In Search of the People, In Search of Russia

In Search of the People, In Search of Russia ELISE KIMERLING WIRTSCHAFTER For scholars trained to approach sources and assumptions from a critical perspective that allows for the possibility of open-ended interpretation based on careful empirical reconstruction, the popular adage “history repeats itself” smacks of determinism and reductionism. Yet as any practicing historian knows, methodologies and concrete questions for research do in fact repeat themselves. For this reason it is at once a spur to creativity and a source of unwarranted self-congratulation when scholars seek to present their work in terms of newness and reconceptualization. Among American scholars of Russia the impulse to differentiate and individualize appeared with particular force during the era of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement, which encouraged opposition to Cold War perspectives and broad distrust of established authorities. With ever-greater frequency, workers, women, peasants, parish priests, and eventually national minorities appeared alongside rulers, nobles, politicians, diplomats, military leaders, church hierarchs, and intellectuals as crucial subjects in the writing of “new” histories. The new social history, the new cultural history, women’s history, demography, economics, and ethnic studies—a range of methodologies were enlisted in the effort to understand the experiences of ordinary people and by extension the social foundations of the Russian revolutions. Whether or not historians directly examined the world’s first socialist revolution, the outcome of 1917 informed thinking about the entire imperial period. In more recent times, the appeal of topics sometimes frowned upon in the 1960s and 1970s—for example, religion, empire, and elite culture—as well as the need to come to terms with the historiographic implications of the Soviet collapse, have underscored claims to reinterpretation, which also can be justified by greater access to archival sources. The paradigmatic role of the Revolution has receded, replaced by concepts such as civil society, citizenship, gender, and national identity. In Russia, where quite different dynamics come into play, historians are reaching out to their European and American colleagues, attempting to assimilate decades of foreign research previously accessible to only a few trusted scholars, and in the process also returning to the prerevolutionary tradition of history-writing. In contrast to American and West European historiographic trends, which can be readily identified and pegged to specific works, the Russian situation is highly fluid. Freed from Soviet ideological strictures, Russian scholars are actively exploring new languages of historical analysis. Presently an amalgam of foreign, Soviet, Imperial Russian, and intelligentsia idioms, their conceptual apparatus cannot yet be defined in the concrete terms of identifiable methodologies. It is only a matter of time, however, before history-writing in Russia will blend imperceptibly into the larger international arena, currently dominated by Americans and West Europeans, while also providing its own unique perspectives. The Russian Review 60 (October 2001): 497–504 Copyright 2001 The Russian Review 498 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter If methodological and thematic diversity has complicated and hence enriched historians’ understanding of the past, it also has left on the table a set of enduring questions. First among these is the relationship of the state—the monarchy and its administrative apparatus—to the people or constituent groups of Russian society. In Russia and abroad historians continue a search for the people that began among the Russian educated classes of the nineteenth century.1 For several decades now social and cultural historians have labored valiantly to bring alive the experiences and attitudes of Russians from all segments of society.2 Macrolevel explanations derived from economic organization, social structure, and governmental policy have been augmented by microlevel analysis that focuses on family, community, everyday culture (including religion), and judicial process. The macro approach directly connects social experience to legal-administrative institutions and markets, while the micro approach seeks to understand everyday life without reference to the state or political economy. But regardless of whether historians adopt a sociological or anthropological orientation, they place “the people” at the center of historical inquiry by drawing attention to social agency, particularly the agency of individuals and groups outside governmental and elite circles. The seemingly inarticulate and disfranchised enter the arena of political and social negotiation, both within their own families and local communities and in relation to large-scale patterns of development. Through engagement with the surrounding environment—whether in the form of positive identification, evasion and dissimulation, or open resistance—ordinary people influence the course of history. Attention to social agency expands historical understanding of Imperial Russia in a number of ways. First, it illuminates the behavior of people from diverse statuses and conditions in terms of their own immediate context and life experience. Individuals and social groups emerge as subjects or historical actors rather than objects of manipulation by the government or educated classes. Rather than reacting to outside forces, they initiate action in terms of local circumstances. Second, the emphasis on social agency highlights the gap between idea and reality both with reference to the state’s ability to control or mold society and with reference to what people in society aspire to be or do. Third, social agency in the form of resistance to, or participation in, judicial and other administrative institutions reveals not only the sources of disaffection and conflict that interest historians of revolution but also the mechanisms of reconciliation and integration that help to explain how the Imperial polity functioned and why the monarchy for so long endured. Finally, appreciation of the degree to which individual and collective agency at all levels of the social hierarchy contributed to historical change lays bare the ad hoc, fragmented contours of authority and power. Precisely because historians generally must rely on sources that depict ordinary and for the most part illiterate people in relation to the monarchy and bureaucracy, they not only characterize society in statist terms but also show the weakness of effective state authority. Having brought the self-conscious actions of disfranchised individuals and social groups to the fore of historical analysis, why does it remain so difficult to conceptualize a people’s history of Russia? Having established the very real limits to effective governmental power, 1 Prerevolutionary “populist” historians and ethnographers had long focused attention on the lives of peasants, workers, soldiers, and ethnic minorities. 2 For recent synthesis of this research see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 1997); and B. N. Mironov, Sotsial'naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII–nachalo XX v.): Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem'i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1999). Space limitations require that throughout this essay I provide minimal references to the relevant scholarship, solely for purposes of illustration. In Search of the People, In Search of Russia 499 why do historians continue to find that major reform initiatives emanated overwhelmingly from official circles? Only after 1864 did elected assemblies of local self-administration (zemstvos) consistently address social, economic, and political questions—including education and public health—that affected all of society rather than the needs of a particular group or community.3 The birth of Russian “society” as an organized translocal political force dates only from the late 1850s when noble assemblies, responding to instructions from above, mobilized to debate and compose projects for Emancipation.4 Moreover, only after the 1905 Revolution were political parties and their associate professional and occupational organizations integrated into a centralized legislative process. Either the social agency so meticulously documented for the sixteenth century onwards remained fragmented, localized, and devoid of political implications, or the state’s power was more omnipotent than social and cultural historians would have us believe.5 Or perhaps power was so evenly balanced between social groups, communities, and localities on the one hand, and the monarchy and its administrative apparatus on the other, that de facto informal arrangements produced a polity grounded in negotiation and consensus politics. Precisely this image emerges from recent anthropological studies of Muscovite political culture and from studies of post-Emancipation peasant engagement with judicial process and later the Stolypin reforms.6 Although categories such as negotiation and consensus may overstate the case, the scholarly interest in social agency has documented convincingly the extent to which the Russian people not only resisted constituted authority but also made it work for them. Through direct manipulation of legal-administrative institutions, individuals and communities could either challenge or bolster state power. But did social agency that stopped short of producing translocal political outcomes, institutional changes, or legislative initiatives constitute effective negotiation or resistance? 7 Especially in dire circumstances of war, rebellion, and repression could not agency simply represent survival? Moreover, in cases where social action did in fact produce a legislative response, should historians equate it with institutionalized political participation? Such questions may echo the cold legal formalism of nineteenth-century liberalism, but it was precisely the technicalities of contracts, constituted bodies, scholasticism, and professional jurisprudence that gave rise to the rule of law and modern civil society in Western and Central Europe.8 3 Harley David Balzer, ed., Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, NY, 1996); Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1991); Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich, eds., The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (New York, 1968). 4 Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (London, 1968). 5 The documentation of social agency throughout Imperial Russian society is one of the crucial achievements of the new social and cultural histories. On agency in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, 1999); Valerie A. Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, 1996); and L. V. Danilova, E. I. Indova, and N. V. Gorbushina, eds. Krest'ianskie chelobitnye XVII v.: Iz sobranii Gosudarstvennogo Istoricheskogo Muzeia (Moscow, 1994). 6 M. M. Krom, “Antropologicheskii podkhod k izucheniiu russkogo srednevekov'ia (zametki o novom napravlenii v amerikanskoi istoriografii),” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1999, no. 6:90–105; Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (New York, 1999). 7 The case for negotiation is made in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1993); and James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985). Scott’s model has been applied to Russian peasant studies repeatedly, whereas Thompson’s influence is more visible in labor history. 8 This is the conclusion to be drawn from studies such as Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957). 500 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter Social agency did indeed generate tangible results in two settings examined by historians of Imperial Russia. The first was local, personal, and individual, as when a landlord felt impelled or obligated to accommodate the demands of his peasants, or when a governor intervened to ensure justice and thwart abuse. A second example appeared in conditions of systemic breakdown such as succession crisis (1730), peasant uprising (1773–74), or military defeat (1856). Yet in neither setting did social agency fundamentally alter social or political arrangements. Eighteenth-century palace coups produced changes of personnel, not changes in political organization; and while the Decembrists certainly sought political change, they acted in social isolation. Only in 1905 did social agency lead to structural change in the form of universal civil rights and an elected legislative assembly. For most of the Imperial period agency appeared in discrete episodes that addressed immediate problems and begot fragmented, localized outcomes rather than generalized change. Missing were the formal linkages that could integrate agency into the everyday functioning of translocal social and political institutions. It remains, then, for historians to find ways to understand not only how people behaved, or what they thought in the local or micro arena (an endeavor that is far from complete), but also how the cumulative effects of their actions moved governments, economies, and social organizations. If the concrete actions embedded in the notion of social agency cannot be tied to politics and government, then a people’s history has no need for the framework of the Russian Empire.9 Instead, historians must content themselves with anthropological vignettes and stories of people struggling to survive in changeable circumstances. However intrinsically interesting and personally engaging these stories may be, they tend to leave the reader with the vague global conclusion that human beings find ingenious ways to survive because life can be so hard and injustice so great. To overcome the limitations of micro or anthropological analysis, historians situate individual life stories in broader contexts. Concepts such as civil society, the nation, and citizenship allow them to connect individual or group agency and subjective experience to politics and translocal structures.10 Particularly exciting is the capacity of these concepts to integrate the “old” political and intellectual histories with the “new” social and cultural histories. But problems of definition and application remain. How to define civil society is a case in point. John Locke understood civil society as the public and hence governmentcentered sphere of social organization, distinct from the state of nature, the sacred sphere of canon law, or private territorial lordship. For Locke civil society was political society, which included secular government. For G. W. F. Hegel civil society was the realm of free-market relations based on contract law.11 Even if we set aside the definitions of philosophers and 9 Charles Maier notes that roughly from 1860 until 1970 territoriality structured politics, economics, and national identity, but that since the 1960s territoriality as the organizing principle of historical periodization has begun to decompose. Is the current interest in microhistory an indication of this shift? See Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105 (June 2000): 807–31. 10 Civil society is discussed immediately below. On the nation see Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire 1552–1917 (Cambridge, MA, 1997). On citizenship see Jane Burbank, “Legal Culture, Citizenship, and Peasant Jurisprudence: Perspectives From the Early Twentieth Century,” in Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864–1996: Power, Culture, and the Limits of Legal Order, ed. Peter H. Solomon, Jr. (Armonk, NY, 1997), 82–106; and David Moon, “Peasants into Russian Citizens? A Comparative Perspective,” Revolutionary Russia 9 (1996): 43–81. 11 On civil society see Manfred Riedel, “Gesellschaft, bürgerliche,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, 8 vols. (Stuttgart, 1972–97), 2:719–800. Recent Russian efforts to come to terms with the problems of definition can be found in Z. T. Golenkova, ed., Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo: Teoriia, istoriia, sovremennost' (Moscow, 1999). In Search of the People, In Search of Russia 501 accept the current understanding of civil society as voluntary association independent of the state and market, localized discretionary authority and community autonomy did not necessarily add up to “civil society.” For much of the Imperial period local self-sufficiency and de facto independence resulted from the formal institutional weakness of both state and society. Russia’s “civil society of the educated” (obshchestvo) arose only in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and at the time did not describe a universalist society encompassing all citizens.12 Thus although educated Russians invoked concepts such as “the public” (publika), “society” (obshchestvo), and “the people” (narod) that transcended social particularism, historians must be wary of applying the nineteenth-century meanings of these categories to eighteenth-century social relationships.13 Similarly, they must be wary of applying the categories of sociology and political theory—for example, Habermas’s “bourgeois public sphere”—to historical contexts in which comparable categories had not yet been articulated.14 The historian who seeks to recover the voices of the people would do well to employ the language, categories, and concepts articulated by those very people.15 This can be well nigh impossible with respect to people who did not express themselves in writing, and with respect to those who did leave a written record, the discernible voices of a particular historical context, like the manifestations of social agency, can leave historians with a multiplicity of discrete articulations. So once again, what is the significance of the particular without integration into the general? To insist on integration of the particular into the general, and of the social into the political, is no marker of Enlightenment, Hegelian, or modernist bias. To the contrary, it is the poststructuralist insistence on contingency that expresses the modernist orientation. The everyday lives of Russians in the period of the Empire may have been filled with contingencies and ad hoc adaptations—immediate physical survival could be quite precarious—but the life of the mind and spirit was not so dispersed or unstable. Peasants remained monarchists bound by Orthodox Christian morality until 1905, and the educated classes who embraced Enlightenment culture beginning in the eighteenth century did not inevitably abandon Christian morality or the assumption of a God-given natural order. Prior to the Great 12 On Russia’s “civil society of the educated” see Marc Raeff, “Transfiguration and Modernization: The Paradoxes of Social Disciplining, Paedagogical Leadership, and the Enlightenment in 18th Century Russia,” in Alteuropa— Ancien Régime—Frühe Neuzeit: Probleme und Methoden der Forschung, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker and Ernst Hinrichs (Stuttgart, 1991), 99–115; and Anthony G. Netting, “Russian Liberalism: The Years of Promise” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1967). 13 Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb, 1999); Roger Bartlett, “Aufklärung, Adel und Gesellschaft in Russland,” in Europa in der Frühen Neuzeit: Festschrift für Günter Mühlpfordt, vol. 5, Aufklärung in Europa, ed. Erich Donnert (Cologne, 1999), 521–30; idem, “The Free Economic Society: The Foundation Years and the Prize Essay Competition of 1766 on Peasant Property,” in Russland zur Zeit Katharinas II: Absolutismus—Aufklärung—Pragmatismus, ed. Eckhard Hübner, Jan Kusber, and Peter Nitsche (Cologne, 1998), 181–214; Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1996). 14 Jürgen Habermas describes the prepolitical literary public sphere as a realm of freedom and independent thought poised between the private household, also a site of autonomy, and the absolutist state. He situates the autonomy of private life in the classical Greek household, superceded in medieval times by localized lordship, and it is from the private form of political authority that the “bourgeois public sphere” emerges to limit the power of the increasingly intrusive bureaucratic state, evident but still of limited effectiveness in the eighteenth century. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989). 15 This is the lesson of Begriffsgeschichte, the history of concepts. 502 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter Reform era there is little evidence that Russians regarded the gap between idea (whether based on religious or Enlightenment principles) and reality as something to be overcome. Only after Hegel did European thought establish the expectation of a correspondence between idea and reality—between the personal and public or the internal and external. Before modern times people lived with the real while imagining or awaiting the ideal. The ideal represented less a principle to be achieved on earth, though it also could carry this meaning, than the promise of divine justice, to be realized through Providential history. Even among the educated, Westernized, and nonreligious the Enlightenment quest for personal perfectibility could remain fully consistent with Orthodox Christian morality. Perhaps the continuity of religious belief explains why in Imperial Russia, the “new politics” of open contestation—represented by parlementary opposition in France or the Wilkes movement in Britain—began as a struggle for the moral high ground in literary debates.16 Instead of institution-based oppositions and movements, Russia produced a sociocultural group identity, the intelligentsia, that understood politics in moral terms. Religious practice and belief thus provides a key area of research where individual or local experience can be incorporated into a larger framework. Military service, market relations, judicial process, and after 1905 electoral politics offer additional venues, all of which remain under scrutiny by present-day historians. In each of these arenas, macrolevel structures reached down into the immediate levels of the household and local community. Still more effective in integrating micro- and macrolevel experiences is the effort to place Russia in the broad spectrum of European history. Again problems of definition and applicability arise. Caught between nineteenth-century Westerner and Slavophile positions, historians either emphasize the degree to which Russian conditions corresponded to the European pattern or argue that Russian historical development followed a unique, fundamentally distinctive path. In both cases scholars apply a hegemonic European model based on philosophical categories—civil society is but one example—created in Western or Central Europe. Historians have long recognized that the primary themes of Russian history are those of Europe: Christianity, serfdom, nobility, monarchy, Enlightenment, industrialization, nationalism, constitutionalism, democracy, and socialism, among others. Oftentimes, the apparent Russian divergences result from a chronological lag (for example, late industrialization) or from quantity rather than qualitative substance (for example, limited urbanization or small middle classes). Whatever the concrete nature of the “divergence,” historians face a conundrum fueled by a Western metanarrative that equates the well-being of all humanity with liberal modernity: the rule of law, material progress, civil society, capitalist market relations, and democratic constitutional government. If historians think of Russia as occupying one endpoint in a European continuum that reaches all the way to Britain or even the United States, the most egregious value judgments fall away: that Russians are a servile people, that Russia lacks a democratic tradition, that centuries of autocratic rule have undermined the rule of law. Such stereotypes have all but disappeared in academic circles, where the collapse of the Soviet Union has strengthened the voices of scholars inclined to stress the benign aspects of Russian monarchy. Even Communist Russia is now seen as a place where social agency and unadulterated human expression coexisted with bloody terror. If Russia has yet to realize fully the requirements 16 On the emergence of a “new politics” of open contestation within the institutions of the old regime see Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1990). In Search of the People, In Search of Russia 503 of liberal modernity, historians need only remember that the United States has possessed the potential to achieve translocal civic equality and the rule of law only since 1965, when legal segregation was dismantled. This attention to historical commonalities is important, but historians also must be careful not to blur the differences between democracies, however imperfect, and authoritarian regimes.17 The weakness of legality and democracy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia cries out for the degree of historical recognition and analysis long characteristic of the Russian prerevolutionary historiography and the “old” political and intellectual histories of Americans and West Europeans. To come to terms with this weakness is not to deny the Europeanness of Russia. To understand it would represent a timely contribution to the process of democratization currently under way. The Russian Empire was an old-regime monarchy, and the legal guarantees enjoyed by Imperial subjects constituted privileges or grants, not universal natural rights. At times it seems as if historians would like to include Russia in a European continuum without holding the Empire to a European standard of development. The result has been to exaggerate the homogeneity of Western Europe, to underestimate the differences between absolutist and constitutional monarchies, and to confuse the rule of laws with the rule of law. In order to integrate Russia into the European fold, modern historians also sometimes oversimplify and overemphasize the utopian and antidemocratic tendencies further to the west. The praiseworthy effort to avoid negative stereotypes about Russian inferiority and “otherness” can have the ironic effect of making Russia seem more European than Western Europe. The solution to the problem of situating Russia in the European context is twofold. First, historians should pay close attention to the diversity of European experiences. Any notion of “the West” is anachronistic and ahistorical. This is a tall order for scholars who find little appreciation for Russia’s Europeanness among colleagues in the European field.18 Second, historians should focus strictly on actuality and forget potentiality. In order to Europeanize Russian history, scholars erroneously point to potentialities of development— where Russia was heading rather than where she actually stood at a given historical moment.19 Ironically, to emphasize actualities in a narrow historical context can have the effect of either exaggerating or underestimating Russian difference. It is important, then, also to keep in mind the larger picture. The sum of the parts is the whole. If widespread capital punishment in eighteenth-century Britain seems barbarous when compared to the contemporaneous Russian system of criminal justice, this does not mean that Russia was equivalent 17 A significant piece of scholarship that both conceptualizes Russian history in terms of a European continuum and also blurs the differences between democracy and dictatorship is Peter Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work’: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Modern History 69 (September 1997): 415–50. Other scholars trace the roots of twentieth-century socialism and Soviet communism to the Enlightenment’s (in my view misrepresented) utopianism yet avoid such a blurring. See Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York, 1994); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995); and Amir Weiner, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,” American Historical Review 104 (October 1999): 1114–55. Unfortunately, a rhetoric that negates the distinction between democracy and dictatorship easily leads to Gulag denial. See Kate Brown, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same Place,” American Historical Review 106 (February 2001): 17–48. 18 German scholarship leads the way in overcoming this problem, partly because of geography but also perhaps because “Russianists” are required to conduct research in the broader field of “East European Studies.” See, for example, Christoph Schmidt, Auf Felsen gesät: Die Reformation in Polen und Livland (Göttingen, 2000), which includes discussion of Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, Livonia, and Russia. 19 Potentiality is the organizing principle throughout Mironov’s Sotsial'naia istoriia. 504 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter to Britain in terms of development toward the rule of law.20 Such examples reveal the need to consider the totality of social, political, and legal organization before making claims for equivalency. Judgments about Russia’s peculiarity or uniqueness in relation to other parts of Europe are not necessarily the vestiges of a Cold War perspective or the result of a failure to appreciate the dynamism and achievements of Russian society. The Russian Empire maintained great-power status in a pan-European arena; consequently, it is entirely appropriate to compare Russia to Britain, France, Austria, or Prussia rather than to the Balkan countries or Poland. If historians remain inclined to evaluate Russian experience in terms of an idealized “Western” standard, perhaps this stems from the unconscious awareness that the liberal democratic societies of “the West” are cut from the same mold as Russia. They could have or still might become more like Russia; their democracies have been or could again become similarly fragile. If until very recently the historical results appeared to diverge, the basic themes of Russian development have been recognized as European since the eighteenth century. (Think of Voltaire’s histories.) Thus Russian history reveals alternative and not especially attractive outcomes to patterns of European historical development over the long duration. To appreciate these outcomes in Russian terms—to confront the actualities of Russian history—is to understand ourselves and our own sometimes hidden potentialities. The glories of European and Russian civilization are readily embraced and visible for all to see. Yet only by confronting the brutalities can historians secure for Russia a recognized, fully integrated place in the continuum of European history.21 Only by confronting the brutalities can we come to terms with ourselves. 20 Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975); V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (New York, 1994). 21 Although E. V. Anisimov’s characterization of the Petrine “police state” can be seen as an anachronistic transposing of Soviet reality back into the eighteenth century, it nonetheless represents an important effort to break out of the Soviet mode of thinking by confronting harsh historical reality. See E. V. Anisimov, Vremia petrovskikh reform (Leningrad, 1989).