The first historians after the close of Peter's reign were foreigners, Germans for the most part. This was advantageous on the whole, for as Europeans they could display in a strong light the foreign elements in Russian development. It is true that their treatment of the subject was by no means impartial; and their comparison between Russia and Europe from the outlook of eighteenth-century history and philosophy was of little value. Writing as German patriots, they tended to lay especial stress upon the barbarism of the Old Slavs and Old Russians, and to extol the civilising influence and the state. The constructive talent of the Teutonic Varangians.
The publication of these German theories aroused a spirit of contradiction among the Russians, who inclined to insist upon the moral value of Old Russian life and institutions.
Prince Ščerbatov was not troubled because the first Russian princes were foreigners, perhaps Germans; but he championed Old Russian simplicity. One of his writings was devoted to the criticism of the reforms of Peter and his successors. This work, The Corruption of Russian Morals, is all the more interesting seeing that its author was an aristocrat and conservative, but had had a European education, and exhibited strong leanings towards rationalist liberalism. Ščerbatov was among the most zealous advocates of representative government and the restriction of absolutism. He recognised that since the days of Peter, the Russians had made social and political advances, but held that their progress had been achieved at the cost of moral backsliding. He was sufficiently logical to blame Catherine and her life as well as Peter's reforms. In contrast with the innovations, he extolled as an ideal to which the the Russians should return the morals of prepetrine Old Russia.[1]
Ščerbatov did not stand alone as critic. His noted opponent Boltin the historian and general, criticising the Histoire de la Russia ancienne et moderne issued in 1783 by Le Clerc, a French physician in Russia, was the first to attempt a logical and detailed demonstration that the defects which foreigners, and above all the French, were accustomed to point out in the
- ↑ It is characteristic of the conditions of the day, conditions still prevailing, that Radiščev's book was seized in the year 1790, and that Ščerbatov did not venture to have his work printed. Both were first published in London in 1858. Radiščev's Journey could not be circulated by the Russian book trade until 1905. Tatiščev, promoter of culture and champion of autocracy, had a similar fate with the work he wrote in 1733, entitled Discussion Concerning the Value of Science, and it was not published until 1882.
