Dilemmas of a Progressive Administrator: Baron Boris Nolde

Abstract

Upon Boris Emmanuilovich Nolde's death in 1948, one of his friends and fellow emigres, the Socialist Revolutionary Mark Vishniak, classified him as a man of liberal Vishniak then hastened to add: But one would be hard pressed to say that Nolde held firm political views. This is probably explained by his attitude to politics as something of secondary importance, and by his general quality of mind and character. Nolde never suffered from doctrinalism and things as they were. (1) Vishniak's reading is the prevailing view of Nolde: a man of moderate liberal views, situated on the right wing of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party. (2) Yet Nolde was engaged in activities he understood as politics for far longer than the four years he intermittently participated in debates within the Constitutional Democratic Party. How did Nolde understand politics, and how did this understanding shape his proposals for transforming the empire, first in his role as a reforming bureaucrat in the tsarist government's foreign ministry and then as a political activist in 1917? In this article I ask how Nolde, in Vishniak's words, took things as they were. In the last decades of its existence, the Russian empire faced the dilemma of restructuring itself in an age of nationalism. A key figure who both thought about this problem in its historical dimension and developed policies to accomplish this transition was Baron Boris Nolde (1876-1948). (3) For well over a decade--from 1907 to 1917--he participated in the formulation and implementation of state policy, first for the imperial government and then for the Provisional Government. Both in imperial Russia and later in emigration in France, Nolde combined his work in various official capacities with a productive scholarly life. Not only did he combine these two tasks, he insisted that the synergy between these spheres was crucial to his own outlook. In his study of Iurii Samarin, written in Russia in 1918-19, Nolde noted: While true in individual cases, the banal idea that a politician cannot be a scholar, or that a scholar cannot be a politician, is inaccurate in the majority of cases. Politics emerges from forming an evaluation of and from the activity that acts upon those evaluations.... Of course, the combination of a scholar and a politician in a particular individual is more or less an entirely accidental event, but when it happens ... there is nothing unnatural in this combination. (4) It is no accident that Nolde chose to write a biography of Samarin, a man who was active both in politics and in intellectual life. Nolde viewed himself in similar terms, as simultaneously a politician and a scholar, who in both his administrative and his academic work account of living reality. Due to his milieu, his own life experience, and the limitations upon political life in imperial Russia, living for Nolde meant first and foremost the task of administration. While many other scholars and political activists were engaged in work in various political parties or within the Duma, Nolde was distinct in that he was engaged in actual state service within the Foreign Ministry. Nolde's understanding of living served him well both as a scholar--he was without doubt a superb historian and legal theorist--and as an administrator within the established order of Russia's old regime. He would later write that people must be governed, and there are times when one cannot be overly delicate. (5) Indeed, his commitment to historically developed institutions and his skepticism regarding the desirability of radical reform served as a rationalization, if not a justification, for the status quo. Yet Nolde's understanding of reality, of which he was so proud, proved a much poorer guide for times of dynamic change--arguably, precisely the time when reality was most alive. When faced in 1917 with the implosion of the system in which he had formulated his worldview, Nolde showed a striking lack of patience with the messiness of electoral politics and internal party discussions. …