectures on

historiography. The second and less obvious abstraction

is found in the implicit holism and teleology which under­

lies the whole base of his Course. I think that part of

the difficulty in understanding Kliuchevskii*s concept of

causation is that he uses the word law in several ways

without clearly distinguishing the differences between

them. On the one hand he means by law the generalizations

which arise from comparative historical study. On the other

127 . Fedotov, pp. 342-43.

 115

hand he means the kind of regular historical development

which involves the Hegelian evolution of the national

state. The second use of law implies that history has a

regularity because the life of society conforms to the

fixed influences of the natural environment. The first

use of the term implies a regularity conforming to a certain

dialectical logic in time. Unfortunately, these two kinds

of regularity get mixed up with each other. Whether the

logic and laws actually inhere in the observed facts of

history or are the product of the historian’s own thoughts

about the past is never made clear.

In our own day the impact of modern science has made

these older fashions in history less secure, if perhaps no

less prevalent. Kliuchevskii accepted the idea of a regu­

larity in social affairs which could be grasped and de­

scribed by the historian. In this attitude he was typical

of the nineteenth century. His idea of a kind of organic

teleological evolution in history is best described by

the phrase romantic positivism, if that does not seem like

a contradiction in terms. Kliuchevskii could accept

himself as both an historian and a scientist because the

disjunction between the two realms of thought was not as

great as it is at present. It is possible that the

historian can never escape the search for regularity in

 116

time sequence. The point is that in Kliuchevskii1s era

he did not think himself less scientific for such a limi­

tation.
One may wonder whether Kliuchevskii1s simultaneous

feeling for the unique- in the life of persons and nations

and his search for abstract generalizations were equally

strong motives of his personality. His skepticism and

dislike for the overly schematized in history may have its

emotional echo in his love of the Russian past and his

distrust of the "showy" side of upper class life. In both

cases he may have been attacking different kinds of pre­

tentiousness. As a young man he had taken particular pride

in his humble seminarian origins. * He kept throughout

his life an interest in the life of the ordinary people.

He may have been simultaneously attracted and repelled by

the materialism and economism of the historical tradition

within which he operated. As a young secondary student

his teachers had predicted for him a great literary future,

but doubted that he would find historical scholarship

129
congenial to his talents. 7
One way in which light may be thrown on the relation­

ship between Kliuchevskii's historical reasoning and his

12$. See Pis'ma, passim and particularly his letter of

October 21, 1361, p. 6$.
129. Chteniia. p. 6.
 117

emotional loyalties Is through examination of a problem

which stands at the meeting point of those loyalties and

his scholarly obligations. This is the problem of how he

treats Russia and western Europe in his historiography.

This topic serves as one ideal focal point for the evalua­

tion of his style of explanation. In the first place it

requires the simultaneous development on his part of the

very widest type of generalization in defining "Europe"

and "European civilization.” Equally, it involves a

particular problem of the unique and different in that

it posits the necessity of defining "Russia." Moreover,

the question is not merely a scholarly or academic one but

a moral one calling forth a host of loyalties and values

associated with Kliuchevskii1s love of his fatherland.

Consequently, it is the most revealing form which the

question of the one and the many, the unique and the

general, ever took in his work. Therefore, we shall now

turn to this problem.

 118

CHAPTER III

RUSSIA AND THE WEST

Observe others in order to know thyself better.

Remember what you have been in order to know
what you may become. Do not look only to your­
self, but do not rush to imitate others.

True enlightenment must be based in the simultan­

eous development of rational and moral feeling,
on the agreement of European education and
national feeling.2

Each of them bore on their back the cross of

Russian life.3

Comparisons between Russia and the countries of

western Europe form a major theme in the writings of the

nineteenth-century intelligentsia. Russian attention to

this comparison appears in different forms in the works of

Slavophiles, Populists, Pan-Slavists, and the early

Marxists. Recent scholarship has revealed the extent to

which comparisons between Russia and Europe formed a central

issue in the thought of diverse and often mutually

T] Istoriografii. Sochineniia. VIII. A32.

2. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Vospominanie o N. I. Novikove i
ego vremeni,1* Sochineniia. VIII, 237*
3. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, in a letter to a former student,
February 13, 1908, cited in A. F. Koni, "Vospominaniia
o V. 0. Kliuchevskom," Kharacteristiki. p. 162.
 119

antagonistic thinkers.^ The terms in which distinctions

between Russia and the West were made varied. For some

writers the differences were fundamental, for others

secondary. Whether these differences rested on systems

of government, opposing spiritual principles, type of

economic development, or tempo of economic development

were matters on which there was much dispute.

Thus, while interest in the comparison of Russia and

western Europe was widespread, description and definition

of the comparison varied. Caught in a nexus of conflicting

political and cultural loyalties the educated Russian

often sought a solution in an appeal to history. One

native scholar of Russian social thought has gone so far

as to say that in the seventies all "democratic" Russian

thought centered on the problem of Russia and the West.5

Another has called this problem the "model problem of

Russian nineteenth-century historiography."^

The general significance of this theme in the culture

of the intelligentsia was reflected in the more limited

4^ See for example. N. V. Riasanovskv. Russia and the West

in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (Cambridge, 1952J,
and his Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia.
(Berkeley. 1959): or A. P. Mendel. Dilemnas of Progress
in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism
(Cambridge"," 19517.---- ------------ ------ -----
5. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, IV, 52.
6. Rubinstein, p. 211.
 120

field of scholarly historiography. During the very first

flowering of Russian historiography in the mid-eighteenth

century the problem of Russia and the West had formed the

center of a scholarly dispute in which can be seen an early

attempt of Russian historical thought to define the posi­

tion and importance of Russia in European civilization.

A convenient point for dating the origin of this

argument in Russian historiography is the sixth of Septem­

ber, 1749 (O.S.). On that date Gerard Friedrich Miller, a

German scholar working in Russia, read before the Academy

of Science a paper entitled, On the Origins of the Name

and the People of Russia. In this address Miller advanced

the thesis that the Vikings were the source of both the

first Russian state and of the name Russia. This thesis

aroused a controversy over the role of the Vikings in Rus­

sian history and led nationalist writers to attack the

importance of the "foreign” Viking influence. By the mid

point of the eighteenth century writers within Russia were

divided into two general camps. One were the so-called

"skeptical westernizers" who asserted that Russia lagged

behind western Europe. "Russia had no past but only a

future." More nationalistic writers took up the challenge

and tried to find special value in Russian history. This

subject became the theme of early polemical writings in

 121

the contemporary journal Spectator as early as 1792.7

The variety in the arguments advanced over the

problem of Russia and the Vest makes it difficult to

easily characterize Russian historiography in this respect.

Theories varied and individuals changed their opinions.

Thusi N. M. Karamzin in his youth had held to the idea

that all peoples went through a similar process of enlighten

ment and that the important thing was to be a human being,

g
not a Slav. He had asserted that what was good for one

people was good for all peoples. ^ By the end of his life,

however, Karamzin was arguing that Peter the Great had

destroyed the natural development of Russia and that

autocracy was uniquelysuited toRussian society. Karam­

z i n ^ case is particularlyinterestingbecause he did not

make a complete disjunction between Russian history and

that of western Europe. He identified Russia of the

appanage period with feudal Europe and he considered Ivan

the Terrible similar to the western opponents of feudal

privilege. Karamzin accepted the early westernizing of

Alexei Mikhailovich as useful because it was "quiet and

not arbitrary."^0

TI V. 0. kliuchevskii. Istoriografil. Sochineniia. Vlll.

412ff.
8. Illeritskii, p. 132.
9. Ibid., p. 132.
10. ISI3.: p . 137.
 122

The interest in comparisons between Russia and

Europe increased in Russian historiography of the nine­

teenth century. •*■■*■ For example, the historian N. A.

Polevoi (1796-1846) wrote his six-volume history of Russia

in terms of the comparison of Russian institutions with

those of western Europe,'*’2 while K. D. Kavelin (1818-

1885) in his Views on the Juridical Life of Ancient Russia

developed a six-fold antithesis between the history of

Russia and that of western Europe."*^

In the first part of the nineteenth century there

arose a new interest in defining the general nature of

the historical process. Under the impact of the new self-

conscious interest in history and the philosophy of history,

Russian historians had to find a way in which to unite

their general conception of the universal laws of histori­

cal growth with a definition of the special way in which

Russian institutions and conditions differed from those of

western Europe. There were two levels on which the

problem of Russia and the West had to be handled. On the

practical concrete level the actual events of Russian

11. On the general prominence of this theme in Russian

historical writing see Ivanov-Razumnik, Vols. I and II,
passim: Ikonnikov, passim: and Rubinstein, passim.
12. Rubinstein, p. 298.
13. V. I. Picheta, Vvedenie russkogo istoriu (Moscow,
1922), p. 112.
 123

history had to be compared to those in western Europe and a

judgment made as to the degree of similarity or dissimilar­

ity between these events. On the theoretical level Russian

writers had to define the general nature of universal

historical development and Russia's role in that develop­

ment.
The historians of the State School usually started

out with an abstract formula which was held to be common

to all people and then proceeded to distinguish the

Russian differences in detail. K. D. Kavelin held that it

was nan immutable law” of history that all societies pass

from loosely knit tribal forms to the state, but he admit­

ted certain distinctions in Russian history. He argued that

in Russia the relationships of the barbarian warriors

and their commitatus (druzhina) had led not to feudalism,

but to an appanage form of society. In Russia the church

had been subservient to the state, Russian natural condi?

tions had been particularly harsh, and moreover, there was

a lack of "free personality” due to the dominant role of

the state. Another of this group, B. Chicherin (l£2&-

1904) also asserted that there was a common scheme of

development for all nations, but he emphasized the unique

features of the Russian experience. In the Vest the

people not the state had been the source of unity. In

 124

Russia the State had played a much greater role in uniting

the separate portions of the Russian land. Russian history

could he understood as the passage from clan organization

to the civil state.

Kliuchevskiifs own great tbacher, S. M. Solov'ev

emphasized the physical differences between eastern and

western Europe. For him the split of eastern Russia from

the Vest was a moral and spiritual tragedy and he associ­

ated this with the long Mongol overlordship. However,

Solov'ev did not think that the Mongols had played a funda­

mental role in the evolution of the Russian state and he

denied that Russian history was fundamentally different

from that of western Europe. In particular Solov'ev thought

that from the time of Peter the Great the state had been

increasingly similar to those of Europe. Solov'ev rejected

the idea that Russia had been formed as a result of a

peaceful invitation of the Viking princes and he argued

that Russia was traveling, somewhat later, the same path

of development. For example, Solov'ev identified the

Oprichina of Ivan the Terrible with similar attacks on

feudal power in the West.1^

Michael Petrovich Pogodin, the historian of Official

14. On Solov'evas general scheme see riS. M. Soloviev kak

istorik," L. V. Cherepnin, in S. M. Solov'ev, Istoriia
Rossii, I, 5-50.
 125

Nationality, acknowledged a number of close parallels

between Russian history and that of western Europe. He

considered the Normans to have played the same role in

Russian history as they had in the West. The Mongols aided

royal power in Russia as the crusades aided it in the West.

However, the differences between Russia and the West were

fundamental; Russia had developed no middle class, Russia

had not known feudalism. Russian history had been charac­

terized by peacefulness, love, concord and unity and this

had stemmed from the fact that Russian history did not

develop out of conquest as had the countries of the West.

As Professor Riasanovsky has written, for a man like

Pogodin, Russia and the West was a fundamental dichotomy.^

As the nineteenth century progressed Russian histori­

ans turned increasingly toward comparative studies of

domestic and European institutions.*^ Of course, no

nineteenth-century historian working on a broad scale

could escape the questions posed by the political and

cultural diversity of nationalistic Europe set within the

cultural unity of the common Greco-Roman heritage and the

mutually inter-dependent state system. It has been

recently demonstrated how important the theme of nation

T5~. On Pogodin see Riasanovsky. Nicholas I . passim; and

Illeritskii, pp. 166-74.
16. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, IV, 52.
 126

versus the larger European community was in the thinking

17
of the great German historian, Friedrich Meinecke. '

In the case of Russia, however, the definition of national

individuality and European universality become almost, as

Kliuchevskii once remarked, na category of Russian

thought.
There is little doubt that an abiding and intense
interest in the exact nature of the similarities and dif­

ferences in the historical experience of Russia and western

Europe constitutes a major theme in the life and work

of Kliuchevskii. In almost everything he wrote from the

earliest letters of his student days at the University

of Moscow, to monographs, public speeches, articles on

Russian literature, book reviews, and the Course, there

are comparisons of Russia and the Vest. His work dwells

upon those characteristics of Russian history which, in

his opinion, set it apart from the history of western

Europe. Yet, at the same time, he identifies Russia and

the Vest with a common European civilization. Moreover,

his writings contain, both implicitly and explicitly,

statements of what he thought should be the proper atti­

tude for the Russian intelligentsia to adopt toward

Vf. Richard V. Sterling. Ethics in a World ot Power.

(Princeton, 1956), passim.
16. Zaoadnoe vliianie: Ocherki. p. 144*
 127

western culture. Thus, his work is at one and the same

time an affirmation of national individuality, a plea for

cultural autonomy, and a statement of Russia's fundamental

membership in the European community.

While none of these ideas are mutually exclusive,

their simultaneous assertion within one body of work cre­

ates certain tensions. In this sense, Kliuchevskii's

writings express a struggle between his nationalism and his

Europeanism. Moreover, the duality of Russia and Europe

was linked in Kliuchevskii*s thought with a number of other

closely related problems. Discussions of the state versus

the individual, the welfare of the people versus the power

of the state, the value of Russian political and social

institutions and the possibility of changing those insti­

tutions, were all related to the comparison of Russia

and the West.

Kliuchevskii held that sociological history should

concentrate on the experience of different nations in order

both to discover the general laws of history and to spell

out the specific experience of each nation. Here we see

the recurrent problem of universal regularity and national

diversity which so many Russian historians faced. In

those very sections of the introduction to the Course

where he had argued for the methodological value of

national history, he took care to point up the special
 12$

value of the study of Russian history to the study of

historical sociology. Russian history is important be­

cause in it, /
we observe the action of those same historical
forces and elements of society as in other
European societies; but with us these forces
act with a different tension, these elements
appear in different assortments, take on dif­
ferent dimensions, and reveal properties not
noticed in other countries.19 /Italics added/
This joint assertion of Russia's membership in

Europe and emphasis on the special nature of Russian

history is found throughout the Course. The inference may

be drawn from the above passage that there is some explicit

historical norm labelled "Europe” against which the special

case of Russia may be measured. This inference is strik­

ingly confirmed in a later section of the same work dealing

with what Kliuchevskii calls the "fourth period of Russian

history,” that is, the period from 1613 to 1$55« Kliu­

chevskii lists several characteristics of the fourth period

which distinguish Russia during that time from Europe.

These peculiarities are the fact that as the territory

of the state expanded the internal freedom of the popula­

tion declined; the fact that the laboring force grew more

productive as it grew less free; and the fact that as

the personnel of the state administration came to be drawn

13. " R u r s TTzT.

 129

from all classes, class distinctions grew greater. Kliu-

chevskii comments on these features of Russian history in

language which is expressive of his feeling that there is

something which is systematically unusual about Russian

history.

These three processes...were not anomalies. not

mere negations of the regularity of the historical
process. We would do better to call them antin­
omies. exceptions to the rules of historical life.
They were the product of a unique local set of
conditions which, however, once developed, be­
came subject to the general laws of human life,
just as an organism with a disturbed nervous
system continues to function according to the
general norms of organic life, yet produces
phenomena in conformity with its disorder.

The explanation of these antinomies of our modern

history must be sought in those relations which
became established among us between the needs
of the state and the resources of the people.
When a European state finds itself facing new
and difficult tasks it seeks new resources among
its people, and usually finds them. This is
because European peoples living the normal,
regular, life of* free labor and thought can de­
vote to their state the wealth resulting from
this free labor and thought without straining
themselves. ^These7 riches...consist of in­
creased tax-paying ability and of conscientious,
knowledgeable statesmen. The heart of the matter
is that among such people cultural labor is
carried out through invisible, intangible, butj
amicable activities of separate persons and
private associations independent of the state.
Their activities usually anticipate the stated...
needs. With us the opposite has been the case. u

2'0.“ IFi'cTTIITfl'O^ir.'" Italics added on"tKe'wdrd

"feuropean.”
 130

Thus, Kliuchevskii uses the quasi-scientific language

and conceptions of his sociological history to juxtapose

Russia and Europe. Europe is an organic entity which has

experienced a normal development in contrast to the dis­

turbed organism of Russia. Europe*s health is the result

of a social harmony between the European states and their

citizens. This health is economic and moral. If there is

a universal regularity in history, then it is Russia not

"Europe” which proves an exception to the rules of histori­

cal life. Incidentally, in this passage Kliuchevskii is

tacitly assuming a general rule or norm of historical

development which he elsewhere suggests may someday be

developed.

In the first lecture of the Course he had written that

"the general laws of the form of human society may someday

be found." But in the above passage he is assuming that the

regular nature of sociological development can be identi­

fied with the development of western European states.

The laws he refers to in the first lecture of the course

are "independent of time and p l a c e . T h e y are nomothetic.

In the above passage he seems to assume the existence of

such laws by using terms like antinomy and anomoly to

describe Russian social development. An anomoly is a

21. Ibid.. j . '19

 131

departure from a general law.

The idea of a significant difference between the

history of Russia and that of western Europe is not a late

development in Kliuchevskii1s thought. As early as The

Bovar Duma of Ancient Russia (1BB1) he had advanced the

view that the development of social classes in Russia had

taken place in quite a different manner from that in the

Vest. At the very start of this work Kliuchevskii remarks

that social classes may develop in one of two main ways,

either by the development of economic differentiation and

the subsequent rise of one particular class to political

domination through economic domination or through a

reverse process where political domination comes first and

leads to economic domination. As an example of the latter

type he cites the situation of a class differentiation

arising through the conquest of one people by another.

He says that Russian history is unique in that it has seen

the development of legal classes (soslovie) through both

of these processes. Again the comparison with the Vest

forms one means for his expression of the special charac­

teristics of Russian history.

The scholar well versed in the origin and

development of western European classes
will not encounter /in our history/
phenomena with which he is familiar. He
will encounter similar moments and condi-
 132

tions, but he will encounter them in unique

combinations and under external circumstances
surprising to him.22

He now develops the theme that in the Vest national

states arose either through "the natural coming together

of the formerly disparate parts of one tribe or through the

forcible unification of multi-tribal elements through

c o n q u e s t . I n Russia however, the state arose from

the economic interest b o m of the river trade with Byzanti­

um combined with forcible and voluntary unification of

Slavic and Finnish tribes.

In addition to statements of general differences

between the history of Russia and that of western Europe,

the Boyar Duma often points to numerous specific differ­

ences between Russia and the West. Thus, we are reminded

that the Russian prince of the twelfth century did not have

to contend with an unruly aristocracy in the composition

of his crown council because the Russian boyar sat in the

Duma by virtue of the fact that he was the prince's

servitor and not by virtue of his landholding within the

princely domain. He further points out that by comparing

the Duma to the crown council of the medieval kings we

25
will see "what the Boyar Duma was not and could not be."

2 $. Boiarskaia Duma, p. 12.

23. Ibid., pp. 35^3o.
2k. ibid.. pp. 35-36.
25. X E B - . PP- 144-46.
 133

It Is a characteristic of Kliuchevskii1s monographs

that they repeatedly and in diverse ways accentuate the

gener&l and specific differences between Russia and the

West. Indeed, one of his most notable works, The Composi­

tion of the Zemskij Sobors of Ancient Russia touched on a

lively controversy in which the nationalist amour propre

of the Russians and the political aspirations of many

Russian progressives were involved. This was the question

of whether the ancient Russian representative gatherings

were truly representative, advisory, or reflections of

political opposition to the tsar. Kliuchevskii's approach

to the problem is nationalistic in the most fundamental

sense of the word. He rejects most of the questions

heretofore asked about the Sobors on the grounds that they

arose from seeing the problem of the nature of the Sobors

in a false light. He admonishes Russian scholars for

seeing the Sobor only in terms of a comparison with

western institutions and says this mistake came either

from a "confused social sense" or from a feeling of

dejection that the Russian assembly would not bear compari­

son with those of the West. It is time to forget the

comparison says Kliuchevskii since it "enfeebles scholarly

energy" and approach the nature of the Zemskii Sobor as an

26
indiginous and unique institution.
26 . Sostav soborakh: Onvtv i issledovanie. p. 363.
 Having delivered this injunction, however, Kliuchev­

skii himself cannot avoid repeated references to the West.

He develops the argument that the Zemskii Sobor was a

consultative assembly of the Muscovite state servants

called by the government itself. He then goes on to

argue that in Russia the Representative principle” was

extremely feeble. In Muscovy there did not exist firm

social groups with persistent political claims nor suffi­

cient social solidarity for the classes to combine against

27
the state. Unlike the West, Russia does not experience

the struggle between etats and the sovereign which results

oft
in the establishment of a modus vivendi between the two.

Moreover, the Sobors were ”extremely meager and colorless

even in comparison with the French Estates-General.”^

The tough-minded honesty which enabled Kliuchevskii to

face up to the lack of representative institutions in

Russia’s past is an example of the fulfillment of his own

dictum that "national conceit like national self-

abasement is but a substitute for national self-understand-

30
ing.” Although a nationalist he was never an apologist

for national failings. Or, to put the matter more

 135

accurately, his apology for those characteristics of Rus­

sian society and history which he deplores is couched in

terms and set within a context which emphasize the histori

cal tragedy and the "grim past" of Russia.^ Again and

again in his writings Kliuchevskii points to the special

harshness of Russian life, to the endless struggle with

steppe and nomad. At the start of the Course the special

difficulties of the Russian physical and historical

conditions are stressed, expanding a theme developed in

the work of Solov’ev, that nature was a step-mother to

Russia but a mother to Europe.

With the original cultural resources belonging

to all the Aryan tribes...the eastern Slavs from
the time of their first steps into Russia found
themselves in geographic and political-interna­
tional circumstances far different from those
that had fallen to the lot of their Aryan kinsmen
the Germans when they began the modern history of
western Europe. The wandering Germans settled
among ruins which immediately subjected their
forest-born customs and imagination to the influ­
ence of a powerful culture...The eastern Slavs,
on the contrary, found themselves in the midst
of an endless plain whose rivers impeded compact
settlement, whose swamps and forests made agri­
culture difficult in the newly founded villages.
They were among neighbors who were of an alien
origin and a lower level of development from whom
nothing could be borrowed and with whom it was
necessary to carry on an endless struggle...
These original conditions of the life of the
Russian Slav determined the comparative slowness
of their development and the comparative simplic­
ity of their social structure as well as the

31. Kurs. V. 267

 136

notable uniqueness of that development...

Mark well this starting point of our history.

It will help us get our bearings at the very
start of the road which lies before us. 32
In the second volume of the Course33 serfdom is

presented as a result of the harsh struggle for survival

of the Muscovite state. Other unattractive features of

Kussian history are explained in a similar fashion. Thus,

the gulf between the intelligentsia and the people

the superficiality of many of the Petrine reforms and the
anomolies they evoked, ^5 Russian cultural backwardness,

and the lack of a rule of law in Russian society,^ are

all attributed to the struggle for survival of the Russian

state. An unusually moving statement of this idea is found

in the Course.
For us in Russia, as the territory and the
international power of the nation grew, the
people's internal freedom was constricted. The
exertions of the people widened the extent of the
realm, but diminished the elevating capacity of
the national spirit. The external successes of
modern Russia remind one of the flight of a bird
which the wind hurls along at a speed faster
than the power of its own wings.

Always in the background of this theme is the implicit

327 Ibid.. I. 2d-29.

33. Ibid.. II, 3 2 9 ; VII,156.
34. Ibid.. IV, 32-35. and throughout the minor essays
35. iBia.; ppl 200-223.
36. Ibid.. pp. 302ff.
37. Ibid.. Ill, S.
 137

acknowledgement of the superiority of Europe and, more

particularly, the conception of "Europe” as an entity which

has experienced a natural, normal, or regular path of de­

velopment. At one point Kliuchevskii writes,

A thousand-year-long hostile closeness to

the ravishers of the steppe - here is a
circumstance that can excuse the lack of
more than one European advantage in Russian
historical life. /See note/38

Not without reason have G. P. Fedotov, S. I. Tkhor-

zevskii, and N. Kotliarevskii^ pointed to a sense of

melancholy and tragedy as essential characteristics of his

view of Russian history. At first this may seem paradoxi­

cal. To use such terms when discussing the work of an

avowed "historian-sociologist" seems a contradiction.

Tragedy and melancholy are within the realm of art, not

science. Yet, the combination of a scientism in theory

with a lyrical expression of the sadness of Russian history

is typical of Kliuchevskii. It parallels that fascination

with personality, yet submersion of personality within the

social matrix which characterized his theory of causation.

If we are to judge from his writings, his style and

Ibid.. II. 6 8 . The actual Russian phrase used is

"evropeiski nedochet,” which is stronger than my trans
lation of "European advantage" since it implies a mark
or measure against which Russia does not measure
up.
39. G. P. Fedotov, p. 346; S. I. Tkhorzevskii, p. 170;
N. Kotliarevskii, p. 96.
 138

method of reasoning constantly sought to combine the insti­

tutional historian's search for valid descriptive generali­

zations and the narrative historian's artistic sense of the

variety and irony of history.

The problem of Russia and the Vest was a key example

of this duality of his thought. Even as a young man at

Moscow University he had sought to combine his sense of

Russia's cultural deficiencies with an historico-

environmental explanation of those deficiencies. In the

fall of 1661 he wrote to a friend that he had been studying

German folk poetry and that he finds that Russian folk

poetry lacks the ’’bold” and "hearty" spirit of the German

heroic epic. Then he offers an explanation for this

deficiency in Russian poetry.

But for us there was always foremost a

burdensome need, a heavy struggle with the
poverty of nature, yes, and with the poverty
resulting from historical circumstances;
from the Tartars, from Byzantium, from agrari­
an dues and other causes. There was no time
to think of poetry.

and the letter ends with a quotation from Glinka:

Songs are not gay to us as £Vich;

We sing them out of sorrow.

Of course, this is not the reasoned argument of a

mature scholar but the random lament of a young student.

4GT Fis'ma. pp. 76-^1.

41. Ibid.. p. 71.
 139

Moreover, in this instance Kliuchevskii is not comparing

Russia to "Europe” but rather Russian folk poetry to German.

Nevertheless, the awareness of a gulf between Russia and a

country of Europe and the tendency to explain that gulf in

terms of a "burdensome heavy struggle" with nature and

historical circumstances is present in more sophisticated

form throughout his mature writings.

The most emotional expression of the differences

between Russia and the West appears in those articles and

speeches which he devoted to leading figures in Russian

intellectual history. Possibly because these essays were

on literary subjects and were not bound by the discipline

necessary in the Course, the note of lyrical sadness is

stronger. let, the essential historical argument is the

same. For example, Kliuchevskii wrote two articles on

Pushkin which were originally presented as speeches, one

delivered in 1880 and the other in 1887 on the fiftieth

anniversary of the poetfs death. There is a close con­

nection between the two works since the second represents

the development of an idea expressed in the first. In

the 1880 address Kliuchevskii suggests that Pushkin's

works are an historical source for the delineation of a

particular type of educated Russian.

We will give this type the name of the com­

pound man...This is the Russian person who
 140

grows up in the conviction that he was

born a non-European but is obliged to
become one.**2
Seven years later he expatiates on this theme in

Eugene Onegin and his Ancestors. Therein he explains that

Pushkinfs romantic hero typifies those members of the in­

telligentsia who are alienated from Russian life. This

alienation is no accident but the sad fruit of Russia's

relationship to western learning.

Truly, Onegin was not a sad accident, a chance

mistake. He had his geneology, his ancestors
who passed on from generation to generation their
acquired intellectual and moral distortions and
abnormalities
With vehemence and skill Kliuchevskii proceeds to trace the

progressive development among some of the Russian intelli­

gentsia of a type little prepared to cope with Russian

reality. First in this "geneology" is Onegin's great­

grandfather, a serving noble of the old Moscow type.

Rooted in Muscovite isolation he knows little of the West,

but his son is the first to encounter western learning in

its early Roman Catholic and Polish form. He becomes

42. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Rech proiznesennaia v torzestven-

nom sobranii moskovskogo universiteta 6 iiunia 1660 g.,"
Ocherki. p. 60.
43* Onegin. Sochineniia. VII, 406. In this article he
takes care to point out that he is dealing with an
exception to the general run of gentry. This
reservation is not present in the 1660 address.
 141

adept at "sly latin doggerel,"^ but finds this skill of

little use when confronted with the tough practical tasks

of the Petrine era. This man's son trained in the practi­

cal and technical westernization of Peter the Great feels

out of place when he is caught between a new passion for

French fads and a contrary demand for an uncritical return

to the pre-Petrine e r a . ^ With each generation the confu­

sion of some of the intelligentsia becomes greater. In

the folowing excerpt Kliuchevskii, with an ironic scorn,

expressed through his use of certain French phrases in the

midst of the Russian, points to eighteenthcentury nobility

who know little of Russia. This type of noble

coldly and simply decided that the order of
things in Russia is assez immoral,because in
it il n'y a presqu' aucune opinionnubliaue.
and he thought that this was sufficient reason^
to ignore everything that was done in Russia.4,

The culmination of the tragedy of Russian intellectual

history is reached with Onegin himself. Like his ancestors

he does not understand Russia. But, due to the shock of

the Napoleonic invasion he recognizes a latent power in the

fatherland and dimly perceives that the mere use ofwestern

models is not enough to solve Russia's problems. However,

Onegin's "ancestry" has not prepared him to do more than

____

45. U S . , P. 412.
46. I H 3 .. p. 417.
 142

sense the problem. He does not know what to do either

for himself or for his country and thus falls into

”despondency” and ”moral numbness.”^

The sense of sorrow at the moral and intellectual

malaise in the history of the Russian intelligentsia is

somewhat differently treated in an article which Kliuchev­

skii wrote on another giant of Russian poetry, Lermontov.

This article is titled, significantly, Melancholy. (Grust).

According to Kliuchevskii, the dominant note in Lermontov's

poetry is grief or melancholy. He develops a particular

definition of this term as it applies to Lermontov. Grust

means resignation in the face of a distasteful and harsh

reality.
...The source of grust is not the victory of an
absurd actuality over the mind and not the
protest of the latter against the former, but
the victory of a sorrowful heart over its sorrow,
its reconciliation with a sad reality. Such atg
least.is grust in the fashioning of Lermontov.
Characteristically, Kliuchevskii is not content to ascribe

this melancholy of Lermontov's to the complexity of the

poet's personality, but seeks to link it to a peculiarity

of Russian society. Lermontov's sadness is the result of

the fact that he finds himself bound to an artificial upper-

class world which he despises but with which he cannot

4?.n Ib'idV, p7T 2i:---------------------------------------------

4d. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, ”Grust," Ocherki. p. 127.
 143

49
sever his ties. Furthermore, Lermontov's sadness is

the echo of a fundamental Russian national humor. In a

slightly different version of the very words which, as a

young man, Kliuchevskii had written to his friend, Gvozdev,

he now writes that the authentic note of Russian songs

50
nis not gaity, not sadness, but grust. and of Lermontov's

relation to this trait he continues,

The personal feeling of the poet in itself,

independent of its poetic expression, is
nothing more than a psychological peculiar­
ity. But if that feeling answers some basic
humor of the people then that poetry becomes a
phenomenom of the national life, an historical
fact. The religious nurturings of our people
have given to this humor /i.e. grust7 a particu­
lar coloring, uplifting it from the realm of
emotion and converting it into a moral rule, an
act of fate that is the will of God. This is a
Russian humor; not western, not asiatic, but
Russian. In the West they know and understand
this sense of resignation, but there it is a
mutant-like phenomenon of personal life and is not
experienced as a national cast of mind. In the
East there is added to this tendency a languor, a
hopeless cessation of thought, and from this mix­
ture is formed a rough psychological composition
called fatalism. To that people which has come
to stand between the hopeless East and the self-
confident West has fallen the fate to develop
a cast of mind permeated with hope, without self-
confidence, but only faith.51

Finally, Lermontov is seen as the personification of that

inclination of the Russian national spirit summed up in the

w : "iH<r."; p . T 3i:-----
50. Tb13.; p. 135.
51. Ibia.. pp. 135-36.
 144

words, "God's will be done."'*2

Kliuchevskii*s studies of Pushkin and Lermontov are

more than interpretations of leading figures in Russian

intellectual history; they are episodes in the biography

of their author. They express in the field of intellectual

history that same sense of a difference between Russia and

the West and that same emphasis on the burdens of Russian

history which is found applied to other problems in the

Course and in special monographs.

Moreover, these essays reflect an essential assumption

of Kliuchevskii’s view of the world. Reality is historical

national reality. In one of his minor essays he once used

the phrase "the harmonious individuality of nations"53

and there is not the slightest doubt that he conceived of

high culture as the co-operative product of a number of

nations. However, his sense of historical evolution and of

the organic nature of society led him to urge his students

to understand the uniqueness of Russia's past in order to

find the realistic solutions to her problems. In the

second lecture of the Course Kliuchevskii ended with a

statement of the pragmatic value of history which combined

his sense of the wholeness of the human community with a

warning against a fallacious abstract idealism based on

52. Ibid.. p. 136.

53. ^ T T N . Boltin," Sochineniia. VIII, 155.
 145

universal principles and a plea that the good citizen be a

good historian. He writes that ideals are the product of

"life's experiences'1 and they come either from the national

community's experience or from other peoples'. However,

Ideals are not always generally applicable to all

people, in all times, or in every place. In
order to know which of them can be realized in a
given society and a given time one must know the
resources and means which are at hand in that
society; and in order to know this we must weigh
and evaluate the historical experiences and
impressions which the society has lived through
ana the morals and customs which have been bred
into it.54

And then he moves on to a quite explicit reference to the

host of social theories and programs which obsessed the

Russian intelligentsia of his time.

This is all the more necessary as we live in a

time abundant with ideals, but with ideals that
are struggling with each other and that are
irreconciliably opposed. This impedes the
expedient selection among such ideals. A know­
ledge of our past facilitates such a choice.
It is not just a necessity of the thoughtful
intellect, but essential to sensible and cor­
rect action.55 /See note7

To be valid then, ideals must be grounded in historical

understanding.

Linked to this feeling for historical reality was the

idea that Russia must assimilate alien ideas in a balanced

54 ” XuS7T.')ft.----------------------------
55. Iblci.. p. 4 4 . It is worthy of note that the specific
reference to contemporary times was added to the first
printed edition of the Course in place of a more
general comment in the lithographed text.
 146

fashion. Therefore, the problem of Russia and Europe is, in

part, a problem of cultural assimilation. It is quite clear

that Kliuchevskii respected the general intellectual heri­

tage of Europe. In his student days he had written with

scorn of certain "realists," among them Chernyshevskii,

who wished to reduce the importance of the classical

languages in Russian schools. In a letter to a cousin who

was attracted by this idea he had written that perhaps such

a reduction might be possible in England or Germany and

that in Germany the classical heritage had made possible

such "scholarly phenomena" as the brothers Grimm, Humboldt,

Fichte, and Lessing, but that Russia needed more, not less,

of this tradition.^ /See note7 In his acceptance of the

reforms of Peter the Great, in his scorn for the primitive

nature of early Russian religious thought, and in his view

that Russia would have to move along the path to personal

freedom as had the countries of the West, we sense his

involvement and committment to the culture of western

Europe. However, his references to Russian assimilation

of the western tradition are filled with a language which

evokes a sense of difficulty and a fear of superficiality

"55^ Artobolevskii, p. 165. the date of the letter Artobo-

levskii quotes is not given but it had to have been
written between 1861 when Kliuchevskii entered the
university and the summer of 1862 when Chernyshevskii
was arrested. It is clear that Chernyshevskii was
still free at the time Kliuchevskii writes of him.
 147

in this process of acquiring Western ideas. Thus, he once

remarked that Western ideas came into Russia in such a way

that they accentuated the gulf between classes and destroyed

the social homogeneity of Russian society. He likened

this to a window which has heat applied unevenly to it and

cracks as a result.57 The false assimilation of Western

ideas is associated with an escape from reality into

eg
senseless dreams, and with a growth of nmoral stagna­
te
tion" among certain sections of the upper classes. 7 In

particular the age of the Enlightenment is associated with

the shallow and the superfluous.

In order to avoid this superficiality, participation of

Russia in a common European civilization must be made in

terms which preserve the cultural autonomy of Russia. Both

in the Course and in his other writings Kliuchevskii

didactically expressed his ideal of the proper attitude

to be taken toward western learning. Illuminating in this

respect are those sections of the Course dealing with the

growth of western influence in the seventeenth century.

Kliuchevskii acknowledges that Western learning was neces­

sary to Russia and even that that learning corresponded

57. Kura. III. 362.

5&. hVospominanie o N. N. Novikove i ego vremeni,"
Sochineniia. VIII, 227.
59. Ibid.. p p 7 ~ 230-31.
 143

"to the highest intellectual and practical needs of man."^®

He takes care to point out, however, that Western scholar­

ship brought with it

Much that was not demanded by the needs of the
state, much that it would have been possible to
do without, and much that was premature.°1
In the section in which this passage occurs, Kliuchev­

skii does not specify what kind of western learning is

useful and what kind unnecessary. It cannot be said that

he thought only practical westernization useful since he

acknowledges that foreign art "embellished native crudity."^2

In his portrait of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and of T.

M. Rtishchev, he presents his recipe for a successful

assimilation of western learning. Both men are pictured

as combining characteristic Russian virtues with a willing­

ness to learn from the West. The Tsar with his piety and

love of Muscovite religious learning is "the finest type

of old Russian,^ yet he helped reformers to do their work

by creating a renovating mood at court.^ Rtishchev

combined the humility and kindness of the best in the

Russian Christian tradition with an awareness of the

shortcomings of the old w a y s Kliuchevskii is particu-

6 o.'"ETrs,' -----------------------------------------------
61* Ibid.. p. 231.
62. TBH., P* 271.
63. 1513.. p. 327.
64. T5T3., p. 329.
65. M3.; v.331.
 149

larly fond of the era of Tsar Alexei which he describes

as the only time in Russian history when a respect for

native tradition and antiquity was combined with an

intelligent use of Western learning to solve domestic

problems. 66 It is this type of westernization that Kliu­

chevskii most admires. It is best expressed in an article

he wrote on the eighteenth-century Russian historian I. N.

Boltin. The main theme of this study is that Boltin knew

how to use the knowledge of the Vest in order to combat a

superficial westernism. He knew how to convert a fetish

for things Western into a respect for the real learning of

the Vest and to combine that respect with a "moral affinity

67
for the Russian people." /See notg7 There is little

doubt that Kliuchevskii himself felt this intimate "moral

affinity" with the fatherland. It is represented by the

admiring and loving essays which he wrote on those figures

of old Russia whose moral qualities he thought to be the

best example of national virtue.66

In contrast to his willingness to paint Russian life

as harsh and "abnormal" when compared with the Vest,

66. Ibl'dfr. p. 320. :

67. V7T5. Kliuchevskii, "I. N. Boltin," Sochineniia. VIII,
147. The Russian phrase is virtually untranslatable.
It reads, "...chuvstvo nravstvennoi sviaz s rodnym
narodom."
6£. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Dobrye liudy drevnei Rusi,"
Ocherki. pp. 137-58, and "Znachenie Prep. Sergiia dlia
russkogo naroda i gosudarstva," Ibid., pp. 194-209.
 150

Kliuchevskii will often praise individual figures in the

Russian past. Although recognizing the influence of geo­

graphy and politics upon the formation of the Russian

state, Kliuchevskii could distinguish the state from the

nation. The nation was above all a moral community.

Moreover, it is the moral sphere of life which is pecul­

iarly and uniquely national. For, although the Russian

state may not have equaled the other states of Europe in

certain political and social advances, the Russian type of

man has shown at its best notable individual instances of

virtue. In most instances these old Russian moral quali­

ties are linked to Christian virtues. Although no friend

of the state church, Kliuchevskii wrote two minor essays

in which he praised the "modesty," "charity" and "generos­

ity" of the good people of old Russia.^ One of his

contemporaries noted that his irony and sarcasm were most

70
often reserved for the latter imperial period.' He con­

trasted the social cohesion of an earlier period with the

social fragmentation which characterized m o d e m Russia.

The fact that the sphere of morality is uniquely national

is reflected in his approval of the idea of Fonvizin that

69. See "Bobrve liudv. passim, and fenachenie Frep~
Sereiia. passim.
70. Chtenila. p. 50.
71. See particularly his references in the Course to the
homogeneity of classes and culture prior to the seven­
teenth century. Kurs, III, 361-62.
 151

the evil which men do is the result of failings common

to all humanity, but that virtues are expressions of the

national character. Here is Kliuchevskii1s expression

of this idea.
The dark blemishes which enter into the life
of separate peoples, the Russian as well as
others, must be laid to the account of human
nature. But great deeds and virtues, like
grasses, are growths coming from the local
forces of climate and soil. They must be ascribed
to the qualities of national character borrowed
from no one and repeated by no one...'2

Kliuchevskii1s love of Russian antiquity, his admira­

tion for Russia's Christian heritage,^ /See note7and his

conception of the social homogeneity of pre-PetrineRussia

suggest a slight resemblance to the Slavophile ideal. How­

ever, such was not the case. Both in general principles

and in specific doctrines Kliuchevskii broke with the

Slavophile tradition. He rejected a fundamental antithesis

between Russia and the West and acknowledged that Russia

would probably pass through experiences similar to those

of western Europe. The usefulness of the Petrine reforms

and the beneficial influence of western learning were never

72. "I. N. B o l t i n . Sochineniia. VTlt. 153.

73* See in particular the characterization of Kievan Rus­
sia as the land of monasteries, and his identification
of Kiev as the only capital which the Russian people
ever loved. Kurs. I, 203; and his letter to N. I.
Mizeravskii, cited in ”Tz pisem V. (o>. fc^iuchevskii"
pp. 232-233.
 152

fundamentally questioned. Both in the Course and in

Lectures on Russian Historiography he attacked the facts and

the logic of the Slavophile argument. Writing of the first

appearance of the Westernizer-Slavophile controversy in the

Course he says that the

Westernizers were distinguished for their disci­

plined thought, their love of exact study, and
their respect for scholarly learning; the Slavo­
philes bathed in grand bold ideas, in a brave
faith in native forces, and in that discursive
lyrical dialectic which so mercifully hid their
gaps of logic and slips in learning.74

In his Lectures on Russian Historiography he generally

identified the growth and development of Russian self-

knowledge with the introduction of western rational histori­

ography and in particular with the contributions of the

German, A. L. Schletser.?^ He dismissed the Slavophile

doctrine of the uniqueness of the peasant commune, and

pointed out that the commune known to early Russian history

and that of the m o d e m period were two different institu­

tions .
Kliuchevskii was aware that in dealing with the ques­

tion of the Russian village commune he was touching on a

question which formed one of the centers of argument among

the contemporary intelligentsia. He introduced his remarks

7*m Kura. III. 261. ’ ~ "

75. Iatoriografii. Sochineniia. VIII, 440-42, 44#* and
passim.
 153

on the subject in the following manner:

Hearing me raise the question of the village com­

mune of the fifteenth and sixteenth century you
no doubt are wondering what I will say on this
subject and are all ready to ask me whether or
not these societies tfgre similar to our present
day village commune.7o

After this introduction he proceeds to attack the idea

that there is any historical continuity between the Mir

of the sixteenth century and the commune of the nineteenth.

In preparing his lecture on this subject he used the work

of his teacher, B. N. Chicherin, and supports the latter*s

view: that the modern commune had been created by the state

and by historical circumstances and did not represent any

collectivist principle among the Russian peasantry. More­

over, the references to the contemporary controversy were

added to the lectures when Kliuchevskii was preparing the

second volume of the Course for publication in the summer

of 1906 and are not found in the original lithographed

77
version of his lectures on which this volume is based.

Here Kliuchevskii disputed one of the favorite ideas of

both conservative and radical Russian nineteenth-century

theorists who saw in the institution of the commune evi­

dence for the innate socialism of the Russian people.

Finally, if Kliuchevskii were to be consistent with'Ms

76. ifttrsT II. 297.

77. I5l3.. pp. 297-300, 439.
 154

own historiographical views he ought to reject a position

which emphasized the fundamental moral antithesis between

Russia and the Vest. There is, after all, no point in

speaking of the nproper” combination of the Devil and God.

However, Kliuchevskii often used language which was

closely related to the more formalized and coherent

nationalism of the Populist and the Slavophile tradition.

In this respect he is a notable example of the way in

which the diverse cross-currents of ideas present in a

community can be combined by a particular mind in an

original combination lacking the rigor of a doctrinaire

position. Like most educated Russians of the second half

of the nineteenth century, Kliuchevskii was perturbed

about Russia's future in Europe. In the second lecture of

the Course he combined one of his frequent references to

the harsh past of Russia with a statement that Russia had

not yet achieved her just position in the world. It is

necessary, he says, for Russians more than anyone else to

properly understand their history because

Through centuries of effort and sacrifice the

Russian state was formed. It is a state the
like of which in its composition, extent, and
world position has not been seen since the fall
of the Roman Empire. But the people who have
created this state through their spiritual
and material efforts have not yet achieved first
rank among the other European peoples. Due to
unfavorable historical conditions our internal
maturity has not kept pace with our international
 155

position, and has even at times been retarded

byl that position... .We cannot rival others in
either scientific, politico-social, or other
spheres.7®

In this passage Kliuchevskii is coming very close to

the distinction made in his ovm day between national wealth

and popular welfare. Like many of the Populists he accepts

the idea that Russia's greatness has been at the sacrifice

of the moral and material welfare of the people. One of his

most famous epigrams summed this argument up when he said

that in the seventeenth century "the state grew fat and the

people withered away.”^ It is not until after i860 that

the Russian state becomes the state of the Russian people.

go
It is worthy of note that in an earlier version of the

Course given in 1895, Kliuchevskii had an even more ex­

tended passage on this theme wherein he wrote of the lack

in Russian history of those conditions necessary to the

development of the free cultured personality.^ Here the

comparison with western Europe is more explicit and the

note of lament at the Russian experience is stronger.

He entered into great detail about the lack of

balance in Russia between the demands of the state and the

needs of the citizen. This entire section of the 1895

78. fturs. It. Li.

79. Ttitt.. Ill, 12.
80. lEI5.. I, 382-84.
81. Tbia.. I, 382.
 156

version of the Course amounts to over six hundred words.

In contrast, the final version was reduced to approximately

three hundred and sixty words and the references to the

lack of free personality in Russia were omitted. However,

in both versions the essential argument that Russia has

suffered from her geographic and historical circumstances

is maintained. It may be that the less vehement language

of the final printed version bespeaks a certain growing

confidence and optimism about Russia. Unfortunately, there

is little other evidence in the Course to suggest such a

change in Kliuchevskii*s feelings.

There is in Kliuchevskii*s work no consistent or fully

worked out conception of the Slavic folk as a distinct

racial type. He accepts Solov*ev*s identification of the

Slavs with the Germans. If the eastern Slavs have differed

from the Germans those differences are the result of histor­

ical and geographical circumstances. This is the point

that Kliuchevskii drives home in the introductory lectures

of the Course. Nevertheless, he sometimes uses language

which contradicts this position. In the Course he refers

to the seventeenth-century south Slavic literary figure,

Krizanich as **a Slav and therefore devoid of the merit of

being moderate or of looking at things in a simple direct

manner.”**2 Such an idea is “inconsistent with both his view
52. "ibir.Tni."gro.-----------------------------
 157

of Russian history and with the fact that he rejected the

idea of pan-Slav unity as a npolitical dream standing out­

side h i s t o r y . W h i l e there is little doubt that Kliu-

chevskii's sense of political reality kept him from

espousing the more extreme contemporary nationalism, there

is a residue of feeling in his work which reflects current

popular passions. He seems to have accepted the active

hostility of the Western nations toward Russia, particular­

ly in matters which concerned the national pride of the

Russians. In one of his minor essays, referring to an ill-

informed eighteenth-century French commentator on Russia,

he notes:
All of this was in the nature of things.
Russian society had long ago accustomed itself
to foreign digs at national self-esteem, and
we then acknowledged, as now, the right of
foreign writers on Russia to endless innova*,
tions and inventions in the realm of error. ^

While he avoided the a-historical chimera of pan-

Slavism there is at least one occasion on which Kliuchev­

skii spoke with feeling of the harm done to brother Slavs

by the traditional enemy, the German. In 1375 on the

170th anniversary of the birth of the Czech hero, Shafarik,

Kliuchevskii gave a speech in which he spoke with feeling

of the evil day when Tilly had won his victory at the

W. Ibid.. p. 2W.
34. riI. N. Boltin," Sochineniia. VIII, 4 6 6 .
 15*

battle of the White Mountain.

The centuries-old life of a flowering Slavic

country was cut off in one hour. The Germans
and the Jesuits swarmed over it. Twenty thousand
families were banished or resettled. The Karo-
lovskii University, which had grown up when
there was not one university in Germany was
closed and its professors dispersed.8*
In the balance of this address Kliuchevskii spoke with

pride of the nineteenth-century revival of Slavic culture

and lamented the partition of Poland. Again in a privately

printed nshort aid” to Russian students which he prepared

in 1900, he bemoaned the Polish partition as giving Slavic

86
land to two powers "hostile to Russia and to Slavdom."

While sentiments such as these were never in the forefront

of his scholarly work, one who knew Kliuchevskii well once

remarked:
He knew and cared little for the life outside
Russia...by nature he was thoroughly Russian...
he loved that in Russian life which differed
from the Western...8?

In one respect Kliuchevskii was characteristic of the

nationalistic age in which he wrote. He accepted the egoism

of the national state as natural and to some extent legiti­

mate. Thus, he wrote of the acquisition of Finland and

Bessarabia as giving Russia her natural "ethnographic and

£5. Lednitskii, p. 6.
£6. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, Kratkoe posobie po russkoi
istorii, (Moscow, 1900), p. 135.
£7 . Maklakov, Slavic Review, p. 326.
 159

geographic f r o n t i e r s , a n d he says that the eighteenth

century did not understand the "religious-tribal tasks of

foreign policy."^ He criticized a plan of Count Rostop-

chin in the early nineteenth century to partition Turkey on

the grounds that it violated the religious and national

integrity of the peoples involved.90 Consequently Kliu­

chevskii accepted the natural geographic expansion of the

state and the validity of nationalism as a political

principle. Moreover, unless hisstatement about the

development ofthe nineteenth-centuryconception of the

tribal tasks of foreign policy is ironic, he seems to have

thought this a new and worthwhile conception.

Xenophobic nationalism was not characteristic of his

work. The tenor of his nationalism is milder and permits

an acknowledgement of the values of universal ideals. He

was able to cite examples where Russia was an aggressor in

her relations with the Vest. A notable example of this

appears in one of the first works he wrote at Moscow

University in 1365. Describing Tsar Ivan IV, Kliuchevskii

writes that foreign writers were quite correct in seeing

his reign as a "burning point" where Russia decisively

attacked her western neighbors.91 Kliuchevskii's

W . K u r s T T T W r ------------------------------------- ------------
39. ISI3.. p. 197.
90. IbI3.. p. 193.
91. Skazaniia inostrantsev. pp. 74-75.
 160

nationalism was not a matter of patriotic myopia but a far

more subtle and pervasive immersion in the conception of

national reality as the essential historical basis for all

judgments, moral, political, and scholarly. This is why

he seemed haunted throughout his life by the necessity to

describe the "good” or proper relationship of the Russian

nation to the general European community of which she was

a part. Yet, he never coherently or specifically defined

the terms of his argument. For while detailed differences

between Russia and Europe abound in his work, there is

inconsistency and ambiguity in his terminology. He speaks

of Russia and the countries of western Europe as if they

were bound together in some larger association. However,

the basis for that association is never quite clear. At

times it seems to be a common Christian civilization or

heritage. In an essay on Western Influences on the Church

Schism of the Seventeenth Century, he speaks of "Russia"

and "Europe" as "two worlds born of the same mother."^2

There is no clear exposition in Kliuchevskii's writing

either of the content of the Byzantine Christian tradition

or of the role of that tradition in Russian history. It

is true that he. credits the Christian influence with

contributing to the break-down of clan relations in Kievan

92. frapadnoe viianie. ucherki. pp. Au9-lU

 161

Russia and with a certain mitigation of pagan legal prac­

tices,^ but the exact nature of Russian orthodoxy and its

Byzantium origins is never spelled out in his work. The

Russian church itself is most usually identified by Kliu­

chevskii with antagonism to Western secular knowledge and

tradition. In Western Influences on the Church Schism

in the Seventeenth Century he mentions without any meliora­

tive reservations the low level of Russian Church intellect­

ual life. He does not specify in any precise fashion the

differences between Latin and Russian-Orthodox Christianity.

In short, while he refers to a "common mother" he leaves

the differences between the brothers unclear.

It may be that he had stronger feelings about the

Byzantine influence on Russian history than he let appear

in his work. On two occasions in his life he referred

privately in a fleeting, but unfavorable manner to the

Byzantine inheritance. Once as a young man he expressed

bitterness over the Byzantine church traditions inhibiting

influence on the natural joy of village merrymakers.^

In keeping with this early remark, early in the twentieth

century he was asked what he thought of the Byzantine

influence on Russian life and he replied with a metaphor.

$3. Kurs. I. Lektsiia XV.

94. HPjna, pp. 70-71.
 162

He said that there had once been a tart and tasty Russian

cabbage which had had its flavor ruined by a Greek sauce.^

Kliuchevskii is not always careful or unambiguous in

the terminology he uses to refer to Europe. In general the

terms ’’western," and "old Europe" are closely identified in

his mind with an advanced culture and an advanced formof

social organization. The following passage from the third

volume of the Course illustrates well the context in which

he uses these terms.

Less favorable was the cultural relation of

Russia to the West. In contrast to old Roman-
German Europe with its perfected social forms,
with its norms for good order which became
converted into social habits and even prejudices,
and with its huge store of knowledge, ideas, and
material resources accumulating almost from the
days of Romulous and Remus, stood new Russian
Europe with only talents...hopes...and a great
quantity of,recruits...but without firm cultural
resources.

At times Kliuchevskii will leave out the terra "west­

ern" when contrasting Russia to Europe. He does this when

discussing the Russian institution of serfdom which sets

Russia apart from Europe. In doing this Kliuchevskii was

echoing the thought of his teacher Solov’ev that serfdom

distinguished Russia from the civilized community of

95 • Mariia Golubtsova, ’'Vospominaniia o V. 0. Kliuchev-

skom,” U Troitsy v Akademii 1S14-1914: iubileinyi
sbornik istoricneskikh materially. (Moscow. 1914).
p. 67. The main work is hereafter cited as U Troitsv.
96. Kurs, IV, 224-225.
 163

Europe. However, Kliuchevskii never attempted to work out

and explain the various levels, moral, institutional, and

political in which he used such terms as "European” or

"Asiatic." He uses the term Asiatic in a context which

usually suggests despotism and crudity, as in the following

passage from the Course.

The wider became our use of the fruits of
western European culture the more we parted from
its strivings for freedom and equality. In
the measure that we acquired western European
forms of political and civil life, the character
and internal structure, of the state became all
the more Asiatic.9' /See note/

All of thi3 suggests that Kliuchevskii admired the

political and social values of western Europe. To. a

certain extent this is true. However, he may have had some

reservations toward parliamentary government as "granu­

lated" and destroying the organic unity of people and

government because it represented the power of wealth in

politics.93 This difficult question of his political and

social values will be left to a later chapter. It is

sufficient to note at this time that, despite such reserva­

tions, he undoubtedly respected and admired western society.

For while there is ambiguity in his definition of Europe he

undoubtedly used the word Europe in a meliorative sense.

W. ibid.. Ill. 3i$. When he originally wrote this passage
he included the words "and society" after the word
"state" in the last line, but later struck it out.
98. Tkhorzevskii, p. 196.
 164

His pride in the services of defence rendered to Europe

by Russia and his sensitivity to too extreme a disjunction
between Russia and Europe are evidence of this fact. In
an early review he published in the Historische Zeitschrift,
in 1676, he took a contemporary German historian to task
for not identifying Russia with Europe.
The chief failing of this book consists in the
fact that he /the author/ has a narrow grasp of
the meaning of European civilization. In the
history of the latter he has included only
western European types. But the absence of
several local marks of European culture in the
historical life of the Russian nation does not
justify the conclusion that the latter does.not
possess the basis of European c i v i l i z a t i o n . 9 9
Kliuchevskii specified a number of differences between
Russian development and that of the countries of western
Europe. In general he acknowledges the technical, cultural
and political backwardness of Russia vis a vis other Euro­
pean states. His analysis of the rise of serfdom, of the
autocracy, and the loss of individual freedom all emphasize
Russian backwardness. This emphasis on the special tragedy
of Russian history is expressed in a context which identi­
fies Russia with a broader European civilization shared
with the West. The argument is that Russia is backward
because she has stood on the border of Europe and has made
V. 0. Kliuchevskii. v. Bemhardi: Geschichte Russ-
lands und der europaischen politik in den jahren 1814-
IS317" Otzwy i otvetv (Petrograd, 1916), Appendix,
p. v. The main work hereafter cited as O t z w v .
 165

sacrifices in the defence of a common heritage she shares

with the West.
Our people were placed by fate at the eastern
gate of Europe as a guard against a break-in
by the heathen nomad of Asia. For whole centur­
ies it expended its strength in withstanding the
pressure of the Asiatics; some it killed, nour­
ishing the wide Don and Volga with both their
bones and its own. Other heathens were peace­
fully introduced into European society through
the doors of the Christian church. Meanwhile,
western Europe, freed from Mohammedan pressure
turned beyond the ocean to the New World, where
it found a wide and favorable field for its
labor and mind, exploiting those untold riches...
Thus, we found ourselves in the rear-guard of
Europe; we guarded the back of European civiliza­
tion. But guard service is always thankless and
is soon forgotten, particularly when it is ful­
filled. The more watchful the guard the more
fastly sleeps the guarded and the less disposed _inn
is he to value the sacrifices made for his repose.1UU
Again in another volume of the Course this idea is expressed
in terms which more explicitly point to the high cost which
Russia has payed for her service to the West.
This almost two century long struggle of Russia
with the Polovtsi had its significance in Euro­
pean history. At the time that the west Europe­
an crusaders were entering the Asiatic East, and
the same movement was taking place against the
Moors in the Iberian Peninsula, Russia was cover­
ing the left flank of the European advance. Yet
this historical service cost her dearly since it
dislodged her from her old location on the
Dnieper and altered the whole trend of her future-
life.101
T O O : Kurs. II. 397-98.
101. IbicL. I, 2S1-B2.
 166

These passages express the essential argument of Kliu­

chevskii 's explanation of the relationship of Russia and the
West. Pushed by his own interest in comparative national
history, by his deep love of the fatherland and, perhaps by
the demands of the climate of opinion of late nineteenth-
century Russia, he used his sociological and geographic
concept of historical causation to construct an apologia
for Russia's weaknesses cast in the form of positivistic
history. The form of this explanation is important. When
Kliuchevskii simultaneously concentrated on the institu­
tional and historical differences between Russia and Europe
and asserted Russia's membership in the European community
he ran into difficulties. It is at this point that the
philosophic confusion which characterized his view of histor
ical causation interfered with his developing a clear
conception of Russia's relationship to Europe. Behind his
ambiguities of terminology was a fundamental contradiction.
In his earliest major monograph, The Bovar Duma (16B1)
Kliuchevskii had posited the fundamental importance of geo­
graphy in defining the path of Russian historical develop­
ment. He continued to hold this view in the Course of
Russian History. If geography is one of the decisive
factors in the growth of national society and if Russian
society was bora and flourished in geographic conditions
 167

essentially different from those of other European states,

how did Kliuchevskii explain the similarity between Russia
and Europe which he asserted in other of his writings?
In the History of Legal Classes in Russia (1836) he had
argued that all Europe was undergoing a path of development
which saw the progressive equalization of social classes.
In this process the state played an essential role. In
the last portion of the Course of Russian History he argued
that since 1861 Russia had become a European state. Indeed
he dated the origin of this process even from the start of
the nineteenth century. However, that portion of his
historical theory which was positivistic and the majority
of his monographs on institutions supported the separate­
ness of Russia from Europe. The problem was that his asser­
tions of Russia's membership in Europe violated his own
documentation. It is true that he had vaguely asserted
in the early portions of the Course that all societies pass
through a scheme of development from the clan to family to
national state. But he never made this the basis for the
Course. It was as if he had assumed that Russia and Europe
were moving along two similar parallel roads and that
suddenly after 1861 the roads joined and became one
thoroughfare.
Kliuchevskii once criticized a student for proving
more than he asserted and asserting more than he proved.
 163

His own work is subject to this criticism. His monographs

proved a degree of difference between Russia and Europe
greater than he was willing to assert. He does not seem
to have been aware of this contradiction in his work.
Apparently, the fundamental membership of Russia in the
European community was an assumption so obvious to him
that it required neither theoretical definition nor speci­
fic documentation. The only way in which he could have
consistently united his facts and his theories would have
been to make more explicit the universal teleology suggested
in his picture of the emergence of the Muscovite state. If
the sociological theories were to be accepted then the
emergence of modern "European Russia" did not make theoret­
ical sense. If, on the other hand Russia was a part of a
general European development then the sociological theories
would have to have been qualified and supplemented by
something more than mere assertions.
It is difficult to find in Kliuchevskiifs work any
major change in his description of the relationship between
Russia and Europe. From his earliest student letters to
his final Course of Russian History he accepted Russian
membership in Europe but was plagued by Russia's back­
wardness and accepted with reservations the idea that
"Europe” constituted an ethical norm against which Russia
could be measured. In the late 'eighties and early part
 169

of the twentieth century he was forced to deal with the

problem on a scope much greater than in his early mono­
graphs. Both the History of Legal Classes and the Course
of Russian History required a general synthesis of Russian
history which meant that he had to refine and clarify his
thinking on the problem of Russia and the Vest. At this
point his synthesis broke down.
In the early twentieth century the course of Kliuchev­
skii *s own life and of the society in which he lived forced
him out of his academic isolation. His historiography may
not have undergone any essential change but he had to face
a practical choice as a citizen. This choice would indi­
cate the degree to which Kliuchevskii sympathized with the
values of Western constitutionalism. In order to under­
stand what this meant for Kliuchevskii we must turn to
the general question of his political and social values,
perhaps the most perplexing of all questions concerning
the man.
 170
CHAPTER IV
THE HISTORIAN AS MORALIST

Kliuchevskiifs moral views are best understood if

we accept the fact that he was first and foremost an
historian and an academician. Although he lived through
the most tumultuous period of nineteenth-century Russian
domestic history he never overtly participated in political
action until the end of his life. During the student
disturbances of the early 1360’s Kliuchevskii was notice­
able for standing aloof from radical activity, although
not from radical friends. An interesting story is told in
this connection. During his student days Kliuchevskii
was close to a circle of radical students generally from
the same milieu as himself; one of these students was later
involved in an attempt on the life of the Emperor Alexander
II. This group, known as the Ishiutin circle were among
the original Populists. Kliuchevskii often engaged in
student debates with them. One time, it is reported,
Ishutin told some others in the group that they should
"leave Kliuchevskii alone. He will follow another road.
He will be a scholar."^ Unfortunately it is not certain
that the Ishutin involved in this incident was Nikolai
Andreievich Ishutin, the radical Populist, but the

T~, Iakovlev, p. 100.

 171

probability that it was the same man is great. N. A.

Ishutin was almost the same age as Kliuchevskii, had
attended a secondary school at Penza, the same department
as Kliuchevskii, and we know that the young men in his
circle were largely from the department of Penza.^
The story, if true, captures an essential character­
istic of Kliuchevskii's life. A number of facts suggest
that from his student days and throughout his life,
Kliuchevskii1s primary loyalty was to the university and
scholarship. When he began his university career in 1361,
it was a time of disturbances among the students. In
October of 1361 a number of students staged a demonstra­
tion at Moscow University and Kliuchevskii's attitude
toward their actions is revealed in letters which he wrote
to a friend and in a letter to an uncle. He says that the
students "spoiled the affair from the start" by their
disorderly conduct. 3 While he agreed with some of the
objects of the student petition for freedom of thought, he
did not sign the petition because
It was issued in an unlawful form. Whoever
petitions for the abolition of something must
still adhere to the existing regulations. Is
this not so? In the second place,...this
address was not carefully framed - worse, it

T. Franco Venturi. Roots of Revolution (New 'York. 1^60).

p. 331.
3. Pis*ma. p. 5#.
 172

was done in a manner lacking submissiveness....

For example, in the address they did not say we
beg the following — no — but we direct, we
wish, we demand.5
Nine days later Kliuchevskii has become somewhat more
sympathetic to the student agitators since he dislikes the
brutality of the police and of rougher elements in the
crowd toward the students. However, he continues to
maintain that the agitators are "street urchins" not
truly representative of the student body. Above all it is
a "university matter" not an affair of s o c i e t y . 5 He
quotes with approval the address of the moderate Populist
F. I. Buslaev, urging the students to return to their
studies, and adds, "I wonder who of all these critics
is worth one word of a lecture from Buslaev or of any of
the other professors."^
The limited information we have on Kliuchevskii during
these early years confirms the impression of academic
withdrawal from current events which is found in his later
works. Writing of these early years the editor of his
letters comments,
His political convictions apparently changed
little. He continued to preserve the inherited

4^ I. A. Artobolevskii, "Iz pisem V. 0. Kliuchevskago,"

Golos Minuvshago. IV, (April 1913), p. 227.
5. Ibid.. p p . 228-29.
6. Pis'ma, p. 57.
 173

connection with the patriarchal conservatism

of the provincial clerical family. Truly, a
slight movement to the left can be noticed.'
and describing this movement he writes,
As Kliuchevskii broke with the seminary life
in the name of true knowledge, he was led in
his student years to review the excessively
religious and idealistic Weltanschauung which
held sway in clerical circles....Kliuchevskii
became a worshipper of free thought, searched
for a free conscience, and became a convinced
narodnik and to a significant degree freed
himself”from that traditional piety toward
authority without, however, going as far as
radicalism.°
During these early years Kliuchevskii was truly
working out his "own path." Like the Russian roads of
which he loved to write, it is a winding path not easy
to describe. However, certain characteristics of his
path are dear. He was no time server or merely a
frightened young seminarian determined to avoid annoying
authorities. Had he been such he could scarcely have
gained the friendship of those more radical than himself,
nor would the reactionary Minister of Education, Count
D. I. Delianov, have so feared him as to try to have him
removed from his teaching post at the Moscow Seminary.
Perhaps the most salient feature of these early years is
the way in which he turned to the university and more

jbid p> 58>

S. IEI3.: p. 33.
 174

specifically to history as a context within which to pose

and answer the personal and political questions which
bothered his young mind. As he broke with his background
he became caught up in the current positivist critique of
Christianity. In November of 1361 he was reading Feur-
bach’s On the Essence of Christianity and he wrote that
he had to submit Christianity to a searching historical
examination, for ’’without history now, as in any transi­
tional period, there is no salvation.”9 He will follow
history wherever it may lead and
Call before the Tribunal of History all those
holy fathers to ask them what they have done not
for themselves, not for the few, but for the
masses.!'3
He wishes to
Examine the whole historical path of Christi­
anity, to examine it impartially; and it is
all the same whatever the outcome of that
examination, even it it lead3 to the rejec­
tion of Christianity.il
Yet his boldness is mitigated by a remark that,
despite its faults, Christianity has a core which enables
one to be reconciled to it. This core has cured many of
the world’s wounds. He is troubled that his correspondent
may think his ideas too liberal, and he replies to this

9. Ibid.. ^ T t T.
10. T5TH., p. 75.
11. IblcT.. p. 75.
 175

charge that he despises the doctrinaire liberal.

This word...is hateful to me when it signifies
a blind.tearing down, which is how the majority
use it. 2
Yet he has found so much that was false in his
”childhood faith" that, despite the pain, he must break
with it. This does not mean that he is a "liberal but a
simple person, like any other, seeking truth.
Therefore, while there is no evidence that Kliuchev­
skii ever adhered to any of the systematic forms of
radicalism in his youth, it is clear that his thought was
becoming more secular and critical during this period. In
his first years in the university his friends were from a
"largely clerical b a c k g r o u n d , a n d they would "philo­
sophize with the fullest freedom."^5 The evidence of
Kliuchevskii1s role in these conversations is scanty and
conflicting. He was called "Robespierre" by some of his
contemporaries and was listened to with great attention
in the usually critical student circles.^ However, he
seems to have held opinions not shared by many of his

lZl Ibid..p. 75.

13. I H 5 ..p. 76.
14. Ibid., p. 20.
15. M. M. Kovalevskii, "Moskovskii universitet v kontse
70-x i nachale 30-x godov proshlago veka," Vestnik
Evropy. CCLXIII, (May, 1910), p. 1SS.
16. Koni,p. 171.
circle. He once defended the governments closing of a
student society at St. Petersburg University on the
grounds that the students were in error in their activities
and he was attacked for this view by all his friends.
Speaking of the conversations which the student circles
held he wrote to a friend that he had adopted the "ser-
pantine wisdom" of keeping his own council and found this
the only way to be left in peace among the "liberal
heretics who provoke ill-starred events."■*•? He scoffs at
the chilly abstractions which his fellow students mouth
about "the future, law, the successes of the father-
1$
land," and does not find the contemporary Russian scene
a place in which it is possible to cry "aux armes citoyens."

One must wait for better times when the field is more
fertile for plowing.2® These words were written in Janu­
ary of 1867 to a friend who was reputedly a "liberal"
and who had participated in student riots at Kazan Semi­
nary. Since this particular year was one of great govern­
mental suppression following the attempt on the Tsar’s
life in April of 1S66, Kliuchevskii's caution may have
reflected the new conditions. We know that during this

T f ~ . Pis’raa. p. 113.
13. IbTdT, p. 113.
19. Ibii.. p. 113.
20. Ibid., p. 116.
 177

year he was noted in his circle for ’’not always, but

often” expressing theories and attitudes close to those of
such conservative thinkers as M. N. Katkov, and B. N.
ol
Chicherin. He also seems to have been noted for an
attempt to maintain equanimity and peace among his polemi­
cal and passionate friends.22 in short, Kliuchevskii
demonstrated in these early years that somewhat non­
committal "ironically sober attitude toward authority"
which characterized his later life.23 interestingly
enough, he was more aroused and less circumspect on social
questions relating to the peasants’ welfare than in
political matters.24 Unfortunately, it is not possible
to give further concrete specific instances of what he
thought and felt about current social and political issues
since the only major source for these years of his life
are the few letters of Gvozdev. Consequently, in attempting
to portray the earlyyears ofKliuchevskii’sintellectual
life and their relation tothe moralisticfeatures of his
historiography one is left with a series of impressions
which are difficult to sustain by detailed evidence.
There is a passage in Professor Franco Venturi’s

21. Ibid.. p. ST".

22. Ibid.. p. 23.
23- IEIH., P. 23.
24. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Pamiati T. N. Granovskogo,’’
Sochineniia. VIII, 391.
 173

history of the Populist Movement, Roots of Revolution,

which describes the origin of a certain kind of Russian
liberalism. Although it refers to a generation immediately
prior to that of Kliuchevskii, I am going to quote this
passage because it mentions as one of the prime examples
of this type of intellectual a man Kliuchevskii referred
to as "the ideal model of a professor" and a man who
"taught his students to value scholarly knowledge as a
social force," This man was T. N. Granovskii. Moreover,
the passage illustrates the climate of opinion in which
Russian historiography developed, a tradition to which
Kliuchevskii was closely related through Solov’ev.
Venturi says that Russians of Granovskii’s type were
too learned and too exhausted by the effort of
escaping from the myths and metaphysics of
Romanticism to create new, active and effective
political ideals, and so gradually withdrew
more and more into historical research, literary
criticism and the study of customs....This
retreat into research, however, had one important
result. It inspired the reconsideration of
the problem of the Russian State and the
reforms of Peter the Great...In so doing it
opened up a way of escape from the blind alley
of the Slavophiles to a conception of history
which, though it created the myth of the
continuity and progressive function of the
State, nevertheless established with Granovsky,
Kavelin, Chicherin, and especially Soloviev the
foundations of modern Russian historiography.25

25 • Venturi, p. 24.
 179

While it would be unwise to explain Kliuchevskii in terms

of this tradition alone, similarities to the attitude
described above are found in his life. Certainly, he
withdrew from overt political action into the sphere of
scholarship and pedagogy. Throughout his career he tried
to keep the university and scholarship functioning under
the difficult conditions of his time. So strong was this
desire to do nothing to injure the university that
Kliuchevskii disagreed with some of his colleagues who
had left the university in protest against government
policies. In a conversation with the juridical historian,
B. N. Chicherin, Kliuchevskii remarked,
Don't you see? You did not sufficiently consider
your obligations and duty. The Tsar himself
expressed the wish for you to stay?
to which Chicherin replied,
You call it my obligation to stay. But from
my viewpoint, to act contrary to one's con­
science at an imperial order means to do
something loathsome and base.20
Kliuchevskii was stung by this reply and those present at
the incident tried to hush it up. Kliuchevskii himself
decided to stay at his post under difficult conditions in
the lBBO's. When the government passed a new repressive
university statute in 1334, he retained his position as

26. Trubetskoi, p. 11$.

 180

Dean of the Historical Faculty, even though he did not

agree with the new statute. As civil strife and distur­
bances grew in the late 'nineties Kliuchevskii continued
to maintain this position. In November of 1899 the
government closed Moscow University and General P. S.
Vannovskii, a government official who was relatively
liberal in his attitude toward the universities, was
appointed head of a commission to investigate conditions in
the universities.^ On the occasion of the closing of
Moscow University, Vannovskii addressed a meeting of the
faculty in which he urged them not to feel persecuted;
although their teaching activities were temporarily cut
off they still had another important task — "scholarly
research." Kliuchevskii called these words "the wisest he
had ever heard spoken." 28
Immersion in scholarship and the university did not
mean for Kliuchevskii a refusal to judge contemporary
life, but instead was an expression of his conviction that
only study and history could provide the basis for any
true reform of Russian life. One of the outstanding
characteristics of his writings is his deep feeling for
the university as the focal point for the resolution of
Tf. Sergei Pushkarev. The Emergence ot Modern Russia (New~
York, 1963), pp. 199-200.
28. A. A. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletji: vosgomin-
aniia. 1881-1914. (Prague, 1929)» P* 247-48. Hereafter
cited as Na rubezhe.
 181

political and social questions. He was convinced that

there was only one place where civic consciousness and the
demands of the individual mind meet in a free situation and
that was the university.!
I know of only one place where both those
processes which essentially are the stuff of
all history meet and unite, that is, the work
of the individual mind and the movement of
social thought. That place is the university
lecture hall.29
In several of his minor essays, Kliuchevskii made
passing references to the close relationship that had
existed between Moscow University and society. Writing in
Russian Thought in 1894 he recalled with pride that the
university was not society's "debtor" and argues: "Why
should one add up accounts between these two? Certainly
they will both be the richer the more they enter into
each others debt."^ In his article on Granovskii he
portrayed that scholar as reinforcing and building the
tradition of the university as the hope and conscience of
society in dark times.^
Committed to the idea of the university as the source
of true knowledge, Kliuchevskii did not wish to sacrifice
scholarly objectivity to polemical necessity. Rubinstein

29. Istoriia soslovii. SocfajLneniia. VI. 298.

30. HVospominaniia o N. N . Novikove...," Sochineniia,
VIII, 252.
31. "T. N. Granovskii," Ibid.. 390-91.
 1B2

has remarked that when one reads his early student letters

one receives the impression that his thought was "on the

side of the professorial group."^2 It continued to be

throughout his life. When he was chairman of the Imperial

Historical Society, he was instrumental in keeping the

sessions of the society closed to the "general public,”

remarking that "the street has no place here."33* That

he was not unwilling to give time to popular educational

activities is demonstrated by the fact that he participated

in popular lectures for women organized by the progressive

pedagogue, Vladimir Ivanovich Gerie.-^* The point was

rather that his main loyalties and activities remained

always with the university.

If the university was the place for the discovery of

beneficial knowledge, history was the subject indispensable

to social progress. The early interest in history as a

tool of analysis with which to approach Christianity was

expanded and refined until it colored virtually all of

Kliuchevskii1s intellectual activities. History meant

continuity, an avoidance of abstract schemata of reform.

JT, N. A. Rubinstein, ed.. V. 0. Kliuchevskii. Kurs Russ-

koi istorii (Moscow, 1937), I* Introduction, p. v.
Hereafter cited as Rubinstein, Introduction.
33. E. V. Barsova, "V. 0. Kliuchevskii kak predsedatel
obshchestva," Chteniia, p. 39.
34* Liubovskii, Chteniia. p. 19.
 183

It enabled him to avoid the nihilism characteristic of

student circles in his youth. But to be an historian did
not mean to reconcile oneself to the existing order, to
accept the "rationality of the real." In a letter dated
January 21, 1862, Kliuchevskii cried out against the social
passivity implied by this doctrine.
Under such a view it is necessary to be recon­
ciled with everything. To justify everything
and to act against nothing....Such an attitude
is no better than a dead fatalism.
Far from accepting such a doctrine, Kliuchevskii
acknowledged the possibility of the historian being a
moralist. In an article he wrote on S. M. Solov’ev as a
teacher, he pointed to the legitimate kind of moralizing
engaged in by Solov’ev.
Solov’ev was an historian-moralist....1 do not
see in this a scientific error. Solov'ev’s
practical /historical^ activity and moralizing
were similar, but in the case of his moralistic
activity he applied the scientific concept of
cause and effect relationships to the phenomena
of good and evil, to intentions and their results.
Solov'ev was a historian-moralist in the simple
sense that he did not exclude from his field
of observation the motives and phenomena of
moral life. Who of Solov'ev’s listeners will not
remember for his whole life these moral com­
mentaries: that ’society’ can only exist under
conditions of sacrifice, when its members are
aware of the obligation to sacrifice private
interest to the general;...that society is firmer
the more clearly its members are aware that the

35. Pis’ma. p. 84
 134

basis of society is ’sacrifice*; that ’European

quality will always triumph over Asiatic quantity”
and that that quality is "the preponderance of
moral force over material force."’6
There was another and more profound sense in which
history had for Kliuchevskii a didactic and moral value.
It was above everything the subject for the realist who
wished to know what was possible and to take the proper
social action. In 1394, the year before he wrote the
above passage on Solovfev, Kliuchevskii included in some
notes he was preparing for his Course of Russian History
a long detailed exposition of the difference between the
true historian and the narrator of historical tales. He
pointed out that the true business of the historian is
the tracing of cause and effect relationships, the revela­
tion of the pattern of historical growth, while the mere
chronicler of the past seeks abstract edifying moral examples.
Moreover, the historian assumes the possibility of the.
practical application of his study to the needs of human
society.37 jn the introductory portion of the Course
itself Kliuchevskii quite clearly states that more than
any other people the Russians must know their past in
order to solve current problems.

36. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "S. M. Soloviev kak prepodavatel,"

Sochineniia. VIII, 261.
37. Sochineniia. VI, Komentarii, pp. 477-79.
33. Kurs, I, 42.
 165

He goes further and says that

The value of any kind of knowledge is measured
by its relation to our needs, strivings, and
course of action.39
and in another part of the Course he reminds his listeners
that it is only through
the immediate sharp and deep observation of
private life, nature, people, and human rela­
tions as they are, not as they are created by
ideas, that human life is built and trans­
formed, 40 /italics in the original/ —
Although Kliuchevskii was committed to pure scholarship,
to the preservation of the university as a place aloof
from the more active forms of involvement in contemporary
issues, at the same time he asserted the paramount aim of
scholarship as social utility. In a muted manner he
faced a problem that was characteristic of his society and
his time. It has been remarked of Kliuchevskiifs genera­
tion that it loved to nclothe ethical norms in the language
of usefulness A crisis was forced upon the Russian
scholar by his simultaneous love of the objective standards
of the newly acquired positivism and his passionate desire
to enunciate political values which would lead to a
reform of society. In such a political person as N. K.
Mikhailovskii this struggle gave rise to the Subjective

39. Sochineniia. I. 42.

40. Ibid.. p. 364.
41. Ivanov-Razumnik, p. 35.
 1S6

School of Sociology with its contention that abstract

empirical truth and social truth or utility can be joined

and that a teleological element is not only necessary but

unavoidable in the study of society.^ jn Kliuchevskii’s

case the problem of subjective usefulness and objective

truth is never clearly faced. He never mentions Mikhailov-

skii’s work, although he must have known of it. Unlike

Mikhailovskii, Kliuchevskii, for reasons that we cannot

fully document did not enter the political or social struggle

directly. His bias was toward the initial step of esta­

blishing the objective "truth” of Russian history. He

lacked the epistomological sophistication of a Mikhailov­

skii. Yet, unavoidably, moral feeling and social and

political values permeated his work.

The development of individual personality and the

relation of the individual to the state forms one of the

fundamental themes in Kliuchevskii’s historiography. In

the second lecture of the Course he tells his listeners

that it is possible to measure the "moral level of a soci­

ety" by the degree to which that society shows an awareness

of the necessity to restrict the interests of the individual

on behalf of the welfare of the community, without sacri­

ficing the liberties necessary to the development of

42. tbld.. pp. 1^2-76.

 1S7

personality. Law is the objective description of the

degree of success a community has achieved in this task.
This particular passage, which was probably written as
early as the academic year l$£4-85 is not specific as to
the means necessary for reaching the legal state. However,
in 1&95 in a sketch version of the Course he generalized
more fully on this topic. He argued in this manuscript
that each people have two great historical tasks; the
establishment of external and domestic security, and
provision of the individual with the means for intel­
lectual and moral growth.
For a nation's life to follow a full, normal,
and straight course there must be a just
proportion between the energy expended on
these two tasks....The alteration of this
proportion through the demands or pretensions
of the state, or through an especially heavy
burden in foreign defence, retards the suc­
cesses of private welfare, the development of
personality.4-3
To this observation Kliuchevskii adds his usual
lament at the particular harshness of Russian history and
the unfavorable conditions for the development of "per­
sonality."^ At one point when he was working on the
third volume of the Course in 1906-1907 and reworking
the lectures given in the 'eighties, Kliuchevskii advanced

43• Kurs. I. 3#3.

44. Ibid., pp. 3&3-&4*
 1SS

the idea that the fundamental "regularity” and logic of

historical life was exemplified in the fact that the
successes made in one sphere of life is accompanied by
setbacks in other spheres. A specific instance of this
general observation is the case of Russia where the suc­
cesses of the state were achieved at the sacrifice of the
welfare of the individual. This form of antithesis, state
versus individual, is one of the main characteristics of
the entire Course. Its theoretical base is the concept
of the public and the private domain as constantly warring
poles throughout history. The true legal state in Kliu­
chevskii’s mind was linked with the common welfare of the
citizens and with the securing to them of civil and poli­
tical freedom. He praises Peter the Great for approaching
a legal conception of the monarch.^ The history of
Russia is the history of a ’’winding and difficult” path
toward freedom.^ In Russia, as the "state grew fat the
people withered away,"^ and Kliuchevskii repeatedly
attacks arbitrary government and the lack of law. He
attacks the Russian habit of judicial denunciation, the
arbitrary tax collectors of Peter the Great’s time, and

45'. "Ibid.; TV: j5'6T

46. TH3., Ill, 373.
47. Ibid.. p. 12.
4d. Ibid.. IV, 166.
 139

the corruption of the eighteenth-century gentry which he

describes in the following words:

They were true children of the fiscal police-

state which nurtured them with its contempt
for law and human personality and with its
attack on the moral sense.

Russia is presented as a land in which there was lack

of free personality, and it was not until the first

contacts with the West that "the notion of personal secur­

ity was awakened."^® In one of his forceful and biting

summations Kliuchevskii described the different govern­

ments which Russia had known in the following terms:

The people to this day remember and know old

Kiev with its princes and knights, with its
monasteries of St. Sophia and Pechersky. They
have loved and honored it sincerely as they
have loved and honored none of the other Capi­
tols which have taken its place, neither Vladimir
on the Kliazma, nor Moscow, nor St. Petersburg.
They have forgotten Vladimir and indeed, knew
little of it in its own time. Moscow was a burden
on the people and they respected it a bit and
were rather afraid of it, but they did not
sincerely love it. St. Petersburg they neither
love, nor honor, nor even fear.->J-

It would seem that Kliuchevskii accepted the anti­

thesis of state and people as characteristic of Russian

history. Such a view was not unusual in contemporary

historiography. The opposition between the people and the

W- Ibid.. p. 2547
50. Ibid.. V, 437.
51. Ibid.. I, 203.
 190

hostile alien state machine was a theme among the radical

Populists and conservative Slavophiles. In Russian histori­
ography, A. P. Shchapov (I83O-S3 ), who was achieving
reknown just when Kliuchevskii entered Moscow University,
was a notable example of this view of Russian history.52

Much in Kliuchevskii!s background would seem to suggest

a Populist slant for his historiography in this respect
at least. In one of his early letters he contrasted the
53
Russian people with the ’’German breeches wearers” of
the government. This attitude appears repeatedly in his
later writings. The seventeenth century is pictured as
a time when the people and the state grew farther and
farther apart. Despite his good intentions, Peter the
Great oppressed the people. Yet, Kliuchevskii”s anti-state
attitudes are less than they appear. Kliuchevskii is no
enemy of the state per se. His comments against the state
are limited to a particular kind of state and to the
failure of particular classes to perform their duties in
a way which would represent a "healthy” social condition.
There are fundamental reasons why we would err to consider
Kliuchevskii anti-statist in his historiography. In the

J2~. 6n ShcHapov see. V. 1. fricheta. Vvedevie v russkogo

istoriiu (Moscow, 1922), pp. 139-40.
53. Pis’ma. p. 24. Kliuchevskii borrowed this phrase from
Buslaev.
 191

first place, despite his reputation as a popular historian

his work is fundamentally a history of the rise of the
political structure of Russia in terms of the participating
classes. Unlike Shchapov he seldom deals with regional, local
or ethnic history in great detail. His philosophic assump­
tions as set forth in the sections on methodology in the
Course of Russian History and in the History of Legal
Classes accept the state as the culmination of a tele-
ological process, in which the nation finds the fullest
expression of its personality. His very assumption that
the legal structure of a society was a good indication
of its ”moral level” assumes that law is the expression of
a peoples' historical life. Moreover, Kliuchevskii saw
in the state the ultimate hope for a reconciliation of
class interests, as we have noted in previous chapters.
This is particularly noticeable in the History of Legal
Classes. In this work he acknowledged that a solid aware­
ness of class interests is one path toward the establish­
ment of representative institutions, but he pointed out
that in some countries the government itself became aware
of ”the necessity for representative institutions in order
to reconcile class interests and to arouse these classes to
friendly joint action.^ In the same work he outlines the
5^. Sostav soborakh. Sochineniia. VIII. 13.
 192

general conditions under which truly representative insti­

tutions can grow up, conditions lacking in Russia:
The various classes of society must be aware
of and recognize these interests, and feel
such mutual solidarity about them that they not
merely desire something, but are able to engage
in joint and friendly participation in govern­
ment, without converting that representation into
an arena for new civil quarrels and without it
becoming a new source of anarchy, instead of a
support for order.55
In this passage, first published in the journal Russian
Thought in the 1890’s, Kliuchevskii recognizes consensus
as necessary to a functioning political order; this is
perfectly in keeping with the focus of his interest ever
since the early days of the Boyar Duma. At the heart of
the Boyar Duma was the idea that the juridical and poli­
tical importance of state institutions is fundamentally
defined by the classes participating in these institutions.
Throughout his writings he emphasizes the periods when the
cooperation of all classes declines. In the study of the
Zemskii Sobors of Ancient Russia he points out that it
did not always matter that some of the representatives were
government appointees since "at that time there was not
the antagonism /between government and society/ which now
e x i s t s . T h e Boyar Duma bemoaned the loss of civic

55. Ibid.. p. 1%;..

56. Ibid.. p. 175..
 193

feeling and devotion to the common welfare which charac­

terized the Russian society of the thirteenth and four-

57
teenth centuries. In the third volume of the Course he
attacks the lack of "civic feeling" on the part of the
officials of the early Romanov dynasty.^ in an article
published in 1397 he again brought up the point that ever
since the Time of Troubles Russian turned against Russian
and the "sense of moral solidarity was lost."^ The time
of Catherine the Great is pictured as one of material
growth but "moral enfeeblement" due to the constantly
increasing gulf between the classes.^®
The counterpart of this distaste for class antagonism

is a conviction that it can be avoided. Unlike the

Marxists, Kliuchevskii did not think of class conflict as

representing a fundamental contradiction which could only

be ended by revolution. The state could reconcile class

differences and indeed the Russian state was slowly doing

just that. In the final portion of the Course Kliuchev­

skii viewed the nineteenth century state as constantly

striving for the legal equality of all citizens and

for the cooperation of all classes in the state.^ Even

57. Boiarskaia Duma. p . 77.

53. KursTTIT," 2557
59. rtZapadnie vliianie," Ocherki. p. 339.
60. Kurs. V, 173-79.
61.. Ibid.. p. 201.
 194

Paul I is portrayed as leading the assault on class

privilege and Nicholas I and his bureaucracy lay the basis
62
for the Emancipation of 1861. In a sketch for an addi­
tion to the Course which he wrote just prior to his death,
Kliuchevskii wrote that the liberation of the serfs estab­
lished a "normal” state order and that with that act the
Russian state became a true state in the fullest sense of
the t e r m . D e s p i t e the fact that he wavered and changed
his judgment of individual monarchs he consistently held
to the view that with the Reforms the process of the
regularization of the state life had been achieved and
that Russia was now truly a European state.
The possibility that the State could act above the
interests of classes and interest groups assumed the
possibility of altruistic activity on the part of
citizens. Yet, such a view was consistent with Kliuchev­
skii fs view of human nature. There is no point in lamenting
the loss of civic consciousness and praising sacrifice
for the common welfare unless man can rise above his petty
interests. Without such a possibility, Kliuchevskii’s
exhortation to his students in the Course to learn history
in order to set the state in order would have little

VT. Ibid.. V. 189 and 263-64.

63. Ibid.. p. 463.
 195

meaning. If the students’ social consciousness was mired

in a nexus of determining class relationships, the kind of

autonomous intelligent action which can lead to reform

would not be possible. He held that for every

thinking person there is a necessity to have

a fund of understanding of society and of
social obligations, of civic ethics.... *

and even the striving toward individual economic gain

and personal happiness leads to

elements which curb egotism. These elements

arise from the fact that in economic life...
there is a desire for the protection of personal
freedom, both external and internal, intellectual
and moral. On the highest level these aspira­
tions will reveal themselves in a conception
of the common welfare and in a feeling of moral
obligation,to act for the benefit of the
community.

However, the deep sense of history and time which

colored Kliuchevskii’s approach to every question led him

to recognize that different societies had different con­

ceptions of social morality. In one of his minor essays

he even suggested that the idea of the welfare of the

individual as the raison d ’etre of society was developed

late in historical evolution.^ And in the Course he warns

his readers not to judge the legislative norms of old

W. Ibid.. IV.-lS:
65. Ibid., I, 39.
66. ”0 vzgliade khudozhnika na obstanovku i ubor izobrazh
aemogo im litsa,” Sochineniia. VIII, 29&ff.
 196

Muscovy in terms of the modern respect for the individual. ^7

Despite this warning he repeatedly mentions with

approval Russian statesmen who attempt to curb arbitrary
state government and develop a legal state. Thus, he
gives three pages of the third volume of the course to an
analysis of a treaty between the King of Poland and the
Russian nobility during the time of Troubles because it
represents the high point of Muscovite political con­
ceptions and even approaches the idea of personal
inviolability from arbitrary government. He portrays
the constitutional projects of the various classes in
1730 as a search for legality and says this groping is
what unites all classes.^ He is painfully aware of the
arbitrary nature of the nobles1 power over the peasantry
and when he finds an isolated figure seeking some juridical
definition of the serfs’ position his moral sense and his
national pride combine, as in the following praise of a
seventeenth century statesman:
Anisim Maslov is one of those state servitors such
as appear in the dark periods of national life
and through their appearance aid us in recon­
ciling ourselves if not to the period, then at
least to the country which gave them birth.70

W. Kurs. III. 143: IV. 186.

66. TbTcL. Ill, 41-45.
69. I H 5 .. IV, 274.
70. Ibid.. p. 313.
 197

This distaste for arbitrary authority was a constant

throughout Kliuchevskii1s life. At the university he

reacted against the dogmatic and rigid discipline of the

seminary. He wished to write a satire on seminary life,

but could not find a publisher and he wrote a friend

that he was happy to escape the "suffocating atmosphere"^

of the seminary. This dislike of oppressive authority

finds more general expression in the biting sarcasm of his

Course with its references to Russian torture chambers and

the lack of free personality in Russian history. He made

many of these allusions during the repressive era of the

’eighties and it was this scorn of unlimited authority which

led students to think of him sympathetically. However,

he was never sanguine in his hopes for the development of

freedom in Russia and his attitude toward this matter

changed somewhat toward the end of his life. This change

was linked to a change in his general historiography.

Kliuchevskii’s early works emphasized the unique and

particular nature of Russian history. When he first en­

countered the idea of a universal regularity in the

historical process he did not like the idea. Listening to

the lectures of Iurkevich he complained he could not agree

with the thesis that the state was a logically necessary

71. Pis'ma. pp. H." 100. arid ID'8.

higher form of historical development.*^ Moreover, he
doubted that change meant progress and he blamed his mentor,
Solov’ev, for justifying the Moscow despotism as a neces­
sary stage of d e v e l o p m e n t .73 However, while rejecting the
teleological portions of Iurkevich's teaching, Kliuchev­
skii was enthralled by the conception of the world as the
"result of the multifarious combination of fixed ele­
ments. "7^ Turning away from the universal regularity of
history, Kliuchevskii set forth in the Boyar Duma his own
generalization of Russian history. In keeping with the
Boyar Duma most of his early works emphasize the uniqueness
of Russian history.
Nevertheless, in his conception of causation, his
view of the role of the individual in history, and the
relationship of Russia to western Europe, we have seen how
he alternated an emphasis on the unique and accidental
with occasional references to the regularity and universal
teleology of history. It is difficult to trace any
consistent or coherent pattern of development in his thought
on this question of universal regularity. As has been
pointed out by Kizevetter, who examined an early manuscript
portion of the Course of Russian History given in the

72. Ibid.. p. 31.

73. Ibid.. p. 84.
74. Ibid.. p. 85.
 199

’seventies,75 the essential conception of the Course never

changed from that outlined in the Bovar Duma. However, in
The History of Legal Classes in Russia, written in the first
semester of 1886-8? he went very far indeed toward ac­
cepting a pattern of development common to all peoples.
Certainly, in the final version of the Course his meth­
odological conceptions try to blend an abstract process
of development with an assertion of the special circum­
stances of Russian history. The question of primary
interest is what was the relationship between this leaning
toward an abstract universalism and Kliuchevskii’s poli­
tical values? Did his willingness to admit the possibility
of a similarity between the Russian experience and that of
Europe in general reflect a new admiration or confidence
in western constitutionalism? Kliuchevskii had always been
a constitutionalist in the sense that he admired the legal
state. He had always been a Populist in the vague sense
that he loved, but did not glorify, the people. Toward
the end of his career was he moving toward a union of his
populism and his constitutionalism by accepting the
necessity of an evolution along parliamentary lines?

75. Supra, p. 63.

 200

There is no simple and easy answer to this question.

Most Russian commentators on Kliuchevskii emphasize his
nationalism and aloofness from abstract schemata. One
emigre writer looking back on the influence of his Course
and finding much to praise, nevertheless came to the
final conclusion that his history was too parochial and
destroyed the sense of universal ideals.
Our generation has the imperative necessity to
break from the magic circle of Kliuchevskii,
from his local, confined, domestic themes, and
return again to the world scope of the forties.76
There is much in Kliuchevskii’s writings which, if not
entirely justifying such a point of view, at least explains
how a mind with a love of universal themes could arrive at
such an estimate of his work. Kliuchevskii had reservations
about western parliamentarianism which he criticized in
terms reminiscent of the Populists and Slavophiles. As
early as the first version of the Boyar Duma a hint of this
attitude appears. He told his readers
Experience has taught us more than once that a
beneficial constitutional order can...in some
cases be limited to mere successes in parli­
amentary rhetoric and that laissez faire can
be turned to the exploitation of the
community by one class. In short the most
careful regard for the technical forms of
the political structure cannot eliminate

76. Fedotov, p. 362.

 201

those disasters which occur under worse

forms /of government/.''
Seven years later in the History of Legal Classes, he
was more forceful in his language. Describing the method
of voting in contemporary parliamentary states he wrote:
representation is distributed among eligible
citizens according to the taxes that they pay....
The contemporary European state represents a
complicated mechanical apparatus constructed on
the basis of an economic and juridical arrange­
ment which unites fragmented individuals into one
whole on the basis of their contribution to the
state. This is called in the language of
western Europe political freedom....
Society has been smashed into the tiniest of
particles the comparative value of which cannot
be seen with the naked eye and must be seen by
the microscopic examinations of the ministry of
finance with its statistics as it distributes
taxes. This political pulverization of society
is the result of the abolition of the hereditary
rights and privileges on which Etat distinctions
were based....The political position of the
individual in the contemporary state can be
viewed as a constant nomadic wandering from
political group to political group in accordance .
with failure or success in the economic struggle.
While such language does not imply rejection of
parliamentarianism, it does suggest that Kliuchevskii was
less than sanguine about the total worth of such a system.
This impression is supported by the remarks of Kliuchev-
skii’s friends and students. Paul Miliukov has written

77. Quoted in JtLliukov. Kharakteristi. p. 2l3.

7&. "Istoriia soslovii.11 Sochineniia. VI, 237-S3.
 202

that Kliuchevskii shared the "democratic-narodnik distrust

of constitutions,” but that as a result of the shock of
1905 he came closer toward ”the reconciliation of his
democratism and his constitutionalism.Miliukov may

not be a reliable witness. As a student he felt that

Kliuchevskii may have distrusted his "political tendencies"
and suggests that may have been one of the reasons Kliu­
chevskii opposed his entering into advanced studies in
3n
Russian history. In Kliuchevskii!s writings for the
period before 1905, there are indications that he was
troubled by the problem of social harmony and individual
freedom. One of the most interesting, because one of the
most oblique and probably unintentional references to the
problem is to be found in a lithographed version of the
Course given in 1332-33. In comparing the independent
trading community of Novgorod with Moscow he contrasts the
two in the following way:
Moscow gives the impression of an anthill, much
scurry and fuss, but no life, many patiently
burdened backs, but no faces (dimly seen indi­
viduals ), a huge amount of untiring collective
work, but no trace of personal happiness....
we see society, the community, but no people
and we begin to grieve for the individual.

79. Miliukov. Kharakteristiki. p. 212.

30. Miliukov, Vospominaniia. pp. 119-21.
 203

but in Novgorod
there is a political order in which there are
only people and society cannot be seen. Due
to the boisterous and ambitious rich you
cannot see the people. It is a place where
everyone is for himself and no one is for
all, where only interests play a role and
where there is no clear law. Novgorod is the
apotheosis of capital.
Here again is evident the love of social harmony and
the distrust of extreme individualism found in the first
version of the Boyar Duma and in the History of Classes.
If during the late ’eighties and early ’nineties there was
a crisis in Kliuchevskii's search for social harmony and
social freedom, there are only random hints in the sur­
viving evidence. At home with students, when they would
press him on current political questions he would answer
with
jests sown with paradox with which it was
difficult to agree and indelicate to disa­
gree.
Kizevetter remarks that Kliuchevskii "spoke with bitter
irritation about the political novelties of the times,
and Maklakov writes that "his individualism made him look
askance at the new political parties and organizations"^
and further writes

51. Kurs. it. 4l8.

52. Miliukov, Vospominaniia. I, 93.
53. Kizevetter, Istoricheskie otkliki, (Moscow, 1915).
p. 390.
54. Maklakov, "V. 0. Kliuchevskii," p. 327.
 204

During the period of1the liberation movement and

the constitutional reforms many active politicians
imagined that they had convinced him and won
him over to their camp. What he thought about
them is a secret which he took to the grave. 5
Unfortunately one begins to suspect that men found in
Kliuchevskii what they wanted to find. For Miliukov he
was a positivist and eventually a liberal, for Trubetskoi
an opponent of positivism, and for Maklakov an enigma.
Yet there is substantial evidence that the crisis of 1905
did affect him and lead him to either suppress or attenuate
his skepticism toward parliamentary institutions. As a
result of this event he took a more active part in politics.
Kliuchevskii was involved in the crisis of 1905 in two
ways - through the invitation of the government to partici­
pate in the Peterhof Conference of advisors on the proper
kind of constitutional government needed by Russia and
later, through becoming an active candidate of the Cadet
Party, or as it was sometimes known, the Party of the
Peoples* Freedom. In the first of these projects the
government invited Kliuchevskii to participate in the
Peterhof Conference with the feeling that he was a "safe"
academician with an enormous reputation and the recommen­
dation of having served as the historical tutor of one of

W- Ibid.. p. 3297
the Imperial Family. Certainly, prior to 1905 the Govern­
ment seems to have trusted Kliuchevskii. In 1693-95 he
was considered a "conservative” by the government.^6
At the time of the accession of the new Tsar, he "stood
aloof from the liberal circles, but keenly followed the
course of social life."*^ At the time of the death of
Alexander III, Kliuchevskii read an address in which he
praised the foreign policy of that Tsar as conducive to
peace, without referring to that monarch1s domestic
policy. This address so angered the students, who were
generally sympathetic to Kliuchevskii, that his popularity
was diminished for a time. The disturbance became so
great that for two days the students rioted in front of
Kliuchevskii’s lecture hall and hissed him in the course
of his lecture.^ Yet, at this very time Kliuchevskii was
entertaining doubts about the future of the monarchy.
During an evening walk he encountered his student and
colleague Kizevetter and remarked to him:
Mark my words: Nicholas II will end the
Romanov dynasty, and if a son is born to
him he will not be crowned.°9

66. Thkorzhevskii, p. 169.

67. Kizevetter, Na Rubezhe, p. 197*
66. Olga Trubetskaia, Kniaz S. N. Trubetskoi (New York,
1953), p. 21.
69. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe. p. 197*
 206

These years of the ’nineties leading up to 1905 were

the years in which the professional classes were becoming
disenchanted with the government. While we do not know
the exact extent to which Kliuchevskii shared in this
development, it is clear that by the time of the Peterhof
Conference, he was skeptical of the government’s inten­
tions. He expressed the private conviction that he had
only been invited to participate in the conference because
the government wished to cloak their aims under a ’’scholarly
label. ”90 ne remarked that certain conservative members
of the State Council wanted the Duma to be "a cat so
they can step on its tail to see how it h o w l s . ”9^

Kliuchevskii’s actions in the Peterhof Conference

speak well for his integrity and courage, but do not tell
us much about his attitudes toward parliamentary insti­
tutions. He spoke out vigorously against representation
in the Duma on a class basis. His argument was that class
representation would convince the nation that the Duma had
been created for the purposes of protecting the interests
of the gentry. 92 Moreover, the gentry, judging by their

90. Mariia Golubtsova, p. 676.

91. Ibid.. p. 674.
92. Bernard Pares, ”The Peterhof Conference of 1905,”
Russian Review. (London, 1913), II, 105.
 207

actions in their assemblies, often "degenerate into

the simple intolerance of the opinions of others."93
Yet, this attitude does not label Kliuchevskii a liberal.
Pobedonotsev himself was against class representation at
this time, and many of the conservative members of the
conference were inclined to place great faith in the
conservative inclinations of the peasantry. But Kliuchev­
skii went further; he argued that the Duma should have
no limitations on its power to bring matters to the atten­
tion of the throne and that the Duma should have some say
in the question of defining its own competence.94 ^he
Duma was for him a source of information, a link between
crown and country, and he explained that
to know the disposition of the country is an
essential need of the government and this
knowledge can only be given by the D u m a . 95
It seems probable that although Kliuchevskii advo­
cated peasant representation, he felt a certain distrust
of their political competence. He argued that no harm
would be done by peasant representation, especially if
they voted for "really competent persons who clearly
understand the interests of the rural population and are
able to defend them in the Duma not worse but even better

93. ' 3 W . T pT T P S T
94. Ibict.. p. 104.
95. ISIS., p. 96.
 208

than themselves."^ Who such people would be is not clear.

On the role of minority opinion Kliuchevskii expressed an
unusual faith in the eventual triumph of the right decisions.
In terms reminiscent of a western liberal he argued that,
If the idea of the minority has vitality, it
will not be lost. In a given house it may be
rejected, but it will triumph in the end: the
majority, if not all, will pass over to it.97
Such faith in the triumph of "vital ideas" is natural for
the Kliuchevskii who saw i860 as a turning point in Rus­
sian history, for the Kliuchevskii who urged his students
to become students of history in order to become good
citizens. It is not clear what he means by "vital", but
the most coherent meaning in terms of his life and work is
the idea of historical viability or conformity with the
contemporary needs of Russian society. He had, after all,
always attacked abstract ideas for their own sake. How­
ever, in taking such a view of the role of minority
opinion he shows himself, in this instance, more favorable
to parliamentary institutions than the early strictures of
his writings suggest.
Once the Duma became an actual fact Kliuchevskii
moved decisively if briefly into the political arena. He
became a member of the Cadet Party and ran for the Duma in

W. Ibid.. p. IU8T
97. Ibid.. p. 116.
 209

in March of 1906. The intriguing question of what position

Kliuchevskii would have occupied in the spectrum of the
Duma is left unanswered since he was defeated by an Octo-
berist, Professor V. A. Sokolov, and by a wealthy lumberman,
S. S. S h a r i k o v . Even at this time of political activity,
however, he was reticent about his position. On being
asked where he stood regarding contemporary questions he
QQ
replied slyly that "he was neither God's or the devil's."77
A sufficiently ambiguous remark to plague a future student
of his work. Thereafter, he played no direct role in
politics and even refused appointment to the State Council
as a representative of the academic community. He re­
turned to Moscow and forsook the western capital which he
disliked. One rather suspects that had he continued his
political life, Kliuchevskii would have been closer to the
right wing, Maklakov, section of the Cadet Party than to
that of Paul Miliukov.^®® /See note7 In particular Kliu­
chevskii was disappointed with the Viborg Manifesto and
thought that a moment had come in Russia's constitutional
struggle which had been lost.^^ The evidence does not

9$. Mariia Golubtsova, p. 674.

99. Ibid., p. 674.
100. Note: I say this despite Miliukov's statement that
after 1905 Kliuchevskii and he were in "complete agree­
ment" in their views., Miliukov, Vospominaniia. 11,51.
101. Iakovlev, p. 131.
 210

suggest what Kliuchevski thought should have been done on *~

this occasion, but since it could not have been a turn to
revolution, if he followed the habits of a lifetime, it
was probably cooperation with the existing Duma which he
wanted.
The first years of the new constitutional era correspond
to the last years of Kliuchevskii's own life. After the
excitement of the revolutionary period he did not play an
active part in political life. Maklakov remarked that he
was too little of a "European” to engage in active
102
politics, a judgement which is weakened to the extent
that he had run for office on the Cadet ticket. Kizevetter
says that it was only illness which kept him from standing
for election in the second Duma.103 if Kizevetter is
accurate, then Kliuchevskii would have been among that
wing of the Cadet party which continued to participate in
political life after the appearance of Stolypin. This
would have been in keeping with the guarded enthusiasm
with which Kliuchevskii referred to the Duma after its
dissolution. On the 21st of July (O.S.) 1906, eleven
days after the Viborg Manifesto, and thirteen days after

102. Maklakov, "Kliuchevsky,*1 p. 326.

103. A. A. Kizevetter, "V. 0. Kliuchevskii kak uchenyi
istorik Rossii," ftusskiia Vedomosti CXI (May 15>
1911), No pagination.
 211

the dissolution of the first Duma, Kliuchevskii wrote to

the jurist, A. F. Koni, his opinion of the fallen parlia
ment.
I am compelled to acknowledge two facts I had
not expected. These are the rapidity with which
the people have come to look upon the Duma as
the most reliable organ of legal authority and,
secondly, the incontestable moderation of the
attitudes which have made their appearance
there. This attitude toward authority in a
popular institution has moderated that revolu­
tionary freedom which is beginning to engulf
us. The existence of the Duma is the least price
to pay for the bloodless soothing of the
country.I0**-
The general tenor of this statement suggests a modified
skepticism toward the Duma and a feeling for social
order which is in keeping with the emphasis on histori-
cism and continuity which characterized Kliuchevskii*s
historical judgments. Yet, if he was a friend of
social order he was not unwilling to speak out against
injustice and police terror even in the repressive year
1907. During the wave of assassination of intellectuals
and liberals which were organized by the extreme
nationalists at the time of the first Duma, two Kadets,
Grigorii Borisovich Iollos, a journalist, and Mikhail
Iakolovich Gertsenstein, an economist, were murdered.

1 0 4 . Koni. Na zhiznennom puti. II. 190.

 212

Immediately after the murder of the former in March, 1907,

Kliuchevskii published a tribute to both men in the journal,
Russian News. He praised both men as Russian patriots
who had shed their blood for the Russian land and asked
that their deaths be remembered by all Russians as a
symbol of the **New R u s s i a . g o t h these men were
anathema to the Right extremists on two grounds - the fact
that they were Cadets, and the fact that they were Jewish.
Kliuchevskii*s outspoken tribute took courage in the
dangerous atmosphere of the times. This tribute was a
concrete example of the dislike for terror and arbitrary
government found in his writings.
In summing up Kliuchevskii*s reactions to the crisis
of 1905 and the appearance of at least quasi-parliamentary
structure in Russia, it seems apparent that he accepted,
although with some skepticism, the new changes as bene­
ficial and in line with the general development of Russia
as a European state since l£6l. He tried to act in
consistency with the respect for academic freedom and the
respect for orderly social progress which are reflected in
his historiography. But the times had in effect passed him
by. It is impossible to see any clear and specific

105. Eichenwal'd, p. 124*

 213

view of the new Russia in his writings. He had not

finished the fifth part of his Course at the time of his
death. He was using various students1 editions from the
late feighties and early 1nineties in preparing this work,
but there is little evidence that his revisions of these
lectures were effected by the new events. It is true
that he somewhat expanded his treatment of the Decembrists
to show how their thought reflected the tendency of the
progressive dvprianin and not long before his death, he
rendered a harsh judgment of the early rulers
of nineteenth-century Russia. He wrote that Paul I,
Alexander I, and Nicholas II, had "ruled but not governed"
in Russia, that they had pursued dynastic interests, and
not the welfare of the people. This was a somewhat
more critical view of these rulers than that found in the
printed version of the Course. In short, his writings do
not reflect in any very specific way the nature of the
changes which 1905 may have brought about in his attitudes
toward parliamentary institutions. If we turn from his
view of the Duma and examine his attitude toward different
social classes in Russian history, toward religion and
toward specific figures in Russian history we find the same
love of individualism tempered by a committment toward

155: Kurs. V. 4557

tradition, by skepticism, and by a dislike for the super­
ficial which characterized his attitude toward Parliament.
These characteristics are particularly noticeable in
his attitude toward religion. Kliuchevskii did not take
part in the all out attack on religion which was a prominent
theme among the positivistic radicals of the period; on the
other hand, he eschewed the religious romanticism of some
Russians. In his very earliest years he was critical
both of the official church hierarchy and of the influence
of the Byzantine-Church tradition in Russia. Kliuchevskii
knew intimately the oppression and backwardness of the
church seminaries, and he spoke with pain of the joylessness
of the church morality. In his letters as a student there
are repeated and bitter references to the formalism of
church dogma, to the oppression of the church hierarchy,
and to the inadequacy of theology to find an answer to
107
contemporary problems. He blamed the Russian Christians’
sense of sin for restricting the natural joy of the peasant
and pointed to the village priests who went around dis-
persing village folk dances. Attempts to update
theology to meet the demands of contemporary literary

107. Artobolevskii, rtIz pisem V. 6. Kliuchevskago,"

p. 231; and Pis’ma« pp. 70-71, 74, and 109-10.
criticism ’’missed the mark,” as far as he was concerned
and often degenerated into what he called with scorn,
109
"mysticism.” Theology was a "toothless old hag."
After arriving at the University he ceased to attend church,
and only returned to this practice when writing a paper
in religious history. Although he scorned the official
church, Kliuchevskii seems to have kept a residual faith
in the essential beauty of simple Christianity. This two-
sided attitude persisted throughout his life and is
reflected in his writings. For despite the weaknesses of
the Russian church he found in Russian Christianity at
its best a saving spirit of morality and love. His
early work in monastic history gave him a particular com­
fort, for as he wrote to a friend, N. I. Mizerovskii, in a
"confessional letter" it
fortifies faith in the Russian people about whom
there are so many doubts as to whether they will
ever produce anything worthwhile.110
Curiously enough, although he moved away from the
official church Kliuchevskii was, in a sense, fleeing to
the best examples he could find of the ancient Russian
religious consciousness. This effort to find something
admirable in Russia’s religious past is particularly

Ibid.. p. TUT.
110. I. A. Artobolevskii, "Iz pisem V. 0. Kliuchevskago,"
p. 233.
 216

evident in two of Kliuchevskii's later essays. In his

work on St. Sergius, which was published in the Theologi­
cal Messenger in 1692, he praised that Saint for teaching
love of one’s fellow man and disciplined frugality by his
holy example. And, in the same year in the same journal
he wrote in his Good People of Old Russia that the highest
examples of virtue to be found in Ancient Russia were
motivated by Christian c h a r i t y . I n some ways Kliuchev­
skii identified this simple Christianity with his own
social milieu. He liked to consider his own class of
priests’ sons as the bearers of equality and Christian
Up
culture in a world of barbarism and force. * Sir Bernard
Pares has written that when he first heard of Kliuchevskii
in 1693-99 he considered him ’’eminently religious

But if he was religious it certainly was not in any

conventional sense nor is there much indication of this
religiosity in his writings.
Kliuchevskii is an unsparing critic of the official
church. He thought Church influence on the political
history of Russia slight and confined to giving a blessing
to already accomplished f a c t s . H e thought that Russian
nr: ”Znachenie Prep. Sergiia.y< Ocherki. passim and
’’Dobrye liudy,” Ocherki. passim.
112. Miliukov, Kharakteristiki. p. 206.
113. Sir Bernard Pares. My Russian Memoirs (London, 1931),
p. 46.
114. See comments in his review of "Geschichte Russlands,"
Otzyvv. Appendix.
Christianity had followed an unusual path of development;
whereas Christianity in general had developed from a
primitive religion to a sophisticated liturgy and philo­
sophy, the Russian experience had been the reverse. When
primitive Russian society adopted the Byzantine faith, he
argued in Western Influences and the Church Schism in 17th
Century Russia, they had mistaken the forms of religion
for the essential content. And in his work on The Con­
troversies of Pskov he argued that Russian thought was lost
in a ”cold dialectic” and avoided the ”warming sun of life's
daily moral n e e d s . i n such a context the exceptions
represented by his portraits of St. Sergius and Tsar
Alexei Mikhailovich become even more meaningful. His work
is studded with antagonism toward the official hierarchy.
Describing a banquet in the time of Peter the Great, he will
remark that when a particularly potent drink was served,
Only the church authorities did not turn their
faces from the burning drink and sat at their
places getting drunker and drunker - sending
far and wide the smell of onions and radishes.
Visiting foreigners noticed that the very
drunkest of the assembly were the clerics...
Although he was offended by the obscene parody of church
ceremony in which Peter the Great indulged, Kliuchevskii

115. "Zapadnoe vliianie.” Ocherki. p p . 422. 437: and

"Pskovskie epory," Sochineniia. VII, 106.
116. Kurs, IV, 3d.
 216

acknowledged that the hypocricy and licentiousness of the

clergy explained the scorn in which the Tsar held them.^^

Kliuchevskii attacked the failure of the Russian church

in its seven hundred year history to do anything for popu­
lar education, and as for their moral leadership he wrote:
The ancient Russian clergy succeded in frightening
their flocks with threats of a reckoning beyond
the grave, but they did not know how to instil
into their parishoners respect for the house of
God, or for themselves.
The above criticism is, in a sense, religious in its style.
One of the most commonplace interpretations of Rus­
sian intellectual history is to point to the inverted
sectarianism and fervor of the Russian radical intelli­
gentsia. Characteristically, Kliuchevskii’s alienation
from the official church was more moderate. Not only did
he keep a reverence for the emotional truths of Christi­
anity but he specifically defended liturgy and ceremony.
However, the terms in which he did this suggest that his
main line of thought on these matters was rationalistic and
progressive. In an article written in 1672 he argued that
institutionalized ceremonies could bring people closer to
an awareness of religious truth, and in the Course of
Russian History he expanded this argument in much more

TFT. Ibid., p. 42.

116. Ibid.. p. 166.
 219

detailed f a s h i o n . I n a section of the Course sub­

titled "the force of religious ceremonies and texts" he
points to the fact that religious truths are not grasped
by logical thought but by religious thought. Then he
warns his students not to be surprised by these terms:
Let the student not be alarmed by these terms:
religious knowledge or mental development is
as much a function of the human mind - although
a method distinct from logic or argumentation -
as is artistic thought; only it is directed
toward more elevated subjects. Man does not
always attain his ends through logical lines of
thought. Indeed, it may. be that along such
lines he may only reach the very least part of
what he is s e e k i n g . 1 ^

He then goes on to argue that grasping religious

truth through ceremony is an extra rational project
not subject to the laws of logic and rather, analogous
to grasping a musical motif. Furthermore, religious
practices are attuned to the historical experience
of each nation.
When an Orthodox priest intones the phrase,
"exalted be our hearts," there takes place in
the believing Orthodox an exaltation of reli­
gious consciousness which helps him to relieve
himself of earthly cares. But let that same
priest make the prayer from the Catholic prayer-
book, Sursum corda, that same believer, no
matter how well he knew it was the same prayer,
but in the Latin language and a more energetic

119. "Zapadnoe vliianie." Ocherki. pp. Z>.09-lO

120. Kurs. Ill, 233.
 220

form, would not be exalted by it for he would

not be accustomed to it.1*!
Finally, Kliuchevskii expresses the view that religious
practice is essential to contemporary man. He asserts
that it is possible that in the distant future man
may be able to dispense with religious ceremony as a
function of his religious understanding, but with
characteristic conservatism he adds,
I do not know what man will have become in a
thousand years. But, take from contemporary
man his hard-won stock of religious rites, and
such habits as have been passed on to him
through the centuries and he will forget all that
he has learned and have to begin learning all
over again.122
This passage is certainly not expressive of deep
religious faith in the usual sense of the word. There is
a certain implicit modernity, a note of condescension
toward these hard-won practices. One suspects that Kliu­
chevskii did not personally require them as spiritual
nurturing. On the other hand, his attitude is not radical.
He shows respect for custom and, in that sense, for estab­
lished religion. Here, as elsewhere, he is loath to
sunder the web of custom; just as he suspected innova­
tions in the political field, so he shied away from the
militant secularism prevalent in his age. This hostility

IZT. Ibid.. p. 289.

122. Ibid.. p. 291.
 221

to the current dogmas of the left is evident also in his

social views.
Although Kliuchevski has been called the peasant
historian, his work does not represent any glorification
of the masses. He refuses to find in the Russian masses
any "inherent" principal of cooperation or socialism. If
the Russian people have any basic character in Kliuchevskii’s
conception of them, it is one of long suffering resignation
to hardship and a melancholy such as he described in his
famous article, "Grief." Toward the upper classes Kliu­
chevskii is at times hostile, but not consistently so. In
his work on the History of Legal Classes in Russia (written
in 1SS6) he attacked those historians of the 1(330’s and
1&40’s who sought to divorce the higher classes from the
rest of the nation.
The term "narod" encompassed all of society and
signified essentially or even exclusively the
simple folk. In the literature of the ’thirties
and ’forties there was even constructed a complete
historical theory which fairly coherently built
the whole history of Russia not so much on its
actual processes as on a dialectical development
of the conception of the people....Under such
a view the higher classes appeared as a mere
growth on the national body, harmful in their
practical effect, and useless from the scholars’
viewpoint. Thus the history of social classes
was perverted into either an edifying or
accusing tale of the upper classes and the lower,
either a tale of their salvation through their
unanimity or of their destruction through
enmity, although all the honor for the unanimity
 222

was assigned to the lower classes and all the

blame for the antagonism to the upper classes.123
Kliuchevskii decries this perversion of history and
continues
a growth, even while a growth, remains an
organic part of the living thing and partici­
pates in the life of the organism and even acts
on it at times more strongly than the normal
parts...Under this view the higher classes were
represented as traitors to the national principle,
enemies of the people. On the basis of their
estrangement from the fatherland was built a
whole chimerical period of our history beginning
with the activity of Peter the Great and the
whole significance of this period was assumed
to be the moral estrangement of the upper classes
from the patriotic masses....This, if one may use
the expression, demomania or aristophobia led
even to an attack upon the highest classes and
to their political injury. Yet this class had
not stolen secretly into our society but had
existed under the proper legal ordinance of the
supreme authority and their legal rights and
position were defined with great exactness in
the ninth volume of the Law Code. ^
Kliuchevskii avoids any wholesale condemnation of
classes, yet he often condemns individual members of the
gentry and the later the period of Russian history with
which he is dealing, the closer he comes to a condemnation
of the dvoranin as a group. According to Kliuchevskii,
the dvoranin became estranged from the rest of society as
125
a result of serfdom. ^ The emancipation of the gentry

123. Istoria soslovii. Sochineniia. VI. 300

124. Ibid.. p. W :
125. Kurs, IV, 71.
 223

from the obligations Peter tried to force upon them was

a moral catastrophe for the gentry themselves. ^6 He

bitterly describes the indifference of the gentry toward

the p e o p l e . ^ h e following is an example of his attitude
toward the constitutional projects of the lesser gentry in
1730:
In several of the projects we find expression
of the desire for a lightening of the tax bur­
den of the serfs, in other words, a lightening
of the financial obligation of the gentry them­
selves. But we do not find a single dvoranin
who let drop a word about the freeing of the
serfs or even a word about the legal definition
of the obligations or duties of the serfs to
their lords. 28
It is the selfishness and parasitism of the upper
classes which Kliuchevskii repeatedly condemns, but this
condemnation is limited to the period when the gentry no
longer serve a useful social function.
Since Kliuchevskii concerned himself primarily with
Russian history before the liberation of the serfs, there
is little in his writings which refers specifically to
classes following the emancipation and almost no reference
I

to the new industrial, bourgeoisie, proletariat, or liberal

professions. There are two small exceptions to this general

126. Ibid., pp. 251-2.

127. IBIcT., p. 234.
123. THU., p. 234.
 224

rule. One is to be found in a supplementary lecture which

he gave to his general course in Russian history in the

year IS83. Pointing to the contemporary class structure

of Russia he wrote:

At the head of the nation stands the Supreme

Authority, concentrated in one person. Under
him are the mass of the Black Folk who have
been entrusted to the keeping of the landowning
class by the Supreme Authority. Between these
three forces writhes a comparatively small,
transitory stratum of civil servants, clergy,
townspeople, who stand shivering as if waiting
for someone to give them a justification for
their existence.^29 /See note7

Written in the period of severe repression which

characterized the decade of the feighties this fragment

suggests that Kliuchevskii recognized the lack of a public

voice which the new classes suffered. However, while

apparently aware of the presence of new social classes,

Kliuchevskii never wrote extensively about them. Moreover,

toward one manifestation of the new industrial Russia he
seems to have been hostile. He had no liking for the

Lumpenproletariat. or at least the first vestiges of a new

intelligentsia emerging from this class. Evidence of this

can be found in his attitude toward the first light of

early twentieth century proletarian literature, Maxim

129. This selection is to be found in Tkhorzhevskii, p. 1^3»

and is made from the notes of a student named A. F.
Hartwig.
 225

Gorkii. In 1902 Gorkii was enjoying a tremendous vogue

among the literate public, a vogue that was to pass within

a few years. At this time he was elected for membership

in the Academy of Science. Kliuchevskii had his doubts

about the choice. In a conversation with a friend,

Elpidifor Barsov, Kliuchevskii bitterly attacked Gorkii,

his aesthetic values, the class he represented, and his

lack of taste. Gorkii, he said, was a propagandist not an

artist. Gorkii represented a new struggling unstable class

in society, a class blown by the winds of modish doctrine.

A class

of the lowest people suffering their birthpangs

in Znanie /a radical journal started by Gorkil7
and thinking themselves intelligentsia purely
on the basis of their colleague Gorkii. Their
underdeveloped and unfastidious tastes are
seen through the talent of his...Lower Depths
with all its nastiness and undertones of
Nietzscheanism and politiking etc.J-30

To the question of whether or not Kliuchevskii thought

Gorkii should be admitted to the Academy, he replied that

tb do this would be to lower the Academy to the level of

the tramps found in Lower Depths and that,

with the course of time there would be heros

in academic gowns preaching the victory of
physical force over morality, and of socialism

130. Elpidifor Barsov, "Mnenie • V. 0. Kliuchevskago o

Maksim Gorfkom,n U Troitsv. p. 692.
 226

over private property and the state. It would

be the end of elementary ethical feeling in the
academy.^31

When Barsov objected that these were pretty harsh words and

judgments, particularly in view of the fact that Gorkii

was an admirer of Kliuchevskii and had committed his lec­

tures to memory, Kliuchevskii replied: "That’s a pity;

my words were not meant as horse fodder. He remains a

propagandist."^32

So meager is the information on Kliuchevskii’s private

life and values that there is a temptation to make perhaps

too much of such an isolated outburst. He may have been

having a bad day at the time. However, there is nothing

in this statement inconsistent with the values revealed in

his writings or reported actions. He did value private

property and he was not nihilistic in his attitude toward

the state. Moreover, as a member of an old and traditional

social group, if an underprivileged one, Kliuchevskii may

have looked with little understanding or sympathy on the

newly underprivileged. Finally, his high esteem for style,

his essentially academic personality, which had led him to

cut down on admittance of the populace to meetings of the

Imperial Historical Society, are consistent with a distaste

131. Ibid.. p. 693.

132. Ibia., p. 693.
 227

for the new proletarian avant-garde. This distaste is

given added interest by the fact that Kliuchevskii was not

a man who fled from his origins to academic snobbery.

Throughout his life he remained simple and frugal in his

personal tastes. Even when he was a full professor he

continued to travel third class in the railways, to make

his own cheap table wine, and to smoke the cheapest of

cigars.^ 3 His attitude toward Gorkii cannot then be

seen as the reply of an arriviste to a newly rising class.

More probably it is a reflection of his love of fine

language, of the high culture of the universities, and his

general love of rural Russia and distrust of innovation.

Insofar as Kliuchevskii had any personal historical

heros, they reflect his admiration of private virtues, of

moderation and of social cohesion. Tsar Alexis Mikhailo-

vitch, the simple Christians of ancient Russia and St.

Sergius are, in his portraits of them, virtuous because

they are living symbols of continuity and humility in the

face of the world’s complexity. His confusion over Peter

the Great, and his awareness that even the great Pushkin

bore the mark of his troubled time bespeak Kliuchevskii’s

unhappiness with modern Russia. If this is the case, then

we may ask what was the moral burden of his works? Did

133. Iakovlev, pp. 127-30

 22#
his work encourage progressive political action? Was it

essentially rationalist? Did it encourage respect for

authority? It is difficult to answer these questions

clearly since he appealed to so many different kinds of

men. Yet, I think the general moral sense of his historio­

graphy is clear in several essentials.

First, Kliuchevskii tended to emphasize understanding

over action. When writing his work on the Zemskii Sobors of

Ancient Russia he warned his readers against exaggerating

the importance of the Sobors and he scoffed in the fol­

lowing terms at those who thought the Sobors indicated a

representative institution in Russia:

A representative gathering of the land in sixteenth-

century Muscovy! A whole world of alluring
political phantasies rise up with these words
and all the more does the conviction grow in
the scholar that he will be able to establish
the existence of such phenomena in the sixteenth
century. Then the scholar begins to worship
those muscovite minds of a long distant time
and place for being able to reach such imagina­
tive heights. But, what if the scholar is
only adoring the creation of his own hand, a
self created chimera, or what is even worse,
his own dreams?134

Here speaks the essential scholar in Kliuchevskii.

Always tough minded, he demanded no glorification of the

past. The initial step for those who wished to help Russia

was through careful examination of her history.

134. Sostav soborakh. Qpvtv i issledovanie. Appendix,

p. xii.
 Secondly, there is in his work a long range hopefulness

and faith in man's ability to intelligently influence, if

not control, his environment. This is quite clear from his

faith in "historical sociology" and history as the prepara­

tory school of citizenship. However, this long range

optimism is almost obscured in most of his work by a short

range sadness at Russia's tragic and backward society. At

times this sadness seems to have been stronger than at

others. In particular he seems to have been in this mood

in the 1390's when he was writing his article, "Grief."

To this sadness is added the conviction that his own

generation, that of the Reform Era, had not solved their

tasks very well and it remained for the next generation to

take up the task.

Thirdly, Kliuchevski respected individual liberty and

dignity. He insisted on the protection of the individual

through law. However, he did not admire excessive individu­

alism of an abstract or universalist sort. For him all

people had their individuality only through participation in

society, and more specifically the national society. Even

religious aspirations must be rooted in national form if

they were to retain their validity.

Fourthly, Kliuchevskii stood apart from the excessive

nihilism which characterized some of his generation. While

he was perfectly willing to attack fraud and deceit, to

point out the failures and hypocricy of the church hier­

archy, the nobility, and the government, he never expressed

the idea that the whole fabric of society should be attacked

or that what was worthwhile would survive such attacks.

Institutions and habits changed slowly and the only healthy

change was one which maintained ties with the past. He

was bitter and ironic toward the oppression he found in

Russia but the state could and 3hould act to redress these

evils. He does not deal with the great peasant rebellions

of the 17th and 13th century in the Course and portrays

the Decemberists as generous hearted, but misguided youth.

The Cossacks were for him pillagers of the Fatherland,

rather than champions of primitive democracy.^-’/See note7

Fifthly, Kliuchevskii was hostile or silent toward

socialism in either its Populist or Marxist version.

Socialism violated the "private" area of human life which

he identified with economic activity. He scorned the

Populist reading of Russian history in terms of the unique

peasant socialism of the Russian tradition, and he was

l35. In his short aid to the study of Russian history.

Kratkoe posobie po russkoi istorii (Moscow, 1901), he
was very critical of the Cossacks. In the final
version of the Course he admits a "democratic" char­
acter to the Cossack revolts, but does not praise
them for this and notes that their revolts at that
time had no national significance. See: Kurs, III,
111-112.
 231

silent toward the Marxists, except in his letter on

Gorkii, where he may be considering Marxism among the
"modish doctrines" of the new intelligentsia.^36
Finally, Kliuchevskii’s work is imbued with a kind
of stoical love for Russia, a call to his students to
study and avoid abstractions, and an admiration for the
role of the serious academic as a servant of the country.
The whole burden of his view of history in general and
Russian history in particular emphasized the relatively
limited scope of individual heroic action.
Therefore, the general moral and didactic sense of
Kliuchevskii’s lifelong work in Russian historiography is
clear. His writing encouraged a sober quizzical patriotism.
It expressed a restrained faith in progress and a belief
in history as a useful subject. It avoided the extreme
scientism of the generation in which he emerged as a
scholar, as well as the reaction against that scientism
which came toward the end of his life. Finally, in a
rather quiet way it attempted to reconcile and synthesize
the virtues of academic objectivity and the impulse toward
civic protest.
Throughout this study it has been necessary to cope
with the ambiguity and contradictory nature of Kliuchev-
skii’s historiography. A number of polarities in his

I36. Barsov, p. 692.'

 232

thought have become obvious. Some of them are: positivism

tempered by idealism; nationalism mitigated by a love of
universal values and admiration of Europe; a kind of
historicistic conservatism moving slowly toward a restrained
liberalism; history seen as romantic narrative and history
seen as science. It is the thesis of this dissertation that
these polarities and the style of their expression in Kliu-
chevskii’s work reflect the world in which he lived filtered
through his own personality. Precisely because he is not
monolithic in his historiography he expresses in his work
an ambiguity centered on certain key problems of his
culture. In short, he is an historian whose work expresses
the problems of his time, albeit in muted form. This thesis
will be summed up in the final chapter of this dissertation.
 233

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In this section I wish to recapitulate some points

made in the preceeding analysis of various aspects of
Kliuchevskii1s historiography and to describe what might
be called his style of thought. This portion of the
dissertation is an interpretative essay based on the
documentation of the main portion of the study. The point
of the essay is that Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii is
best understood in terms of certain unreconciled dualities
in his thought which reflect his struggle with the intel­
lectual problems of his own time and of the culture in
which he wrote.
Kliuchevskii is best known outside of Russia for his
widely translated Course of Russian History. The first
general impression created by this work of synthesis is
one of coherence and philosophic conviction. The initial
scheme of periodization based on the successive movement of
the Russian population throughout the Russian land, the
dialectical development of each period from the preceeding
period, and the explicit detailed concept of the nature of
historical study all contribute to this impression. However,
closer examination challenges this first impression. The
introductory emphasis on history as an empirical and
naturalistic study becomes combined with romantic and
 2.34

teleological generalizations about the growth of the Rus­

sian state and the nature of Russian man. Despite the
insistence on continuity in Russian development, modern
Russian history stands in sharp disjunction from the
majority of the Course. The emphasis on geography gives
way to an assertion of the importance of political reform
and the role of the state in that reform. A work which
be_gan by asserting the unique nature of Russian history
ends by identifying the development of modern Russia
with that of Europe. Finally, within the body of this
institutional and social history are a number of lyrical
and moving word portraits of particular figures which are
badly integrated with the general context of the Course
and with its philosophic assumptions. Ambiguity and
contradiction now seem more characteristic of the work than
coherence. Reference to the full body of Kliuchevskii's
work makes the nature of these ambiguities more clear.
Kliuchevskii began his work as an institutional and
church historian in the late 'sixties of the nineteenth
century. At that time the two outstanding characteristics
of Russian historiography were quasi-scientific positivism
and an interest in social and institutional history. In

keeping with this tradition Kliuchevskii*s earliest works

were on the role of the church in early Russian colonization
 235

and on the institutions of Muscovite Russia. Although

we know very little of his Weltanschauung during his early
years, what we do know suggests that he shared his contemp­
oraries' dislike of the Hegelian tradition and was searching
for a nomothetic science of society. Although his early
monographs were of a limited scope he showed from the very
start of his career a desire to relate his special studies
to the broader questions of Russian history. All his
works attempt to define the "structure of the national
spirit." In particular he wished to define the nature of
Russian history in comparison with that of western Europe.
By the time of the lBBO's when he was working on his major
studies, The Boyar Duma of Ancient Russia. The Terminology
of Russian History, and the History of Legal Classes in
Russia we see an explicit concern with the total meaning
of Russian history. In the Boyar Duma of Ancient Russia
(lBBl) he had set forth the outlines of his general scheme
of Russian history, but he had not attempted in this work
any explicit definition of his philosophy of history.
However, in the mid-eighties he begins to set forth in
his lectures on the Methodology of History and in his work
on legal classes a more explicit definition of history.
Now he had to face the task of combining his earlier
general view of Russian history with the theoretical
 236

statements about history made in the general courses he

was giving at the university.
This need to bring together theemphasis on the
special nature of Russian history with some general model
of development of society applicable to the history of
nationalistic Europe finds its most clear expression in the
History of the Legal Classes (1386) and in the Course of
Russian History. It is at this point in his work that
we begin to notice a curious combination of positivism and
teleological romanticism. On one level he writes as if
history were a subject analogous to a natural science. He
persistently uses organic terminology. He speaks of the
"unique combinations of elements” which have produced
Russian history. Yet, despite the whole burden of his own
monographic work and of major portions of the Course he
identifies the general course of Russian history with that
of the countries of western Europe. He asserts that all
nations pass through the same stages of development. He
uses the term "law” in a contradictory sense. In one
sense it signifies generalizations covering observed histor­
ical data which may someday be elucidated as a result of
studies in comparative national history. On the other
hand, he often assumes that some general laws of social
development are either already known or close to being
discovered. He accepts the idea of west European social
and political development as a norm against which the
deviations of Russian history may be measured. In the
History of Legal Classes in Russia in particular he comes
close to predicting the general course of European social
development in the future. He flatly contradicts himself
by advancing the thesis in the Boyar Duma and later in the
Course that geographic circumstances play a fundamental
part in the development of Russia and that "geographically
Russia is not Europe," and then concluding the Course
with the assertion that Russian development is analogous
to that of Europe. It is a variant of a generally similar
scheme.
The contradictions in his work become greater the
closer he comes to modern Russian history. The original
synthesis of the Boyar Duma was more suited to quasi-
sociological generalization because of the lack of detailed
cultural and biographical information for the earlier
period of Russian history. The more Kliuchevskii moved
in to the period after 1613 the more he was forced to
deal './ith the role of ideas in history, the problem of the
continuity of Russian history, and the problem of the

hero in history. His treatment of Ivan the Terrible and

of Peter the Great were notable examples of his failure
 23$

to find a language and a concept which would integrate his

fascination with the role of great figures in history with
the essential determinism of the general scheme first out­
lined in the Boyar Duma.
By the time he was preparing the final version of the
Course he began to attenuate his sociological emphasis.
This can be seen by his reworking of the lecture on the
Rota system assigning more importance to the role of the
princes in the development of that institution, by the
doubts he expressed about the applicability of the concept
of scientific cause and effect in history, and by his
insistence that his emphasis on geography and economics in
the Course was purely methodological. Moreover, after
1B91 he began to write more and more in the field of intel­
lectual history. He made romantic assertions about the
special nature of Russian sadness and began to emphasize
the characteristics of the national mind.
I do not wish to suggest that Kliuchevskii*s philo­
sophic confusion or the change in the emphasis of his
writings after 1B90 was uniquely Russian. Unfortunately,
we do not know the extent to which his reservations about
the nature of historical study as a science of society were
the result of the general attack on positivism which took
place in the late nineteenth-century historical writing.
 239

There is not mention in hie works of such critics of posit­

ivism as Heinrich Rickert or Vilhelm Dilthey. But his

confusions over the nature of history are characteristic

of the general climate of opinion at the end of the

century. To this extent he is himself evidence of the

closeness of Russian academic historiography to that of

Europe in general.

What does seem uniquely Russian in Kliuchevskii is the

uses to which he put his scientific conception of history.

His search for general laws was always closely linked to the

problem of Russia and Europe. It is interesting that both

Kliuchevskii and the English historian, Henry T. Buckle,

employed the same kind of terminology and argument to de­

fend the special scientific value of the history of their

respective nations. In the fifth chapter of his History of

Civilization in England (1361), Buckle argued that he had

chosen to study the history of England because that history

had a special scientific value. England was the nearest

approximation in his historical experience to a nation

where liberty, free institutions, and human progress had

been able to develop free from unfavorable influences.^ Kliu­

chevskii argued that Russian history had a special scientific

IT faenrv Thomas Buckle. History of Civilization in England

(Hew York, 1366), Chapter Y. The 18&1 edition was not
available to me.
 240

but that special value was the poverty and harshness of

Russian history. Both men felt impelled to defend their
interest in national history in broad scientific terms.
One spoke from the security of the richest and most
cohesive society of nineteenth-century Europe. The other
spoke from a country dominated by a repressive state. The
positivist Englishman complacently asserted that English
history was the most unique and the most normal. The
positivist Russian pessimistically stressed the tragic
nature of Russian history and defined that history as
jMifiormal.
Had Kliuchevskii accepted the Marxism which became
popular in Russian society during the 1390*s he might have
found a system which would have enabled him to bring into
one total synthesis his sense of Russia’s difference from
and similarity to western Europe. On the other hand, had
he been able to accept the romantic idealization of the Mir
and the masses of the Populist tradition he might have,
worked out some general theory of the special nature of
Russian history. The fact was he could not accept the
facts of the Populist argument and he would not accept the
theory of the Marxist argument. He did not accept the
Marxist monism but asserted that the private economic
sphere of human activity and the public sphere were always
in opposition. If there was any hope for a mitigation of
 241

this opposition it was to be found in the progressive role

of the enlightened state.
In many ways Kliuchevskii1s life, about which we know
so little, and his writings involve an attempt to reconcile
hostile sympathies and ideas. In his attitude toward the
state he walked a middle ground between out-right rejection
of the tsarist regime and acceptance of it as the fruit of
Russian history. Throughout his adult life he was an
employee of the regime. Unlike the radical friends of his
youth, he never openly battled the state. Neither did
he act as an apologist for the state. Instead he took a
position which condemned the state in the past yet held out
hope for the progressive role of the state in the future.
His condemnation took two forms. The Course was filled
with ironic attacks on the arbitrary state and with an
emphasis on the fact that for most of Russian history the
state had lacked a moral legal base and was at war with the
people. To this was added the idea that the culture which
the state had developed since the time of Peter the Great
was arbitrary and forced. This state supported western
learning had split the nation into two groups.
Unfortunately, the main argument of Kliuchevskii1s
historiography diminished the force of his own ironic
attack on tsarism. If serfdom, the autocratic government,
and lack of popular welfare were the price that Russia had
 242

had to pay for survival then the guilt of the governors

was lessened. Kliuchevskii*s view of Russian history did
not lead to alienation from the state as much as it led to
a skeptical acceptance of the state. His work is subject
in this respect to the same comment that Alexander Herzen
made of Kliuchevskii's teacher, S. M. Solov’ev. Writing
in the Bell in 1862, Herzen argued that by asserting that
the state was the historical expression of the Russian
people, Solov’ev and other historians were saying that
2
"whatever the people are, such is the state.”
Kliuchevskii's arguments did not make as clear an
identification between the people and the state as did
Solov’ev’s. Yet his view of history, in effect, supported
the view that the Russian state was the only possible state
for the Russian people since it was the product of one
total historical process.
Even Kliuchevskii's conception of the origin of the
title "autocrat” did not define this term in an oppressive
or anti-popular sense. In connection with the political
implications of his definition of autocracy we have one
interesting example of the direct influence of his views.
In 1900 Sergei Witte asked that a special edition of the
Course of Russian History be prepared for the use of the

~2. Illeritskii, p. 181.

 243

government. Since the Course was then only in lithographed

editions, Witte asked Kliuchevskii to prepare a version at
state expense. Kliuchevskii declined this task but recom­
mended that one of his students, S. Kniazkov, do the job.
This student prepared a brochure form of the Course and it
was Witte's impression that Kliuchevskii had helped
Kniazkov with the task. Later this brochure may have
played a role in the Tsar's retaining the title "Autocrat"
after 1905 on the grounds that historically the term
"autocrat" did not mean a domestic despot but a sovereign
3
independent of foreign states. Unfortunately there is no

confirmation of this story in Witte's memoirs.

In his attitude toward Christianity Kliuchevskii

tried to take a moderate position. His early student exper­
iences were almost exactly like those of Chernyshevskii or
Dobroliubov. Kliuchevskii, like the other two sons of
the provincial clergy, was deeply affected by reading
Feurbach’s On the Essence of Christianity. The comparison
with Chernyshevskii is particularly striking. In 1$49
when he first read Feurbach Chernyshevskii had already
begun to question the forms of religion, but not the
essential moral values. Later Chernyshevskii passed to an

^Unsigned newspaper article/ "Pamiati V. 0. Kliuchevska-

go," Russkoe Slovo.
 244

outright condemnation of religion.^ In Kliuchevskiifs

case the second step was never made. In the main his
historiography is secular and scientific. He clearly
disliked the official church; he could not glorify institu­
tionalized Orthodoxy. Yet he admired the good religious
men of Russia's past. Consequently he ended up by writing
an anti-clerical history which accepts certain religiously
motivated men as the finest figures in Russia's past.
In some of his language Kliuchevskii bears a striking
resemblance to the Populist theoreticians of the 18*60*s and
18*70's. When he compared Peter the Great to a refreshing
rain drawn from the earth and returning to the earth he was
using a simile coined by Dobroliubov and approved by
5
Mikhailovskii. In his social ideal of a balance between
the needs of the state and the requirements of personality
he comes close to Lavrov. Indeed, his view that social
consciousness arises from enlightened egoism is almost
exactly like that of Lavrov.^
Kliuchevskii liked to think of judicious and careful
criticism as particularly suited to the academic community.
He asserted that the good historian was the good citizen.
But the emphasis for him was on the historian not the
♦

4” Venturi, p. 135-
5. Ivanov-Razumnik, pp. 68, 187.
6. Ibid., p. 126.
 245

citizen. In seminars he was not interested in broad moral

education of his students but in monographic specialization.7
He usually did most of the talking and was not a teacher
of the young in any overtly didactic sense. As late as
1899 he remained content to find solace in research when the
University was closed. When the crisis of 1905 came the
difficulties of his position became clear. Invited by the
government to become a participant in political discussions
he was the friend and former teacher of many of the
educated opposition to the Autocracy. The reserved
admiration he showed toward parliamentary institutions and
his skepticism toward political innovations now had to
face an actual political choice. The University he so
loved was closed. At this point Kliuchevskii acted with
courage. He was the first of the faculty of Moscow
University to sign a petition asking for university auton­
omy.^ He entered politics and spoke out against right wing
terrorism. He refused to participate in the State Council
as a representative of the academic community, giving as
his reason his dislike of St. Petersburg and his desire to
return to Moscow. He had never liked Peter’s city. The

T<> Kizevetter. Na rubezhe. p. 7d.

8. A. Pokrovskii. Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii: ocherk
kharakteristiki lichnosti 1 mirovozzreniia pochfgshago
istorika (Moscow. 1912). p . 24.
 246

tragedy of his position in 1905 was summed up by a friend

in the Cadet Party who remarked that he remained a patriot

at a time when ”patriotism was becoming laughable because

9
it was linked to the monarchy and only to the monarchy.”

It is unlikely that an academic historian of Kliuchev­

skii fs ability and talents would have been plagued by such

problems of value judgment in any other major European

nation of his time. In a society with more established

popular institutions he would have found no trouble in

identifying the state and the nation. In a society where

there was no crisis between the people and the state he could

have identified the state more coherently with the national

past. Or, in a society with a greater degree of univers­

ity autonomy he might have carried his immersion in scho­

larship ever further and not have been plagued by the

problem of the social utility of his work. In Russia at

the time he lived an honest scholar could not find the

basis for a confident, optimistic, or unambiguous histori­

ography. He did not create the value conflicts which

plague his writings. He merely tried to live with the

problems of his time in a temporizing fashion consistent

with his own personality.

A. 'furkova-Vll'ams. Ma putiakh k svobode (New tork.

1952), p. 57.
 247
Several years ago the late G. P. Fedotov took up in

one of his articles the old and complex problem of de­

fining the Russian intelligentsia. In this work Fedotov

returned to the idea that one of the primary characterist­

ics of the intelligentsia had been ttrootlessnessn which

he defined as being

cut off from national culture, national

religion, from the state, class, and from
all...social forms.10

This remark was followed by a statement that on these

grounds a man like Kliuchevskii must not be included in the

intelligentsia. I do not know whether or not Fedotov's

idea is central to a definition of the intelligentsia.

I do know that he obliquely leads us to Kliuchevskii’s

importance as an example of Russian historical thought in

the post-reform era. The fact that he was not "rootless"

in the sense that Fedotov uses the term makes him a good

example of educated Russian thought outside of the radical

and conservative extremes to which so much recent attention

has been directed. His search for a moderate honest

patriotism and a coherent philosophy of history resulted

in contradictions and ambiguities which were a reflection

of the times in which he wrote.

10. G. P. Fedotov. Novvi Grad: sbo m i k statei. p. 16.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works bt Kliuchevakii

Books
Kliuchevskii, Yasilii Osipovich. A History of Russia.
Translated by C. J. Hogarth. Hew York, 1911-31•
Blaaodatnvi vosoitatel russkaao narodnago dukha.
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Drevnerusskie shitiia sviatvkh kak istoricheskii
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