I.

AMERICAN POLICY TOWARDS RUSSIA^[1]

Law School Forum^[2]
Nov. 15, 1946

The present international crisis goes beyond the usual difficulties experienced by a coalition on the morrow of victory.^[3]
Its real source is the profound divergence in objectives, methods and principles between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union.
In this controversy, the aggressive part has been played by the Soviet Union with the democracies on the defensive.
Thus the single major disturbing factor in the present international situation is the foreign policy of the Soviet Government.
This policy is disturbing
a) because of its dynamic expansionism (acquisition of territory and extension of spheres of influence).^[4]
b) because of its revolutionary features as exemplified in particular by the Soviet “security policy” in Eastern Europe which might be characterized as a “diplomacy of civil war.”^[5]
The objectives and methods of Soviet foreign policy have been determined not by Russia’s national interests but by the peculiar nature, the political interests and the ideology of the present Russian regime.
So long as this regime continues in power or does not undergo a fundamental change the possibility of a complete and lasting understanding between the democracies and the Soviet Union will remain remote.
This does not mean that an armed clash between the two sides becomes inevitable.
A temporary modus vivendi can be and must be established which in itself will be a tremendous gain.
It is reasonable to expect that years of peace will strengthen the constructive forces in the world, which will make possible an eventual erection of the new international structure on more solid foundation.
The foreign policy of the United States should pursue simultaneously (a) the long-range aims of the new world organization and (b) the immediate objectives of establishing the temporary modus vivendi.
With regard to the ultimate goal of a new world organization, the United States must assume leadership in that voluntary self-limitation of the great powers without which no effective world organization is possible.^[6]
The organization of the United Nations must be regarded as a stepping stone only, and its insufficiency must be frankly recognized.
The United States must support the revision of the Charter of the United Nations in the direction of the greater equalization of rights as between the participants and, more specifically, of the limitation and eventual abolition of the veto.
The tendency of development must be away from the war-time coalition of the Big Three towards a broader and more genuine international organization.
Simultaneously, the United States should support and encourage:
a.) Steps directed towards the liquidation of armaments and armies (including an effective control of the atomic bomb);^[7]
b.) Gradual transformation of the colonial system in the direction of self-government and eventual independence of the colonial peoples;^[8]
c.) formation, wherever conditions warrant it, of regional federations as stepping stones towards a world organization.
With regard to the specific issues now forming a subject of dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union.
1. The U.S. should not recognize Eastern Europe as a zone of exclusive Russian influence.
Reasons
a. The U.S. has a legal right to an active participation in the post-war reconstruction of East European countries on the basis of the Yalta agreement, and a moral obligation to safeguard their independence.^[9]
b. Conceding Eastern Europe to Russia would mean permanent division of Europe, which would be detrimental both from the economic and political point of view.
c. It would mean an extension of Russia’s power beyond legitimate limits, which would be a threat to international peace.
2. The U.S. should insist on the speediest possible realization of the Potsdam agreement with regard to the economic and political unification of Germany, subject to the adoption of adequate measures for the prevention of new German aggression in the future.^[10]
A united Germany is necessary for the reconstruction of Europe within which it must be reintegrated.
3. The U.S. should strive for the earliest possible termination of military occupation in European countries as a prerequisite for their real recovery.
4. The U.S. should uphold the principle of international agreement and international control in the solution of such problems as the fate of Trieste, the status of the Straits, and the navigation in the Danube.^[11]
Reasons:
a) These areas are of vital strategic importance to other great powers besides Russia, and a one-sided solution of the problems connected with them would lead to grave international complications and thus form a threat to peace.
b) In all these cases, international control would guarantee the rights and the very independence of the smaller nations directly concerned, otherwise they would be left at the mercy of Russia.
5. In the Far East, the U.S. should work for the real independence and political unification of both China and Korea without which there can be no lasting peace in that part of the world.^[12]
None of the points of this program of American foreign policy can be characterized as aggressive or imperialistic.
None involves any demands of territorial annexation in favor of the U.S., or any attempt at creating a zone of exclusive American influence.
None is directed against legitimate Russian interests or presents a threat to Russia’s national security.
None is incompatible either with the immediate objective of establishing a temporary modus vivendi or with the long-range aim of creating an effective world organization.

II.

PROBLEMS OF RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY^[13]

Talk by Prof. Karpovich in Russian Seminar
Hoover Lib., Aug. 13, 1947

Professor Karpovich spoke of some problems confronting the historian who attempts to write a general history of Russia.^[14]
One of the chief difficulties is a lack of sufficiently prepared ground as far as monographic treatment of certain aspects or periods of Russian history is concerned. This is due to the somewhat uneven development of Russian historiography both before and after the Revolution.
Thus before the Revolution, typical of the majority of Russian historians was the one-sided concentration of Russia’s internal development, with the result that the country’s foreign relations received little attention. The situation has not been remedied by Soviet historiography to any substantial degree. Important monographs on diplomatic history have been few and far between (Romanov’s Russia and Manchuria,^[15] Skaz<k>in<’s> The End of the Three Emperors’ League,^[16] Tarle’s The Crimean War^[17]). To this day, one must still look to the work of some foreign scholars for a thorough treatment of some of the most important phases of Russia’s diplomatic history. (Gerhardt’s book on the Anglo-Russian relations in the eighteenth century,^[18] Mosely on Russian Near Eastern policy in the 1830’s,^[19] Sumner on Russia’s Balkan policy in the 1870’s,^[20] Langer on the Franco-Russian alliance,^[21] Churchill on the Anglo-Russian Entente,^[22] etc.)
Neither the Soviet nor the foreign contributions have filled all the gaps in the field of Russian diplomatic history. The history of Russia’s foreign relations still remains to be written.^[23]
Even in the field of domestic history, attention has been limited to some aspects of it, but to the neglect of other phases.
Roughly speaking, the majority of Russian pre-revolutionary historians worked on the problems of institutional history during the first half of the nineteenth century, and on those of social and economic history (with a particular emphasis on agrarian relations) during the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries.
The principle gaps were the following:

1) History of the Russian Empire
(a) Regional histories and histories of national minorities.^[24]
Relatively little was done in this field before the revolution except for some works in the earlier history of the Western regions (The Lithuanian-Russian State, Liubavsky^[25] and others) and the earlier history of Ukraine (Hrushevsky^[26] and his school). Substantial additions have been made by Soviet historiography, but the field is still far from being thoroughly covered.
(b) History of Expansion and Colonization
Some important contributions have been made before the revolution, more has been done since (particularly with regard to Siberia and the Pacific area; i.e., Bakhrushin,^[27] Ogorodnikov,^[28] and Okun^[29]); important contributions have been made by foreign (particularly American scholars (Golder,^[30] Kerner,^[31] Mazour^[32]), but as yet Russian historical literature on the subject compares very unfavorably with the wealth of American historical literature on the Westward Movement or on regional history.
(c) History of imperial administration and the imperial policies^[33]
This remains an almost virgin field. There are few monographs in Russian historical literature which could be compared with Lantzeff’s recent book on Russian administration in Siberia during the seventeenth century.^[34] The contrast with the wealth of English literature on the history of the British Empire is striking.

2) Economic History
In the field of economic history, Soviet historiography continues the pre-revolutionary study of agrarian relations, and has made very substantial contributions to the history of Russian industry (particularly in the eighteenth century) and Russian labor. The relatively neglected field has been, and still is, the history of Russian trade (both foreign and domestic). Hence the importance of such books as Raymond Fisher’s recent study of the fur trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[35]

3) Historical Biography
The situation in this field is particularly unsatisfactory. It is enough to say that as yet there are no up-to-date biographies of such important historical figures as Catherine II, Alexander I, or Alexander II among rulers; Potemkin, Speransky,^[36] the Miliutin brothers, Pobedonostsev,^[37] Witte, or Stolypin, among statesmen; Ermolov or Muraviev-Amurskii among the empire builders, and so on.

4) Political History of More Modern Periods
Up to present we do not possess any scholarly treatment of the reigns of the last three emperors. Neither is there available a monograph dealing with the Revolution of 1905 or with the constitutional experiment.^[38] In this respect the situation has not been substantially improved by Soviet historians in view of the one-sidedness of Soviet historiographical approach. Important contributions have been made in the field of revolutionary history and some aspects of Russian political thought have received special attention – namely, those trends that are looked upon as leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. Other trends, however, have been sadly neglected. We still lack, for instance, a history of Russian liberalism.^[39] Neither have all the conservative trends received the attention they deserve.^[40]

5) Certain Phases of Cultural and Intellectual History
Here one could mention such relatively neglected fields as the history of Russian education or the history of the church and religion in Russia. With regard to the latter field there are many books and histories of the Greek Orthodox Church, but these are of a rather narrow character. The recent book by George Fedotov on the history of the Russian religious mind is a pioneer attempt in the direction.^[41] Likewise, some phases of Russian intellectual trends still await real investigation.^[42] The attention of the Soviet historians again is centered on those intellectual trends that are congenial to the present day official philosophy, but as yet very little has been done with regard to the Slavophils or other representatives of what might be called the idealistic trend in Russian thought.^[43]
In conclusion, Professor Karpovich dealt briefly with problems of interpretation, pointing out the various pitfalls which have to be avoided by historians of Russia.

III.

THE HERITAGE FROM TSARIST RUSSIA

by Professor Michael Karpovich^[44]
(26 October 1953)

General EBERLE: This afternoon we are privileged to have as our guest lecturer Professor Michael Karpovich, who will open our course on the power position, objectives and policies of the Soviet Union with an address on “The Heritage from Tsarist Russia.” Our speaker is Professor of History and Chairman of Slavic Studies at Harvard University. His major field of interest has been Russian history, and he is an author of a number of important works in that field.
This is Professor Karpovich’s sixth appearance at the National War College,^[45] and it is indeed a pleasure to welcome him back to our platform and to present him to this audience.

Professor KARPOVICH: The problem of the Tsarist inheritance in the present-day Russia is the problem of the Soviet regime’s historical background.^[46] To attempt to find out what this background is, in this case, as in every other historical case, is a legitimate and even indispensable undertaking. But while engaged in this sort of query, all of us must be on guard against two dangers. One of these dangers is that we concentrate our attention on continuity to such an extent that we begin to neglect or at least to minimize the element of change; and yet change is just as much of the very essence of history as is continuity. I think there are certain historical situations in which change might be more important than continuity, and I submit that revolutionary situations, like the one in which we find ourselves, is of this category, for the very simple reason that revolution itself is, in one of its aspects, an accelerated and intensified change. This is why one should not take too literally the much abused expression that history repeats itself.
Strictly speaking, I think it would be more proper to say that history never repeats itself, in the sense that an exact replica of what happened before cannot be found in the history of the world. Some elements of political and social structure, some psychological attitudes, some cultural concepts might reappear. Sometimes they will reappear repeatedly, but each time they will appear in a different context, and this different historical context is bound to affect their very nature.
The second danger in building up, or attempting to build up, a historical background is a tendency to oversimplify the continuity itself. One sees in the past something that looks very much like something in the present, and without much further analysis one too easily assumes a straight line of continuity between these two things, one in the past and one in the present. Sometimes somewhat more cautious people might call it “the same thing in a new garb,” but this implies that the essence has remained the same and therefore the difference might be dismissed as affecting the surface only.
Moreover, in the search for continuity, one naturally looks for similarity rather than for difference; and therefore the whole process assumes the nature of a selection – it might be conscious, subconscious, or semiconscious – of those trends in the past which seem to lead to the present-day situation, while other trends, no matter how important they might have been at the time, are either minimized or neglected, on the assumption that they have been discarded by history or, in Mr. Trotsky’s elegant expression, “relegated to the garbage can of history.”
I am afraid that in this way one is likely to get a distorted or at least an incomplete picture of the historical background. In reality, the historical background includes, of course, both those trends that temporarily have emerged victorious and those that temporarily have suffered defeat. These latter trends must be included in any consideration of the historical background for two reasons: first, because even in their defeat they have to some extent determined the present; second, because they might yet play a part in the future. There are no such things as final victory or final defeat in history. Trends that might be suppressed for the moment have a chance of re-emerging in some unknown future.
One more remark of introductory nature: the past might determine the present not only in a positive but also in a negative way. It means that to explain, for instance, the Soviet regime, one has to look not only for what was present in pre-Revolutionary Russia, but also for what was lacking in it. This way of connection between the past and the present, which is negative and not positive, I would dare to call – although the expression is somewhat paradoxical – a negative continuity.^[47] And to my way of thinking, in some cases this negative continuity is more important than the positive one.
The purpose of these theoretical, or, if you wish, methodological remarks was simply to impress upon you the complexity of the problem with which I am supposed to deal.
I shall try to illustrate these theoretical propositions, rather dogmatically and hastily formulated, by means of a discussion of some of the fundamental features of the Soviet regime as compared with pre-Revolutionary Russia. I will begin with the political setup.
Whatever else one might think of the nature of the Soviet government, I hope that all would agree that it is a highly centralized and a strongly authoritarian government. I would add that it is also a despotic government, but with this not all, of course, would agree. In Russia’s historical past one easily finds (not throughout the whole of Russian history but over a very large part of it), the existence of a centralized, authoritarian and despotic government. Hence, the natural conclusion that there exists a direct continuity between these two phenomena.
The life span of Russian autocracy (which is nothing else but a Greek name for what in the West would be known as royal absolutism) is rather impressive. It arose in the latter part of the fifteenth century, at the same time when royal absolutism was rising in Western Europe; but it had a much more rapid development than in the West. The reasons for this unusually rapid development of absolute government in Russia, I think, were manifold. I think one of them, which I would stress, was the weakness of opposing forces like the ones we find in Western Europe where the kings of France, for instance, for centuries had to combat the opposition of the feudal elements in society. The self-governing towns were another obstacle in France. In other countries the Church was a third obstacle. It was because of the existence of these organized and firmly entrenched groups that royal absolutism in the West had a rather difficult time in trying to establish itself.
In Russia, because of the underdeveloped feudalism and undeveloped feudal tendencies – that at least is my explanation – no such strong opposing forces were in existence. So royal absolutism won largely by default. Some historical commentators also point out Russia’s inheritance either from Byzantium or from the Mongols, or from both. I think this was only a subsidiary and secondary factor. The fact that the Russian Tsars could get a ready-made theory of royal absolutism from Byzantium, and that they watched the practice of absolutism among the Mongols helped somewhat in the crystallization of autocracy, but to my way of thinking it was by no means a decisive factor.
Another thing that has to be taken into consideration is the geopolitical factor which, as a matter of fact, is stressed in the introductory remarks to the present lecture and which you will find in the syllabus. Now, by and large I agree with reference to the importance of this factor, but I would formulate it somewhat differently. The stress in the printed paragraph is on the need for security – the openness of Russia to attack from outside leads to the necessity, or at least to the development, of a strong royal government. I don’t think that it always was, even at that time, a problem of security; I think the problem was larger. I think the source of trouble was in the unusually rapid expansion of Russia, a territorial expansion which was favored by the geography of the region and by the political geography of the region. Not only were there no natural obstacles that would stop the Russians from expanding, or make the expansion slower, but there were no political obstacles, at least in some directions in which they tried to expand.
Because of that, Russia became prematurely too large in size. As I once expressed it, Russia’s body was growing more rapidly than her soul, meaning by her soul the internal development – political, economic, cultural. This was an unhealthy situation, a situation which, in my opinion, had very much to do with the firm hold which a strong, centralized government, using military power which it was obliged to develop, could exercise.
This reason, however, as far as security and problems of expansion were concerned, I think became less operative in the subsequent periods. In my estimation, almost from the eighteenth century on, certainly from the second half of the eighteenth century on, it did not operate any longer. By this time Russia had achieved her expansion in its main outlines. Territories were added in the course of the nineteenth century, as everyone knows, but they were in the nature of annexes, and their acquisition did not require the same concentration of effort as before. As I see it, from that time on, Russia as a state was reasonably secure, certainly no less secure than some of the West European countries.
Recently I had a quarrel on this subject with no less an authority than Toynbee who, in my opinion, greatly exaggerates in his theory that Russia was always attacked from all sides and therefore developed an anti-Western complex.^[48] If you take the Napoleonic invasion, all of Europe was invaded; not Russia alone. And the other wars in the course of which Russian territory was invaded also were general European wars, and again not Russia alone was invaded.
The survival of autocracy in modern times, up to the first years of the twentieth century, was therefore a historical anachronism, and it was this historical anachronism that greatly impressed the outside world. While to the west of Russia absolutism was disappearing much more rapidly and more radically, Russia seemed to be “frozen in icy immobility,”^[49] as an American writer expressed it more eloquently than correctly; even in Russia there was no immobility throughout the nineteenth century. Such events as the constitutional regime that was introduced in 1906 and thus existed only for ten years before the revolution or the democratic experiment in 1917, which lasted only for eight months and ended in a dismal failure, naturally did not impress the Western world. The comparison of the long stretch of absolutist government with these brief and unsuccessful interludes – unsuccessful as far as final results were concerned – had very much to do with over-stressing the continuity in this respect. The natural conclusion, however, that Russia always lived under more or less the same kind of government that she has today, is certainly not correct.
To begin with, there were some changes in the fate of autocracy and even in its nature. It was losing its grip progressively, at least from the latter part of the l8th century, and was forced to change under the pressure of modern circumstances. It is true that periods of reform usually were followed by periods of reaction, but the significant thing is that each succeeding reaction was weaker than the previous one. All the efforts of Nicholas I in the middle of the nineteenth century were not able to restore the same situation as existed in Russia under Paul I at the end of the eighteenth century; and later in the nineteenth century and during the early years of the twentieth century, the reaction under Alexander III – and that of the first years of Nicholas II – was even less successful in turning back the clock of history, as it could not restore even that degree of governmental suppression and control which has existed under Nicholas I. Conversely, every succeeding period of reform was more far-reaching than the previous one – rather modest under Alexander I, much more ambitious and far-reaching under Alexander II in the middle of the century, and finally leading to the establishment of national representation after 1905.
So I think the trend of the development was unmistakable. It was away from a strongly centralized authoritarian government toward some form of a milder, more democratic, more liberal regime. But even in the periods of its greatest strength – I shall limit myself to the nineteenth century only – autocracy was significantly different from the Soviet dictatorship, and thus both in quality and in quantity.
Let us begin with the qualitative differences. First of all, as I see it, Russian autocracy was not what I would call an ideocracy. By this I mean that it had no developed system of ideology, no overall plan, no one guiding idea in accordance with which it tried to shape the political, social and cultural life of the country. In other words, there was no counterpart to Marxism-Leninism (I wonder whether I still have to add Stalinism in the Soviet Union). There were some official slogans, the importance of which I think has been exaggerated by some writers. After all, every government in the world has some sort of official slogans, but it is something very different from that highly developed, all-embracing quasi-philosophical system which we have in the case of the Soviet Union. Nothing like this was produced by Russian autocracy.
It also was not a totalitarian state, whatever else it was. By this I mean that no attempt was made to control all manifestations of human life and human activity. I think this lack of ideocracy and totalitarianism also explains why there was no counterpart of one of the principal, if not the principal, instruments of Soviet power, that is of the Communist Party. There was no Tsarist party of the same nature as the Communist Party. Instead of a quasi-religious order of devoted followers who dedicate all their lives to the propagation and realization of the doctrine, Russian autocracy ruled with the help of bureaucracy which, generally speaking, was of the same type that you find in other nineteenth century European countries.
I think this difference between the two regimes becomes particularly clear, if one compares Tsarist censorship at its worst, as it was under Nicholas I, with the Soviet system of thought control.^[50] The difference can be expressed briefly – I have no time to bring in some rather interesting illustrations^[51] – as a difference between negative and positive censorship. Negative censorship is the traditional censorship which tells people what they have no right to say or to write. This is what it was under the Tsarist regime, even under Nicholas I – don’t write about serfdom and its abolition, don’t attack the government, don’t write against religion and the established Church – a series of don’ts. But positive censorship goes much further than that, and this is what we have in the Soviet Union. The purpose of it is to force people to say certain things. It is not enough to refrain from saying something. No neutrality is tolerated. You must perform in literature, in science, everywhere.
Now this is really not censorship, or at least it is not only censorship – it is censorship plus indoctrination. In Tsarist Russia, by and large, there was only censorship. There was no indoctrination except for some feeble attempts in this direction, so feeble that they really do not count.
In quantity, there is also a significant difference. By these quantitative differences I mean primarily that no Tsarist government, no autocratic Russian government, even the strongest one, ever had at its disposal such technical means that would be even remotely comparable to those available to the Soviet regime, thanks to the development of modern technology. I think it is a very important factor which should not be overlooked. This refers to the means of suppression and the means of persuasion, both of which are widely used by the Soviet regime.
In some historical writings one still finds the myth of the ubiquitous and all-powerful Tsarist police. The moment one begins to study the documents, however, and particularly if one begins to compare their data with the achievements of the political police in the modern totalitarian state, this illusion of the extraordinary power of the Tsarist police disappears. Again, I have no time to bring in rather amusing and interesting illustrations, but the fact is that the Russian government of the nineteenth century, even under Nicholas I, not only was not a totalitarian state but I hesitate to call it even a police state, for the very simple reason that in order to have a police state you must have a sufficiently developed police, and the numerical strength of the Russian police in proportion to the population – both at that time and later – was surprisingly small. Therefore, with the best intentions in the world, the Tsarist police could not penetrate everywhere and control everybody as it has been so very often assumed.
Likewise, no possibility was available to the Tsarist government of cutting Russia effectively from any contact with the West, of erecting a Chinese wall, which at least in Russia was the mid-nineteenth century synonym of our iron curtain,^[52] and again for the same reason, for lack of necessary technical means. And we know from contemporary evidence that Russian intellectuals of the period were in close contact with the latest development of Western thought, including the most subversive type of thought from the government point of view, and this at the time of Nicholas I and at the height of reaction. Nor was there an effective apparatus for governmental propaganda, nothing that could be compared with the remarkably developed technique of propaganda used by the present Soviet regime.
My conclusion from all this is that the differences in this case are more significant than the similarities. The similarity, after all, consists of the fact that both governments we are comparing, the present-day Soviet government and the pre-revolutionary Tsarist government, were centralized and authoritarian. But even here, even where there is some similarity, one must introduce quantitative reservations, because to a large extent the Tsarist government’s centralism and its authoritarianism often were there more in intent and pretensions than in practice, because it simply was not able to exercise its power effectively throughout the whole extent of that tremendous empire. Despotism, as somebody has said of the Tsarist regime, was always tempered by inefficiency. If you compare this with the stark realities of the Soviet government’s immense power, I believe the difference becomes very significant.
To this is added the even more significant difference in spirit and aims as indicated above as well as a difference in methods. After all, the old Tsarist governments used largely traditional and rather common methods, that is, methods that were being used by other reactionary and conservative governments in Western Europe, while the Soviet methods are revolutionary and very often unique. If this is the case, what then has been inherited by the present regime from the Tsars in the political field? How much could they learn from the Tsars?
I think that directly they could learn very little. I don’t think they could learn much in such fields as centralization or authoritarian government or means of suppression, for reasons which I have tried to indicate. But what they did inherit was a situation in the country which was largely due to Tsarist policies and which facilitated the conquest of power by Lenin and his Bolsheviks as well as its consolidation in their hands. Here is a case of what I have called the negative continuity. Because of autocracy’s prolonged resistance to political change, which on the eve of the revolution was long overdue, you have Russia’s late start on the way to self-government. As a result, on the eve of the revolution there were nowhere in Russia strongly entrenched and developed democratic and liberal tendencies.
If you look at the situation of Russian society at than time, you will find an intellectual class, which because it was so long kept out of active participation in national politics was deprived of practical political and administrative experience. You will find middle classes which for the same reason had no strongly developed corporate feeling and an insufficiently developed civic spirit. And at the bottom you will find the millions of peasants without a feeling of belonging to the national life, because to all practical purposes they took no part in it.
All of this does not mean that pre-revolutionary Russians became completely used to authoritarian government, that in all matters they relied on the authoritarian state and expected from it the solution of all their problems, that they had no notion of self-government and political freedom, that they had no longing for either the one or the other, and that they not only were habitually submissive slaves but even enjoyed and loved their slavery. These or similar assertions have been frequently made by various writers in discussing the historical continuity between the past and the present of Russia.^[53]
As a matter of fact, pre-revolutionary Russians were not a state-minded or a state-worshipping people. If anything, the contrary was true. Again for lack of time, I cannot develop this theme and so it may sound to you as a dogmatic statement, but I am convinced that anti-state tendencies were very strong both among the intellectual elite in Russia and among the peasant masses.
My conclusion is that neither historical experience nor national tradition prepared the Russians for a willing acceptance of a totalitarian regime. What actually happened was that this history did not teach them, first, how to organize their life on the basis of self-government even when they had an opportunity to do so, as was the case during the first stage of the revolution of 1917; and secondly, how to defend their freedom once they had got it, from the kind of danger, which arose in the second phase of that revolution. This, I think, is about as far as we are justified in going in trying to connect Russia’s past political experience with the nature of the present regime.
If I turn now to the economic setup with the similar purpose of comparing and contrasting some of the fundamentals of the Soviet economic system with what we find in pre-revolutionary Russia, the picture, as I see it, is very much similar to the one in the political field. Here again the fundamentals of the Soviet economic system can be summarized briefly. It is a system which is characterized by complete governmental control over the whole of the economic life of the country, involving planned economy, virtual exclusion of private initiative, nationalization of industry, trade, finance, means of transportation, and collectivization of agriculture. Now if one looks for precedents for all these things in Russian pre-revolutionary history, one finds the following: direct governmental participation in various branches of economic activity much more developed than in any other contemporary West European country; state owned and state operated industrial establishments; state banks of several varieties; state owned and state operated railroads; strict governmental control over private railroad lines and private banks; governmental aid to private industry in the form of subsidies, governmental orders and other protective measures; and finally, a few governmental monopolies of which I am sorry to say the most outstanding one was the monopoly production and sale of vodka. In the field of agriculture one finds collective land tenure among the Russian peasants.
Let us consider these two cases separately, first the economic policy of the government; and second, this collective land tenure among the peasants; and see to what extent they were like what we find in Russia today. In both cases, again, I must stress the differences in order to reduce the similarities to their proper proportions. With regard to governmental participation in and control over business, as far as modem times are concerned, this participation and this control at no time approached, be it even remotely, that degree of totality which is characteristic of the Soviet system. Both participation and control were exercised within strictly limited spheres of activity, such as some branches of heavy industry; some forms of exploitation of natural resources; some types of banking; and most of the means of transportation – most but not all. Beyond this there still remained a very wide field for private enterprise and private initiative on various levels, from big business, in industry, trade and banking, down to the artisans of the cities and peasant craftsmen. Trade was entirely in private hands, and so was light industry, including the production of virtually all consumer goods.
If one takes the whole course of Russian history from the sixteenth century on and up to the time of the revolution, one sees there a process of a gradual contraction of what might be called the state sector, to imitate the Soviet terminology of the NEP period. The state sector in Russia’s national economy was gradually contracting, and there was a corresponding extension of the private sector. In other words, again as in the political field, the general trend of the development was unmistakable: away from governmental control toward larger and freer expression of private initiative and private enterprise. Moreover, at no time, not even when the system of governmental economic initiative and control was at its strongest did it imply any notion of planned economy, which is, of course, the very heart of the Soviet system. The Tsarist government had no economic philosophy of its own, just as, strictly speaking, it had no political philosophy of its own. There was no intention of creating a system of state capitalism in Russia similar to the intention of the Soviet government to create a socialist and eventually a communist system in the country. The economic policies of the Tsarist government were determined not by any over-all plan or any far-reaching objectives, but partly by circumstances of any given time period and partly by the government’s immediate and practical needs.
With regard to industry, for instance, one must remember that Russia had a very late start on the way of capitalistic development. And it is known that in the early stages of capitalistic development, governmental initiative, intervention, encouragement and protection was a rule in West European countries as well. In Russia this paternalistic role of the government lasted longer simply because the country’s economic development lagged behind that of the more advanced Western countries. But this paternalism was not an end in itself, not an ideal to be pursued to its logical conclusion and final realization, but a temporary measure that was dictated by the circumstances of the time.
That was the attitude of Peter the Great, who often is looked upon as the creator of Russian industry. He would build a factory from governmental funds, start its operation and then turn it into private hands, sometimes even forcing the private capitalist to take over the factory. Whatever one might think of his methods, his intention was to stimulate private industry with governmental initiative serving as a prompter for the latter. Generally similar was the policy of Witte, Minister of Finance in the end of the nineteenth century, who was a strong protectionist (in the sense of governmental intervention in business), but who, too, wanted not to hinder but to sponsor the development of capitalism, with its inevitable concomitants of private initiative and private interests.
The immediate practical needs of the Russian government also affected its economic policy – I mean primarily military needs, particularly in the earlier period. Very often a factory or a foundry was started by the state, because the government could not wait until private initiative would begin producing what was needed by the army. So the first attempts of government to operate industrial establishments were in those fields which produced ammunition and equipment for the army, and to some extent this remained true to the end of the period. It was certainly true with regard to the building of the Russian navy, where again governmental shipyards were created because as yet private industry could not be relied upon. The same was true with regard to those railroads which were constructed because of strategic considerations of greater or lesser urgency. The principle used was very much the same, it seems to me, as that which forms part of the policy of our present administration, that is, to step in only on those occasions when private initiative proves to be insufficient. But there was no idea of state ownership or state business as an ideal in itself.
What the Bolsheviks have inherited from the Tsarist regime in this respect, I think, are the practical achievements of the early stages of industrialization and very little else. What they did inherit were plants, not policies. The policies are inherent in the regime’s own fundamental aims, which of course are widely different from the aims of the pre-Revolutionary government. As to the planned economy, there is evidence to show that the immediate inspiration came to Lenin and his advisers from the experience of imperial Germany during the First World War. They were greatly impressed by the attempts at planned economy which the Germans had made under the stress of the blockade during the First World War. It is on the record that Lenin and his advisers studied the German experiment very closely.
I have very little time left, but I hope you will permit me to speak for a few minutes longer in order to cover one more topic, namely the comparison between the pre-revolutionary Russian peasant commune (which is often referred to by the Russian term “mir”) and the present kolkhoz. This comparison has been used to prove the continuity of the collectivist spirit of the Russian peasants which supposedly has been expressed in both institutions.
I think this collectivist spirit of the Russian people is, again, to a large extent a myth, which incidentally has been propagated by many misguided Russian thinkers and writers who in turn have misled foreign investigators. There was enough of an acquisitive spirit in Russia, and of personal initiative, and if it did not give the same results as in the Western countries, it was because no full scope for the development of these qualities was available. And this not because of the government’s economic policy but because of its general policy: lack of political freedom led to various legal limitations on personal freedom which was a hindrance to personal initiative in economic matters. The rigid social system which prevailed during the existence of serfdom (abolished only in 1861) also was an obstacle to the development of private initiative. This is the reason why these qualities were not sufficiently developed, and not because there was some sort of innate collectivism in the Russian soul.
The village commune as it existed before the revolution had one common trait with the kolkhoz, and that was that where the commune was in force the land was owned not by individuals but by the commune as a whole, that is, there was a common land tenure. But there was no common work except for the necessity of adhering to the same course of husbandry because of the strip system in which your land was surrounded by the land of other people, and except for the common use of pasture, and occasional neighborly help in an emergency. There was no principle of common work which is essential in the kolkhoz system. There was no pooling of resources. If you had a horse it was your horse. If you had a cow it was your cow. The implements were your implements. There was no distribution of income, either on an equal or on a proportional basis, all of which features you find in the kolkhoz.
The most important difference, however, is in the respective relationship of the pre-revolutionary commune and the kolkhoz to the state as well as in the respective policies and aims of the two governments. In Tsarist times, except for tax collection, the government left the commune as an economic unit alone. No prescription came from above as to what and how should be produced, as is the case in the kolkhoz system. There was no state control over the disposal of the produce, while the kolkhoz is subject to such a control in the fullest degree.
Moreover, the whole arrangement of the pre-revolutionary village commune, in connection with some of its administrative functions, made it a sort of peasant self-government, or at any rate tended to preserve and to strengthen the peasants’ identity as a class; that is, to make of the peasants a separate and distinct group in Russian society. Too much so, because it separated the peasants even further from the rest of the Russian society, which was one of the reasons for their feeling of apartness. The admitted purpose of the kolkhoz system, on the contrary, is to eliminate the peasantry as a separate class structure, to transform the peasants into something altogether different, to bring them closer to the factory workers, and eventually to “urbanize” them. The member of the present-day kolkhoz is just as different from the pre-revolutionary member of the village commune as an individual farmer is. It is a different sociological formation, so to speak.
To what extent the existence of the “mir,” with its not fully developed sense of property among the peasants, facilitated the establishment of the kolkhozes is a very difficult thing to say. It is difficult to say because as far as we know there was a good deal of opposition to the establishment of the kolkhozes even among the middle group peasants, many of whom had the village commune background. But I think the most significant thing is this: that from the outset the Soviet government was forced to make concessions to the peasants’ acquisitive instincts and private interests by permitting the members of the kolkhoz to have a special plot of their own, and permitting them to work on this special plot for their own benefit.
You have, then, the paradoxical situation in which a continuity can be established not with one of the predominant traits of the Soviet regime, but rather with a departure from it, a concession which was forced upon the Soviet regime by the tenacious survival of some pre-revolutionary tendencies among the Russian peasants.
Well, I think I will stop here. I haven’t said all I wanted to say, but I understand that after a brief interval there will be a question period, and I hope that you will give me an opportunity to develop some of the points in answering your questions.

IV.

BIBLIOGRAPHY, 1948-1963

This bibliography gives an idea of contributions made by M. M. Karpovich’s students in the period between 1947 and 1963, and how these contributions changed the field. Chronologically, the bibliography begins the year when Karpovich’s talk, published here, was given, 1948, and the cut-off date is 1963 (five years were added to include works by those who were slow in publishing them). At the end of this period a general history of Russia was published by one of Karpovich’s students, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky. The attempt was made to make the list as complete as possible.

Barghoorn, Frederick C. The Russian Radicals of the 1860’s and the Problem of Industrial Proletariat // Slavic and East European Review. 1943. Vol. 21. March. Pp. 57-69.
Barghoorn, Frederick C. The Philosophic Outlook of Chernyshevski // American Slavic and East European Review. 1947. Vol. 6. No. 3/3. December. Pp. 42-56.
Barghoorn, Frederick C. D. I. Pisarev: A Representative of Russian Nihilism // The Review of Politics. 1948. Vol. 10. April. Pp. 190-211.
Barghoorn, Frederick C. Russian Radicals and the West European Revolutions of 1948 // The Review of Politics. 1949. Vol. 11. July. Pp. 338-354.
Browder, Paul Robert. The Origins of Soviet-American Diplomacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. 256 p.
Browder, Robert Paul and Kerensky, Alexander F. (Selection, Eds.). The Russian Provisional Government 1917: Documents. 3 Vols. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961.
Daniels, Robert V. The conscience of the revolution: Communist opposition in Soviet Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. 526 p.
Daniels, Robert V. A documentary history of communism / Edited, with introd., notes, and new translations. New York: Random House, 1960. 393 p.
Dinerstein, Herbert S. Purges in the Soviet Union and in the satellites. Santa Monika, CA: Rand Corporation, 1953. 191 p.
Dinerstein, Herbert S., Goure, Leon. Communism and the Russian Peasant; Moscow in Crisis. Two Studies in Soviet Controls, with a foreword by Philip E. Mosely. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955. 264 p.
Dziewanowski, M. K. The Communist Party of Poland: an Outline of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. 369 p.
Fischer, George. Russian Liberalism: From Gentry to Intelligentsia Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
Haimson, Leopold H. The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955. 246 p.
Hecht, David. Russian Radicals Look to America, 1825-1894. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947. 242 p.
Kazemzadeh, Firuz. Struggle for Transcaucasia, 1917- 1921 / with an introd. by Michael Karpovich. New York: Philosophical Library, 1951. 282 p.
Kazemzadeh, Firuz. The Origin and Early Development of the Persian Cossack Brigade // American Slavic and East European Review. 1951. Vol. 15. October. Pp. 351-363.
MacMaster, Robert E. Danilevsky and Spengler: A New Interpretation // The Journal of Modern History. 1954. Vol. 26. No. 2. June. Pp. 154-161.
MacMaster, Robert E. The Question of Heinrich Ruchert’s Influence on Danilevski // American Slavic and East European Review. 1951.Vol. 14. February. Pp. 59-66.
Malia, Martin. What is the Intelligentsia? [Daedalus. Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 1960. Vol. 89. No. 3. Summer]. Reprinted with an index added: New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Pp. 441-458.
Malia, Martin. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. 486 p.
Matlaw, Ralph E. The Manifesto of Russian Symbolism // The Slavic and East European Review. 1957. Vol. 1. No. 3. Autumn. Pp. 177-191.
McLean, Hugh and Vickery, Walter N. (Eds., transl. and introd.). The Year of Protest, 1956; an Anthology of Soviet Literary Materials. New York: Vintage Books, 1961. 269 p.
McLean, Hugh. The Development of Modern Russian Literature // Slavic Review. 1962. Vol. 21. No. 3. September. Pp. 389-410.
Mendel, Artur P. N. K. Mikhailovsky and His Criticism of Russian Marxism // American Slavic and East European Review. 1955. Vol. 14. No. 3. October. Pp. 331-345.
Mendel, Artur P. Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. 310 p.
Mendel, Artur P. (Ed.). Essential Works of Marxism. New York: Bantam Books, 1961. 592 p.
Monas, Sidney. The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia Under Nicholas I. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. 352 p.
Page, Stanley W. The Formation of the Baltic States: A Study of the Effects of Great Power Politics upon the Emergence of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. 193 p.
Page, Stanley W. Lenin and World Revolution. New York: New York University Press, 1959. 252 p.
Pipes, Richard E. The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. 355 p.
Pipes, Richard E. Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. 266 p.
Pipes, R. E. Russian Marxism and its Populist Background: The Late Nineteenth Century // The Russian Review. 1960. Vol. 19. No. 4. Pp. 316-337.
Pipes, Richard (Ed.). The Russian Intelligentsia. [Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 1960. Vol. 89. No. 3. Summer]. Reprinted with an index added: New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. 234 p.
Radkey, Oliver H. The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. 521 p.
Radkey, Oliver H. An Alternative to Bolshevism: The Program of Russian Social Revolutionism // The Journal of Modern History. 1953. Vol. 25. March. Pp. 25-39.
Raeff, M. Russia After the Emancipation: Views of a Gentleman-Farmer [Koshelev] // Slavic and East European Review. 1951. Vol. 29. June. Pp. 470-485.
Raeff, M. A Reactionary Liberal: M. N. Katkov // The Russian Review. 1952. Vol. 11. No. 3. Pp. 157-167.
Raeff, Marc. Siberia and the Reforms of 1822. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1956. 210 p.
Raeff, Marc. Michael Speransky, Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772-1839. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1957. 387 p.
Raeff, M. Some Reflections on Russian Liberalism // The Russian Review. 1959. Vol. 18. No. 3. Pp. 218-230.
Raeff, Marc. State and Nobility in the Ideology of M. M. Shcherbatov // American Slavic and East European Review. 1960. Vol. 19. October. Pp. 363-379.
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952. 244 p.
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. 296 p.
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. Khomiakov on Sobornost’ // Ernest J. Simmons (Ed.). Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955. 563 p.
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. A History of Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. 711 p.
Rogger, Hans. National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. 319 p.
Rogger, Hans. Nationalism and the State: A Russian Dilemma // Comparative Studies in Society and History. 1962. Vol. 4. No. 3. April. Pp. 253-264.
Smith, C. Jay, Jr. The Russian Struggle for Power, 1914-1917: A Study of Russian Foreign Policy During the First World War. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. 553 p.
Thaler, Roderick Page. Radishchev, Britain and America // Harvard Slavic Studies. 1957. Vol. 4. Pp. 149-167.
Thaler, Roderick Page (Ed., with an introd. and notes). Radishchev, Alexander. A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow / Trans. by Leo Wiener. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.^[54]
Treadgold, D. W. The Constitutional Democrats and the Russian Liberal Tradition // American Slavic and East European Review. 1951. Vol. 10. April. Pp. 85-94.
Treadgold, D. W. The Populists Refurbished // The Russian Review. 1951. Vol. 10. No. 3. Pp. 185-196.
Treadgold, D. W. Russian Expansion in the Light of Turner’s Study of the American Frontier // Agricultural History. 1952. Vol. 26. October. Pp. 147-152.
Treadgold, Donald W. Lenin and His Rivals: The Struggle for Russia’s Future, 1898-1906. New York & London: Methuen, 1955. 298 p.
Treadgold, Donald W. The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. 278 p.
Treadgold, Donald W. Twentieth Century Russia. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1959. 550 p.
Twarog, Leon. Soviet Historical Novelists Look at America // American Slavic and East European Review. 1960. Vol. 19. December. Pp. 561-576.
Walsh, Warren B. Russia and the Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948. 640 p.
Walsh, Warren B. Pobedonostsev and Panslavism // The Russian Review. 1949. Vol. 8. No. 4. Pp. 316-321.
Walsh, Warren B. (Ed.). Readings in Russian History. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1948. 549 p.
Walsh, Warren B. Perspectives and Patterns; Discourses on History. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1962. 148 p.