Perceptions of the Time of Troubles in Russian Social and Political Thought in the Late 18th — Early 19th Centuries

Abstract

This article examines the changing perceptions of the Time of Troubles in Russian political culture between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author draws on the methods of the Cambridge school of ‘intellectual history’, represented by the works of J. Pocock and Q. Skinner, which allow the historical materials involved to be considered within the framework of the approach of ‘cultural glossaries’ and rhetorical strategies. The study focuses on debates about the ideal form of government, including historical plots of the Time of Troubles, in Russian socio-political thought of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including those based on historical plots of the Time of Troubles. The article demonstrates that the appeal to these plots was connected with the foreign and domestic political spheres relevant to the contemporaries, and with the attempt to change the form of government in Russia or the threat of its change from outside during the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century. The analysis shows that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian authors reinterpreted the historical events and personalities of the Time of Troubles using the Aristotelian glossary of forms of government. The application of this glossary to the historical themes of the Time of Troubles in Russian social and political thought effectively ‘reinvented’ the history of the Time of Troubles. In this ‘invention of the Time of Troubles’, the themes of ‘tyranny’ and ‘tyrannicide’ and speculation about the most appropriate form of government for Russia emerged. It is concluded that the emergence of these rhetorical strategies in references to the Time of Troubles played the role of historical argument and evidence in favour of the Russian monarchy for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors.