THE RUSSIAN PARTITION 67racial overtones were introduced. 'We have a different climate from the West,'
wrote Pogodin, 'a different landscape, a different temperament and character, a
different blood, a different physiognomy, a different way of thinking, different
beliefs, hopes, pleasures, different relations, different conditions, different his-
tory, everything different.. .' According to this notion, the Russians were the
natural leaders of the Slav world, the bearers of a sacred mission to regenerate
decadent European civilization, and to civilize Asia. Although Slavophilism led
to a widening gulf in Russian intellectual circles, and eventually to democratic
concepts which challenged the very foundations of Autocracy, it remained a
constant theme in approved attitudes:
Dawn is breaking over Warsaw;
Kiev has opened its eyes;
And Vysehrad has started to converse
With Golden-domed Moscow.^4When, in response to repeated Polish Risings, Russification was adopted as a
prime goal of official policy throughout the Polish provinces, it lent the
government a respectable intellectual justification for its proceedings. From
1864, when the istniy russkiy chelovek, 'the genuine Russian person', was taken
as the sole criterion for candidates aspiring to serve the state, most Poles were
automatically excluded. By that time, the principle of Russian Nationality was
as emotional, as intense, and as exclusive as its Polish counterpart.
To many observers from the West, the miseries caused by Poland's incorpor-
ation into the Russian Empire were often thought to be essentially constitu-
tional in nature. Since Russian Autocracy ran contrary to Poland's traditions,
it was imagined that a few modifications in the form of government - a few con-
cessions to local autonomy, a few gestures in the direction of democratization -
would somehow eliminate Polish grievances. Hence, when Polish insurrections
continued to occur in spite of the reforms of so-called 'liberal Tsars', western
opinion tended to lose patience and to believe the Russian stereotype of the
ungrateful, incorrigible, and anarchic Pole. In reality, the problem went much
deeper. Muscovite social traditions, which demanded the total submission of
the citizen to the ruler and the total effacement of the individual in the interests
of the collective, were far too strong to be shaken by mere constitutional forms.
Indeed, Russian History is full of instances where the most enlightened and
apparently progressive constitutional declarations have coincided with the
blackest periods of despotism. To the Muscovite way of thinking, any relax-
ation of the formal structures of Autocracy necessarily requires an intensified
degree of vigilance and control on the part of the responsible authorities. By the
same token, the prosecution of the most tyrannical policies can usually
be masked by the promulgation of extremely libertarian, but completely inop-
erative, reforms. Outside commentators who have taken the Petrine Reforms or
the Stalin Constitution at face value, and have interpreted them in the light of
western conceptions of the rule of Law, or even of British ideas of fair play,