XI International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia
10th-14th July 2023
Gregory Afinogenov, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA, "The 1790s in the Mirror of History: Politics and Parallels in the Revolutionary Era"
Abstract: The paper looks at the political role of historical thinking, parallels, and analogies in 1790s Russia, as both left-wing and right-wing thinkers and elites scrambled to make sense of the continent-wide transformations they were experiencing. Catherine II turned to the era of Henri IV in France and Charles I in England, while her cautious critic Iakov Kniazhnin drew parallels to the ninth-century Rus’ rebel Vadim of Novgorod. Later, as Paul consolidated his neomedieval vision of a post-Catherinian political order, comparisons to the Middle Ages began to flourish. All of these reference points invite us to revisit Marx’s famous dictum that “it is precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis that they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow names, battle cries and costumes from them in order to act out the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.” For both left and right, history provided a number of ways to understand the present and a shifting set of roadmarks for the future. It could also be used to rethink the relationship between Russia and Europe and to give new life to what had seemed to be dead antiquarianism.
