Russia under the Old regime

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outlined on the preceding pages were not known in the middle of the nineteenth century when Slavophile theory was formulated; in the main, they are the product of scholarly research carried out during the next hundred years. The Slavophile outlook probably owed more to the contemporary 'Young England' movement than to anything in Russia's own tradition. The Slavophiles greatly admired Britain (as they disliked France and Germany), and they wished Russia to have the same kind of unwritten constitution under which the relations between crown and nation were regulated by custom rather than written law, where the crown (ideally) allied itself with the laboring classes, where the bureaucracy was small and weak, and where it was taken for granted that the state did not interfere with society's right to go about its business. Of course, they knew next to nothing of the long historic antecedents of the Victorian compromise, or of the role played in it by the things they so hated, namely law, property and an institutionalized adversary relationship between rulers and ruled.

Their grotesquely idealized picture of the past permitted the Slavophiles to maintain that she was the country of the future, destined to solve the problems plaguing mankind. Her contribution would lie in the spread of voluntary associations, built in the spirit of love and brotherhood, and of a political system based on trust between authority and nation. By so doing, Russians would once and for all eliminate the world's political and class conflicts.

Because they like symmetry, historians have created a foil for the Slavophiles, a party they call 'Westerners', but it is difficult to perceive among the opponents of Slavophile theories any unity except that of a negative kind. They rejected the whole vision of Russia and of the west of the Slavophiles as compounded of ignorance and utopianism. Where the Slavophiles saw depth of religious feeling, they saw superstition verging on atheism (see Belinskii's letter to Gogol, cited above, p. 160). The historians among the anti-Slavophiles had no difficulty in demolishing one by one their most cherished beliefs; they could show that the modern repartitional commune was not of ancient and spontaneous, 'folkish' origin, but an institution created by the state to ensure collection of taxes (p. 17 above); that every one of Peter's 'revolutionary' innovations had had its antecedents in Muscovite Russia; that the alleged understanding between state and society had never existed, the Russian state always crushing society under its massive weight. They did not deny that Russia was different from the west, but they explained this difference by her backwardness rather than uniqueness. They saw virtually nothing in Russia worthy of preservation; the little there was, had been created by the state, and especially Peter the Great. Apart from their rejection of Slavophile idealizations, the Westerners