The Russian Historical Tradition and Prospects of Liberal Reforms

Abstract

Not long ago, an interesting debate was published in the journal Druzhba narodov, which in our view merits broad scholarly discussion. Two conflicting views on the relationship between our historical tradition and current changes were presented in G. Lisichkin's "Tsar Boris and the Fall of the Soviet 'Golden Horde' " (1996, no. 10) and A. Yanov's "Russian Liberals Against Russian History" (1997, no. 1). According to the first author, the legacy of Russian history, the centuries of Tatarism and Orthodox stagnation, clearly conflict with the tasks of liberalizing the country. In the opinion of the second, there are two tendencies in Russian history, the deepest and most powerful of which is the tendency toward a liberal evolution of society, uniting Russia and Western countries. Yanov is convinced, for example, that a typical manifestation of this tendency is the intrinsically free relationship of boyars serving the grand prince, reinforced by their right of "departure" to serve another prince. In Yanov's view, this situation imposed restraint on the development of the autocracy, and did not allow the prince to become a despot on pain of the collective "departure" of all the boyars and the loss of his armed forces. The preservation of this tradition was the foundation for the development in Russia (in the fifteenth and the fmt half of the sixteenth centuries) of tendencies that were progressive even compared with general European trends. Ivan the Terrible needed a particular kind of "revolution," the introduction of his oprichnina, to establish the autocracy. Yanov considers the inability to rely on this fertile liberal tendency, which goes far back in Russian history, a testimony to the weakness of the one-sided reforms being implemented mainly by economists who do not know our history and are not prepared to apply it to the changes they would like to make.