RUSSIA AS EUROPE'S OTHER Iver B. Neumann European ...

diplomacy is forever broken (Engels 1952: 25 & 46-47). 13
Engels stood out in the emphasis he placed on social power (but not in the way
he saw the lack of organised social life outside the state’s control in the early
part of the period as an asset for Russia rather than as a handicap). In two other
regards, however, this construction is seen to be representative of the period.
First, Russia was represented as a socially and economically backward power.
This view was part of the authorised version not only in constitutionalistinclined
countries such as Great Britain, but also, if to a minor extent, amongst
its partners in what started out as a Holy Alliance of 1815. Lest it be forgotten,
the Austrian prince to which Alexander presented the original draft for what
became the Holy Alliance later testified that he thought at the time that
Alexander had lost his marbles (Neumann 1995). Secondly, the text makes a
point of discussing and indeed fixing down to a year when Russia became ’a
European country like any other’. Elsewhere, it stressed the economic process
of ’westernisation’ (Engels 1952: 51). As already demonstrated, this particular
question of to what extent, in which respects and from what point in time Russia
belonged to Europe was an obsession with almost every European who wrote
down his or her views on Russia at any length during the period.
The period from the French Revolution to the First World War, then, exhibits
one crucial trait similar to later periods: in European constructions of Russia the
discourses on strategy and the relative merits of regime types are inextricably
intertwined. It would perhaps be an overinterpretation to see the construction of
Russia as part of the construction of Europe’s own pre-revolutionary history.
Nonetheless, just as the European discourse of the interwar perod seemed to be
tied up with European anxieties about the future, so the discourse of the
nineteenth century tied in with Europe’s laying out of the chronological
dimension of its own identity. Towards the end of the period, de Maistre’s
worry that some ’Pugachev from the university’ should try to act out European
revolutionary ideas was, of course, taken up by others, in counterdistinction to
the hopes of Engels and others for a similar development, and there was a shift
in this regard. A marginal and often eschatological strand, which saw Russia as
the land of the future, may also be noted as a counterpoint: after 1848, Ernest
Coeurderoy invited Russia to come in and shatter Europe’s bourgeois order, and
for Bruno Bauer, Russia was Europe’s ’sphinx of the future’ (cf. Cadot 1967:
520). In most other regards, however, the constructions of the early part of the
period dominated the field throughout. There is a reason why the useful works
13 In 1848 (eg Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 12 July), Marx had indeed advocated a military
attack on Russia and called it a revolutionary necessity, cf. Hammen 1952: 35.
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