Reading Back the Empire: The Return of the Normans
Muller's and Lomonosov's interpretations of Russian history, as shaped by the debate of 1749-50, represented fundamentally opposing views of the Russian past. Muller, applying the latest achievements of Western scholarship in the criticism of historical texts, allegedly denied Russia its 'proper' place in history, while Lomonosov, relying on outdated compilations like the Kyivan Synopsis, presumably restored Russian history to the glory it was thought to deserve.
The historians of Catherine's age appear to have regarded this as a false dichotomy and sought to combine scholarship with love of the fatherland without detriment to either. The first attempts to chart an independent course between 'Normanism' and 'nativism' may be seen in the writings of Russia's foremost historian of the first half of the eighteenth century, Vasilii Tatishchev. His political outlook was formed in the era of Peter I, and his historical views were developed in the 1730s, during the rule of Anna Ioannovna. Tatishchev began work on his Istoriia Rossiiskaia (Russian History) in 1729, submitted the first draft of the manuscript ten years later, and continued working on it until his death in 1750. The publication of the mammoth history, which was largely a compendium of Rus' and Muscovite chronicles, did not begin until the late 1760s, but the work was known in manuscript to Muller and Lomonosov and influenced the field long before its appearance in print. In his views on Rus' history, Tatishchev was closer to the Normanists than to their opponents, and during the Varangian debate he refused to condemn Muller, whom he deeply respected as a scholar. Indeed, around the time of the debate, he was busy translating into Russian the 'Normanist' articles of Bayer, which he included as chapters of his history of Russia.29At the same time, Tatishchev was by no means lacking in Russian patriotism.
He began his historical research with the goal of paying tribute to Peter I and his accomplishments. He criticized Western historians for denying Russia its ancient past and resolved to cleanse Russian history of Polish 'lies and legends.' How did Tatishchev manage to combine his patriotism with his 'Normanism'? First of all, he rejected the theory that the Varangians had conquered the Novgorodian Slavs, asserting that they had been invited to Novgorod by the legendary Slavic ruler Gostomysl. This ruler, unknown to chroniclers prior to the fifteenth century, was most probably an invention of a fifteenth-century Novgorodian chronicler who tried to counter the aggression of the Muscovite Rurikids with legends about Novgorod's pre-Rurikid past. Now the Gostomysl legend was used to counter the perceived German threat. By adopting it, Tatishchev not only implicitly rejected the view that the Slavs had been conquered but also suggested that the Kyivan state had been established by the Slavs long before the arrival of the Varangians. He also traced the non-Slavic Rus'/Varangians not to Sweden or Norway, as did the Normanists of the time, but to the politically more acceptable Finland. The population of the Rus' realm, according to Tatishchev, consisted of autochthonous Slavs, whose name he derived from the word 'glory' and whom he traced back to the Scythians, and migrant Rus'/Varangians, whose ancestors he located among the Sarmatians dwelling in Finland.30 This view of the old Rus' nation as a conglomerate of peoples of various ethnic backgrounds contradicted Lomonosov's thesis of the Slavic origins of the Rus' nation. At the same time, it was much more in accord with the sources and the latest achievements of historical scholarship; moreover, it had the advantage of being politically correct in a multinational empire ruled for most of the eighteenth century by foreign-born tsars and tsarinas. It comes as no surprise that the Tatishchev scheme found numerous followers at the court of Catherine II, not least the empress herself.While the writings of Bayer and Muller contained only a potential threat to Russian national pride, historical works produced by foreigners and published in the second half of the eighteenth century turned that threat into reality, ironically proving Lomonosov right on the issue of the political danger posed by foreign dominance of imperial historiography. Once von Schlozer, the new official historiographer of the academy, left the Russian Empire for Germany in 1767, he was free of Russian censorship. While his works on Russian history published abroad laid the foundations for Russian historical scholarship, in St Petersburg they were regarded as offensive to Russian pride. Schlozer slighted his Russian colleagues, who, in his opinion, knew little but their chronicles and did not read foreign-language sources or historical works. He also denied Russia its glorious legendary past, stating in that regard: 'May patriots not be incensed, but their history does not go back to the Tower of Babel.' He also stressed the savagery of Russian life before the arrival of the Varangians, claiming that the latter, whom he considered to be of Germanic descent, had civilized Russia. Schlozer's views on Russian history were echoed by another foreigner in the Russian service, the French physician Nicolas-Gabriel LeClerc. His six-volume Physical, Moral, Civil, and Political History of Ancient and Modern Russia appeared in France between 1783 and 1794. LeClerc extended Schlozer's thesis about the primitivism and barbarism of the Russians to the times of Peter I, who, in his opinion, was the first ruler to introduce civilization in Russia. In many ways LeClerc's view of Russian history reflected the main postulates of Western Enlightenment historiography, whose writers took a dim view of the pre-Enlightenment past of their own countries. Needless to say, the 'enlightened' foreigners saw much less civilization and much more barbarism in Russia than in the West and reacted accordingly. For the Russian elites, who generally discovered the concept of the fatherland and became interested in its history only in the Age of Enlightenment, Western 'revisionism' of the historical foundations of their patriotism was hardly acceptable.31
Few people were more upset by the Western attack on the Russian past than Catherine II.
Existing Russian historiography did not satisfy her. The history of Russia written and published in the early 1770s by Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov was no match for Western writings. Shcherbatov, a much more sophisticated historian than Lomonosov (he endorsed Tatishchev's stand on Normanism), was not only suspected of having helped LeClerc produce his blasphemous attack on the Russian past but was also considered by the empress to be a boring writer (for good reason). Besides, Shcherbatov's work on Russian history progressed too slowly. The publication of Tatishchev's history had just begun, but his work was even less readable than Shcherbatov's. Thus, on being presented with Tatishchev's multivolume work, the empress set out to write a history of Russia herself. It was serialized in one of the Russian journals beginning in 1783. Her closest collaborators also sought to enlist the services of a 'full-time' historian to rebut LeClerc's allegations. Such a historian was found in the person of Major-General Ivan Boltin, a subordinate of the empress's closest collaborator, Prince Grigorii Potemkin. Boltin indeed turned out to be a saviour of Russian historical pride. In 1788, five years after the appearance of the first volume of LeClerc's history, he produced a two- volume critique of the Frenchman's work. Ideologically, Boltin was very much under Catherine's influence. His study demonstrated the growing maturity of Russian imperial historiography and its considerable progress since the times of the Lomonosov-Muller debate. Boltin managed to turn Enlightenment ideas against the enlightened critics of Russian barbarism. On the one hand, he insisted on the universality of historical laws and claimed that the Russian nation was like any other in Europe, since the major developments in Russian history had their parallels in the West. On the other hand, indicating the importance of climate in human history, he insisted on the peculiarity of the Russian national character and customs. For the first time, the defence of Russian pride was formulated in a language common to all of Europe - that of scholarship and enlightenment.32What about the accursed question of Rus' origins? Here Tatishchev's interpretation of the past served as a guiding light to both Catherine II and Boltin. Tatishchev's acceptance of the non-Slavic Germanic origins of the Varangians was balanced by his insistence on the multiethnic character of the original Rus'/Russian nation. Following in Tatishchev's footsteps, the empress believed that the Varangians were related to the Novgorodian ruler Gostomysl and thus were not invaders but lawful rulers of Novgorod. The invitation to the Varangians had been extended by the Rus', Slavs, and Chud. According to Catherine, the Rus' constituted the autochthonous population of the region, which merged with the Slavs and later with the Varangians, eventually forming one people. Boltin presented a slightly different picture of early Rus' nation-building. According to him, Rus' was the name of a Sarmatian (Finno-Ugric) tribe, part of which merged with the Varangians to form a people known as the Varangian Rus'. The Rus' were eventually conquered by the Slavs, whose language and letters were adopted by the whole realm. Boltin nevertheless believed that the Rus' (Finno-Ugric) and Slavic languages coexisted for a long time. He wrote in that regard: ‘Both the Rus' and the Slavs understood, just as today in Olonets all Russians can speak Karelian and all Karelians can speak Russian.' Boltin confused the issue somewhat with this example, creating the impression that the Rus' language had developed into the Karelian of his own day, while the language he originally called 'Slavic' had turned into 'Russian.' More importantly, Boltin's interpretation showed that he was prepared to read the eighteenth-century ethnolinguistic situation back into the past.33
The Russian intellectual elite celebrated the multiethnic character of the empire.
That motif was quite prominent in the panegyrics written to praise the colonization of southern Ukraine by Prince Grigorii Potemkin, the governor-general of New Russia - the province carved out of the Hetmanate and Zaporozhian and Tatar lands. The author of one of those texts, V.P. Petrov, who was a student of Mikhail Lomonosov's, stressed the multiethnic character of the project and declared the loyalty of the new subjects to the empress:All Kherson has bestirred itself
One sees no end to it...
The Moldavian, the Armenian,
The Indian and the Hellene
Or the black Ethiopian
Whatever the sky beneath which
He came into the world
Catherine is the mother of all.
Praising Potemkin for his achievements in settling southern Ukraine with foreigners, Petrov wrote, addressing the governor general,
May you be known as the foster father
Of tribes from the whole world,
Plants from foreign countries
Are moving north.
Transform alien peoples
Into Russians.34
According to Petrov, the settlers who accepted Catherine as their sovereign were also embarking on the path of political Russification. The Little Russians, whose territories were appropriated by the empire along with their history, did not count for much in this context, since they were considered no less Russian than their counterparts in Russia proper. They and their history were fully incorporated into the allRussian narrative and identity, comprising both the narrow Slavic and 'nativist' models and the broader 'civic' or imperial ones.
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