NICHOLAS V.

RIASANOVSKY

KLIUCHEVSKII IN RECENT
SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY

V. O. Kliuchevskii is the most distinguished repre-

sentative of the bourgeois-landlord historical science
of the second half of the XIX-beginning of the XX c.
But in his creative work, especially in its final stage,
there are also already clearly apparent the funda-
. mental traits of its crisis.
L. V. Cherepnin1

When you read Klyuchevsky and Solovyev, you see

Russia's real history, complete and unconcealed. But
when you read the periodically retouched pages of
our modern history, you bitterly see that the pages
are interspersed with white spots of silence and con-
. cealment, dark spots of obsequious truth-stretching
and smudges of distortion.
- Evgenii Evtushenko2

Not a self-contained subject, the Soviet treatment of Kliuchevskii has con-

stituted, of course, an integral part of Soviet cultural policies and the Soviet
cultural scene. Nor can it be argued that it ever determined those policies
or occupied the center of that scene. Still, one should not underestimate
Kliuchevskii, even in relation to the Soviet Union. Vasilii Osipovich Kliu-
chevskii, 1841-1911, who died shortly before the First World War after occu-
pying the chair of Russian history at the University of Moscow for thirty-
one years, was at the time of the October revolution almost certainly the
most influential, the most famous, and the most popular historian of Russia.
Kliuchevskii's numerous students were continuing the investigation of Rus-
sian history in different, frequently fruitful directions, while his own finally

1. Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR, 4 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1955-66),

11, 170. L. V. Cherepnin's intelligent and i m p o r t a n t section on Kliuchevskii occupies pp.
146-70.
2. "Talk b y Y e v t u s h e n k o in Its E n t i r e t y , " The New York Times, Dec. 19, 1985, p.
A 10. See also p. A 11 o f the same issue o f the newspaper for Philip T a u b m a n ' s article
a b o u t the talk.

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published lectures, Kurs russkoi istorii, stood out as its best-known and most
admired comprehensive statement, with the lecturer's magnificent artistic
images, whether of the Great Russian national character, Tsar Aleksei Mik-
hailovich or Peter the Great, vying in appeal among the educated Russians
with the most celebrated pages of classical Russian literature. It was hard or
impossible then and later to ignore Kliuchevskii entirely. The Soviet treat-
ment of him is, therefore, of some moment to the student of the Soviet
regime and culture as well as, needless to say, itself a historical record of the
fortunes of a great historian in his native land during the period of time
which now extends to some seventy years.
The earlier phases of the Soviet age are outside the scope of this essay,
and it is sufficient for us to keep in mind the cataclysmic nature of those
years. The purpose of the regime and the system, as yet poorly organized and
coordinated and allowing many "vestiges of the past" to survive, was to
destroy the old world tout court-rather than to deal at length individually
with Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii-and to replace it by a brave new world
based on a schematic universal Marxist history, or, according to some espe-
cially optimistic versions, on no history at all. It is worth noting that the
leader of the drive to replace bourgeois historiography with the Marxist,i
historical science and indeed to achieve a similar transformation in the
broader field of Russian, now Soviet, culture was Kliuchevskii's "renegade"
student and a leading Russian Marxist intellectual of his generation Mikhail
Nikolaevich Pokrovskii, 1868-1932.3 Pokrovskii was, to be sure, a well-
trained and gifted scholar, full of hatred of "bourgeois" intellectualism but
genuinely interested in historical problems and in the "correct"' approach
to history. Other people, events, and especially the dreadful physical circum-
stances of the time were frequently merely destructive. Russian culture in
the large, not just the work and legacy of Kliuchevskii, suffered greatly.

3. There is a good book in English on Pokrovskii: George M. Enteen, The Soviet

Scholar-Bureaucrat: M. N, Pokrovskit and the Society o f Marxist Historians (University
Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1978).
The subject of Kliuchevskii's students certainly deserves further study, and on several
levels. The late L. V. Cherepnin was working on the "Kliachevskii school" when he died.
In relation to the present essay I have barely room to mention that many of those stu-
dents, including such prominent ones as P. N. Miliukov and A. A. Kizevetter, emigrated;
others, exemplified by M. M. Bogoslovskii, ended their lives in the Soviet Union as rather
isolated figures; relatively few played an active and significant part in Soviet higher edu-
cation. Of those last ones perhaps the most important was Professor Iu. V. Gauthier, a
teacher of P. A. Zaionchkovskii and other Soviet scholars. The Soviet specialists, includ-
ing Academician Militsa Vasil'evna Nechkina herself, who have mounted the "Kliuchev-
skii revival" to which the rest of my essay will be devoted, seem in the main to have
come to Kliuchevskii from the outside rather than to represent a continuation or a re-
emergence of the original Kliuchevskii tradition.

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 In the broad perspective of history, the dramatic, varied, and tragic dozen
or so years in Russia following the events of 1917 may well be defined as
a transition period between pre-revolutionary Russia and the definitive
establishment of the Soviet system. That system attained its full form in the
course of the so-called Stalinization of the 1930s, and, some important
particular modifications aside, it has not been significantly altered since.
Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism proved to be a remarkably dogmatic, rigid, and
intolerant doctrine, but it also aimed at comprehensiveness and stability.
All of Russian history and all of Russian historiography too, including
"bourgeois" historiography, received their assigned places in the long and
arduous but glorious and triumphant march of the Russian people toward
Great October. Moreover, as it was noticed at the time and became more
apparent later, especially during the desperate Second World War years,
the set ideological requirements were not limited entirely to the Soviet
version of the Marxist canon, although, to be sure, they were never to trans-
gress that canon explicitly. Rather, rejecting the nihilism of the early Soviet
period, the authorities decided that history was once again to play a positive
role also in the patriotic education of Russian, more precisely Soviet, men
and women. Probably the most important date in Soviet historiography
was May 16, 1934, when teaching history as a separate and important subject
was reintroduced in the schools of the country. Kliuchevskii's Kurs russkoi
istorii was republished in 1937.
The next, and heretofore last, stage in the Soviet reception of Kliuchevskii
covers the years after the Second World War. Devoid of conceptual innova-
tion, because the basic evaluation of Kliuchevskii merely repeated the al-
ready-established formula, i.e., a bourgeois historian fully subject to profound
limitations and crucial errors inherent in that position, but a good scholar
within those limitations, a brilliant verbal and literary artist, and a fine .
craftsman whose skills helped to advance the historical profession in Russia,
the new stage acquired a distinctive character as a result of the amount of
attention, usually favorable attention, paid to Kliuchevskii. In the course
of postwar decades Kliuchevskii's writings were republished or even published
for the first time, including letters, "jottings for the diary," "aphorisms and
sayings about history," lectures, lecture outlines and lecture notes of differ-
ent kinds, a few poetic ventures, in fact almost everything imaginable.
Attempts at reconstructing Kliuchevskii's lectures and whole courses of
lectures remind the reader at times of work with the Pushkin manuscripts
rather than the more prosaic treatment usually meted out to historians.
Indeed on occasion one is at a loss to determine whether one is dealing with
an error-prone and deceptive bourgeois ideologue or with a kind of national
treasure. Together with this huge archival, bibliographic, and editorial work,
there have appeared in the Soviet Union since the Second World War not only
sections and chapters, but articles and books devoted to Kliuchevskii, in-

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cluding Academician Nechkina's magisterial account. To be sure and to re-
state a major point, the basic Soviet evaluation of Kliuchevskii remains un-
bendingly severe, and only "acceptable" and usually secondary characteristics
of the scholar receive constant praise. But perhaps, after all, quantity can
turn into quality. In any case, as of now no historian, certainly no pre-Soviet
historian, had received as much attention in the Soviet Union as has Vasilii
Osipovich Kliuchevskii.
Soviet publication of Kliuchevskii's own writings could well be the most
important and enduring Soviet contribution to the study of Kliuchevskii,
and it deserves initial consideration. The "Kliuchevskii revival" may be said
to have started in 1956-59 with the appearance of a new eight-volume edi-
tion of the historian's Works, the largest amount of his materials ever put
together.4 The collected writings included the celebrated five-volume Kurs
russkoi istorii, another remarkable course of lectures, dealing this time with
the history of legal estates (Istoriia soslovii v Rossii), and a considerable
number of shorter studies. Unfortunately three books and many articles and
lesser pieces were excluded.5 On the other hand, some material was published
for the first time: in the sixth volume two lecture courses, one on the ter-
minology and the other on the sources of Russian history ("Terminologiia
russkoi istorii" and "Kurs lektsii po istochnikovedeniiu"); in the seventh
two historiographical items, "Otvet D. 1. Ilovaiskomyu," and "Otzyv ob
issledovanii V. 1. Semevskogo 'Krestianskii vopros v Rossii v XVIII i pervoi
polovine XIX v.' "; and in the eighth more lectures, namely a whole course

4. V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochtnenita v vos'mt tomakh, 8 vols. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat,

1956-59).
5. The books were: Vasilii Kliuchevskii, Skazanlia tnostrantsev o Moskovskom gosu-
darstve (Moscow, 1866); V. Kliuchevskii, Drevnerusskie zhitiia sviatykh kak istoricheskii
istochnik (Moscow: Izdanie K. Soldatenkova, 1871); and V. O. Kliuchevskii,Boiarskaia
duma drevnei Rusi, 5th ed. (Petersburg: Literaturno-izdat. otdel Narodnogo komissariata
po prosveshcheniiu, 1919). Among the excised shorter pieces were: "Sodeistvie Tserkvi
uspekham russkogo grazhdanskogo prava i poriadka," "Dobrye liudi drevnei Rusi,"
"Znachenie Prep. Sergiia dlia russkogo naroda i gosudarstva," "Dva vospitaniia," and
"Zapadnoe vliianie'i tserkovnyi raskol v Rossii XVII v.," together with the bulk of minor
items. These shorter pieces and minor items can be found in the second and third vol-
umes of an earlier three-volume edition of Kliuchevskii's shorter writings: V. O. Kliu-
chevskii, Ocherki i rechi. Vtoroi sbornfk statei (Petrograd: Lit-izd. otdel Komissariata
narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 1918); and V. O. Kliuchevskii, Otzyvy i otvety. Tretii sbor-
nik statel (Petrograd: Lit-izd. otdel Komissariata narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 1918).
In English, there exists an old and awful translation of the complete Kurs: V. O. Kliu-
chevskii, A History o f Russia, 5 vols. (London: 1911-31; reprint New York: Russell and
Russell, 1960); and two somewhat better-translated, separately published parts of that
history: V. O. Kliuchevsky, A Course in Russians History: The Seventeenth Century (Chi-
cago: Quadrangle Books, 1968); and V. O. Klyuchevsky, Peter the Great (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1958).

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 on Russian historiography, essentially eighteenth-century historiography
("Lektsii po russkoi istoriografii"), as well as five other varied and interesting
items, "Pgrniati 1. N. Rotlina," "Otzyv o issledovanii P. N. Miliukovn 'Gnsu-
darstvennoe khoziaistvo Rossii v pervuiu chetvert' XVIII v. i reforms Petra
Velikogo'," "F. I. Buslaev kak prepodavatel' i issledovatel'," " 0 vzgliade
khudozhnika na obstanovku i ubor izobrazhaemogo im litsa" and "Pamiati
A. S. Pushkina." Supervised by Academician M. N. Tikhomirov and executed
by such specialists as A. A. Zimin the eight-volume publication maintained
a very high level of professional competence. Excellent notes frequently
not only helped to set and clarify the text, but also quoted drafts or other
additional pertinent information from the Kliuchevskii archive.
One hesitates to assess precisely the total value of the new Soviet edition
of Kliuchevskii's Works. It is, of course, a major achievement to present in
an up-to-date scholarly manner the historian's famous Kurs and many of his
other writings, some of which are of central significance for Russian historio-
graphy. Manuscript material published for the first time deserves special
attention, but also a more nuanced judgment. A number of new pieces, as
their mere titles correctly indicate, are perfectly valid and valuable but quite
minor additions to the Kliuchevskii corpus. The new lecture courses, how-
ever, are generally a disappointment, for they are mostly notes or even simply
lists of subjects to be covered rather than real works. The editors recognized
the fact and repeatedly stressed not their intrinsic value, but their usefulness
in demonstrating Kliuchevskii's interests and methods as a scholar. Those who
produced the edition deserve our gratitude not only for their expertise, but
also for their devotion to Kliuchevskii, his thought, and his work, a recurrent
characteristic of what I called the "Kliuchevskii revival." Yet this devotion
does not transgress ideology. The case in point is not so much the set inter-
pretation of the historian, present in the Works together with other relevant .
Soviet writings, as the list of articles omitted in the new edition-just read
the titles in my note S.
A decade later came the next massive publication of Kliuchevskii archival
materials: a packed volume of over five hundred pages entitled Letters.
Diaries. Aphorisms and Thoughts about History.6 Three scholars especially
important in the "Kliuchevskii revival" produced the book, with M. V.
Nechkina listed as the "responsible editor" (otvetstvennyi redaktor) ,and
R. A. Kireeva and A. A. Zimin as "compilers" (sostaviteli). The professional
quality of their publication was very high. Yet, as in the case of the restored
lecture courses, the new volume could be considered a disappointment. Some

6. V. O. Kliuchevskii, Pis'ma. Dnevniki. A f o r i z m y i mysli ob istorii (Moscow: Nauka,

1968). Not all the e x t a n t letters were published; presumably those left o u t were entirely
inconsequential.

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of the most informative and revealing letters, notably Kliuchevskii's corres-
pondence with his lifelong friend, P. P. Gvozdev, had already been published,7
while the others proved to be on the whole sparse and scattered. The diaries
were in fact merely diary notes, the publishers explained, and they amounted
altogether to less than a hundred pages. They were totally inadequate, for
example, for tracing the historian's reaction to the important events in his
lifetime at home and abroad; rather, the reader has to be grateful for a few
relevant comments jotted down over a period of several decades. The aphor-
isms were in the main not outstanding as literature, and they were also below
the extremely high level of irony and wit in general characteristic of Kliu-..
chevskii's lectures and formal writing. Indeed one of the explicit justification
for publishing them was their quality of "a workshop" out of which the
much-admired better products associated with Kliuchevskii had come. Still
and all, the volume proved to be a valuable contribution to our knowledge of
Kliuchevskii, a contribution which, as it turned out, tended to confirm rather
than change the prevailing image of the historian. For instance, it provided
further evidence for the belief that Kliuchevskii found in abundance in his
contemporary world human folly, contradictions and misery, which he
stigmatized so ironically and brilliantly in his historical work. To illustrate,
a diary entry witten in 1866 referred scathingly not only to Karakozov and
his attempt to assassinate Alexander II, but also to what Kliuchevskii consid-
ered to be the narrow-minded, stupid, and coarse patriotic reaction to that
attempt.8 Or, to quote a late aphorism: "I understand Izvolskii's difficulties:
no army, no fleet, no finances-only the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle."9
The historian's alienation from that world of folly and vice could be traced
from the beginning of the record to its author's death. At times it assumed a
painful urgency: "[To escape] into the s t e p p e . . . or into the forest! "10
In 1983 the same team-although on that occasion Zimin's name was set
off in black to mark the death of that notable historian-put out under the
title Unpublished Works another sizable volume of Kliuchevskii archival
material.1 I t began with nine lectures and some notes for the tenth from
a special course on "The Western Influence in Russia after Peter" delivered
by the historian in 1890-91 to help the victims of famine then raging in the
Russian countryside. Rich and remarkably critical, the lectures deserve
attention, although it should be added that they differed little from what

7. Pis'ma V, O. Kliuchevskogo k P. P. Govzdevu, with an introductory article by S. A.

Golubtsov (Moscow: n.p., 1924).
8. Kliuchevskii, Pis'ma. Dnevniki. Aforizmy i mysli ob istorii, pp. 227-28.
9. Ibid., p. 389.
10. "V step' by ... ili v les!"-break in the original.1bid., p. 231. The tone of this en-
try dated March 30, 1867 was perhaps extreme, but not unusual. '
11. V. O. Kliuchevskii, Neopublikovannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1983).

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 Kliuchevskii said about the eighteenth century in Russia elsewhere and were
indeed incorporated in part into the b'urs when it finally came out. The next
section, "Historiographical Studies," began with the "sketches on the
'Varangian problem'," which the editors traced with particular care, empha-
sizing the historian's departure from the orthodox Normanist views and his
far-ranging criticism of the handling of that issue by scholars, and continued
with the author's comments, usually brief and sometimes very brief com-
ments, on a considerable number of Russian historians and related occasions
and matters.l2 The third section, "Modern History of Western Europe
in Connection with Russian History," consisted of summary notes of a course
delivered by Kliuchevskii in a military school and represented a rare published
record of the Moscow professor as a general European, rather than Russian,
historian. Its concise nature, approaching that of an extended table of con-
tents, limits its value, again, to whatever light it might throw on Kliuchev-
skii's orientation and interests. The fourth very short section was devoted to
"Literary-Historical Sketches," the fifth, even shorter, to the author's brief
"Thoughts about Russian Writers," ranging in time from Lermontov to
Chekhov, and the sixth and last to Kliuchevskii's own occasional light ven-
tures into "Poetry and Prose." Excellent notes enriched the volume.
Moving from the publication of Kliuchevskii materials to recent Soviet'
works about Kliuchevskii does not necessarily change the frame of reference.
In fact two of the three books in that category which deserve attention are
essentially, again, expert, detailed and devoted reconstructions of the his-
torian's manuscripts. In 1966 R. A. Kireeva, whom we already encountered
as a dedicated Kliuchevskii compiler, published a monograph on I! O. Kliu-
chevskii as a Historian o f Russian Historical Science.13 In 1970 E. G. Chuma-
chenko put out his investigation of V. O. Kliuchevskii-a Student o f Sourc-
est. 14 Kireeva's volume was a determined effort to obtain, squeeze out and
mobilize everything Kliuchevskii had ever written or said about historio-
graphy in his native land, to arrange it chronologically, from ancient times
through the nineteenth century, and to proclaim the author a leading Russian
historiographer as well as a leading Russian historian. Not surprisingly,
Kireeva's sources ranged from well-known articles and famous pages of
larger published works to, once again, drafts, summaries, and notes. Also
not surprisingly, her success was mixed.

12. For materials o n Kliuchevskii as a historiographer, see, in addition to the works

already m e n t i o n e d a n d the Kireeva b o o k to be discussed, the following item: A. A. Zi-
min a n d R. A. Kireeva, "Iz rukopisnogo naslediia V. O. Kliuchevskogo: (Novye materialy
k kursu po russkoi istoriografii)," in Istoriia i istoriki: Istoriograficheskii ezhegodnik,
1972 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), pp. 307-36.
13. R. A. Kireeva, V. O. Kliuchevskii kak istorik russkoi istoricheskoi n a u k i (Mos-
cow: Nauka, 1966).
14. E. V. C h u m a c h e n k o , V. 0 . K l i u c h e v s k i i - i s t o c h n i k o v e d (Moscow: Nauka, 1970).

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 Chumachenko tried a different kind of reconstruction-the chapters
dealt with "first steps in historical science-the first efforts of a student of
sources (The Tales o f Foreigners)"; "the development of mastery in the study
of sources (The Lives o f Saints)"; "the height of source mastery (The Course
in Russian History; the course in the study of sources)"; and "new themes for
investigation-new approaches in source study (sources for the Russian his-
tory of the XVIII-XIX centuries)"-the author attempted not so much to
restore everything Kliuchevskii had written or said in a given context as to
establish which sources the historian had used for a specific work of his and
in what manner. A rewarding enterprise, because Kliuchevskii's first two
books (analyzed in Chumachenko's first two chapters) were explicitly studies
of sources, and because Kliuchevskii continued to be deeply interested in
sources and to study them all his life, Chumachenko's monograph made
rich use of Kliuchevskii's research notes, drafts, and other new relevant ar-
chival material.
While both the Kireeva and the Chumachenko volumes may be considered
modest in their size and scope, the opposite is true of Academician Nech-
kina's magisterial ilasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii. A History o f His Life and
Work, published in 1974.15 A splendidly produced and illustrated book of
well over six hundred pages, it is an enduring testimony to Nechkina's lifelong
fascination with Kliuchevskii,i as well as to her and her eight assistants'
indefatigable labors. Indeed it is the richest and the most comprehensive
study of Kliuchevskii written in the Soviet Union or anywhere else, as well as
the fullest Soviet treatment of any historian. Not conceptually or intellec-
tually innovative, because the author adheres entirely to the established
Soviet interpretation of the Moscow professor, the book is remarkable for
its painstaking tracing of Kliuchevskii's life and work, and frequently for its
intelligence and its sensitivity. The quality of a kind of filial piety so striking
in the "Kliuchevskii revival" in the Soviet Union is present throughout the
volume to the point that it takes an effort to realize that Nechkina had never
met Kliuchevskii and that her personal connection with him had been mainly
through Pokrovskii (which association, if one is to pursue the subject, would
raise two series of painful questions, one series concerning the relationship
of Pokrovskii to Kliuchevskii, and another concerning the relationship of
Nechkina to Pokrovskii). Uncounted episodes and details are devotedly de-
picted. As one of our graduate students commented after reading the book:
"Is it really necessary to know Kliuchevskii's telephone number (10-49) or

15. A k a d e m i k M. V. Nechkina, Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii. I s t o r i i zhiznl i tvor-

chestva (Moscow: N a u k a , 1974).
16. For a brief tracing o f this fascination, see the first pages o f Professor R o b e r t F.
Byrnes's interesting review article o f Nechkina's b o o k : R o b e r t F. Byrnes, "Nechkina's
Kliuchevskii," The Russian Review, 37, No. 1 (Jan. 1978), 68-81.

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 the color of the book jacket on his doctoral dissertation (green)? " But it
would be completely wrong to dismiss Nechkina as merely a purveyor of
trivia. She also gives us, for example, the best and the most convincing
account of the creation of the celebrated Kurs, and much else besides. Un-
fortunately Nechkina's knowledge of Kliuchevskii and her sensitivity to him
are not all-embracing. The most damaging single exception is the major
matter of religion and church in Russia and in Russian history, where Kliu-
chevskii was an insider, whereas Nechkina remains an outsider, and often a
blind one.
Nechkina's major study of Kliuchevskii and its bid to be definitive brings
me back to the beginning of my essay with its aim to establish the recent
Soviet assessment of the remarkable Moscow professor and his work. To
repeat, after 1917 and especially once the canon had been set in the 1930s,
Kliuchevskii had been identified as a leading Russian bourgeois historian.17
There have been only very minor qualifications of this identification since.
At times, as in Cherepnin's statement quoted as the first epigraph to my
piece, "bourgeois-landlord" ("burzhuazno pomeshchichii") is used instead
■if simply "bourgeois." Yet the "bourgeois" part is invariably present, and,
moreover, one is usually told that the "landlord" designation refers to the
new "liberal" landlords, close to the bourgeoisie, rather than to the old�•
"reactionary" ones represented by such historians as Karamzin. Again,
Nechkina and some other writers like to refer to Kliuchevskii as "the out-
standing" rather than "one of the outstanding" Russian bourgeois historians,
but that kind of intellectual difference is barely worth mentioning, especially
because even the greatest Soviet admirers of Kliuchevskii's talents do not
challenge Kliuchevskii's position on the continuum of Russian bourgeois
historiography presented in the. next paragraph. Notably, in spite of the filial
piety of the "Kliuchevskii revival" and the devotion of its proponents to the
Moscow professor, I know of no effort to annex Kliuchevskii as in some
fundamental way Soviet, in contrast to the Soviet treatment of figures as
diverse as Radishchev, the leading Decembrists, and even the young Dos-
toevskii.l8
Kliuchevskii, the Soviet assessment continues, was not only a bourgeois

17. In addition to the works already cited and those to be cited in various specific
connections below, see N. L. Rubinshtein's able and relatively early evaluations: N. L.
Rubinshtein, "Burzhuaznyi ekonomizm. Kliuchevskii," in Russkaia istoriografiia (Mos-
cow: Gospolitizdat, 1941), pp. 441-69; and "Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii," Istoriche-
skii zhurnal, No. 6 (1941), pp. 32 -42. '
18. Kliuchevskii was probably too close to the events of the time, too well-known,
and too firmly identified with the anti-Marxist and anti-revolutionary camp for such
speculations. I am unaware even of suggestions that he would have seen the light after
October had he lived long enough.

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 historian in general, but also a faithful representative of the Russian bour-
geoisie in a particular phase or phases of its historical evolution. S. M.
Solov'ev had reflected the progressive and hopeful prime of that bourgeoisie
Kliuchevskii came next, when the bourgeoisie had passed its zenith and,
struggling against Marxism,.began its accelerating slide toward the inevitable
revolution. More searching analyses usually delineate two successive stages.
The first, in the 1860s, 1870s, and perhaps in part 1880s, with the Russian
. bourgeoisie at or near its summit, witnessed the full flowering of Kliuchev-
skii's mighty talent and his most advanced and important historical work.
Notably, at that time he introduced the economic factor decisively into
Russian history using the approach often .described by Soviet commentators
as "bourgeois economism." The second phase, covering the remainder of the
nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries, already found the
Russian bourgeoisie, and Kliuchevskii with it, in deep and worsening contra-
diction and crisis. Soviet specialists argue concomitantly that in his first phase
Kliuchevskii was strongly influenced by the more progressive Russian histor-
ians and other intellectuals, as well as by the entire radical spirit of the 1860s,
and that it was only in his second phase that the Moscow professor, in a des-
perate search for defenses against Marxism and the approaching revolution,
became a proponent of the state and the state school in Russian historio-
graphy which had been created by his teachers, S. M. Solov'ev and particularly
B. N. Chicherin.l9 The Soviet assessment of Kliuchevskii, it should be noted,
has its felicitous aspects. The Solov'ev-Kliuchevskii continuity and sequence
are undeniable, and the certain primacy assigned to Solov'ev is at least argu-
able, in not incontrovertible. More importantly, the presentation of Kliuchev-
skii as essentially a historian in contradiction and crisis corresponds to the
opinion of almost every commentator on Kliuchevskii, once that commenta-
tor had penetrated through the external brilliance of the Moscow professor's
presentation of history and, most especially, his magic with w o r d s . 20

19. See especially A. A. Zimin's seminal article: A. A. Zimin, "Formirovanie istori-

cheskikh vzgliadov V. O. Kliuchevskogo v 60-e gody XIX v.," Istoricheskie zapiski, 69
(1961), 152-79. 'This approach dominates Nechkina's volume and recent Soviet historio-
graphy on Kliuchevskii in general.
20. Of course, different reasons have been adduced to explain this "contradiction and
crisis." Very common is a personal, psychological explanation, which emphasizes the
historian's alienation from his environment, usually ever since he left Penza. I prefer to
stress, in a much narrower interpretation than the Soviet, the collapse of idealistic philo-
sophy and historiography in Russia and the fact that Kliuchevskii at least found no other
safe moorings. For my views, see the section on Kliuchevskii"in Nicholas V. Riasanovsky,
The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1985), pp. 176-84; and my forthcoming article on Kliuchevskii in The Modern
Encyclopedia o f Russians and Soviet History, Leo Tolstoi seized brilliantly Kliuchevskii's

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 Once firmly classified, and thus, in a sense, caged, Kliuchevskii can be and
has been praised by Soviet specialists for his many virtues and achievements.
V. I. Astakhov, to give one example, lauds "the turn to the study of the
economic, social and cultural history �of Russia, the effort to throw light on
the social life of the Russian people, the rejection of the traditional division
of Russian history according to the reigns of princes and tsars, and the
attempt to create a new periodization with an allowance for the economic
factor, the postulation, contrary to the Normanist theory, of the starting
point of the history of the fatherland in the sixth century, the projection of
the narrative all the way to the middle of the nineteenth century, the thor-
oughness in the use of sources, and, finally, the unmatched colorfulness and
graphic quality of the language."21 The same Astakhov, of course, condemns
at length the obvious and devastating limitations of Kliuchevskii's bourgeois
view of Russian history,22 and writes typically of "a complex and contra-
dictory creative work.,,23 Kireeva emphasizes such specific achievements of
Kliuchevskii as his eventual recognition of the continuity of Russian historio-
graphy from the chronicles to modern times, while Chumachenko praises
Kliuchevskii's great pioneering role in the establishment of the study of
historical sources in Russia. A patriotic note can often be discerned in the
cataloguing of the achievements of the Moscow professor, who, it might be.
added, was one of the "most Russian," or, in any case, one of the least cos-
mopolitan major cultural figures of the late imperial period. Nechkina's
specific praise of Kliuchevskii would exceed the format of this essay-all
in the framework of the severe overall Soviet judgment which forms the
leitmotif of my contribution. No radical, Kliuchevskii has even been com-
mended by Soviet scholars, and probably rightly so, for the kind of criticism
of tsarism that had never before been heard in Russian lecture halls.
Precisely classified, thoroughly condemned, and richly praised, as appro-
priate, Kliuchevskii may be said to have obtained a quasi-permanent solid and
circumscribed position in Soviet historiography. Yet lingering problems con-
tinue to attract attention. The Moscow professor's pluralistic approach to
Russian history could be especially disturbing, and it is not clear that all the
references to his ignorance of the class struggle and to his general failure to

ambivalence: "He is a shrewd one: y o u read, he seems t o be praising; y o u consider it, he

c o n d e m n e d " ("Khitryi, c h i t a e s h ' - b u d t o khvalit, a vniknesh'--obrugal"). Quoted f r o m
Kireeva, V. O. Kliuchevskii, p. 193.
21. V. 1. Astakhov, Kurs lektsii p o russkoi istoriografii (do k o n t s a X I X v.) (Khar'kov:
Izd-vo Khar'kovskogo gos. universiteta, 1965), pp. 500-01. The lecture on Kliuchevskii
occupies pages 467-503.
22. Ibid., passim b u t especially pp. 501-03.
23. Ibid., p. 467.

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follow scientific Marxism have fully exorcised the danger.24 Again, it may
be dangerous to be compared to Kliuchevskii. Thus, Chumachenko interrupts
his painstaking study of the Moscow professor's treatment of historical
sources to complain that I. U. Budovnits's dogmatic rather than research-
centered handling of some of the same specific sources represents a step back-
ward.25 Budovnits could have plenty of company.
Finally, there are the broader vistas. Nechkina was worried about the slo-
gan "back to Kliuchevskii!" in the 1930s.�6 The post-Second World War
"Kliuchevskii revival" must be seen as part of the effort by educated Russians
to recover their past as well as part of the Party effort to control that recov-
ery. Indeed, if the Evtushenko quote at the beginning of my essay is to be
believed, Kliuchevskii, together with his teacher S. M. Solov'ev, represents
today for some Russians that real, complete, and unconcealed history, that
historical truth, which, according to Solzhenitsyn and others, marks the turn-
ing point for awakening Russian consciousness. But all this takes me beyond
my modest theme of the treatment of Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii in re-
cent Soviet historiography.

University o f California, Berkeley

24. Kliuchevskii's pluralism seems to be the main p o i n t o f Golubtsov's interesting ar-

ticle on Kliuchevskii published in the early years o f the Soviet regime: S. A. Golubtsov,
"Teoreticheskic vzgliady V. O. Kliuchevskogo," Russkii istoricheskii zhurnal, bk. 8
(1921), pp. 178-202. The t h e m e has retained interest a m o n g Soviet historians.
25. C h u m a c h e n k o , V. O. Kliuchevskii, p. 126.
26. Nechkina, Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii, pp. 41-43.

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