The Icon and the Axe

Irony is a hopeful, though not a reassuring, concept. Man is not a helpless creature in a totally absurd world. He can do something about ironic situations, but only if he becomes aware of their ironic nature and avoids the temptation to conceal incongruities with total explanations. The ironic view contends that history laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations. It is capable of giving man hope without illusion.2 Applied to history, irony suggests that there is rational meaning to the historical process, yet that man-as a participant-is never fully able to grasp it. Seeming absurdities are part of what Hegel called "the cunning of reason." History does make sense, though our understanding of it tends to come too late. "The owl of Minerva spreads his wings only at the gathering of the dusk."3 Ironically, yet not senselessly, the flow of history always seems to be just one turn ahead of man's capacity to understand it. Today's equilibration of forces is said to be an equilibrium or even a permanent solution by those who confidently project current trends forward into the future without considering those deeper forces which account for discontinuous (or "dialectical") changes in human history. Yet such changes do occur-often with great suddenness in ways not foreseen except by isolated thinkers far removed from the rational consensus of their day. Recent Russian history is full of such discontinuous change: both revolutions of 1917,

the sudden turn to the NEP, Stalin's second revolution, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the post-war psychosis of high Stalinism, and the sudden thaw after

the tyrant's death.

Looking over the sweep of modern Russian history, one's sense of the ironic is compounded. In the Muscovite period the most extreme statements of the exclusive nature and destiny of Russia came in precisely those periods when Westernization was proceeding most rapidly-under Ivan the Terrible and Alexis Mikhailovich. Indeed, the ideologists responsible for insisting on Russia's special destiny were often Western-educated figures: Maxim the Greek and Ivan Peresvetov under Ivan and Simeon Polotsky and Innokenty Gizel under Alexis. The Muscovite rulers concealed from themselves the incongruity of increasing at one and the same time both their borrowings from and their antagonisms toward the West. The pretense inherent in the historical theology of Old Russia was intensified rather than dispelled by initial contacts with the West. The manic xenophobia of Ivan the Terrible and the Old Believers had an enduring popular appeal, and provided the basis for a modern mass culture that was gilded with scientific sanction by zoological nationalists in the late nineteenth century and by dialectical materialists in the twentieth century.

Against such a background, the tsar-reformers of Imperial Russia found their careers beset with ironies. Theoretically freer than other European sovereigns to rule solely by "their own strength" (the literal meaning of the Greek autokrates and the Russian samoderzhavie), they repeatedly found themselves in bondage to the superstitions of their nominally bonded subjects. Grants of freedom and toleration often had the effect of calling forth ungrateful if not despotic responses. "Never did the raskol enjoy such freedom as in the first year of Peter's reign, but . . . never was it to prove more fanatical."4 Catherine, who did far more than any of her predecessors to gratify the aristocratic intellectuals, was the first to experience their ideological enmity. She, who launched the unending discussion in Russia about the liberation of mankind, probably did more than any of her autocratic predecessors to militarize society and freeze the peasantry in bondage. In the nineteenth century the popularity of tsar-reformers tended to vary in inverse proportion with their actual accomplishment. Alexander I, who accomplished surprisingly little and instituted in his late years a far more repressive and reactionary rule than prevailed even under Nicholas I, was universally loved; whereas Alexander II, who accomplished an extraordinary amount in the first decade of his reign, was rewarded by an attempt on his life at the end of the decade-the first of many, one of which eventually proved successful. Among the many ironies of the revolutionary tradition stands the repeated participation of aristocratic intellectuals, who stood to

lose rather than gain privilege. "I can understand the French bourgeois bringing about the Revolution to get rights, but how am I to comprehend the Russian nobleman making a revolution to lose them?" asked a reactionary former governor of Moscow when learning on his deathbed of the Decembrist revolt.5