Will Morrisey Reviews

Richard Pipes: Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

 

Pipes remarks that the term ‘conservatism’ didn’t take hold in continental Europe until the founding of Le Conservateur littéraire in Paris during the years of the Bourbon Restoration. It is therefore anachronistic with respect to Russia, where it “emerged in the sixteenth century.” What he means by Russian conservativism is the defense of a regime, “autocracy,” consisting of a “strong, centralized authority, unrestrained either by law or parliament,” but still different from both the absolute monarchy of the France’s Old Regime and from the constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII that the French littérateurs were defending. Pipes undertakes to explain a paradox: Whereas “Russia’s post-1700 art, literature, and science were all patterned on Western models, her industries emulated Western prototypes, and so did her military,” her politics did not.

In a way reminiscent of Aristotle, Pipes begins by considering the origins of politics as such. Nomadic tribes organize themselves along ties of family instead of territory; they are ‘social,’ not ‘political.’ Equality within each tribe consists in the fact that all members share a bloodline; chiefs are often elected and wield authority temporarily, with no rights inherent in the office. Private property exists in livestock. “Once nomads settle down and turn to agriculture, they transfer the right of private property to land,” held by the tribes, as seen in the histories of the Israelites and the Greeks. In “nontribal, settled communities” such as Egypt, land was the property of kings and priests. “Throughout European history, the existence of private property constituted the single most effective barrier to unlimited royal authority inasmuch as it compelled the kings to turn to their subjects for financial support and, in the process, to concede to them a share of political power.” But European history didn’t begin that way. “Early European kings tended to treat their realm as they did their livestock and land, that is, as property: they drew no distinction between what the Romans called dominium (ownership) and potestas (authority), giving rise to what has come to be known as a ‘patrimonial’ type of regime.” It was Charlemagne in the late eighth century who began to acknowledge the separation of these kinds of rule. If “the kingdom was not the property of the king but the joint possession of the king and the people,” if “kings had not only rights but also duties” to “promote peace and justice,” then Aristotle’s definition of politics as ruling and being ruled, reciprocally, begins to prevail. Politics as understood by Aristotle came to Europe through the influence of the Roman notion of the respublica, the public thing or way; to this, the Roman Catholic Church of course added “the precepts of Holy Scriptures” to the Greco-Roman understanding of justice. If the God of the Bible restricted not only His people but Himself to the rule of law, surely human beings ought to do the same. 

“One manifestation of this notion of a partnership between state and society was the convocation of assemblies throughout Europe for the purpose of consultation on grave matters of state, especially taxation.” Government by the consent of the governed, who sent representatives to speak (hence ‘parle-ment‘) in assemblies called by the monarch “ratif[ied] major political decisions” and “authorize[d] extraordinary assessments.” Throughout the Middle Ages in Latin Christendom, there was no taxation without representation, without parliamentary consent; “it was through control of the purse strings that the most successful of parliaments, the English, ultimately achieved representative democracy.” The relations between feudal lords and their vassals, which entailed mutual obligations, and the commercial relations of citizens, of city-dwellers, amongst themselves and with other cities, in turn fostered rule by consent. “The authority of European kings was thus from the earliest limited by a variety of ideas and institutions.” 

In taking aim at classical and Christian ideas and institutions, Machiavelli worked to establish modern, centralized states, often ruled by ‘princes’ wielding absolute power—both of these undermining the restraints imposed by feudal oligarchs and priests while deprecating the moral laws governing both. Yet even the “absolutism” of a Louis XIV, who asserted exclusive power to legislate in France, while “certainly violat[ing] custom accepted in Europe during the preceding millennium,” did not violate the people’s “fundamental civil rights,” their rights of person and of property, much less their even more fundamental natural rights to life and property under the natural law. That is, the absolute monarchs were not quite tyrants, whatever Machiavelli might have hoped. Absolutism “cannot be said to anticipate twentieth-century totalitarianism.” And when the Bourbon monarchs, the Hanoverians, and others “came under assault” by republicans, their political enemies could draw upon “a widely shared consensus dating back to the earliest days of European civilization as to what constituted legitimate government.” To be sure (it should be added), the conceptions of what constituted natural and civil law had been transformed by ‘modern’ political philosophers after Machiavelli, especially in regard to the new conceptions of natural and divine law those philosophers propounded, but principled resistance to arbitrary power, whether tyrannical or merely ‘absolute,’ throughout ‘the West.’

Not so in the East, not so in Russia. “For a variety of reasons—geographic in the first place, but also cultural—the political evolution of Russia proceeded in a direction opposite to that of the West: from the relative freedom of the Middle Ages to a regime that in the vocabulary of western political theory would be variously defined as tyrannical, seignorial, or patrimonial.” 

In terms of geography, Russian rulers faced the same problem as all others who lived on the Great European Plain, but in much more severe form. “As a rule, the stability and liberty of a country stand in inverse relation to its size and external security: that is to say, the larger a country and the more insecure its borders, the less can it afford the luxury of popular sovereignty and civil rights”; “a country that administers vast territories and is exposed to foreign invasions tends toward centralized forms of government.” What for France and Poland was a serious problem was for Russia a dilemma, being “the most spacious kingdom on earth” by the seventeenth century, with no formidable natural boundaries to protect it from nomadic raiders. “This experience contrasted with that of western Europe, which enjoyed immunity from external invasions from the eleventh century onward,” even if it hardly enjoyed such immunity from territorial encroachments by one or more states upon the others, within. “Under these conditions, there “could be no [Russian] society independent of the state and no corporate spirit uniting its members,” as “the entire Russian nation was enserfed,” with no social or political space for a titled aristocracy, for “a class of self-governing burghers,” or for “a rural yeomanry.” There was, moreover, a “virtual absence of private property in the means of production and marketable commodities” since land was so abundant that peasants simply moved around the immense forests, cutting and burning trees to make way for farming, then moving on to another patch of trees once the soil had been exhausted. “The notion that land could be owned in exclusive property was entirely alien to them: they were convinced into modern times, that land, like air and water, all equally essential to life, was created by God for everyone’s use.” If the czar “claim[ed] title to all of Russian soil,” so what? He didn’t interfere with their way of life, and the Orthodox Church taught that God owned the earth, with the czar as God’s vicar.

As for the cities, private property didn’t establish itself in them, either. “Muscovite cities were essentially administrative and garrison centers, containing sizable rural populations engaged in agriculture and lacking powers of self-government.” That is, cities were much as they had been in western Europe before Charlemagne: fortified nodes in a military-political network. Given Russia’s vast distances and harsh climate, little or no national commerce existed; residents held no property rights against the czar, and there was no credit. The Mongol conquest “destroyed such urban self-government as had existed” before their arrival, and Mongol warlords assured that no such thing would arise for the two and a half centuries of their subsequent rule. Landlords weren’t really lords, holding their fiefs “provisionally, on condition of satisfactory service to the crown.” With no independent titled aristocracy, no middle class, and no private property in land, the czars who took over after the Mongols ruled without civil-social or institutional limits to their power. Nor did the Russian Orthodox Church, heir to Byzantium, establish the idea of a standard of justice applicable to secular rulers, preferring instead the New Testament teaching that whether king or tyrant, the monarch served as God’s scourge of human sinfulness and must therefore “be unreservedly obeyed.” ‘Czar’ means ‘Caesar,’ but a Caesar as conceived in Byzantium, a secular Pantocrator in a ‘new’ Rome, unfettered by such restraints as Roman Caesars were expected to obey, even if many did not. The czars regarded their realm as “patrimonial property, property inherited from their fathers,” with no basis in consent and no obligations to their subjects. “In the eyes of the crown, its subjects had only duties and no rights, and in this sense, they were all equal.” In observing that Russian civil-social equality under despotism would rival the civil-social republicanism of democracy in America, Tocqueville founded his prediction on this longstanding fact.

One dimension of Tocqueville’s remedy to the ills of democracy, the refurbishment of an aristocracy which adapted itself to the new social condition, could not apply to Russia, which had no aristocracy in the Western sense. The titled aristocrats, the boyars, lived in Moscow, attending the czar’s court, or were assigned administrative duties in the provinces. Because the only way to bind the peasants to the land in the vastness of the Russian forests was to have the czars enforce serfdom, “the aristocracy forfeited its political ambitions” in exchange for such enforcement. “Serfdom, indeed, was the element that bound the Russian upper classes to the monarchy from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, and caused it to surrender its political interests.” Peter the Great completed the reduction of the aristocracy by opening military and civil offices to commoners, men even more subservient to their benefactor. There was indeed the Boyar Duma, but it held no public deliberations and initiated no legislation; “it was an instrument of the czar’s will,” neither “serv[ing] the interests of his subjects” nor “convey[ing] their wishes.” As for the Land Assemblies, most of the deputies were appointed by the czar in order “to strengthen the government’s control over the provinces.” The czar and his officials “neither then nor later conceived of society as independent of the state, as having its own rights, interests, and wishes, to which they were accountable.” In Russia, a social group or class could only look to the monarchy in the hope that it would protect them against the depredations of the other social groups. “It was a vicious circle: Russians supported autocracy because they felt powerless; and they felt powerless because autocracy gave them no opportunity to feel their power.” 

Political thought in Russia after liberation from the Mongols centered on a controversy that wracked the Orthodox Church, the question of monastic landholding. Exempt from taxation under the Mongols, the abbeys had accumulated some wealth, the larger ones in effect becoming analogous to the secular estates of Europe. One set of the clergy, the nestiazhateli or “nongreedy” ones, charged that these possessions had corrupted the clergy, who succumbed to worldliness; another set of the clergy, the stiazhateli or “greedy” ones, begged to differ, preferring not to be reduced to beggary themselves. How could a Church without wealth perform acts of Christian charity? they asked. The more cosmopolitan stiazhateli had traveled abroad, committed themselves to the logic taught in the Western European schools; the nestiazhateli eschewed what they labeled as foreign corruption, “reject[ing] logic and reasoning” as damnable vices. Corruption had infected the establishment clergy generally, many of whose members engaged in levels of debauchery unseen since the orgies of Roman emperors. Czar Ivan III countered these squabbles by seizing church properties, with the initial support of the nestiazhateli. In this, he found support also from still another faction within the Church, the ‘Judaizers,’ reformers who translated the Pentateuch into Slavonic and called for the abolition of Church hierarchy, monasteries, icons, and the veneration of saints. 

The Church establishment fought back in the Russian way, initially appealing to the czar to treat the Judaizers as the Spanish Inquisition had treated Jews but then, thanks to the arguments put forth by Joseph of Volokolamsk (“in some respects the most influential intellectual of medieval Russia”), provided the czars with “a novel (for Russia) theory of divine origin of kingship,” namely, that it was “the main task of political authority” to “safeguard the faith”—the doctrine of Caesaropapism. Having thus elevated the monarchy to a spiritual capacity, he justified clerical landholding—but with the monasteries, not the individual monks, as the landholders—as forming a strong foundation for ecclesiastical training and action, action in the service of the czar, justifying the ways of czars to men. Indeed, he took from one of the Byzantine writers the claim that the czar “in his being is like other men” but “in his authority he resembles God Almighty,” to be “unconditionally obeyed.” “He persuaded the crown that heresies, even if they did not directly touch on politics, undermined monarchical authority and that only by pitilessly persecuting them could the monarch secure absolute power.” 

This gave the czars a choice. They wanted to take Church lands, and so approved of the ascetic teachings of the nestiazhateli; yet, they feared the Church establishment, especially since it offered them a degree of churchlike authority in exchange for keeping their hands off Church property. An accident concentrated the czarist mind when, in 1522, Czar Basil resolved to divorce his barren first wife and marry a Lithuanian princess. (“He anticipated Henry VIII of England by nine years.”) This violation of Orthodox canon law met with resistance from the nestiazhalteli; even the distant Greek Orthodox patriarchs weighed in with a condemnation. This enabled the Joseph’s successor among the stiazhateli, Daniel of Volokolamsk, to side with the czar, “promising to take the sin—if such it was—upon himself,” in a remarkably adroit imitatio Christi (best called an imitation imitatio Christi?) that Machiavelli himself might have admired. As Pipes drily notes, the eventual child of the loving couple was Ivan IV, a.k.a. “the Terrible.” Thus solemnized, the doctrine of “the divine nature of royal authority and its claim to unlimited power” reigned victorious, assisted by timely reforms of the Church by the now predominant hitherto corrupt stiazhateli, whose hierarchy moved to squelch the corrupt practices that had threatened to turn the Orthodox Church ‘protestant’ avant la lettre. The newly appointed head of the Church, Macarios, even managed to persuade young Ivan IV “to abandon his unruly ways and take charge of government.” If ‘czar’ means ‘Caesar’ and a Caesar is an emperor, it made sense that the Patriarch of Constantinople (“a capital which had been without an emperor for more than a century”), eventually recognized Ivan as the “only one true Christian emperor in the world.” Czars could now claim their own capital, Moscow to be the Third Rome—replacing the Second Rome, Constantinople, which had, in the eyes of the Orthodox, replaced the First Rome, the Vatican, only to be conquered by the Muslim Turks in 1453. “Implicit in” this claim to rule the Third Rome “was the belief that Russia was destined to rule the world and that the Russian czar was the czar of all humanity.” It is no wonder that Western European political observers named this sort of rule ‘Oriental despotism,’ inasmuch as the czar now asserted a universal authority similar to that long assumed by the Chinese emperors. 

Russia was indeed distant from Western Europe now, not only geographically but intellectually, spiritually, and politically. The czar, as “the world’s only Christian emperor, was affirmed, with the support of theologians, as endowed with unrestrained power—his subjects were in the literal sense of the word his slaves,” rather as the Apostle Paul thought of himself in relation to God, only without the guarantees of the divine covenant. The Russian Orthodox Church acceded to domination by the czar, who appointed its officers and removed them without consultation. At the same time, the Church firmly censured “all independent religious thought” as mudrstvovanie or ‘smart-alecking, offering “no intellectual refuge from those seeking alternatives” to the regime in a manner that “startled foreigners visiting Russia, causing them to wonder whether Russians were indeed Christians” at all. This hardly disturbed the czar or his clergy, who expected nothing better from the lesser peoples, who did not understand Russia as the new Holy Land, “the only country so labeled apart from Palestine.” Understandably if fatally for Russia, “when Russia developed a class of secular thinkers known as the intelligentsia, the majority of them either rejected religion outright or showed themselves, indifferent to it, yet tended to pursue their worldly speculations with a pseudoreligious fanaticism” imbibed from their earliest schooling under the tutelage of the monks. When a prince dared to urge Ivan IV to accept counselors, citing Aristotle and Cicero (“of which” the prince wrote scornfully, “the Russians knew nothing”), the czar rejected the thought out of hand, citing the Bible as interpreted by his appointed priests. “How can a man be called an autocrat if he does not govern by himself?” he rejoined, with etymological exactness. To seek advice from others is “the rule of many,” he explained, and “the rule of many is like unto the folly of women,” who notoriously cannot make up their minds.

Ivan’s successors could only nod judiciously at the writings of the seventeenth-century Croatian emigre, Iury Krichanich, who wrote in his book, Politika, that “perfect autocracy” was the “first, most important, principal” cause of Russian happiness, maintained despite the country’s bad soil, miserable climate, and neighboring enemies. In his judgment, “only a powerful, centralized state could civilize the country. Although the contemporary Patriarch Nikon made an attempt to reverse the lines of authority by asserting “the supremacy of the church over the state,” drawing upon the teachings of the fourth century archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, he succeeded only in weakening the Church still further, making it easy prey during the next century, under the rule of Peter I.

Peter “the Great” was a great modernizer. He abolished the annoying patriarchate altogether, replacing it with the “Holy Synod,” which was no more holy than (as the old joke goes) the Holy Roman Empire. Expropriating church and monastic lands, placing clergy and monks on state salary, he made the Russian church “a branch of the state’s administration” a “powerless tool of the crown,” and proceeded to appoint “laymen, sometimes military officers,” to the Synod. Just as important in theoretical terms, Peter was “the first Russian ruler to view the state as an institution in its own right, distinct from the person of the monarch” in imitation of the modern, Western European, political philosophers, notably Bodin and Hobbes. He sent young men to European universities, the better to absorb modernity and to reinforce it upon their return to Russia. Although in theory this meant the introduction of the idea of the “common good” to Russia, in practice Peter “denied Russians any aspirations of their own and perceived themes subjects capable of functioning only within the context of the absolutist state”—a practice old Hobbes himself would have found congenial. Dissatisfied with his weak and disappointingly religious son, Peter chose his own successor, his grandson. Subsequent anti-absolutist stirrings, centered among the descendants of the boyars, were neutralized by czars who played off this elite against the newer “service nobility,” which “owed its ennoblement to Moscow’s rulers.” Absolutism was vindicated in The History of Russia by Vasily Tatishchev, a former military officer and foreign service officer who served under Peter the Great, his weak immediate successors, and finally the Empress Anna, who reigned from 1730 to 1740. “Skimming over Russian history since Kievan times, he argued that for a country like Russia autocracy was the only suitable regime,” making his the “first document in Russian history in which autocracy was advocated on purely pragmatic grounds, without reference to the Holy Scriptures or the divine origin of royal authority” citing as its justification “the unique size of Russia and the ignorance of her population,” an argument that “would be used by the Russian crown to reject proposals for constitution and public representation during the next century and a half.” Russian ‘conservatism’ conserved the regime of absolute monarchy at the price of dismissing religious justification of its rule as superfluous.

But Peter’s educational program of sending Russian innocents abroad to absorb modern ideas had long-term results unfavorable to czarism. First among these was the emergence of public opinion. With Enlightenment ideas now imported and the structure of a modern state in place, the regime began to see recognizably ‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ and even ‘radical’ movements, in something that was starting to resemble a modern civil society. It started small, under the rule of Peter’s successors, the empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II. With compulsory state service abolished for the aristocrats and the introduction of private property in land, Russia saw, “for the first time, a leisured and propertied class,” “leisured and enlightened” in its upper reaches, “able to view itself as ‘society’ (obshchestvo)—that is, as the state’s counterpart.” This small group “paid attention to the way the country was governed,” and was “actively encouraged” to do so by Catherine, herself “born and raised in western Europe.” This put the regime in a bind, as it wanted and needed elements of modernity in order to survive in its ever-dangerous neighborhood but wanted nothing to do with back-talk, let alone political resistance, from ‘the few.’ “Filled—sincerely, it seems—with the desire to benefit her adopted country and rid it of the stigma of despotism, she nevertheless reacted angrily to any suggestion that she formally limit her autocratic powers.” She admired the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire (with whom she corresponded), and Rousseau, permitting their books to be published and distributed in Russia, yet persecuted private publishers when “displeased with some of their output.” She knew what she thought but didn’t know what to do about it.

As the French would say, she had reason for her confusion. Montesquieu’s labyrinthine L’Esprit des lois scarcely commends despotism but it does maintain that countries with large territories and weak civic culture will require at best constitutional monarchy and sometimes despotism. A constitutional monarchy, upholding “the rule of law, derived from the Law of Nature and adapted to a country’s specific conditions,” needs what Montesquieu (and Tocqueville, following him) called “intermediate” powers—typically an aristocracy, although the civic associations seen in the (then) British North American colonies can serve the same function. That is, non-despotic rule of ‘the one’ limits itself by law, but it must have some elements of civil society capable of resisting monarchic encroachments upon legal barriers. Montesquieu pointed to Russia’s lack of “liberty, honor, freedom of speech, and a commercial third estate” as guarantees of a despotic regime. He thus gave several Russian factions their ‘talking points’: the aristocrats could say, You czars need us if you seek to achieve “a true monarchy”; liberals could say, To survive and prosper in modernity, we must have the rule of law; and partisans of autocracy could say, Russia is far too large to be ruled by anything but a strong hand directed by a single mind. 

Neither the single mind of Catherine nor any of the minds around her could figure out “how to restrain the autocracy by law.” She wanted the rule of law but “drew no distinction between laws and administrative ordinances,” the latter enacted by bureaucrats appointed by the czar and, “implicitly, acting in [her] name.” Further, the rule of law aristocrats propounded didn’t apply to themselves, unencumbered by any “legal restraints over the serfs or their belongings” short of killing or torturing them. Reform efforts thus proved fruitless and autocracy/despotism continued. At the same time, public opinion sniped at the regime, weakening its authority and at times making it question the authority it wielded. Pipes identifies Count Nikita Panin as one such critic, “Russia’s earliest liberal in the Western sense of the word,” an advocate of constitutionalism and civil rights, including property rights. Empress Elizabeth appointed him to tutor Catherine’s son, Paul, and even promised to establish “proper limits and regulations” for “each government institution.” Paul proved a disaster as czar, Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I, who took over after the assassination, also “made no secret of his liberal sentiments” and, like his grandmother, found himself unable to bring those sentiments into practice in any consistent way. 

Alexander’s chief minister, briefly, was Michael Speransky. By now, the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘enlightened’ Europeans had shifted from their adherence to natural rights to the historicism of G. W. F. Hegel. Speransky hoped and expected that Russia would evolve toward republicanism. ‘History’ would solve its problems. His intellectual nemesis, Nikolay Karamzin, a Romantic opponent of Hegelian rationalism, denied that Russia could sustain republicanism, that without an autocratic regime the country would succumb to anarchy and consequent rule by foreigners. He admitted Montesquieu’s distinction between constitutional monarchy and despotism, arguing that Russia could achieve the former without representative institutions by forming a partnership between the czar and “a gentry in possession of inviolable estate rights,” including the right to absolute rule over the serfs. Good men, not good institutions, were what Russia needed—the mirror opposite of what Publius argued in The Federalist, respecting the civil-social conditions prevailing in the United States. A far better historian than Tatishchev, he followed in his predecessor’s line as a historian, writing his History of the Russian State in twelve volumes, persuading himself, and not incidentally the czar, of the soundness of his understanding of autocracy and of its indispensability to Russia. In the dispute between Speransky and Karamzin, Russia saw the two philosophic ‘replacements’ for natural-rights theory: rationalist historicism and anti-rationalist Romanticism. Alexander waffled between reform and ‘conservatism’; as late as 1818, he announced in a speech opening the Polish Diet in Warsaw that Russia, like Poland, would have “legal and free institutions” once its people had attained “the proper level of maturity.” He likely meant reforms along the lines of Karamzin, not of Speransky, but Russian liberals took heart, hoping that this marked the beginning of the end for serfdom.

Until 1825, “all attempts to change Russia’s autocratic form of government had emanated from above,” from the czars or from persons appointed by the czars: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander I, Panin, Speransky, and in his own way Karamzin. Now, however, officers in St. Petersburg and Ukraine led a mutiny of army garrisons against the rule of the newly-crowned czar, Nicholas I. The ‘Decembrists,’ aristocratic liberal admirers of Speransky, had seen, while stationed in Germany and France during the Napoleon Wars, that civic order could be maintained without autocracy. A decade later, they hoped that Alexander’s elder son, Konstantin, would succeed to the throne. When Konstantin’s refusal of the succession became known, their surprise was complete; their rebellion amounted to an attempted palace coup against the perceived autocratic leanings of Nicholas. They were crushed, but alarmed autocrats, very much including Nicholas, leaned even more heavily toward autocracy. 

Nicholas I felt the need for “an official ideology” to justify his regime—another sign that public opinion now existed and counted for something politically. Eventually called “Official Nationalism,” the doctrine was summarized in the slogan, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” or, alternatively, “Faith, Czar, and Fatherland.” While all of these terms invoked the longstanding Russian regime, reconceived in terms of Romanticism, and as such opposed what Nicholas saw as the dangerous secular-liberal, individualist elements of Western European thought and politics, Pipes distinguishes Official Nationalism from the more stridently anti-rationalist Slavophilism contemporary with it: “Peter the Great, anathema to the Slavophiles, was the doctrine’s idol.” If this sounds like an attempt to square the circle—a Hegelian synthesis without Hegelian logic—it may well have been something very much like that. 

The Slavophiles themselves addressed the Hegelian problem in terms of nationalism. If ‘History’ unfolds dialectically, and world history unfolds as nations confront one another “as bearers of specific ideas,” where does Russia fit in? “The Slavophiles depicted the West as poisoned by shallow rationalism inherited from classical antiquity and racked by class antagonisms from which Russia was saved by her Byzantine heritage and Slavic spirit” as seen in the peasant commune, “a solution to the class conflicts which the West was vainly seeking in socialism.” Hegel mistakenly took a fully rational World State to be the ‘end of History,’ but the Slavophiles held up Russia as “the model for the world.” “Russia was the future,” the true end of History. Slavophiles proposed a continuation of autocracy, but an autocracy limited to the realm of the state, a state that left the private lives of its subjects alone in exchange for subjects’ refraining from citizenship, from participation in political life. As did Tatischchev and Karamzin, the Slavophiles presented a mythologized account of Russian history, this time claiming for Russia a fundamentally peaceful character in contrast with the barbaric violence of the West. Fundamentally spiritual, not political, Russians neither want nor should have anything to do with government; “their sense of freedom was inner, spiritual; indeed, true freedom can exist only there,” never in civic life. Autocracy permitted Russians to live the highest form of life human beings could achieve, confining the dirty business of politics to ‘the one’ and his colleagues. The Slavophile writer Konstantin Aksakov summarized: “To the government unlimited freedom to rule, to which it has the exclusive right; to the people full freedom of life, both outward and inner, which the government safeguards.” Russian liberals did not understand true freedom, instead pursuing the illusion of civic freedom, an illusion imported from the West. The successes of the first half of the century, beginning with the victory over Napoleonic France, fed Russian self-confidence.

Reality set in, quickly enough. In response to Russia’s invasion of the Ottoman Empire’s Danube Principalities in 1853, the Turkish emperor allied with Great Britain and France (themselves newly allied) to repel the czar’s army. If France had a powerful army and Great Britain a powerful navy, and both had the most advanced military technologies of the time, Russian Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality had none of these to the same degree, and this handicap derived from its “refusal to involve society in the social and political life” of the country. “Russia, it came to be widely believed in and out of government in the aftermath of the Crimean War, had to build up her human and material resources,” which could be done only with “far-reaching reforms” beginning with the emancipation of the serfs, who constituted eighty percent of the population. This Czar Alexander II did in short order, two years before President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, and four years before the ratification of Thirteenth Amendment. Additionally, Alexander established institutions of local self-government which enabled peasants to begin to govern themselves; he separated the judicial power from the executive, with jury trials. Autocracy didn’t disappear; it concentrated itself and invoked a more virulent nationalism even as it democratized and politicized elements of Russian civil society. What Pipes calls “conservatism,” the defense of the autocratic/monarchic regime, became increasingly “chauvinistic, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic,” as seen in some of the unlovelier passages in Dostoevsky’s writings. 

 The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a jurist and advisor to the czars, viewed Alexander’s reforms with distaste. In the wake of Alexander’s assassination in 1881, he was quick to persuade the heir to the throne to roll back many of the reforms and to reassume “the uncompromising absolutism” of the young man’s grandfather, Nicholas I. In his 1896 book, Reflections of a Russian Statesman, Pobedonostsev argued that “the modern world was on the verge of self-destruction, which only cooperation between the autocratic monarchy and the Orthodox Church could forestall.” Democratization could only lead to tyranny; such abstract principles as natural rights were anti-life, failing to account for nature’s concrete, organic quality, whether in biology or in human society; the modern-Western ‘cult of humanity’ enunciated by Auguste Comte and others would destroy the human personality, which can only flourish under the rule of God and his Orthodox Church. Man must submit to the rightful authority of Church and Czar, since “power is the depository of truth,” ordained as such by God. Pipes observes that Pobedonostsev “had a greater impact on government policy than any other Russian theorist of his time.” After he had passed from the scene, Sergei Iulevich Witte took up the mantle of autocracy, serving as finance minister then as Russia’s first prime minister at and around the turn of the century. Constitutionalism, he told the German chancellor, “will be the end of Russia”; “a parliament and the universal vote would produce anarchy and destroy Russia,” leaving it defenseless against enemies foreign and domestic. Such liberalization might occur, successfully, sometime in the indefinite future; in the interim, industrialization would protect the country from Western predation.

By this time, autocracy continued to prevail, with progressive-gradualist liberalism and revolutionary radicalism gathering strength below. “One cannot comprehend any of the three strains that have dominated Russian thought” in modernity “except in relation to one another.” Among the liberals, Boris Chicherin was “arguably the most prominent,” an advocate of laissez-faire economics and therefore antagonistic to anarchists, Slavophiles, and socialists. Marxist-Leninist doctrines were propounded by Peter Bengardovich Struve, who, unlike his contemporary V. I. Lenin, denied the claim that Russia could vault over the capitalist stage of economic production and establish socialism. But he eventually rejected Marxian notions of historically determined revolution as the issue of class conflict, a heresy which earned him expulsion from the socialist ranks. He became a reformist, convinced that autocracy’s days were numbered and that only a return to the reformism of Alexander II could ward off violent revolution. 

Pipes considers Peter Arkadevich Stolypin to have been “imperial Russia’s last great statesman,” a judgment Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later affirm. Stolypin “understood the need to be rid of the patrimonial ideal by bringing society into some sort of equilibrium with the government.” This made him a lonely figure, supported neither by Nicholas II (whose liberalizing concessions were made “under duress”), nor the autocratic purists, nor the liberal advocates of parliamentarism, nor the Communist advocates of ‘proletarian’ dictatorship. Although he “tried repeatedly to bring representatives of public opinion into his cabinet” and to “lay the foundations of a constitutional autocracy” by transforming the peasant communes into villages in which private property in land was respected, and more, to enact legal guarantees of civil rights for all Russians, it was too late. In 1911, he was assassinated by one Dmitry Bogrov, a shadowy figure who was both a member of one of the socialist parties and an informer for the czar’s secret police. In a few years, the Great War would ruin czarism, soon replaced by a new, far more murderous form of tyranny claiming legitimacy not from tradition but from the supposedly ineluctable laws of ‘History’ as formulated not by Hegel but by Marx, as interpreted by Lenin and Stalin. 

Pipes concludes by remarking that the Russian word for ‘sovereign,’ gosudar, “originally designated a master of slaves.” In Aristotelian terms, then, Russian regimes imitated not the political character of the family’s marital relationship, a husband and wife ruling reciprocally, but the tyrannical character of the relations between master and slave. At best, a czar might mimic the third family relationship, the parental relationship of the father (occasionally the mother) ruling children. Russian thinkers, churchmen, and statesmen never fully accepted the Western Europeans’ distinction between the person of the ruler and the state apparatus he ruled with. In the words, of Nicholas I, “the government and I are one and the same.” And as late as 1917, Nicholas II contended that the Russian people needed to regain his confidence, not the other way around. For most of its late-feudal and modern history, with the exception of a thin layer of modernizing elements, Russian minds and hearts inclined to concur. 

Later, Romantic invocations of nationalism could not bind the czar’s subjects together because “Russia was an empire before she had become a nation.” Russia’s vast territorial conquests resulted in a population that was only half Russian, and ethnic Russians themselves “were widely scattered over the empire’s immense territory.” “Until quite recently most Russians, when asked who they were, would identify themselves not as ‘Russians’ but as ‘Orthodox Christians.” As such, they felt greater affinity with their coreligionists abroad, be they Greeks or Serbs, than with westernized Russians who did not observe Orthodox rituals. That is, both elements of the modern ‘nation-state’ remained incomplete in the empire of the czars. “Limited government was beyond their comprehension, and so was patriotism.” As Montesquieu saw, despots govern by fear and, as Pipes adds, in Russia they were governed by fear, fear of internal stability and external foes. The czars “were convinced—and not without reason, as the events of 1917-1920 were to show—that lacking strong central authority acting for the benefit of the whole and independently of the particular wants of the diffuse population the country would promptly disintegrate.” A regime of autocracy, and of autocracy alone, could undertake the enlightenment of Russians, liberate the serfs, rule a people “by nature apolitical,” defend that people from the degrading philistinism of modern materialism, individualism, and nihilism, and raise Russians “above selfish class interests.” Or so Russian autocrats contended, and still contend to this day.

 

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller: Wilhelm Tell. Gilbert J. Jordan translation. Cleveland: Bobbs-Merril Company, 1964.

 

First produced in 1804, a few years into the Napoleonic Wars, themselves the aftermath of the excesses of the French Revolution, Wilhelm Tell provides a political education in the virtues needed to found republics that avoid such excesses, and thus to issue in no such wars. In the play, three Swiss cantons struggle for independence from Hapsburg rule, which had prevailed in the Holy Roman Empire since 1273, some four centuries after Charlemagne’s founding and three decades before the events of the play. The lessons Schiller draws from the events of that struggle and the men and women who fought it—part history, part legend—may have contributed to the stability of Swiss republicanism after the European revolutions of 1848. In many other countries, republican gains soon evanesced, but not so in Switzerland. 

In 1804, the Swiss had good reason to view French revolutionary fervor unenthusiastically. A few years earlier, invading Frenchmen had centralized Switzerland, abolishing its citadels of self-government, the cantons, and founding the “Helvetic Republic.” Reacting to an invasion by Austrians and Russians in 1803, Napoleon had partially restored Swiss independence, which would be fully restored only after Napoleon’s defeat in the settlement reached by the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Appropriately, given the political and military conflicts of Europe in the previous decade and a half, Schiller opens his play with Lake Lucerne roiling in a thunderstorm, emblematic of the Stürm und Drang of Romanticism, itself roiling European thought. A peasant from Unterwalden canton, Conrad Baumgarten, flees the forces of the imperial governor of the Swiss, Albrecht Gessler, whose Burgvoght or steward he had killed in defense of his honor and the honor of his wife and home. He has crossed the lake in search of relatively safe haven in Uri canton—what “any free man in my place would do.” Fearing the storm professedly and perhaps the civil storm unprofessedly, the boatman refuses him passage. A hunter and expert marksman, Wilhelm Tell, offers to bring him across, saying, “rather fall into the hand of God than in the hands of men.” “No other man is like him in these mountains,” the boatman says. In revenge for the peasant’s escape, the Emperor’s troops take revenge by killing the citizens’ livestock, setting them against both the Hapsburg emperor and his subordinate, who vows “to put a stop to all this freedom,” especially the peasants’ practice of building houses without his permission. Life, liberty, property: the Austrians consider the Holy Roman Empire to be their state, even as Machiavelli describes lo stato as the prince’s personal possession.

As this is happening, Gertrud Stauffacher, wife of the Schwyz canton Landammann or chief magistrate, urges her husband to consult with the “good citizens” of the neighboring cantons to determine “how we can best escape from this oppression.” The cautious Werner admits to having “a storm of dangerous thoughts” in his mind, a storm Gertrud traces to its firm source: “God will always help courageous men” and “noble hearts will never bear injustice.” Her husband acknowledges that “For centuries we Swiss have prized our freedom.” In Uri canton, the Hapsburg governor forces citizens to build a fortress to be used in the enforcement of his edicts, erects a pole and puts his hat on it, announcing that any man who fails to salute the hat will be executed. Wilhelm Tell urges calm. Pointing to the mountains, calls them the “house of freedom God created,” a natural fortress for the Swiss, more formidable than the artifact of tyranny. Such “hotheaded rulers never last for long” because although “sudden storms arise within these gorges,” the Swiss “put our fires out,” bring their boats to harbor, “and a mighty spirit moves across the land without a trace of harm.” He advises his countrymen to “stay quietly at home,” as “peace is granted to the peaceful man.” But Tell knows his limits. He is a huntsman, not one for deliberation: “I cannot weigh and compare.” He stands ready “for a special task,” if called upon. He is no French revolutionary avant la lettre. The problem, Tell’s father-in-law Walter Fürst observes, is that “tyrants give assistance to one another”—in Switzerland, the governor to the emperor—as readily as citizens do.

Revolutionary sentiment also builds in Unterwalden canton. The governor’s advocatus or bailiff demands the ox team of Heinrich von Melchtal, who has failed to pay his taxes. Heinrich replies that if he loses his oxen he won’t be able to pay his taxes at all, and may starve. Let your son pull the yoke, the advocatus sneers, enraging the young man, who raps him over the knuckles with his oxen prod, then flees the imperial troops to the home of Walter Fürst. Again as retaliation, the Austrians gouge out Heinrich’s eyes. This turns son Arnold into a revolutionary, telling his host and the other cantonal dignitaries that he has “many friends” in his home canton who would join them, “the trusted fathers of our country,” in resisting Austrian tyranny. He pleads with them not to “reject my judgment and advice because I’m young and inexperienced,” as “I’m not impelled by hot, impetuous blood, but by the power of a painful grief.” “You too are heads of families, and fathers and you must wish to have a virtuous son who wants to honor and respect his father”; “the tyrant’s sword hangs over you as well.” Whether by rape, confiscation, or physical attack, tyrants destroy families, the foundation of the political community. Fürst reiterates his point about collaboration among tyrants: “Were there a judge between us and our foe, then right and law would govern the decision. But our oppressor also is our emperor and highest court.” Therefore, “our God must help us now through our own strength.” The Swiss elders agree to combine against the tyrant—one association against another.

In Uri canton, the elderly Baron of Attinghausen, a free aristocrat, sympathizes with the peasants. But his nephew and heir, Ulrich von Rudenz, is a collaborator with the Austrians, preferring “the brilliant court” of the Hapsburgs to the role of “ruler of these lowly herdsmen.” Like Heinrich von Melchtal, he has been “blinded,” his uncle tells him, not physically but in his soul, “seduced by splendor,” ready to “renounce your native land, and be ashamed of good and ancient customs of your fathers.” Someday you will “yearn for home and your native mountains,” since “the love of fatherland” is more powerful than “the foreign, evil world” of Vienna. “At the proud imperial court, you’ll be a stranger to yourself and to your heart,” alienated. “The sturdy roots of your strength are here. Out in the foreign world you’ll stand alone, a swaying reed that any storm can break.” The natural bonds are love will prove stronger than the ties of “word and oath” to the emperor. As it happens, it is another natural bond that keeps Ulrich away from the imperial capital: his hope of winning the Lady Berta von Bruneck, the imperial governor’s ward, whom he hopes to impress by his links to the court. Assuming that the young lady must esteem her guardian, the Baron can only lament, “Fortunate is he who need not live to see the new,” the new being the replacement of good and ancient customs, still-older nature, and the God Who created nature.

The people arm themselves against what Arnold von Melchtal calls “the tyranny of this regime,” symbolized by an unsettling rainbow caused not by the sun but the moon. Arnold has been protected in his conspiracy by the “sacred laws of hospitality” obeyed in the Fürst household, still another ancient custom derived from the natural institution of the family. He was right to claim that he is motivated by grief at his father’s unjust punishment and not blind rage. He shows “self-control” by refraining from murdering one of the emperor’s men at a feast, self-government being the foundation of political liberty. Inheritance sustains families through generations, and Fürst finds in him a trustworthy ally in the Swiss political inheritance; “”in secret we must meet on our own soil, which we obtained in freedom from our fathers, convening furtively like murderers, at night, when darkness lends its cloak to crimes and to conspirators who fear the light,” but for a cause that deserves to flourish in the light: “justice for ourselves—a thing that is as pure and bright and fair as is the radiance of the light by day.” Arnold avers that “what’s plotted in the darkness of the night shall joyfully and freely come to light.”

Meeting in nature, in the Rütli, a meadow near Lake Lucerne in Uri canton, the Swiss elect Itel Reding of Schwyz as their magistrate. “I cannot take my oath upon the books,” he tells them, “so I will swear by all the stars above that I will never turn aside from justice.” Walter Stauffacher assures him that he commits no novelty, as this only reconfirms “our fathers’ ancient covenant” in founding Switzerland. And “we’re all one blood,” all Swiss. The new convention, the new and arbitrary ‘law’ of the Hapsburg corrupts families. The stars symbolize unalienable or natural rights. To confirm his claim, Stauffacher relates the founding story of Schwyz canton, then draws its lesson. “Other nations bear a foreign yoke because they yielded to the conqueror. But we, the true and ancient Swiss, have always treasured and preserved our freedom. We did not bend our knees before the princes; we freely chose the emperor’s protection.” That is, not unlike the Americans in their Declaration of Independence, Schiller’s Swiss point to natural rights and to government by the consent of the governed—consent being reasoned assent, neither compelled nor unthinking. These revolutionaries want not anarchy but self-government. “Even free men have an overlord,” Stauffacher says. “There must be government, a highest judge, to render justice when there are disputes,” and “our fathers gladly gave this honor to the emperor,” pledging themselves to “military service” in the Empire, “the freeman’s only duty, to shield the realm that is his own defense.” There is a standard above the emperor, however: Men’s “everlasting rights, which still abide on high, inalienable and indestructible as are the stars.” In light of those stars, in the meadow at night, “we’ll stand for our own homes, our wives and children” as “a nation of true brothers” who “stand as one in danger and distress.” Self-government by reason enjoins prudence or practical reasoning in addition to reasoned assent to just government as rationally discerned from nature and nature’s God. For now, “let each man go calmly on his way to his own friends and his community,” “endur[ing] what you must suffer until then” and “quietly win[ning] friends to our new union,” the new covenant that reprises the old one. “Let the tyrants’ debts to us increase until the day of reckoning is here”; “let everyone restrain his righteous rage and hold his vengeance back to serve the whole, for if one man thinks only of himself, he robs our common welfare and our goal.” 

Rudenz and Berta have their own conspiracy going. They meet secretly in the forest, but to his unpleasant surprise she upbraids him for his preference the Austrians over Switzerland. Once again, it is a woman who holds a man to patriotic account. Having been forced by the imperial governor to accept the prospect of an arranged marriage with one of the courtiers—her guardian guards her poorly—she tells Ulrich, “Only love, your love, can set me free,” but to love me you must love our country. “Where could we ever find the Blessed Isles if not in this fair land of innocence,” a country of mountains and meadows, not of cities. “Here where the ancient loyalties yet live”—fidelity may well be on her mind—and “where falsehood still has never found its way, no envy can obscure our happiness; the hours will pass and fill each shining day,” and “in true and manly worth I see you there, the first among these free and equal men,” sharing “the privilege of king and citizen.” Otherwise, get lost, she implies. True and manly worth is the cornerstone of the family that supports a self-governing federal republic. Nothing less will do.

Wilhelm Tell’s wife is less brave. Her husband declaims, “Whoever looks around with open eyes and trusts in God and his own ready strength can keep himself from danger and distress. He fears no mountains who was born among them.” Against her reservations, he finds virtue in his own disinclination to deliberate: “Who thinks too long will not accomplish much.” But it is not an act but a failure to act that puts him and his son in danger. Passing the governor’s castle in Uri canton, he fails to salute the hat on the pole and Gessler arrests him for this capital offense. During the interrogation, son Walter proudly says that his father is such a good marksman that he can shoot an apple at the distance of 100 yards; it might be that the boy thinks the governor would want to keep a man with such a skill alive and potentially useful to him. Determining to punish both father and son for their insolence, Gessler commands Tell to shoot an apple off his son’s head. In this, he continues the Hapsburg’s evidently systematic assault on family, tightening the noose of centralized imperial rule. In so commanding, he ignores Berta’s compassionate pleading (“My lord, don’t play with these poor people’s lives”), but Gessler will be a man of the law, self-ordained and capricious as it is. He prefers a show of compassion to the real thing. “Your life is forfeited, and I can kill you,” he says to Tell, “but see, I mercifully place your fate in your own skilled and highly practiced hand. You can’t complain and call the sentence harsh if you are made the master of your fate.” Many an archer can hit a bull’s-eye but “I consider him a master who trusts his skill in any situation, whose heart does not affect his eye and hand.” It is the goad of a would-be Machiavellian, a test of virtù disguised as a test of virtue. In the test, the son proves courageous, virtuous by nature, refusing to be tied or blindfolded and, famously, Tell splits the apple without harming him. Gessler keeps him under arrest, anyway.

But this presents the would-be Machiavellian prince with a difficulty a real Machiavellian would have foreseen. In playing with his captive instead of jailing and executing him quickly, in undertaking a mere game of dominance, Gessler has ordered his intended victim to pick up a crossbow. Good arms make good laws, Machiavelli cynically teaches; ergo, a real prince will scarcely let his enemy take up arms and give him the chance to enforce some law other than that of the prince. Tell hastens to instruct him, announcing that if his arrow had missed the apple and hit Walter, he would have used a second arrow to kill the Governor. With this threat he has committed a second crime, this time with no offer of exoneration, however cruel. Walter clings to his father as he is led away, but Tell calmly replies, “Above us is your Father. Call on him.” His message to his wife, who will think her fears vindicated, is “the boy’s unhurt, and God will help me too.” He is no Machiavellian.

God, or nature’s God does indeed help the patriot. As the ship carrying Tell to prison crosses a lake, another storm comes up, understood by a fisherman nearby as the rebellion of nature against the Governor’s assault on the bond between father and son. Evidently not himself a fisher of men, the fisherman considers this a return to the state of nature, now that no humans would want to live in Austria-tyrannized Switzerland. But the natural storm is more powerful than the Governor’s storming, and natural ruler, Wilhelm Tell, is the only one who can pilot the boat through the storm. In releasing him for this task, his guards enable him to escape and to join the rebels. The Governor’s unnatural tyranny won’t last much longer.

In Attinghausen, the Baron is on his deathbed. He has heard of the rebellion. “If countrymen have dared so bold a deed all by themselves, without the aid of nobles, relied so much on their own strength and means, good—then we nobles are no longer needed, and we can meet our death with confidence that life goes on, that mankind’s glory will hereafter be maintained by other hands.” Those hands are before him, the hands of Walter Tell, whom he blesses: “From this child’s head, on which the apple lay, shall spring you new and better liberty,” the liberty defended by the people, who, if united, can resist tyrannic imperial rule. He dies with the light in his eyes, the light that symbolizes God-given republican liberty. But in the event, he is wrong about the needlessness of the aristocrats. Indignant at Tell’s arrest, now followed by the arrest of his beloved Berta on charges of sympathy with the people, the nobleman Ulrich Rudenz shakes hands with the peasant, Albert Melchtal. Across the social classes, national unity has risen and the Swiss agree to fight.

Tell the huntsman lays an ambush for Gessler along a mountain path. He watches as a peasant woman, Armgart, approaches the Governor, petitioning him for the release of her husband from jail on the grounds of hardship; they have seven children. He has no more compassion for her than he had for any of his other subject, saying that what the Swiss need are still stricter laws. At this, Tell intervenes. “I led a harmless, quiet hunter’s life,” he begins. “My bow was bent for woodland game alone, my mind was free from any thoughts of murder.” That was then. “You frightened me away from peaceful ways. You changed the natural milk of human kindness to rankling, bitter poison in my breast. You have accustomed me to monstrous things. A man who had to aim at his own child can surely hit his adversary’s heart,” and he has taken “a dreadful oath that only God could hear” to do just that. Nor is this really murder, but rather the exercise of his duty to “protect my faithful wife, my children, against your awful anger, Governor”—the same argument from natural justice the peasant Baumgarten had enunciated, before Tell rescued him from Gessler’s troops.  If the Governor would endanger Tell’s son and refuse relief to the family of Armgart, he threatens all Swiss families. The Hapsburg regime has forcibly attempted to change the Swiss regime, for the worse, aiming to substitute a Viennese-centered tyranny of fear and force for the liberty of the farm and the hunt. Tell shoots Gessler, and Armgart takes this as a teachable moment for children who need schooling in republicanism: “This is how a tyrant dies!”

But will the Hapsburg emperor not retaliate, send force majeure against the rebel Swiss? On the contrary, God intervenes once more. The Swiss learn that the emperor has been assassinated by his nephew, the duke of Austria. Hapsburg rule has been disrupted, although the Empire remains. But since the Empire does remain, why will the next emperor not bring the Swiss to heel? Will he distinguish between criminal murder and tyrannicide, unjust rebellion and the manly (and womanly) assertion of natural right? Here, Providence enables the Swiss to speak in action ‘louder than words.’ The fugitive Duke, disguised as a friar, seeks refuge with Wilhelm Tell’s family, “hop[ing] to find compassion” there on the grounds that “You too have taken vengeance on your foe.” Tell won’t have it. “You dare confuse ambition’s bloody guilt,” your own, “with a father’s necessary self-defense”? “I’ll raise my guiltless hands to heaven above and curse you and your deed, for I avenged the laws of nature; you dishonored them. I share no guilt with you. Your act was murder, but I defended what’s most dear to me.” But Wilhelm Tell turns out to be a better deliberator, a more prudent man, than his wife or he himself had supposed. He does not turn the Duke in to the Swiss republicans or the not-so-Holy Roman Empire. He tells him to go to Rome, to the Vatican, and beg forgiveness and absolution from the Pope, the Holy Father, vicegerent of God the Father.

Fatherhood vindicated, the Swiss regime, its way of life, equally vindicated, the aristocratic couple, both now patriots and republicans, engage to be married. Having changed his regime allegiance and his national allegiance, Ulrich Rudenz now honors his own late father and readies himself to form a new family, a new foundation for Swiss liberty. In events occurring after the time of the play, the Swiss would ally with Ludwig of Bavaria to defeat Frederick of Austria at the Battle of Morgarten Pass in 1315, helping to remove the Austrian Hapsburgs from the imperial throne. For the modern Swiss, witnessing Napoleon’s rampage across Europe, Schiller teaches how the passions of the French revolutionaries must never be allowed to ruin a republicanism based on families, ancient customs in support of families and local self-government, securing the natural rights of the people as individuals and as citizens, all under the God Who ordained those rights and protects just liberty in the mountainous land He created.

 

 

 

Ivan Vazov: Under the Yoke. William Morfill translation. London: JiatHu Books, 2015. 

 

Peoples newly conquered by the Romans were forced to pass ‘under the yoke’—spears held by the victors over the path of the defeated. In 45 A.D., the Romans subjected several of the erstwhile warring tribes in the Balkans to just that ceremony of submission, bringing order to the region now known as Bulgaria. Tribal wars and foreign invasions renewed after Rome fell; in the late seventh century, the Bulgarian khan, Asparuh, led his people into the region, founding an empire in 681 A.D. after fending off the Byzantines under the command of Emperor Constantine IV. The word ‘Bulgar’ may derive from a Turkic word for rebels, disturbers, and so they were viewed by Byzantium, which eventually conquered them early in the tenth century, only to lose their grip after a revolt in 1185, followed by the establishment of the Second Bulgarian Empire. Two centuries after that, the Ottomans moved in, ruling the restive Bulgars for the next five centuries. As the Ottoman Empire weakened throughout the nineteenth century, both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires sought influence there, with the Russians eventually winning the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. Two treaties aimed at establishing an independent Bulgaria were attempted in 1878. The first, the Treaty of San Stefano, established a ‘Greater Bulgaria,’ and quickly met with challenges from the other major European powers, suspicious of Russian ambitions, especially Russia’s interest in securing access to the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.  The second, the Treaty of Berlin, saw the recognition of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro as sovereign states and the reduction of Bulgaria’s boundaries. Bulgaria was split into the Principality of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia, which was returned to the Ottomans. This arrangement satisfied Great Britain and the other Europeans but left many ethnic Bulgarians out of the new homeland, as sixty percent Eastern Rumelia’s population was Bulgarian. After defeating an attempted Serbian encroachment in 1885, Eastern Rumelia united with the Principality, this time with the approval of Great Britain and France—by now less concerned, perhaps, with Russia than with Germany. In 1908, Bulgaria would achieve its formal independence from the still-enfeebled Ottomans.

Born in 1850, Ivan Vazov joined a line of Bulgarian revolutionaries active in the wake of the 1848 European “Springtime of the Nations.” Animated by sentiments of Romantic nationalism, the “Springtime” consisted of predominantly democratic-republican revolutions against monarchic empires. The closest these came to the Balkans was in the Austrian Empire, but that was near enough to inspire the Bulgarian poet, Georgi Rakovski (née Popovich) to organize the nucleus of a Bulgarian resistance movement. He was joined by Vasil Levski (née Kunchev) of Eastern Rumelia, who became head of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee and has since been honored with the title “Apostle of Freedom” by his countrymen. For his efforts, Levski was executed by the Turks in 1873. His colleague, Hrista Botev, another poet-revolutionary, was killed by an Ottoman sharpshooter during the April Uprising of 1876, which occurred a year before Russia’s intervention. A mountain has been named in his honor.

Vazov understood that achieving independence through revolutionary action would not suffice to establish the modern Bulgarian nationality he and his associates fought for. What regime would Bulgaria have, after independence? Emperor Boris I abolished pagan religions in 864, bringing Bulgarians to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. But Vazov espoused a combination of Romantic and Enlightenment notions, which he brought to life in a series of poems, novels, and plays beginning in the 1870s while also serving on the Permanent Committee of the Provincial Assembly of Eastern Rumelia. Just as urgently, if Bulgarians were to become a coherent nation, they needed to have the wherewithal to speak with one another. The Bulgarian language, a mixture of Bulgar, Greek, Turkish, had never been regularized. In his literary work Vazov set out to do that, succeeding to the point where he is now called “the Patriarch of Bulgarian literature.” Winning a war for independence is one thing, winning the peace another. By the time of his death in 1921, Vazov could think that he had contributed to winning the peace, to founding a modern Bulgaria.

It thus makes sense for him to set his novel not in the Russo-Turkish War but in the April Uprising. While the war actually cut the Turks down to size, and Vazov was a firm Russophile (he wrote Under the Yoke in Odessa in 1886), the Uprising was a purely Bulgarian effort, if a failed one. As a nationalist, he wants to depict a national movement, showing both the virtues and vices of Bulgarians and presenting the best characters as both noble and imprudent—worthy of admiring memory but not of blind emulation. He presents characters embodying Bulgarian ‘types’ while occasionally intervening with observations on human nature generally, teaching his countrymen things they will need to know as citizens in a language they can use.

He begins with a description of dinner in the household of the head, the Chorbaji, of the village of Bela Cherkva, said to be modeled on Vazov’s native Topol. Chorbaji Marko, “a thoroughly practical man” and a product of “the old regime,” in which Bulgarians were granted only modest public education by the ruling Turks, rules his household with “his natural common sense,” which has led him to “understand human nature well.” He thus knows the lesson of the first chapter of Genesis, that “people always hanker most after what is forbidden,” and he uses this knowledge to keep his children honest, entrusting them with the key to his money-chest “so as to prevent any inclination to theft.” Like many slightly educated men, he “loved learning and the learned,” being “one of those numerous patriots whose eager zeal for the new educational movement has in so short a time filled Bulgaria with schools.” Bulgarian patriotism will require Bulgarian literacy to become civically effective; Vazov himself had been forced to seek education in Romania and Russia. It is Marko who rescues the young hero of the novel, Ivan Kralich, the son of an old business acquaintance, who arrives in his courtyard at night, a fugitive from prison, seeking shelter from the Turkish police officer, who is looking for him. Ivan has just escaped a local patrol, through sheer luck: “At moments of unavoidable danger a man’s presence of mind deserts him, like a coward, and only a blind instinct of self-preservation takes the place of all his moral faculties.” He could have escaped the patrol simply by walking quietly in the other direction, into the darkness, but instead he ran through them; their bullets missed him only because “the darkness saved him” as he fled. 

Prudent yet genial Marko offers him hospitality for the night, but when the police show up, looking for the fugitive, Ivan takes off again. A Romantic stylist indeed, Vazov has a thunderstorm come up (“there was a wild beauty in the strife of the elements—in the conflict of the horizons”); “in storms nature attains themes of the sublimest poetry.” The Stürm und Drang conflict of horizons in nature mimics the conflict of horizons in Bulgarian politics. Ivan is a revolutionary, while Marko is a patriot who knows how to deal with the Turks without getting himself jailed or killed. Ivan’s character quickly emerges, as he seeks refuge in a mill, then saves the miller’s daughter from being raped by two Turks, killing both of them. “But there are thousands and thousands more such monsters,” Ivan tells the miller; “the Bulgarian nation can only free itself and live in peace if all seize their axes and cut down the enemy.” The miller brings him to a nearby monastery for safe haven. There, a previous storm had uprooted an ancient pine and knocked over the tower, now replaced by a new one, which “made a strange contrast to the dilapidated old remains of a past age.” Bulgaria is modernizing: “henceforth the monastery has become somber; the eye no longer follows the towering pine to the clouds” and “the soul no longer draws inspiration from the paintings of the walls representing saints, archangels, holy fathers, and martyrs.” The young Deacon Vikenti, a patriot, welcomes Ivan; the monastery also shelters a “harmless idiot,” Mouncho, who had seen Ivan and the miller bury the Turks. The elderly Father Yerote, a kindly “relic of the past,” rules the monastery, very much in contrast with Deacon Vikenti, who “represented the future, towards which he looked with the same confidence as did the old man towards eternity.” In a new regime in an independent country, can the Orthodox Church adapt?

Back at Marko’s house, young Doctor Sokoloff, a veterinary surgeon who had served in a Turkish regiment and “acquired a thorough knowledge of the language and customs of the Turks,” is the best practitioner of medical care for humans in the tiny village; he treats his patients with the assistance “of his two faithful assistants—the healthy Balkan air and nature.” It was he who had given Ivan directions to Marko’s house, the previous night, and the two men discuss the ongoing revolt against the Turks in Herzogivina. Marko wonders why we Bulgarians cannot “do something of the kind”; the younger man confidently says that we have never tried. Prudent Marko tells him not to try, as “we’ve only to move to be cut down like sheep” and “there’s nowhere we can look to for aid.” He will prove correct, this year; the nascent Bulgarian resistance is indeed doomed, without the Russian intervention that will come too late to save the revolutionaries of April.

Sokoloff is soon arrested, falsely accused of shooting and wounding a Turk; more, incriminating papers are discovered in his coat pocket, suggesting that he is part of a revolutionary plot. He had given his coat to the threadbare Ivan, who stuffed revolutionary tracts in the pocket, then shed the coat later, as he fled his pursuers. The Turkish authorities easily traced the coat back to Sokoloff.

When Ivan Kralich learns of the arrest, he realizes that the papers had been his; somehow, they had been planted on Sokoloff, he supposes. He nobly determines to give himself up to the Turks in order to save his benefactor: “I won’t owe my life to the sufferings of others,” he tells the deacon, who understands that Kralich is right; “this self-sacrifice was imposed on [Kralich] by feelings of justice and humanity.” 

There is another chorbaji, Yordan Diamandieff, whose character and family contrast noticeably with those of Marko. The chorbajis as a class are “odious” to the other Bulgarians, many of them rightly perceived as self-serving toadies of the Turks. Yordan’s married daughter, Ghinka, dominates her husband, Simeon; his sister, a nun, Hajji Rovoama, “was lame, malicious, and a thorough mischief-maker,” the village gossip. His daughter, Lalka, is being courted by one Kiriak Stefchoff, the son “of a man of the same stamp as Yordan Diamandieff”—young, like the revolutionaries, “but his ideas were old-fashioned,” the “new and absorbing current liberal thought [having] left him untouched.” The Turks like him; the true Bulgarians despise him not only for his Turkish leanings but for “his haughty, spiteful character and his deceitful and cowardly nature.” Yordan wouldn’t mind having him for a son, but his daughter would very much mind having him for her husband, having fixed her affections upon the handsome, outgoing young doctor Sokoloff, whose arrest torments her. 

As suddenly as he had been arrested, however, Sokoloff is released, to the dismay of Stefchoff and Hajii Rovoama.  As it turns out, Marko had managed to switch out the revolutionary materials for some harmless stuff when the man assigned to carry the incriminatory materials to the office of the Bey, the provincial governor, carelessly left the envelope containing them in a cafe. The novelist’s lesson is clear: the young revolutionaries, patriotic, romantic-idealistic, noble and self-sacrificing, survive thanks only to chance and to the prudence of the older man.

At the convent ruled by the loathsome Sister Hajji Rovoama lives an orphan girl, Rada Gospojina, taken in at birth and being prepared to become a nun. She teaches the youngest children at the religious school, having “grown up in the pernicious and suffocating atmosphere of convent life, under the severe unsympathetic supervision of the old mischief-maker,” a “despotism [which] was daily becoming more felt and insupportable to Rada, in proportion as the girl’s nature developed and her self-respect increased.” That is, Rada symbolizes Bulgaria under Turkish rule, as reinforced by an Orthodox Christian Church partially by the way of life prevailing under that regime. Under the pseudonym Boicho Ognianoff, Kralich has taken a teaching job in the village. In this capacity, he intervenes during a public examination of Rada’s pupils by Stefchoff, who is on the school committee. Rada having rejected Stefchoff’s advances, the questioning has been stern, his questions above the heads of the children. In rephrasing the questions fairly, in terms they can understand, Ognianoff enables the students to pass the exam, making him a hero to the village mothers and most particularly to Rada. As he teaches in both the boys’ and the girls’ schools, he sees Rada often: “Two such pure and honest natures were fated to understand each other without need of a lengthy acquaintance.” He soon tells her that he has come to the village to organize a revolution in the spring and confesses to killing the two Turks, to which she simply responds, “You’re the noblest man living.” In peace or in revolution, he is a man of justice. 

Most Bulgarians, Vazov shows, can hardly be so good or, for that matter, so bad as the likes of Hajji Rovoana and Stefchoff. He takes his readers to a festival in late autumn in a meadow outside of town to show the souls of Bulgarians under despotism. “An enslaved nation has a philosophy of its own which reconciles it to its lot”: “Where the arena of political and scientific activity is closely barred, where the desire of rapid enrichment finds no stimulant, and far-reaching ambition has no scope for its development, the community squanders its energy on the trivial and personal cares of its daily life, and seeks relief and recreation in simple and easily obtainable material enjoyment.” To understand the national spirit, “look at the poetry of the nation.” Bulgaria’s poetry has consisted mostly of songs about roasted lambs, red wine, and dances. But even on such an occasion, a serious conversation can occur, so long as a few revolutionaries gather on the margins. Ognianoff talks quietly with two of the younger men, one of whom is “imbued with all the utopias of Socialism.” To the argument for Bulgarian “political freedom,” independence from the Turks, the socialist objects that this will only result in “new masters in place of the old”; you will only “replace one tyrant by another,” thereby “annihilat[ing] every idea of equality” and “consecrat[ing] the right of the strong to despoil the poor, of capital to oppress labor.” He commends reading Herzen, Bakunin, and Lassalle as preliminary to “rais[ing] the standard of rational modern humanity and sober science.” Here, it is Ognianoff who is the prudent one. “Bulgarian common sense rejects” the “principles of Socialism to which you have treated us”; “we cannot stomach them,” and “they will never find a field in Bulgaria, either now or at any other time.” Bulgarians instead need “to protect our homes, our honor and our lives,” relying not on “obscure theories” of “social science” but “only upon the nation,” including the Chorbaji class and the clergy. “The discussion continued to rage hotly” while the festivities proceeded, and (it must be added) would continue to rage during Bulgaria’s turbulent twentieth century, under the then-unimagined yoke of Soviet Russia. Russia would return not as Bulgaria’s liberator, as in the 1870s, but as its imperial oppressor, worse even than the Turks.

Kralich-Ognianoff will have few opportunities for such debates, from now on. Stefchoff begins to suspect that he may have had something to do with the disappearance of the Turks and orders an inspection of the mill property, where their bodies are soon located. Ognianoff again flees and, for her part, Sister Hajii Rovoana turns Rada, the “shameless hussy,” out of the convent. As the Turks widen their net, they pick up Mr. Kandoff, the young socialist, who vainly fulminates about “the inviolability of my person, which is the most precious of human prerogatives” and the violation “of all legality and every principle of justice.” He is chastened when informed by a friend that there is no point in translating his protest into Turkish, since “the very words don’t exist” in that language. Vazov’s attention to his own nation’s language is thereby underscored.

Stumbling through the winter snow in the mountains, hoping to reach Romania, Ognianoff is wounded by Turkish gunmen who may have been hunting him or only wild game. A Bulgarian friend comes across him and delivers him to a kindly and patriotic monk in the village of Verigovo. The villagers take to him; “heroism is of all the virtues the one that strikes the public fancy the most,” perhaps because the ordinary person treasures life itself beyond all else, and the willingness to risk one’s life seems to them extraordinary. Revolutionary sentiments already run high in Verigovo and Ognianoff’s speeches do nothing to discourage them, but he has his best conversations with an old schoolteacher, Father Mina. Father Mina “had outlived his generation, his old-world learning was of no use at the present day, his only occupation was to sing, without remuneration, in the church choir: there, at least, modern education had not penetrated.” But in this “living relic of a past epoch” the “hot and impetuous nature” of Ognianoff finds comfort. “When a man is in affliction, be it moral or physical, his soul turns to religion; he finds at once a consolation in the words of the great book,” which “assuage[d] his pain like a magic balsam.” “Ognianoff was now for the first time experiencing the soothing effects of the Scriptural language which the old man mingled with his own.” Poetry, again: Father Mina has him read the Psalms and assures him that “God Himself has chosen you to serve the nation” and adjures him to “hope in God,” who “will not desert the suffering that trust in his mercy.” The poetic songs of King David speak across the centuries to the modern Bulgarian revolutionary, their Spirit animating the kind of priest a free Bulgaria can revere. 

Word from Bela Cherkva arrives: Dr. Sokolov has been arrested, the deacon is in hiding, another revolutionary has died under torture, and the villagers believe that Ognianoff is dead, killed by the hunters. Rada was sent by prudent Marko to live with one of his relatives. Ognianoff determines to proceed not to Romania and safety but back to Bela Cherkva, again to rescue someone caught up in his revolutionary actions. Disguised as an imam, he stops at a café frequented by Turks, learning that the authorities know he’s still alive and continue to pursue him. Moving on, he links up with some revolutionaries who want revenge against Turks who have murdered the father of one of their comrades. When the men kill the Turks, the son slashes the corpse “like a wild beast thirsting for blood” in “a frenzied thirst for vengeance.” Ognianoff considers this “savage revenge” to have been “justifiable before God and one’s own conscience,” a “good sign.” “The Bulgarian’s been a sheep for five centuries, it’ll be well if he becomes a wild beast now,” inasmuch as “men respect the wild goat more than the tame sheep.” His Old Testament reading prevails: “Let philosophy flourish, human nature remains always the same. Christ has said, ‘If they strike you on one cheek, turn unto them the other.’ That is divine, and I bow before it. But I prefer Moses with his ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ That’s the natural law, which I followed,” the “inexorable, sacred principle, on which must be based our struggle against the tyrants. To show mercy to the merciless is as base as to expect it from them.” After the men leave the corpses in the snow, wolves circle in; “nature and the wild beasts united to blot out all traces of the terrible deed.” When the Turks discover the remains, they assume the wolves killed their brethren.

In the village, Rada requests to leave “this black town”—black in the sense of a place in which she is persecuted by the Muslim Turks, whose women dress in black, and their Bulgarian collaborators—and to join him in the struggle. “No,” Ognianoff replies, “you can do nothing” because “the revolution demands a man’s strength, bloodthirstiness, merciless ferocity, and you’re a perfect angel.” If he is a man of the Old Testament, she is a woman of the New Testament; the future Bulgaria will need both. He will, however, bring her to the town of Klissoura, which is near his base of operations and, more importantly, will marry her. “We’re in God’s hands” and “whatever happens, I want to have a clear conscience.” He acknowledges that she has “sacrificed for me something dearer than your life—your good repute.” Confirming the piety he had not exhibited until the last few weeks, he says, “Above us is God, the great and just God of Bulgaria, the God of crushed and broken hearts, of suffering humanity. He sees and hears us.” Expecting to be killed (and rightly so, as it will happen), he sets his soul in the just order: his life belongs to Bulgaria, his soul to God, his heart to his future wife. She prays with him for God’s blessing of “our holy union.”

The Ottoman Imperial Government officials know very well that a rebellion is imminent. Their agents know the names of the revolutionaries and the structure of their organization, an alternative or shadow regime: “They’ve established a kind of government, which issues decrees, judges, and condemns to death,” one of their operatives reports to the Bey. The feebleness of the revolutionaries’ preparation may be seen in the fact that they are attempting to use hollowed-out cherry tree trunks as cannons. Even “the sober but honest Bulgarian soul” of Marko contracts the “revolutionary effervescence,” and he contributes a cherry tree from his garden to the cause. Test-fired, it will split, and the victorious Turks will jail him for his contribution to the rebel cause. Marko “represented the moderate element in the national party, an element worthy of respect everywhere save in revolutions, which see to their ideal by violence and extremes. Sometimes [this element] may act as a brake on the wheel, but too often its effect is unfelt.” He kneels before the household icon: “For the first time in his life he was praying for Bulgaria!” Throughout the country, “even the Chorbajis, who formed a close caste opposed to all national development, even these fell under the sway of the idea with which every brain was on fire,” as “the revolutionary spirit, like a flaming seraph, spread its wings over peasant and university student—kalpak and fez, priest’s cap and tall hat alike. As in all the progressive struggles of Bulgaria, science and the cross were in the front rank. The martyrology of modern Bulgarian history proclaims this truth.” Vazov exclaims that “Posterity will be astonished—nay, the very contemporaries of the age, with a whole series of historical examples before them, stand aghast before this moral intoxication, this sublime infatuation of a people preparing to contend with a mighty empire still great in its military resources—preparing with the hope, too, of victory, and with such means, ineffectual even to a point of ridicule, ready to take the field in the very ‘jaws of hell,’ as Marko Ivanoff had said not long before, without seeking for any ally save its own enthusiasm—a will-o’-the-wisp, which flames and dies out, a phantom, an illusion. History has but rarely furnished an example of such self-confidence—verging on madness. The Bulgarian national spirit has never risen to such heights, and never again will reach them.” The April Uprising “may be taken as the example of a great idea fostered in a fertile and favorable soil,” but “the struggle itself by which it was followed was unworthy of the very name.” The Turks, dilatory in their reaction to the plot, will crush the rebels with ease.

A Russian student, Gospodia Kandoff, enamored of Rada, follows her to Klissoura, and when Ognianoff finds them at her hostess’s house he assumes she has betrayed him, urged to this false conclusion by an anonymous letter he has received, “hinting that this was so,” a letter surely written by Sister Hajii Ramoana. He returns to preparing for the revolution against the Turks, averring that “Bulgaria is not broad enough to contain the two races side by side! Well, so be it, no retreat!” The Turks have hesitated only because they fear Russian intervention, but that does not occur, and now that they have mobilized against the revolutionaries, the revolutionaries are finished. Ognianoff readies himself for death, now that “everything in this world” is dead to him, telling himself that he has seen his “two great idols in the mire, your beloved ideals trampled on—Love and Revolution!” Vazov tells his readers, “The revolution ended in capitulation,” a “tragically inglorious” event he likens to “a still-born child, conceived under the impulse of the most ardent love, and stifled by its mother in horror at its birth.” It is “a terrible awakening” not only for Ivan Kralich/Ognianoff but for Bulgaria.

This seems to point to the God of the Bible as the only trustworthy one. But yes and no. In the end, Kralich learns that Rada has been faithful to him, and she will die with him (“love has only one thought—self-sacrifice”), along with his friend Sokoloff, in a firefight with the Turks. She is killed by a Turkish bullet, spared from the rape and torture she would have endured had she survived, and as the doomed Kralich weeps over her body, “perhaps—who knows?—there were mingled also a warm feeling of gratitude to Providence.” As for the Bulgarians, the revolt “raised up for us Alexander II,” Czar of Russia, whose army would win independence for most of Bulgaria in the following year. If the revolutionary movement “had not brought on the war of liberation, then it would have been pitilessly condemned on all sides; common sense would have stigmatized it as folly; nations would have set it down as a disgrace, and history—a meretricious harlot that bows only before success—would have branded it as a crime. Poetry alone might have forgiven it and crowned it with the laurel of the hero.” The revolution “was a poetic folly, for young nations, like young people, are poetical.” In the unpoetic reality, Bulgarians soon turned on one another, betraying the revolutionaries to their Turkish oppressors. The villagers of Bela Cherkva have made Stefchoff as “the wisest, the proudest, most respected man in the town now,” “the savior of the city” since he persuaded the Turks not to destroy it. Kralich himself nonetheless comes to see that although “we can’t destroy Turkey by force of arms, we can gain the sympathies of the world, at least, by our frightful sufferings, by our martyrdom, by the rivers of blood that are now flowing in Bulgaria. We have nothing to be ashamed of.”

The Turks sever Kralich’s head, stick it on a pole and march triumphantly into the village, “set[ting] up the trophy in the marketplace.” The only one outraged, the idiot Mouncho, once protected in the monastery, witness to Ivan’s killing of the two Turks, “broke out into a colossal and appalling blasphemy against Mohammed,” for which he is summarily hanged. 

Under the Yoke can hold few charms for readers who have drunk from the wells of literary ‘modernism.’ Vazov’s younger contemporary, James Joyce, would have viewed its romanticism, its purple patches, and its patriotic passion with cool irony and distaste. But Vazov isn’t writing for James Joyce. He writes to provide his fellow Bulgarians with a political education. By addressing them in the Romantic style, invoking the nationalism of the Romantics, he draws his readers in to a consideration of both the nobility and the limitations of Romanticism and nationalism. He shows that genuine Romantic love, if infused with the self-sacrificing and faithful love of Christianity, deserves the honor it sometimes receives, against the selfish love of a Stefchoff, even as genuine patriotism deserves the honor it sometimes receives, against the sycophancy of a Stefchoff. But patriots and lovers alike must understand that the nation always contains its Stefchoffs, and even when the nation is united in revolutionary fervor, that fervor will turn to bitterness in defeat. ‘The people’ are not moral heroes. Nor are they military superheroes, capable of defeating a powerful enemy by actions animated by intense, evanescent moral fervor alone. They need prudent and courageous leaders in war, statesmen in peace, men who know they may need allies. Those allies must include God, the Ruler of nations, since ‘History’ is a harlot, no lover of human progress toward political liberty. And even prudent men need to know that their prudence may falter when swept along by democratic passions.