The Rise and Fall of Russian Historical Determinism

Negative perceptions of the consequences of radical liberalism have led Russians to decisively reject its claims to universal inevitability.

Editors note: this piece originally appeared on Paul Robinson’s wordpress blog “Irrussianality” and has been reprinted here with his consent.

In July I delivered a talk at the congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES) in London on the topic ‘The Rise and Fall of Russian Historical Determinism.’ Here is a copy of my paper:

Introduction

Historical determinism considers history a unilinear process. Some societies go more slowly than others; some take diversions. But all eventually end up in the same place. In the Russian context, a sense of backwardness compared to Europe has added a political twist, as historical determinism has tended to be associated with a rejection of nationalist discourses that maintain that Russia is a distinct civilization which should follow its own path of development. Instead, historical determinists have viewed Russia as being bound in due course to join what they call ‘civilization’ and become a truly European country. For the past 250 years, this brand of determinism has been the predominant understanding of the historical process in Russia. In the past decade or so, however, it has been gradually eased out of favour. In this paper, I will chart this process and show the rise and fall of Russian historical determinism over the past 200 years.

I identify two main strands of Russian historical determinism: conservative and radical. Conservative historical determinists agree that different peoples are all going in the same direction, but qualify this by arguing that they need to do so in their own way. Radicals, by contrast, tend to derive an ought from an is. Because society is progressing along a given path, they conclude that anything that obstructs that path ought to be removed. The end of history is something to be accelerated. One can identify two currents within this stream of thought: radical liberal and revolutionary communist. Both have sought rapid change, but with different objectives: a Western-style liberal democratic order in the first instance, and a communist society in the second. Let us therefore now take a brief look at these different trends.

Russian Historical Determinism

Writing in the early nineteenth century, economist Nikolai Turgenev remarked: “If one were to ask in which direction the Russian people is destined to march, I would say that the question has already been answered: it must march towards European civilization.”[1] This was a common view among Turgenev’s contemporaries. Even people of a conservative disposition often shared his belief. An example is Nicholas I’s Minister of Education, Sergei Uvarov, a deeply conservative figure who nonetheless also had a thoroughly deterministic view of history, viewing it, like Hegel, as a progression towards freedom under the aegis of the state. Uvarov argued that as societies matured, their morality and form of government evolved to reflect their stage of development. In due course, this process would lead all societies to a state in which “the rights of humanity are known throughout and civil rights are everywhere defined.”[2] “Listen to the voice of history!” Uvarov declared in an 1818 speech, “States have their epochs of birth, infancy, youth, their actual maturity and finally old age. … The wish to prolong one of these ages longer than the time appointed by nature is as vain and foolhardy as the wish to enclose a grown youth in the close confines of an infant’s cradle.”[3]

In Uvarov’s eyes, Russia was very much in its infancy. He argued that as the benefits of education expanded, the population would become fit for freedom. But he also felt that this process needed to move slowly. Along the way, the firm hand of the autocracy would be required to guide the still youthful people towards enlightenment. Uvarov therefore believed both in progress and in the maintenance of autocratic rule.

So too did many of the first generation of moderate Westernizers, who emerged onto the Russian intellectual scene in the 1830s and 40s, although the Westernizers were much less cautious than Uvarov and wanted a much more rapid expansion of civil liberties.

For instance, in the 1840s Moscow University professor Timofei Granovsky laid out a theory that new social forms inevitably replace old ones in a progressive process, leading eventually to the liberation of the person.[4] He argued that “individualization of the masses through the power of ideas is the essence of historical progress. The goal of history is the moral, enlightened individual.”[5]

Among those whom Granovsky influenced was fellow professor Konstantin Kavelin who in 1847 produced an essay titled “A Brief Survey of Juridical Relations in Ancient Russia.” In this he argued that history involved the gradual development of the autonomous individual, or as he put it, the “principle of personality.”[6]

According to Kavelin, Russian history had passed through various stages – communal, tribal, and family – before reaching the era of the state. In the earliest stages, strong blood ties meant that people did not examine the differences between themselves and those around them.[7] With the advent of Christianity, ideas of the inherent dignity of all people began to spread, but it was only with the creation of the modern state that life was established on a principle other than blood lines, and personality was able to flourish.[8]

Kavelin argued that as this process unfolded, “The Russian and the foreign have merged … The boundaries between the past and the present, Russian and foreign, are being destroyed.”[9] The process of moving towards the state and the principle of personality was a universal phenomenon. The fact that Russia was moving in that direction later than the West did not mean that it was copying the West. Rather, both Russia and the West were obeying the same rule of history.[10]

Kavelin’s theory of history was strongly influenced by Hegel. Both men viewed history as a progress towards freedom, made possible through the mechanism of the state. Like Uvarov, Kavelin was in some respects quite conservative, in that he insisted on the retention of powerful, centralized state authority, albeit one that would seek to expand the liberties of its people.

Kavelin’s belief in the benefits of enlightened autocracy had some basis in reality during the reign of Alexander II, when the Imperial government initiated a large series of reforms. Under Alexander’s successors, however, the Russian government became far more conservative. This induced Russian liberals to move in a more radical direction.

Underlying this radicalism was a perception that Western European democracies were the most advanced form of rational government and thus something that Russia should emulate. Perhaps the most important proponent of this belief was yet another historian, Pavel Miliukov, who eventually became leader of Russia’s largest liberal party, the “Kadets”.

Miliukov was noted for his political flexibility, but always remained firm about one thing: Russia was a European country and the laws of history dictated that it was destined in due course to become a liberal democracy like Britain and France. As he wrote in his book Outlines of Russian Culture: “In all spheres of life, our historical development proceeds in the same direction as it has proceeded everywhere in Europe.”[11] “Civilization makes nations, as it makes individuals, more alike,” he told an American audience, adding that “National self-consciousness clings to particular features of national existence, such as dress, dwelling, social habits, political institutions, and old forms of the popular creed. But in the long run these features cannot be preserved.”[12]

It followed from this that as Russia’s economy grew, its people became more educated, and its society as a whole became more civilized, Russia would inevitably adopt the same forms of government as those of Western Europe. As Miliukov put it, “Free forms of political life are as little national as are the use of the alphabet or of the printing press, steam or electricity. … when a new era of history knocks at the door, it is useless to place restraints and delays in its path.”[13] Confronted by the complaint that Western European models did not apply to Russia, Miliukov had a simple response: Russia had to obey “the laws of political biology.”[14]

The problem with the laws of political biology was that different people had different ideas of what they were. Whereas Miliukov felt that the end of history was capitalist liberal democracy, many others followed Marx in believing that history had yet another stage beyond that – communism.

One of the first Russians to declare himself a Marxist was Georgy Plekhanov, who in 1895 published a book entitled The Development of the Monist View of History. By “monist,” Plekhanov meant that there was only one version of historical progress, and that it was the same for all societies. In his book, he traced the development of the concept of dialectical materialism and defended Marx’s understanding of the mechanism of historical change. In the process, he devoted much of his time to denouncing criticisms of Marxism by Russian Populists, who believed in a form of peasant socialism, founded on the Russian peasant commune, and looked very negatively on capitalism, arguing that Russia should seek a non-capitalist mode of economic development. Plekhanov contended that this was futile. “There are no data allowing one to hope that Russia will soon leave the path of capitalist development,” he wrote.[15]

After Russia’s communists seized power in 1917, radical historical determinism triumphed over its more moderate variant, and historical materialism became one of the chief ideological supports of what became known as the Soviet Union. In 1938, Joseph Stalin laid out the official understanding of historical progress in a chapter he wrote for a history of the Communist Party, titled Dialectical and Historical Materialism.

“Contrary to idealism,” wrote Stalin, “Marxist philosophical materialism holds that the world and its laws are fully knowable, that our knowledge of the laws of nature, tested by experiment and practice, is authentic knowledge having the validity of objective truth, and that there are no things in the world that are unknowable. … Hence social life, the history of society, ceases to be an agglomeration of ‘accidents,’ and becomes the history of the development of society according to regular laws, and the study of the history of society becomes a science.”[16] The fundamental social law revealed by Marxism-Leninism, according to Stalin, was that “the clue to the study of the laws of history of society must be sought not in men’s minds, in the views and ideas of society, but in the mode of production practiced by society.”[17]

Stalin identified five historical modes of production, corresponding to Marx’s social formations. These were “primitive communal, slave, feudal, capitalist, and socialist.”[18] History consisted of a progression through these modes of production, ending with socialism. At each stage, the relations of production eventually came to contradict the mode of production, resulting in revolution and the beginning of a new mode. Under socialism, however, “the relations of production fully correspond to the state of productive forces,” ensuring the system’s stability and thereby bringing the process of historical evolution to an end.[19]

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet thinkers began to modify historical materialism, allowing for more possibilities of different modes of historical development. In part this was a response to the process of decolonization that led to the creation of a large number of newly independent states which the Soviets soon realized lacked the prerequisites for a socialist revolution. According to the logic of historical materialism, they would need first to pass through a stage of capitalism, which would lead them naturally into the camp of the West. To get around this problem, Soviet theorists began to argue that former Western colonies should do something that Plekhanov had denied was possible, namely follow a “non-capitalist path of development.” With Soviet assistance, they argued, any progressive class could initiate the movement towards socialism by constructing state-owned industries and so creating a proletariat while skipping the capitalist stage of development.[20]

This constituted a major revision of Marx’s historical theory. At the same time, Soviet philosophers began to tweak the orthodox view of dialectical materialism. Some, for instance, suggested that societies could contain elements of more than one social formation at the same time, a concept known as mnogoukladnost’.[21] Others still noted that historical progress depended on more than a given society’s mode of production; it also varied based on external forces, such as the systems existent in other countries, as well as on what were deemed “economically neutral factors” such as language, geography, and social psychology.[22] Philosophers brought culture into the equation, arguing that culture was dependent on more than just the mode of economic production and that culture itself had a powerful impact on the ways societies developed. This opened up the way for a whole new trend of thought known as “culturology”. In these ways, Soviet historical determinism became less dogmatic as time went along.

In addition, from the 1960s onwards, a new generation of Westernizers emerged who felt that the Soviet Union had at some point gotten onto the wrong historical track. This small but influential group of intellectuals associated civilization with Western Europe and argued that the Soviet Union must “return to Europe” by ending the Cold War division of the continent.

One example was historian Leonid Batkin, who argued in a 1988 article that “[The West] is the general definition of the economic, scientific-technical and structural-democratic level without which it is impossible for any really modern society … to exist.”[23] At the start of the twentieth century, Russia had had the chance to become Western, Batkin wrote, but “From the middle of the 1920s, and quite fatally in the 1930s, we completely rejected this vector. … We have dropped out of world history … We must … return to the highroad of modern civilization”[24] In Batkin’s mind, history followed a specific road. Russia has somehow gotten off it and needed to get back on track.

The failure of Gorbachev’s perestroika broke whatever faith still remained in communism. However, many Russian intellectuals retained their belief in historical materialism. History, in their eyes, still had a goal, and the economic mode of production was still the driving force. But the goal was now a Western-style state, and the preferred mode of production was capitalism.

This attitude was reflected in the policies pursued by the Russian government of President Boris Yeltsin after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under the direction of Yegor Gaidar, the government embarked on a policy of rapid economic liberalization known as “shock therapy.” In the eyes of his detractors, Gaidar and his colleagues just substituted capitalist determinism for communist determinism.[25] As one critic notes, “The Russian liberals were just as convinced bearers of an absolute truth [as the communists] … What was not changed … was the notion of history as a purposeful process. The Soviet telos was replaced by a liberal telos.”[26]

Gaidar and his colleagues viewed the West as the exemplar of the universal path of development, and firmly believed in the idea that Russia should “return to civilization”, i.e. to the West. Thus, Gaidar said that the aim was to “enter the commonwealth of civilized nations,”[27] adding that, “Before World War I the Russian intellectual and business elite was part of a Eurocentric world. The ties were broken in subsequent decades. … Over the last few years, we have started our return to the world.”[28]

Russia’s “return to the world” was seen as dependent on the adoption of free market economics. Liberal economic ideas were viewed as universal laws. As Gaidar said: “We proceeded from the fundamental laws of economic behavior of homo sapiens. And it turned out that these laws work in Russia, with our specific character, as well as they work in Argentina, Korea, the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Australia.”[29] Similarly, Pyotr Aven, Minister of Foreign Economic Relations from 1991 to 1992, remarked that: “There are no special countries. All countries from the point of view of an economist are the same.”[30]

The Fall of Russian Historical Determinism

In the 1990s, therefore, one form of historical determinism was replaced by another. Some liberal Russian oppositionists continue to this day to promote it. For instance, in his 2023 book My Russia, author Mikhail Shishkin echoed Miliukov by writing of the “laws of political biology.”[31] “Nature has its laws: every river at some point ends in the sea. Human nature has its laws too,” claims Shishkin, adding that, “Humanity is travelling down the long road that leads from bellicose brutality to human kindness and honoring the rights of individuals. Sooner or later, everyone travels down this road. Russia is no exception.”[32] Outside of exiled Russian liberals, however, this is no longer a fashionable point of view. The negative experience of economic and social collapse under Yeltsin dealt a fatal blow to utopian dreams of an end of history. In response, from the mid-1990s onwards Russian intellectuals began to dust off older nationalist, Slavophile, and Eurasianist understandings of the historical process and of Russia’s place in it.

A few years ago, a survey of Russian international relations literature revealed that the Russian author most cited by Russian IR scholars was Nikolai Danilevsky, followed by Konstantin Leontyev and Aleksandr Panarin. All three are notable for their rejection of the unilinear theory of history and their insistence that history consists not of a march towards a single objective, normally associated with the West, but of numerous civilizations all moving in their own direction according to their own logic. The survey revealed how the theory of civilizationism had captured the imagination of much of Russia’s intellectual elites. This was a slow process, but in recent years civilizationism has clearly triumphed over historical determinism, with civilizational discourse being included in state policy documents, educational curricula, and the speeches of high officials. In October 2022, for instance, Vladimir Putin used the words “civilizations” and “civilizational” fifteen times in his speech to the Valdai Club, and also quoted Danilevsky and Leontyev. The idea that the West represents the end of history and that all the rest of the world is fated to follow its example has now been firmly supplanted by rhetoric that talks of a multicivilizational global future.

A number of factors explain this phenomenon. The experience of the 1990s and the consequent discrediting of Western liberalism is one. Rising tensions between Russia and the West are another. The influence of culturology, which replaced historical materialism as a compulsory subject of study in Russian schools and universities in the 1990s, is another still.

Whereas once Russian students were taught that history was driven by universal economic laws, now they learn that history is culturally context-dependent. It is a very significant intellectual shift.

Conclusion

To conclude, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a slow movement away from a moderate historical materialism towards a radical version, culminating in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In the 1990s communism was then replaced by an equally radical liberal historical determinism that sought Russia’s rapid transformation into a Western-style society. Negative perceptions of the consequences of radical liberalism then led Russians to decisively reject it in turn. With this, new modes of thinking about the path of history began to gain traction, and historical determinism’s 200-year grip on the Russian imagination weakened. Whether it will some day make a comeback remains to be seen.

---

[1] Alexander Gerschenkron, “The Problem of Economic Development in Russia Intellectual History of the Nineteenth Century,” in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, ed. Ernest J. Simmons (New York: Russell and Russell, 1955), 17.

[2] Whittaker, “The Ideology of Sergei Uvarov,” 160-61.

[3] Chamberlain, Ministry of Darkness, 81-82.

[4] Alexander Polunov, Russia in the Nineteenth Century: Autocracy, Reform, and Social Change, 1814-1914 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), 59.

[5] Andrzej Walicki, The Flow of Ideas: Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to the Religious-Philosophical Renaissance (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015), 235.

[6] Kavelin, “Vzgliad,” 23.

[7] Kavelin, “Vzgliad,” 22.

[8] Kavelin, “Vzgliad,” 48.

[9] Kavelin, “Vzgliad,” 65-66.

[10] Kavelin, “Vzgliad,” 66,

[11] Riha, A Russian European, 32-33.

[12] Paul Milyoukov, Russia and its Crisis (London: Collier, 1962), 30, 34.

[13] Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900-1905 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 126.

[14] Riha, A Russian European, 78.

[15] Plekhanov, The Development of the Monist View, 302.

[16] Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 17, 19.

[17] Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 27, 30.

[18] Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 34.

[19] Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 38.

[20] Roger Kanet, “The Recent Soviet Assessment of Developments in the Third World,” Russian Review 27, no. 1 (1968): 27-41.

[21] James P. Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR: A Critical Survey of Current Soviet Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 193.

[22] Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR, 194-203.

[23] Leonid Batkin, “Turn to be Europe,” XX Century and Peace 8 (1988): 31.

[24] Batkin, “Turn to be Europe,” 32, 33.

[25] Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2000).

[26] Joachim Zweynert, “Economic Ideas and Institutional Change: Evidence from the Soviet Economic Debates 1987-1991,” Europe-Asia Studies 58, no. 2 (2006): 191-92.

[27] Yegor Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 191.

[28] Yegor Gaidar, Russia: A Long View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), xiv.

[29] Lynn D. Nelson and Irina Y. Kuzes, Radical Reform in Yeltsin’s Russia: Political, Economic, and Social Dimensions (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 66.

[30] Hilary Appel, A New Capitalist Order: Privatization and Ideology in Russia and Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 167.

[31] Mikhail Shishkin, My Russia: War or Peace? (London: Riverrun, 2023), 224.

[32] Shishkin, My Russia, 218-19.