Enlightenment and disillusionment of the “Russian David Hume”

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The generation of “chicks of Petrov’s nest” did not create a great Russian culture. Original literature, original philosophy, original science became a noticeable social phenomenon in Russia only at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, almost a century after the start of Peter's reforms.

Institutions under the guise of “academy” and “university” existed in Russia since 1725, but neither Peter, their founder, nor his immediate successors received the fruits of enlightenment.

Three factors played a decisive role in the Russian enlightenment gaining a soul: the founding of Moscow University (1755), the publication of the “Manifesto on the Liberty of the Nobility” (1762) and the long reign of the enlightenment empress Catherine II (1762–1796).

From the moment of its founding, Moscow University was subordinated to the Senate, and not to the squabble-torn Academy of Sciences. This gave him a certain independence. There was a gymnasium at the university, and in 1779 the curator of the university (and a major poet of his era) Mikhail Kheraskov founded the Noble Boarding School - something like a high school, where the scions of noble families prepared for admission. It was already beginning to look like a continuous education system. The same Kheraskov entrusted the university printing house to Nikolai Novikov, who established the mass publication of original and translated books (Rousseau’s prose, Kheraskov and Sumarokov’s dramaturgy, many textbooks) and magazines. Moscow University quickly became the main center of Russian enlightenment (the dissemination of knowledge) and the Russian Enlightenment (a pan-European philosophical movement).

The “Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility” was the most important act of the six-month reign of the hapless Peter III. According to it, the nobility were exempted from the mandatory 25-year government service. Any nobleman now had the right to live idlely on the income from his estates and fill his leisure time with whatever he pleased: to amuse himself with hound hunting, to start serf theaters, to read and write books.

Among other things, the Manifesto freed the privileged class from any corporal punishment. It was the “unflogged nobles” (Pushkin’s definition), who received a good education at the Noble boarding school and at Moscow University, who read books published by Novikov, who, thanks to the “freedom of the nobility,” had leisure and enjoyed the favor of Empress Catherine II, became the very soul of Russian enlightenment.

This did not happen suddenly, of course. Service, having ceased to be obligatory by law, remained a “debt of honor” for the nobleman. Our current main character, Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, served: he headed the Chamber Collegium, and was a senator. Alexey Musin-Pushkin, about whom there will be a lot of talk ahead, was the chief prosecutor of the Holy Synod and, without a twinge of conscience, used his official position to replenish his personal collection of ancient manuscripts. The publisher Nikolai Novikov, like his younger comrade Karamzin, was a private man.

“Integrity,” the presence (or at least the opportunity) of leisure, a good education, and the availability of literature (Shcherbatov’s library, for example, contained 15,000 books) gave these people a huge advantage over the same Tatishchev and Trediakovsky. They no longer had to feverishly catch up with the ideological development of Europe: their everyday intellectual life was, in general, the same as that of their contemporaries in the West: the skeptical philosophy of David Hume, the theory of separation of powers of Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, the economic teachings of Francois Quehne and Adam Smith . . The enlightened Russian nobles of Catherine's era were not yet ready to enter into this grandiose debate on equal terms, but they were already able to listen to it with understanding and interest.

In these new circumstances, the Russian government and the Russian educated society (newborn, but already having time to imagine who knows what about itself) were still waiting for a decent Russian history. Catherine, as soon as she ascended the throne, even commissioned “The History of the Russian Empire during the reign of Peter the Great” from Voltaire himself. The famous freethinker was regularly supplied with translations of the necessary archival materials. But what he wrote horrified the customer: he twisted historical information as he wanted to please his own political and philosophical ideas - and passionately defended his right to do this in letters to the Russian court. The PR move was, of course, a success: both Voltaire’s fame and the glory of Russia as an enlightened country increased. But this work did not advance Russian historical science at all.

At the same time, Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Shcherbatov sat down to write his own “Russian History from Ancient Times”.

There are not many genuine aristocrats among Russian historians. The Tatishchev family, although descended from the Rurikovichs, was so seedy that Vasily Nikitich at the beginning of his career had to use the patronage of the Saltykovs, his maternal relatives. The Karamzins descended from a certain Crimean Tatar Kara-Murza, who entered the Russian service, probably in the 15th or 16th century, and were provincial small-scale nobles. Sergei Solovyov and Vasily Klyuchevsky were the sons of priests, the first from Moscow, and the second from the rural Penza province. Sergei Platonov's father was an official of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and achieved hereditary nobility in 1878, when the future historian was 18 years old.

In this series, Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov stands out for the nobility and wealth of his family. The Shcherbatovs also descended from the Rurikovichs, more precisely, from the Chernigov prince Mikhail Vsevolodovich, revered by the Russian Church as a saint (according to legend, he died at Batu’s headquarters for refusing to bow to the Horde idols). Shcherbatov's grandfather was a okolnichy under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (one of the highest ranks in pre-Petrine Russia), his father was a major general and Arkhangelsk governor under Anna Ioannovna. In the village of Mikhailovskoye, Yaroslavl region, the former family nest of the Shcherbatovs, the ruins of the Church of the Archangel Michael, built in 1700 by the historian’s grandfather, have survived to this day.

Shcherbatov did not study at the Noble boarding school or at the university: his family could afford to give him a first-class education at home. At the age of 12 he was enrolled in the Semenovsky Guards Regiment, so by the age of 23 he had already become an officer. When Peter III issued the “Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility,” Shcherbatov was less than 29 years old, and he did not hesitate to resign and was promoted to captain in the guard. in the journal Monthly Works (published by the Academy of Sciences and edited by Gerard Miller ). Being a private person, he began to publish his translations and articles on political and moral philosophy

But soon Peter III was overthrown by his own wife, who became Empress Catherine II, and interesting things began to happen. At this time, Russia continued to live according to the Council Code, a set of laws adopted back in 1649. The new laws passed since then have not been properly codified. The legal system was like hell. Catherine decided to issue a new Code. The enlightened nobles knew that the empress shared many of their beliefs: she reads Montesquieu and Beccaria, corresponds with Voltaire, consults with the prominent economist and educator Mercier de la Rivière, and invites Diderot to come to her. Moreover, to prepare the draft of the new Code, Catherine created a special commission in 1767, which included not only representatives of government departments, but also elected deputies from nobles, townspeople, Cossacks and free peasants. The “Great Mandate,” in which Catherine outlined the range of issues to be considered by the Statutory Commission and decided in the new Code, in some places resembled a plan for the practical implementation of educational ideas, which until now remained largely theoretical not only in Russia, but also in Europe. The words “constitution” and “parliament” were avoided, but this whole idea could not help but bring to mind about them.

The champions of the Enlightenment were overwhelmed with enthusiasm, and Shcherbatov could not stay away. The Yaroslavl nobility elected him as their deputy to the Legislative Commission and gave him the order to look after the interests of the nobility. The smartest, educated, eloquent Shcherbatov emerged as the leader of the “aristocratic party.”

Here we need a small digression about the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, especially since it also predetermined the direction of Shcherbatov’s historical research. Montesquieu was the universal teacher here. His treatise “On the Spirit of Laws” (1748) contained a huge number of ideas, of which the separation of powers turned out to be the most fruitful. Going through various forms of government: despotism, limited monarchy, democratic and aristocratic republic - Montesquieu gave preference to a monarchy limited by an aristocratic parliament. In his opinion, an enlightened nobility, brought up in the ideals of virtue and noble ambition, will be a reliable guarantor of the monarch's observance of the laws and will prevent the state from sliding into despotism.

Another important educational idea was physiocracy (“power of nature” in Greek) - the economic doctrine of François Koehne. Just as Montesquieu sought the realization of the natural world order in politics, Koehne sought it in economics. He believed that agriculture was the basis of prosperity, classifying not only merchants, but also industrialists and industrial workers as the “sterile class”. He considered large-scale land ownership to be the most effective model of agriculture, the “true cultivators of the land” being not the cultivators themselves, but the owners of large latifundia (in Europe this was mainly the nobility, and, for example, in America - capitalist planters). Koehne considered the most important task of the state in the economy to be the elimination of all restrictions on business activity in agriculture and non-interference (the hitherto well-known principle of laissez-faire , literally: “let me do”). It was from physiocracy that Adam Smith started when he wrote The Wealth of Nations (1776), the book that laid the foundation for modern economics.

These ideas were a reaction to the practices of absolutism (unlimited monarchy) and mercantilism (active government intervention in the economy) that dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. They were very popular in the second half of the 18th century. The founding fathers of the United States built their state on them. Catherine II sympathized with them. And it was they who, in the Legislative Commission, served as a political platform for Shcherbatov as a representative of the “aristocratic party.”

In the Legislative Commission, perhaps for the first time in Russian history, the issue of serfdom was publicly raised.

Arguments for its abolition were mainly ethical: it is not good for some people to own others like cattle. Shcherbatov spoke out sharply against it. His arguments were predominantly economic, in the spirit of physiocracy: if serfdom was abolished, there would be no one to cultivate huge areas of arable land. Even if this land is taken away from the landowners and distributed to the peasants (which would be a violation of the inviolability of private property), small farms, having lost their economies of scale, will not be able to feed Russia. Shcherbatov went even further and criticized the mercantilistic measures taken by Catherine to encourage trade and industry: this, according to the prince, provoked an outflow of workers from agriculture, which was already in a critical condition.

Catherine’s idea with the Statutory Commission was a fiasco.

A representative body unprecedented in Russia immediately got bogged down in bureaucracy, spent several meetings discussing the ceremony with which the empress should be presented with the title of “Mother of the Fatherland,” created many subcommittees that did not agree on anything with each other and got in each other’s way.

A year later, the war with Turkey began, noble deputies en masse went into the army. For another ten years, the Legislative Commission was considered active, but did not actually meet and in the end was simply forgotten.

However, the project was not entirely fruitless: the commission became a real review of Russian educators, and some of them managed to come forward. Shcherbatov was one of these. Catherine recognized him as a like-minded person. The elderly Gerard Miller, who had edited his articles in Monthly Works and who knew that the prince had been writing Russian history on his own initiative for several years, recommended him as a court historiographer in his place. The Empress appointed him master of arms and entrusted him with the analysis of the papers of Peter I.

Already in 1773, Shcherbatov had to take advantage of Catherine’s favor for personal gain: he begged the empress for 40,000 rubles to pay off the debts of his parents and father-in-law. After this, honor no longer allowed him to refuse service: he received the court rank of chamberlain, in 1778 he headed the Chamber College (the department responsible for government collections), and in 1779 he became a senator.

Shcherbatov clearly counted on an important position in power. But Catherine invariably kept him in a secondary role, giving preference to Grigory Potemkin and her other favorites.

For ten years the prince accumulated bile - and poured it out in the pamphlet “On the Damage of Morals in Russia,” written shortly before his death.

He argued that the unlimited nature of the autocracy “took away all the courage of the subjects to express their thoughts, and the nobles became not advisers, but servants of the sovereign and his favorites.” The place of conscientious patriots in power was taken by flatterers and self-interested people, whose company was more pleasant for the empress. In this essay, Shcherbatov did not call Ekaterina herself a whore. The scandalous pamphlet circulated from hand to hand in Russia in lists (handwritten copies), and was first published in printing only in 1858 - and even then by Alexander Herzen in his London “tamizdat”.

The first volume of “Russian History from Ancient Times” by Shcherbatov was published by the Academy of Sciences in 1770. The last of the volumes written by the prince - the seventh, dedicated to the reign of False Dmitry and Vasily Shuisky (1605-1610) - was published in 1791, after the death of the author. That is, Shcherbatov, like Tatishchev before him and Karamzin after him, brought the exposition only to the Time of Troubles.

Publisher Nikolai Novikov worked simultaneously with Shcherbatov. Like Shcherbatov, he was seen in the Law Commission, where he kept protocols. Having retired in 1769, he soon became famous for his satirical magazines “Drone” and “Painter”, which claimed the status of printed organs of the Russian Enlightenment and published, under the guise of letters to the editor, ridicule of mediocre poets, court bribe-takers and flatterers. No names were named, but the circle of readers was limited (a circulation of 1000 copies was enough for the entire “enlightened layer”), and everyone understood everything. At the same time, Novikov started “Ancient Russian Vivliofika” - a magazine in which historical documents were published (princely treaty and grant letters and wills, starting from the 13th century, diplomatic documents from the 16th century, etc.). Gerard Miller and his student archaeographer Nikolai Bantysh-Kamensky, historiographer Shcherbatov, rummaging through the archives, regularly supplied Novikov with material.

Novikov magazines lived for about a year: none of them became commercially sustainable. "Vivliofika", receiving subsidies from the empress, lasted more than two years. This was an extremely valuable experience: Novikov not only introduced many sources into scientific circulation, but also developed a methodology for their publication.

So, by the 1770s in Russia, through the efforts of Miller, archaeographic work was more or less established, through the efforts of Novikov, a more or less systematic publication of sources, Shcherbatov wrote and published his “History”. Enormous progress compared to the middle of the century, when Russian historical science was practically exhausted by the quarrel between Miller and Lomonosov and the reclusive writings of Tatishchev.

Shcherbatov was the weak link here.

And the point is not even that he believed in the omnipotence of the legislator, that is, he believed that written laws accurately and completely reflect public life. This was a common belief of the Enlightenment. The political implication of this belief was that all you had to do was give society good laws, and prosperity would follow naturally. Historical conclusion: based on the laws, one can get an idea of the civil status and way of life of the ancients. With such ideas, entire layers of life that were not regulated by written law fell out of the field of view of educational historians - and this is not to mention the fact that they still could not imagine that the ancient state was essentially different in nature from the modern state, that among the ancients there were different concepts about power, about law, about hierarchy, etc.

Shcherbatov’s much greater problem was that, in the words of Sergei Solovyov, “he began to study Russian history when he began to write it,” that is, he did not receive the necessary methodological training, did not master the techniques of historical and philological criticism, and even poorly understood the language of chronicles.

After the release of the first volumes of History, Shcherbatov was attacked with devastating criticism by Ivan Boltin, Potemkin’s friend, at that time a retired Horse Guards officer and expert on ancient manuscripts, a future major general and member of the Military Collegium. Boltin mocked the fact that Shcherbatov read the word “flag” in the chronicle as “stack”, translated “to walk along it” (that is, “follow him, with him”) as “go to the rescue”, turned the word “rowing” into “ the Greblya River,” turned the names of tribes into personal names, etc.

Here it should also be noted that public scientific polemics in the 18th century resembled public fighting.

Lomonosov, ridiculing the etymological research of Gottlieb Bayer, undertook to trace his own surname to the Russian “barge hauler”. Having reached Bayer’s refutation of the legend about the preaching of Christianity by Andrew the First-Called on the banks of the Dnieper, Lomonosov sarcastically remarks that the author should “bring such a penetrating chemical composition to his nose that he could come to his senses.” So Boltin showered Shcherbatov with offensive words: “nonsense”, “fables”, “fairy tales”, etc. It must be admitted that the reproaches were for the most part fair: Shcherbatov openly “floated” in historical geography, and was a complete layman in historical linguistics. The prince, responding to Boltin’s criticism, snapped at its tone, but as for the content, he admitted mistakes and made excuses. Subsequent volumes, based less on chronicles and more on charters and other archival materials, were noticeably better than the first. However, Shcherbatov never got rid of his other vice - heavy, confusing syllables.

Shcherbatov’s specific historical views hardly deserve the attention of a modern non-specialist reader: they belong to their era and already in the 19th century were mostly either refuted or developed almost beyond recognition by more professional scientists. We should, firstly, pay tribute to the memory of Shcherbatov for his enthusiasm and for the fact that he took the trouble to make many mistakes, saving his followers from them. And secondly,

Shcherbatov is interesting to us because he was perhaps the first in Russian historiography to pose—unconsciously, of course—a scientific problem, which is now commonly called “historical synthesis.”

Here another small digression is required. About ten years before Shcherbatov sat down to write Russian History, the famous Scottish philosopher David Hume sat down to write the History of England. The idea was surprising, if only because Hume did not follow the traditional chronological path (“from ancient times to the present day”), but began with the nearest era: the first two volumes were devoted to the era of the Stuarts (the kings of Scotland from the beginning of the 14th century, at the same time the kings of England from beginning of the 17th century). In his homeland, many did not like this: Hume’s emphasized impartiality seemed to be a disguise of his likes and dislikes. His description of the struggle between the king and parliament in the middle of the 17th century (the “English Revolution”) showed sympathy for parliament, but he clearly disapproved of the execution of King Charles I. The reader, accustomed to biased literature, could not understand whose author it was. side - and was furious. The muted reception of Hume's book in Britain was compensated by its triumph in France, which was the trendsetter of educational fashions. Russian educators also read Hume avidly; Shcherbatov quotes him in the preface to his History.

In philosophy, Hume professed the method of radical doubt - and came to the conclusion that we will never be able to find out how the world “really” works, outside of our consciousness, since reality can only be given to us in sensations, and because sensations we all have the same ones (for example, that we all see the color red the same way or perceive the smell of a rose the same way), no one can guarantee. Subsequently, this philosophical position was called “agnosticism” (“unknowability”).

In writing history, Hume diligently searched for the specific causes of each event, not content with the general philosophical explanations customary for the era, that, say, such and such phenomena are generally characteristic of such and such a state of society. Karamzin, another enthusiastic admirer of Hume, said that he was “very prolific in explaining reasons, but extremely moderate in reflection.” In the hands of Hume, history turned into a science of causes, seeking to discover the laws of social development. That these laws should be sought in history was not at all obvious to his contemporaries: if the nature of man, the “passions” that overwhelm him, are unchangeable and the same everywhere (Montesquieu proceeded from this), then the laws of development can be deduced philosophically, they do not need to be looked for in the ancients legends and half-erased manuscripts. The result of such abstract reasoning was, for example, the theory of the social contract of Thomas Hobbes (mid-17th century): the people, in order to end the “war of all against all,” agree to transfer part of their rights to the state, which is called upon to restore order. The conclusion of this treaty is not a specific historical event, but a speculative phenomenon. Hume, seeing in history the interweaving of many individual characters and wills, noticed the crystallization of habits. Thus, he argued that the state arose not as a result of an imaginary “social contract”, but as a result of the consolidation of the people’s habit of obeying military leaders. (It must be said that in political philosophy the idea of a “social contract,” for all its speculativeness, turned out to be very fruitful.)

Thus, Hume raised the question of revealing the internal logic of history, as opposed to both the recitative listing of events, names and dates, and the subordination of historical writing to certain pre-given political and philosophical ideas.

Shcherbatov understood this task perfectly and bravely took upon himself. It turned out that he was unable to cope with it: diligently dragging into his “Russian History” any details from any sources that came to hand, he drowned in particulars and details behind which not only no internal logic of history could be seen, but sometimes and elementary logic of presentation.

Offended by the lack of recognition by his contemporaries, embittered by the lack of demand in power, but not losing his research fervor, Shcherbatov worked on “History” until his death in 1790, at the age of 57 years.

If we consider Tatishchev to be the “first pancake,” then Shcherbatov was the “second” - and he came out lumpy almost more than the first. His “History” once again proves: every historical work says much more about the time when it was written than about the time it tells about.

History of history: Mikhail Shcherbatov