Towards a Conceptual-Historical Critique of the Essentialist and Teleological Interpretations of Russian History. Part 1

Abstract

The author discusses some of the dominant assertions in the literature on Russian history. One of them is the disqualification of the myth of the benevolent tsar as “false”. This disqualification is accompanied by the formulas “naïve or popular monarchism”, which designate the “pre-scientific illusions” that would have guided the collective movements of resistance to autocracy. Given the importance of collective representations of the tsar and power in Russian history, the theoretical premises on which the above-mentioned disqualifications are based affect the general interpretation of this history, for example the conception of the Russian people as “passive”. The author proposes to abandon this positivist scaffolding and approach the sources from other theoretical perspectives, in particular conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), to pose a radically different question: what truth is contained in the myth of the benevolent tsar and to reconstruct, against the essentialist and teleological vision, the historicity of the collective resistance to power in Russia. The first part studies the genealogy of the expression samozvan/ets/stvo (self-appointment), its original meaning – individual initiative against divine appointment – and its functions in the autocratic political paradigm. The lack of heuristic value of the formulas of “popular, or naïve monarchism,” the logic of which is to deprive the most oppressed segments of the population of their culture and language, is emphasized.