Michail B. Bulgakov Gosudarstvennye služby posadskich ljudej v XVII veke. [Dienstverfplichtungen der posadskie ljudi für den Staat im 17. Jh.] Izdat. IRI RAN Moskva 2004. 347 S. ISBN: 5-8055-0124-4.
Back in the Soviet era, there was a species of monograph that might be called “Just The Facts,” or JTF for short. JTF monographs looked a lot like dry Western dissertations. They were very long on “This is what I found in the archives” and very short on “This is what it means and why you should care.”
The book under review fits the JTF model almost exactly. It’s about local administration in seventeenth-century Russia, particularly about the many ways in which the tsar used prominent townsmen to do his bidding. The author points out in remarkable detail how the center successfully compelled big merchants, petty traders, and just about anyone of means to serve as bagmen for autocracy in the provinces. He shows that the posadskie liudi collected direct taxes, gathered customs, shook-down public establishments (taverns, baths), policed neighborhoods, administered justice, maintained fortifications and generally did anything the tsar ordered them to do, for they really had no choice. The method of presentation goes something like this: “Historians have wondered whether posadskie liudi did X for the tsar. Here’s some good evidence that they did (or didn’t). Historians have wondered whether posadskie luidi did Y for the tsar …” And so on. The author is to be congratulated for scouring the published primary sources and archives to answer all these questions. Now we know.
But one wonders why we would want to know. History books must do more than simply lay out the facts. They must interpret the past so as to make it sensible – and interesting – to the present. When the Communist Party ruled the Soviet Union, Russian historians were rightly weary of undertaking this necessary task, for their script was already written. The Party supplied the interpretive framework, and the historians provided the data – or else. Thus was the JTF monograph born, a creature of narrow-mindedness from above and prudence from below. When the Party’s grip on historiography was broken, many of us thought Russian historians would throw off the chains of the JTF and begin to tell good, interpretively-daring stories. Judging by this book, that has not happened, for it really tells no coherent story at all. It is a set of facts. They are good facts, they are documented facts, and at times they are even suggestive facts. But they are nothing but facts.
This is not to say that Bulgakov doesn’t attempt to array his data in an interpretive framework. He does, but the results are disappointingly familiar. In Soviet times, JTF books began and ended with a flurry of quotations from Marx, Lenin or even Stalin suggesting that these omni-minds understood the “correct” framework in which this or that must be understood even though they had never studied this or that. By the 1970s, everyone recognized that these reverential introductions and conclusions were nothing but pitiful boilerplate. Happily, they began to disappear during glasnost’ and after 1991. But in this book, published in 2004, the boilerplate is back with a vengeance (though, mysteriously, Marx, Lenin and Stalin have disappeared). Thus Bulgakov presents old friends like the storied “estate-representative monarchy” (p. 3), the dastardly “wealthy feudal landholders” (p. 7) and the ever-subversive “separatist feudal aristocracy.” (p. 290). “Class war” even makes a brief appearance (p. 3).
It’s hard to tell why the author included this thin interpretation. Does he believe it? Well, maybe he does, but he makes no sustained argument on its behalf. Was he told to include it by backward-looking retsenzenty? Perhaps. The two reviewers in question – A. I. Aksenov and Ia. E. Vodarskii – were active in Soviet times. Was the book even written after 1991? Judging by the publication record of the author and cited references, it must have been; but judging by the book itself it’s hard to say. The Soviets always had more JTF monographs than they could publish. Is this one of them, slightly updated with some new material?
This book is a missed opportunity. Surely Bulgakov came across material that would have enabled him to speak to many hotly debated, open questions about Muscovy. Was Muscovite political culture essentially “consensual” or was it truly autocratic? Did Muscovite society have a nascent “public sphere” or was it “atomized”? Was the post-smuta monarchy a weak “façade” or a living “despotism”? Bulgakov addresses none of these questions. Moreover, he seems entirely unfamiliar with the literature in which they have been posed. Why? We don’t know. This much, however, seems clear: at least looking at this case, something has gone horribly wrong in post-Soviet Russian historiography.
Marshall Poe, Iowa City, IA
Zitierweise: Marshall Poe über: Michail B. Bulgakov Gosudarstvennye služby posadskich ljudej v XVII veke. Izdat. IRI RAN Moskva 2004. ISBN: 5-8055-0124-4., in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. Neue Folge, 57 (2009) H. 2, S. 267-268: http://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/JGO/Rez/Poe_Bulgakov_Gosudarstvennye_sluzby.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)