The Silence of Muscovy

Abstract

The Russian Review is to be congratulated for at last publishing Ned Keenan's essay on Russian political culture, which has long enjoyed the status of an underground classic. A cursory reading makes clear why earlier redactions of the paper created such a stir. The adjectives "original," "imaginative," and "stimulating" are normally restricted to statements of the most extravagant praise. Applied to Keenan's scholarly writings they seem almost trite. The present essay is no exception. Keenan's reflections resemble a conceptual light show. Brilliant images repeatedly flash before the readers' eyes. Alluring metaphors abound: the tsars of Muscovy were "referees" of a political system that amounted to a "conspiracy against ... chaos." Abstractions such as "politics" have unstable and shifting meanings, and fashionable jargon decorates the surface of the argument. In their new environment, readers easily lose their sense of time: data from the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries blend indiscriminately into a changeless "structure" of Muscovite politics. We are dealing, then, with a prodigiously gifted historian who is also a skilled illusionist. The notion of a Russian "political culture" forms the foundation of Keenan's arguments. The concept of a "political culture" is elusive and, in the Russian case, is open to the self-serving reductionism of those who argue that, since Russians have long tolerated tyranny at home and supported aggressiveness on the international scene, it is hopeless to expect better relations with the Soviet Union in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, in spite of its perils, the concept is a useful way to get at the real differences in political attitudes and conditioned reflexes that clearly distinguish one society from another. Keenan's basic premise is quite correct: Russians' political assumptions and behavior differ significantly from those of Englishmen, Chinese or Ethiopians. One wishes only that, like the political scientists who first developed the concept, he had attempted to explain explicitly how, in their upbringing, individual Russians were "socialized" into the political assumptions and practices of their society. From this sound basic assumption, Keenan draws one disturbing corollary-that the dominant political culture of Russia was monolithic. In his view, dissenting individuals and groups did not constitute a distinct component of the political culture, but stood entirely outside its parameters and therefore could not even understand it. Could one not claim, with more justification, that "westernized" dissenting intellectuals and would-be political reformers formed