A Russia Full of Holes

RICHARD PIPES BELIEVES the Russian people are condemned to repeat their past, whether they remember it or not. Pipes, a former director of Harvard's Russian Research Center, has spent his years in the History Department trying to prove that Soviet institutions are the product of a Russian consciousness composed o nineteenth-century parts. "There are many similarities between Soviet institutions and institutions in the old regime," Pipes said recently. "Under both systems, the country belongs to the state. The state holds it in "outright ownership. There is nothing like it in the world."

Although the parallel between the Tsarist and 'Soviet regimes is not explicitly stated in his ambitious new book, Russia Under the Old Regime. Pipes wants this conclusion to emerge as an historical inevitability. In arid prose he tells the story of how the crown, like a spider stretching its tentacles, became the absolute source of political and economic power in Russia, making opposition from interest groups impossible for 500 years. When opposition finally did come in the late nineteenth century, the crown reacted with the slow, sharp sting of the police state. For Pipes, it seems only natural that when the Bolsheviks established their own supremacy thirty years later, they adopted the police apparatus that had shadowed their childhood. "Systems remain the same," Pipes said. "Only the personalities tone down."

Pipes's whole thesis rests on the premise that the "patrimonial" regime the Muscovite princes created in the fourteenth century, in which the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership were indistinguishable, has not been effectively challenged down to the present day. But his detailed account of centuries of absolutism seems less like the topical history of Russia its title suggests than an article in Pravda, where events don't seem to change things much and where all the loose ends are neatly woven together. Pipes leaves the loose ends out entirely, examining Imperial Russia's various social classes from the single perspective of their relation to the growing Tsarist authority. His narrative becomes no more than a tale of each of the different social classes getting caught in the patrimonial monarch's web.

The nobles were the first to get stuck. Although their duties as administrators of the realm enabled them to put a check on the absolute power of the crown, their panicked reaction to the Emancipation in 1861 revealed the large extent of their dependence on the use of the monarch's serfs for survival. Realizing this, the nobles began to accept what was given to them a little more gratefully, living out the Russian "conviction" that the path way to wealth lies not in fighting the authorities but in collaborating with them. And Pipes argues that with trade and manufacture at the disposal of the tsar, the enfeebled Russian middle class was also forced to sell out.

Because these groups failed in their attempt to challenge the crown, the absolutist government in Russia remained absolute. Pipes thinks the peasants had the potential strength to succeed where the others had failed but that they lost the chance because they were politically unaware. Pipes is angry with the "stupid" peasant because he was too lazy to organize as a class to challenge the serfdom that was oppressing him. For this reason, the peasant was "ill-suited for any political system except an authoritarian or anarchistic one," and he let the opportunities of the intelligentsiarun revolution pass him by.

"The peasants could have saved the monarchy if only they had been politically aware," Pipes said, "but they have no notion of the state or the nation. They know only the joint family, the village, and the Orthodox community." Pipe's condescension towards the peasants makes this heavily-documented section one of the most interesting and infuriating in the book. And the condescending tone becomes mixed with hatred at the entrance of what Pipes finds the most disappointing group of all: the radical intelligentsia.

If Pipes bolsters his conservative universe by revealing the failure of the peasants, "those acquisitive little beasts," as a revolutionary force, then his demonstration of how the radical intelligentsia brought about its own demise in the 1880s is the historian's greatest coup. The radicals, fired by the same Western ideas of service to the state that Peter the Great had had a century before and that the Bolsheviks were to have two decades later, tried to revolutionize the state. According to Pipes, police repression was inevitable from the moment the radicals tried to extricate themselves from the entire web at once. "If you fight for everything, you get nothing," Pipes said recently. "I subscribe to the Burkean notion of fighting for specific rights and privileges. This creates an element of liberty."

But despite all this talk of fighting, Pipes is uncomfortable with disorder. Although he mentions the well-known assassination attempts on the tsars in the late 1800s, he neglects the early seventeenth-century Time of Troubles when there was no absolute patrimonial power in existence. It doesn't mesh with Pipe's thesis, so he leaves it out. He also takes little notice of the political and social havoc wreaked by the Napoleonic War. Pipes said he is concerned with institutions, not with foreign policies. Finally, Pipes leaves a large hole where the worker should be. Although eighty per cent of the country was rural at the time of the 1917 revolution, those battered faces in Eisenstein's cities had been telling the authorities they were hungry for a long time.

Pipes's failure to discuss the rising proletariat is his most serious omission. In the end, his conservative bias leads him to overlook the savior in Russian history he was looking for. And with this error, it is no wonder that his Russia remained the vast, backward, absolutist country it had been for centuries.