I will speak about Marc Raeff as a historian. This will make it possible for those who knew him as a historian as well as those who did not to reflect on the magnitude and significance of his achievement.
I first met Marc Raeff just over fifty years ago in early 1958. I was a senior at Cornell majoring in French history trying to decide where to pursue my planned graduate studies in Russian history. My teacher, Edward Whiting Fox, gave me good advice: he had taught two outstanding students of Russian history at Harvard, one was Marc Raeff, then teaching at Clark University, the other Leopold Haimson at the University of Chicago. I met Marc in his mother’s apartment somewhere on the Upper West Side of New York City. He was very genial and gave me excellent advice. One point particularly impressed me. He warned me in choosing a subject for dissertation research to choose a subject in my advisor’s general area of expertise, but to avoid working in his specific field of research. This struck me as quite sound, and I followed it later when faced with that decision.
I did not study with Marc, but we kept in contact, and he was always generous with suggestions and advice. From time to time, he would send me notes, always handwritten, pointing out a particular publication that I would not normally have come across, a particular archive that I might examine, a colleague worth consulting. Often the notes would contain a succinct, acerbic remark, sometimes distressing, but always indisputable and to the point. I received such a note shortly before his death this summer in response to an article I had published.
I was not to be a student of Marc. But in a sense we, that is, Russian historians, have all been Marc’s students. Marc represented a model of scholarly creativity and responsibility for all of us. He came out of a European tradition pursuing scholarship as an end in itself, as, one might say, a sacred calling. He was one of that first “remarkable generation” of scholars mentored by Michael Karpovich who laid the basis for the serious study of Russian history in the 1950s and afterward. But unlike several of his colleagues Marc was not lured away from the scholarly calling by the enticement of political engagement. However strong his political convictions, they did not shape his understanding of or devotion to history. His dedication resulted in a large, rich, and varied contribution of books, articles, and reviews that numbered 275 in the bibliography that accompanied his Festschrift, published in 1988,^[1] and of course he wrote more afterward.
Marc’s contribution, however, is distinguished not so much by the quantity of his output, as by his achievement in opening new areas of inquiry and research and in producing books that were fundamental in the very restricted sense of the word – that they provided and indeed still provide the basis for approaching eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian history. I am not going to give a listing of his groundbreaking works, but in the limited time I have will simply point out the areas of scholarship that Marc opened and the approaches he originated.
The first is the study of the Russian state and officialdom, an area ignored after the revolution both in the Soviet Union and the West. Marc’s first major publication was his 1957 biography of Michael Speranskii (2nd ed. 1969), the reformer of the first decades of the nineteenth century and the director of the first modern codification or systematization of Russian law.^[2] The book was not the usual intellectual biography, but a work of commanding erudition and insight that revealed the entire mode of thought that animated the rationalistic constitutionalism of the reign of Alexander I.
This was a subject that had been approached within the conventional framework of an opposition between liberal constitutionalists and conservative officialdom. Marc went beyond this: he revealed the presence of a bureaucratic reform ethos – a state of mind that made the events of the early nineteenth century comprehensible and meaningful. He traced the emergence of a rationalist, constitutionalism that combined l’esprit de système with the principle of monarchical absolutism. The work remains fundamental, retaining its validity and freshness to this very day – his description of Speranskii’s reform efforts, his struggles to advance the cause of the law under Alexander I, and later, in a conservative manner under Nicholas I.
The same year, 1957, he published a brief article “The Russian Autocracy and Its Officials,”^[3] which, for the first time, brought the actual functioning of the Russian state and the mentality of its officials under serious scholarly scrutiny. Marc examined the actual workings of the Russian administration, calling upon the social sciences to open new modes of understanding. Models and concepts of Weberian sociology appear in his writings, used to frame a comparative understanding of the subject, in this case the limited degree of professionalism in the Russian administration. Under Marc’s guidance at Columbia, Hans Joachim Torke wrote his definitive monograph on Russian officialdom in the first half of the nineteenth century.^[4] Other scholars followed, and I was one of that number, who studied the Russian state in the nineteenth century and the institutions and social dynamics that both brought about the Great Reforms of Alexander II’s reign and at the same time limited their extent.
Marc complemented this work with the publication of books of documents of Russian history with his own explanatory introductions. These included interpretations of the reign of Peter the Great, plans for political reform in Russia, an interpretation and documentary history of the Decembrist movement, and his collection Russian Intellectual History,^[5] which remains in print and is widely used in classes today.
Marc’s second field of exploration was a study of the social psychology of the Russian nobility, a series of articles that culminated in the Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia.^[6] Again, Marc focused on the mentality of the group he was describing, and again his work was informed by Weberian sophistication, but not constricted by it. The book showed the centrality of concepts of service to the Russian nobleman’s life and thought introduced by Peter the Great, the role of ideas and the dedication to superordinate absolute goals that, under later circumstances, would noblemen transfer to the people. The nobility of course made up a large and dominant component of what came to be known as the Russian intelligentsia.
For me, the book had larger implications, for what Marc described represented an extension of the absolutist ideology of the Russian state, and he explored the implications of this interpretation in his book on the Polizeistaat, the police state in Russia, and then his book comparing the implementation of police state policies in Russia with the institutions of the German states where the concept originated.^[7] These studies may well be the most influential of his publications: there is hardly a Western study of eighteenth-century Russia that does not refer to it and use it as a basis for the analysis of the emergence of the Westernized Russian state and society.
The third and fourth subjects of Marc’s new inquiry were in advance of the field of his time and pointed to areas that had been almost completely neglected during the cold war. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the revelation that Russia was and had been more than a national state – it was a multinational empire, and a spate of works followed about Russia as empire and the role of nationalities in Russia’s past. Marc ventured into the study of Russia as empire long before the demise of the Soviet Union.
In connection with his biography of Speranskii, in 1956, he published his book on the administrative code that Speranskii authored, a reform that became a cornerstone of Russian imperial policy.^[8] The articles he published in the 1970s – “Patterns of Imperial Policies toward the Nationalities” (1971), “Pugachev’s Rebellion” (1970), and “Imperial Policies of Catherine the Great” (1977) – remain fundamental texts that we assign in our courses.^[9] They display Marc’s unique qualities of concise, forceful argument as he employed his erudition to formulate arresting ideas and interpretations of Russia as empire. In this connection, I should also mention his participation in the 1990s as editor and author of two volumes of articles on Ukraine, which marked the beginning of the rediscovery of Ukrainian history that has proceeded during the past decade.
Finally, as if all of this were insufficient, to Marc belongs the leadership in the field of Russian émigré studies, an area that was, of course, personally close and familiar to him. His book Russia Abroad, published in 1990,^[10] first brought the rich Russian émigré culture abroad between World Wars I and II into historians’ purview. The book was translated into Russian, where it found an admiring and sympathetic audience in Russia as well as abroad. I remember one eminent Russian scholar visiting New York, who caught sight of him at a seminar. Her jaw dropped, tears came to her eyes, and she exclaimed in wonderment: “Marc Raeff!!!”
Eulogies are supposed to end on a note of consolation for the loss that we have sustained. Here the consolation is obvious. Marc will be with us in the future as he was with us in the past, that is, in his works, which will continue to inspire us as examples of historical scholarship and inform us about the possibility of new ways to appreciate and understand Russia’s past.