From Ancient Russia to the 19th century
First of all, it is necessary to recall that Ancient Russia was a traditional agrarian society. Of course, this characteristic is extremely general — suffice it to say that such different societies as Ancient Chinese and German, Ancient Egyptian and Byzantine fall into the same group. So this characteristic in itself does not give much, but it must be kept in mind, since it sets very few but important parameters that have remained constant for many centuries.
First, it is sedentariness, attachment to the land — something that later grows into Gleb Ouspensky’s formulation of “the power of the land,” which implied the properties of the Russian peasant, who was thought of as a product of the land, derived from it, rather than forming and modifying it.
An important caveat needs to be made here: since the formation of the Moscow historical school, especially since V.O. Klyuchevsky’s “Course …”, the formulation of the essence of Russian history, which consists in the process of colonization, has become widespread. In the second lecture, Klyuchevsky insists: “The colonization of the country was the main fact of our history, with which all its other facts were closely or distantly connected,” and directly links not only the past to colonization, but also literally the present at that time, concluding the examination of colonization with a description of the development of Siberia, the construction of the Trans—Siberian Railway and resettlement policy. P.A. Stolypin. However, it is equally important that we are talking about agricultural, peasant colonization, which gives the process itself the character of a kind of movement of the sea, now slowly washing away the coast, then rushing with all its might into the opened path, simultaneously expanding the gates themselves.
But the agrarian character of Russian society also has its own specifics, namely: the predominant nature of agriculture did not require regular efforts of centralized government and at the same time needed it: the state was a necessity, but it was an external necessity, providing an external contour, protection from invasions, and the possibility of agricultural production safe from invasion by neighbors. mastering. But this development itself did not need or poorly needed a centralized state — for the economic development of Kursk and Orel, zasechnye features were needed, for the development of Novorossiya — first of all, the disappearance of the threat in the person of the Crimean Khanate, for the settlement of the Volga (and its gradual conversion into the “Russian Nile”) — the pacification of the Bashkirs and the construction of the Orenburg line. To a greater extent, the need for the state was realized in order to establish internal peace, from rival authorities — to a lesser extent, since this goal in the core of the Moscow Grand Duchy was achieved as a whole already in the XV century. and thus it began to be perceived as the norm early on.
Hence the specifics of understanding freedom. The government acted in two guises: first of all, the necessary protection from outside invasion, the general framework that would allow land to be cultivated in a space closed from invasion, and as hindrances, intrusions into everyday life, no need for which, no practical need from the side of his life, the peasant did not see. This, by the way, provided a feature that would remain stable at least until the end of the 19th century — the weak penetration of central government into local relations: for example, the state apparatus back in the 1860s. In fact, it ended at the county level; the need for at least some kind of government presence at a lower level would trigger the introduction of the institution of zemstvo chiefs as early as the 1880s, and it is significant that the debate about the “small zemstvo unit” would continue without a direct practical result until the very end of the empire. What is important here is not only the repeatedly noted “undermanagement” of the empire, but the fact that, despite the obvious drawback for all participants, it continued to operate quite effectively.
A specific situation has developed in Russia — freedom was perceived primarily (a) within the state and (b) from the state, whereas state freedom, freedom of the state in the usual state of things, did not act as a value (reflexive). This is due to the fact that Russia is one of the few countries in the world that has not lost its sovereignty for more than 400 years, that is, from the point of view of historical perception and self—assessment, it is almost identical to “eternity”. Thus, the issue of freedom of the state turned out to be irrelevant by default, freedom was seen precisely as something taken for granted, and this issue was all the more acute in a crisis situation (including as a value suddenly realized at the moment of trial, as something threatened with destruction, belonging to the very essence).
The 19th century will provide a paradoxical, at first glance, but deeply understandable combination of two ideals — moreover, it will be all the more durable because it will be developed in the close interaction of the noble patriarchal and peasant, in their anarchist component. This is the ideal of a world in which, by and large, everyone else remains incomprehensible, preoccupied, in essence, with something unnecessary, if not directly harmful: officials, merchants, philistines (philistines) of large cities – that is, those who have already severed ties with the peasant world. This view was expressed from different angles by very different authors, from Leo Tolstoy to Mikhail Bakunin, from Konstantin Aksakov to Alexander Herzen. Russian Russians are not just from the Russian noble world, but from the old Russian nobility. Despite all the differences, and often the radical dissimilarity of these figures, the list of which is easy to enlarge, it is important that they all come not just from the Russian noble world, but from the old Russian nobility. Freedom here will be in unity with “will”, coinciding with following the natural order as opposed to the artificial one, and at the same time (a) the embodiment of the noble dream, which in many ways became a reality in the period from the granting of the Manifesto of Freedom to the nobility in 1761 and the Charter granted to the nobility in 1785 to the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the possibility of to create their own homestead world, almost without contact with any large orders, and (b) the peasant ideal of free ownership of their land, in freedom from the state, the landowner, and, if possible, from the “world”, the village assembly.
The peculiarity of the transition to modern values and the formation of the value world of high modernity in Russia is in many ways difficult to analyze due to the difficulty of finding/developing an adequate language. At the first level, this transition can be described as a movement from the estate to the civil world — that is, situations where values are class-based. However, there is practically no estate system in Russian history — estates in the sense of corporations can be de facto spoken of only from the letters of Catherine II to the nobility and cities (1785). And already the second half of the XIX century. — a time of rapid transition to a wordless society (a process that would be legally completed only in 1937, with the adoption of the “Stalinist” Constitution of the USSR, which would affirm the principle of civil equality). Estates (“states”, in the language of the Code of Laws, which here Russified the French état) remained very conditional in the legal sense, and the Russian Empire was characterized by high (especially in comparison with synchronous Western European societies) social mobility, where, at the end of the 19th century, it was not uncommon, for example, a general who had left the soldiers, in which I got through recruiting. On the contrary, for a number of legal nobles, their legal status turned out to be slightly different from those from other strata who were engaged in similar activities, which is why the term “raznochinets” has been widely used since the 1840s. Belinsky, who from a legal point of view was a hereditary nobleman (but, what is also very significant, he strongly doubted whether he should correct his noble diploma in the herald and request papers from his native Chamber or remain outside the formally confirmed noble status).The described situation led to the fact that justice has historically been perceived in many ways as equal — that is, one for all strata of society. While the estate ideal dissected different understandings of justice and autonomized the areas of their application, the democratic ideal became widespread in Russia, generating tension, since it implied that people and communities in very different situations and circumstances should ideally be guided by the same understanding of justice and, moreover, practice it in approximately the same way. in a certain way.
The formed understanding of justice can be described in the broadest strokes as a key condition for the accepted violation of will/freedom: the will may be limited, but it is fair (and what is especially important is not only individually fair, but also fair in terms of relations to others). That is, the embarrassing restriction itself is perceived as acceptable, understandable — to the extent that it is common, extending not only to you, but also to “everyone.”
