Russian Historiography from 1880 to 1905: Pavel N. Miliukov and the Moscow School

By Thomas M. Bohn

In Russian historiography, the Moscow School’s paradigm shift from political and legal history to social and economic history was markedly driven by Pavel Miliukov (1859-1943), the late leader of the Constitutional Democrats and foreign minister of the Provisional Government. Russian Historiography from 1880 to 1905 develops a narrative of historical sociology’s advancement through the Moscow School under Miliukov’s influence and provides a window into his decision making as a political figure who based his leadership not on public opinion but on the effectiveness of historical processes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805395492

Thomas M. Bohn

Thomas M. Bohn ist Professor für Geschichte Osteuropas an der Universität Gießen.

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Russian Historiography from 1880 to 1905

New Perspectives on Central and Eastern European Studies

Published in association with the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg, Germany

Series Editors

Peter Haslinger, Director

Heidi Hein-Kircher, Head of the Department Academic Forum

Decades after the political changes that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe remains one of the most misunderstood parts of the world. With a special focus on the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, New Perspectives on Central and Eastern European Studies investigates the historical and social forces that have shaped the region, from ethnicity and religion to imperial legacies and national conflicts. Each volume in the series explores these and many other topics to contribute to a better understanding of Central and Eastern Europe today.

Volume 6

Russian Historiography from 1880 to 1905: Pavel N. Miliukov and the Moscow School

Thomas M. Bohn

Volume 5

The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790–1880

Borbála Zsuzsanna Török

Volume 4

The Middle-Income Trap in Central and Eastern Europe: Causes, Consequences and Strategies in Post-Communist Countries

Edited by Yaman Kouli and Uwe Müller

Volume 3

The World beyond the West: Perspectives from Eastern Europe

Edited by Mariusz Kałczewiak and Magdalena Kozłowska

Volume 2

Heritage under Socialism: Preservation in Eastern and Central Europe, 1945–1991

Edited by Eszter Gantner, Corinne Geering, and Paul Vickers

Volume 1

Rampart Nations: Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism

Edited by Liliya Berezhnaya and Heidi Hein-Kircher

Russian Historiography from 1880 to 1905

Pavel N. Miliukov and the Moscow School

Thomas M. Bohn

Translated from the German by Francis Ipgrave

First published in 2024 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

English-language edition

© 2024 Thomas M. Bohn

German-language edition

© 1998 Brill Deutschland GmbH | Böhlau Verlag

Originally published in German as

Russische Geschichtswissenschaft von 1880 bis 1905. Pavel N. Miljukov und die Moskauer Schule (= Beiträge zur Geschichte Osteuropas. Bd. 25)

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bohn, Thomas M., author.

Title: Russian historiography from 1880 to 1905 : Pavel N. Miliukov and the Moscow school / Thomas M. Bohn ; translated from the German by Francis Ipgrave.

Other titles: Russische Geschichtswissenschaft von 1880 bis 1905. English | Pavel N. Miliukov and the Moscow school

Description: English language edition. | New York ; Oxford : Berghahn Books, 2024. | Series: New perspectives on Central and Eastern European studies ; volume 6 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024001853 (print) | LCCN 2024001854 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805395485 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805395492 (epub) | ISBN 9781805395508 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Miliukov, P. N. (Pavel Nikolaevich), 1859-1943. | Historiography--Russia. | Statesmen--Russia--Biography.

Classification: LCC DK254.M52 B6413 2024 (print) | LCC DK254.M52 (ebook) | DDC 947.0072/2--dc23/eng/20240322

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024001853

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024001854

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-548-5 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80539-549-2 epub

ISBN 978-1-80539-550-8 web pdf

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805395485

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction

Part I. Teaching

Chapter 1. Institutional Framework Conditions for the Formation of the 1880s Generation

Chapter 2. Miliukov’s Scientific Career at the University of Moscow

Chapter 3. Miliukov’s Teaching Activities Abroad

Part II. Research

Chapter 4. The Scientific Paradigm of the Moscow School

Chapter 5. Miliukov’s Place in Russian Historiography

Chapter 6. Miliukov as a Historian of the Russian Revolution and of Bolshevik Russia

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index of Names

Index of Subjects

Tables and Figures

Tables

Table 1.1. Student numbers at Moscow University, 1880–1904

Table 1.2. Total number of hours for the eight-year course at classical gymnasia according to the curricula of 1864, 1871 and 1890

Table 1.3. Proportion of history lessons at Prussian, Austrian and Russian gymnasia and French lycées

Table 1.4. Curriculum at the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University in the academic year of 1864/65

Table 1.5. Model curriculum at the Faculties of History and Philology, August 1885

Table 1.6. Pupil numbers at Russian boys’ gymnasia and boys’ pro-gymnasia, 1882–1905

Table 1.7. Dissertations at the universities of the Russian Empire, 1805–1916 (magister degree and doctorate, without medicine)

Table 1.8. Awarding of academic degrees at the Faculty of History and Philology at Moscow University, 1865–1904

Table 1.9. Staff at the University of Moscow, 1880–1905

Table 1.10. Remuneration from fees for the teaching staff at the University of St Petersburg (1896)

Table 1.11. Remuneration from fees for professors at the University of St Petersburg by faculty (1896)

Table 1.12. Remuneration from fees for lecturers at the University of St Petersburg by faculty (1896)

Table 1.13. Remuneration from fees for the teaching staff at the Faculty of History and Philology at the University of St Petersburg (1896)

Table 2.1. Subscribers to the Commission for the Organization of Home Reading

Table 2.2. Distribution of subscribers to the Commission on the Organization of Home Reading by gender

Table 2.3. Distribution of subscribers to the Commission on the Organization of Home Reading by age group

Table 2.4. Distribution of subscribers to the Commission for the Organization of Home Reading by subject area

Table 5.1. Estimates for population figures in pre-Petrine Russia (in millions)

Figures

Figure 1.1. University foundations in the Russian Empire

Figure 1.2. Chairs at the Faculty of History and Philology according to the university statutes of 1863 and 1884

Figure 1.3. Ranking of teaching professions and academic degrees in the ranks of the civil service according to the university statutes of 1863 and 1884

Figure 1.4. Annual budget of a professorial family of five in 1863 and 1914

Figure 1.5. Annual salaries for paid teaching staff at Russian universities, 1863–1917

Figure 2.1. Professors in the Department of Russian History at the University of Moscow, 1821–1925

Figure 2.2. Miliukov’s courses at the University of Moscow, 1886–1895

Figure 2.3. Distribution of subscribers to the Commission on the Organization of Home Reading by place of residence in 1901

Figure 2.4. Occupational spectrum and social distribution of subscribers to the Commission on the Organization of Home Reading on November 11, 1895

Figure 4.1. The disputations of representatives of the Moscow School

Abbreviations

Preface

Das alte stürzt; es ändert sich die Zeit,

Und neues Leben blüht aus den Ruinen.

What’s old collapses, times change,

And new life blossoms in the ruins.

—Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell (Tübingen: Cotta, 1804), 175

Like no other, Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov embodies the tragic fate of political liberalism in the late Tsarist Empire. His rehabilitation in post-Soviet Russia was only completed in 2015 with the inclusion of his biography in the series The Lives of Remarkable People (Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liu-dei). One thing is clear: this epithet certainly fits. Were he not so remarkable, would Miliukov otherwise have been the subject of so much attention and such varied interpretations from so many historians? In any case, the personal data and the external facts surrounding his life and career are largely well known by now. Perhaps it is time to approach the problem of Miliukov in a different way. Thus far, the focus of interest has mostly been on the homo politicus. The focus of this book, however, is on the homo historicus. His professional socialization, the scientific paradigms and ideological components are all examined. Miliukov’s life and work will not be analyzed in the context of the history of the Constitutional Democrats in the period between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, but rather in the sphere of activity of the Moscow historians of Russia before the 1905 revolution.

Therefore, it is not party history, but the history of historiography that is the subject of this present work. It sees itself as a contribution to research on historicism and is dedicated to a structural history of historical thought. In order to emphasize the close interrelationship between historiography and politics in the period primarily treated in this study, equal importance is given to the fields of specialized scholarship and life praxis. What is new about Miliukov’s biography in this respect may be noted by experts. It is much more important, however, that Miliukov is recognized as a representative of a generation of historians. The following book is less about an individual personality than about the reflection of an epoch. This raises the question: what relevance do historical sociology and cultural history continue to have for historical scholarship to this day?

Those who deal with the Tsarist Empire involuntarily follow the figure of thought of backwardness which was already cultivated by the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century. If one consults historical comparative studies and accepts classical German historicism as an object of comparison, however, one comes to a surprising conclusion. It becomes clear that, in the field of historiographical history, it is by no means possible to point the finger of blame at Russia for following a special path. In sum, the purpose of this study is to point out to experts that, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, progressive historians did not exist only in the USA.

After Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it is again time to reflect on the course of Russian history and to recall the traditions of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. Pavel Miliukov believed that Kievan Rus’ played no constitutive role for the Tsarist Empire. Therefore, his Studies on the History of Russian Culture essentially began only in the sixteenth century. Miliukov’s goal was to replace the paradigm of national history with a social perspective. The course of historiography should not be determined by the legitimization of political goals, but by a critical examination of the present. In this sense, Mykhailo Hrushev’sky’s appeal to overcome the usual scheme of Russian history was directed not so much against the Moscow historical sociology as against the imperial historiography relying on the unity of the Eastern Slavs. Therefore we can still learn from pre-revolutionary historical sciences today.¹

The first edition of this book was published by Böhlau Verlag under the title Russische Geschichtswissenschaft von 1880 bis 1905. Pavel N. Miljukov und die Moskauer Schule (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna, 1998). A Russian translation by Dmitrii Toritsin appeared under the title Russkaia istoricheskaia nauka /1880 g.—1905 g./. Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov i Moskovskaia shkola by Olearius Press (St Petersburg, 2005). Francis Ipgrave is warmly thanked for the professional translation of the German original into English. The present version includes updates on the state of research and a revised bibliography.

Thomas M. Bohn

Giessen, March 31, 2023

Note

1. Myhkailo Hrushevs’kyi, Zvychaina skhema ‘russkoï’ istoriï i sprava ratsional’noho ukladu istoriï Skhidn’noho Slovianstva, in Stat’i po slavianovedeniiu. Vyp. I, 2nd edn, ed. V. I. Lamanskii (St Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, 1904), 298–304.

Introduction

Subject and Objective

When German historiography looks back on the tradition of its own discipline, in terms of scientification and professionalization, there is agreement on the pioneering role played in Europe until the last third of the nineteenth century by historicism. At the same time, the phrase crisis of historicism is often heard. This became apparent at the moment when specialized historiography obstructed the efforts to reorient historiography that were taking place on an international level at the turn of the century. While historicism was able to assert itself once again in the so-called Methodenstreit (methodological dispute) in Germany, pre-revolutionary Russian historiography was already based on completely different premises. Nevertheless, Soviet research resorted to the word crisis, which had been coined only for German historicism, in order to unmask bourgeois Russian historiography as backward. This pattern of interpretation obstructed Soviet historiography’s impartial view of the innovative achievements of pre-revolutionary historiography.

Decisive for the modernity of Russian historiography—modernity in the sense of overcoming historicism—was the influence of the so-called Moscow School of historians of Russia around Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii (1841–1911). In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, this group initiated the transition from the individualizing political and legal history pursued by Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev (1820–1879) and the State School towards a collective social and economic history. Their achievements in the research fields of early modern and modern history continue to be relevant up to the present day.¹ The school, in the proper sense, included those young historians at Moscow University who had been influenced by the university politics of the 1880s and by the populist-Marxist discourse of the 1890s, and who, under the aegis of Kliuchevskii, completed a dissertation in Russian history before or in the wake of the 1905 revolution. Among them are Viacheslav Evgen’evich Iakushkin (1856–1912), Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov (1859–1943), Matvei Kuz’mich Liubavskii (1860–1936), Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kizevetter (1866–1933), Mikhail Mikhailovich Bogoslovskii (1867–1929), Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov (1869–1927), and Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e (1873–1943). The contemporary name Moscow School or Kliuchevskii School has been taken up by researchers. However, thus far there has not been any unambiguous clarification of whether a grouping of Moscow historians of Russia into one scientific school is justified. This is one of the aims of this work.²

In order to capture the specifics of the Moscow School and the academic milieu of the 1880s and 1890s, Pavel N. Miliukov, who became known as the leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party after the 1905 revolution and as the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government after the February Revolution of 1917, seems to offer a particularly useful case study because he both played an active role in university life and led the way for his colleagues in terms of historical research. At the Paris ceremony in honor of his 70th birthday in 1929, Miliukov claimed that the function of the historian was connecting the past with the present.³ With this credo, as will be shown, he was indeed far removed from the scientific tradition of German historicism. For him, historical research meant deriving the effect from the cause, that is, explaining contemporary social structures in causal-genetic terms in order, irrespective of location, to define the future path. In this sense, historical discourse was always also, at the same time, social discourse.

In the field of teaching, Miliukov was committed to the universities’ right to autonomy and to the spread of higher education in the provinces, independently of the state. In addition, he was active both in the scientific societies led by the liberal professoriate and in the controversies, shaped by agrarian socialists and Marxists, over the consequences of the deficits in socio-economic developments in Russia. The stages of his scientific career reflect a number of aspects typical of the time. In this respect, it is also significant that Miliukov’s career as a Moscow historian came to an early end as a result of state repression.

In the field of research, and apart from Iakushkin, who had already studied under Solov’ev, Miliukov was the first student of Kliuchevskii to submit a magister’s dissertation. His work on the State Economy of Russia in the First Quarter of the 18th Century and the Reforms of Peter the Great, published in 1892, has remained a standard work in professional terms to this day. Contemporaries received it as the first articulation of economic materialism. Moreover, Miliukov was also the first representative of the Moscow School to present an overall account of Russian history. His Studies on the History of Russian Culture, published in three volumes from 1896 to 1904, established, even before the appearance of Kliuchevskii’s Course of Russian History, the new direction in Russian historical studies. Finally, in 1897 Miliukov also published the first volume of his study on the Main Currents of Russian Historical Thought, with which he sought to provide an account of the scientific direction he had chosen in his magister’s dissertation, and in which he demarcated the position of the Moscow School against Slavophile interpretations of Russian historiography. The renaissance that the work of the historian Miliukov experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union is manifested by the 1993–1995 reissue of his anniversary edition of Russian cultural history, published in the 1930s.

This personal portrait is not only intended to place Miliukov within Russian historiography. The interest of the present work is furthermore directed towards the intellectual and socio-historical structural contexts in the period between the Great Reforms of the 1860s and the revolution of 1905. With regard to the institutional framework of historical scholarship, a recourse to the university statutes of 1863 and 1884 is unavoidable. When considering the scientific climate at the Historical-Philological Faculty of the University of Moscow, the year 1880 offers itself as a caesura in several respects. Politically, a new era followed the crisis of 1879–1881, which had led to the assassination of Alexander II. For the Moscow School this also represents a key date, due to the appearance of the pre-print of Kliuchevskii’s pivotal doctoral dissertation The Boiar Duma of Ancient Rus’ and through his accession to the chair of Russian history which immediately preceded this. Finally, with regard to Miliukov, the year 1881 marked the resumption of his studies following a temporary relegation, and also the point at which he decided to specialize in the field of Russian history. The caesura of 1905 is set by the revolution. For Miliukov this represented a withdrawal from scientific life and the beginning of a career as a professional politician. Thus, for the period 1880–1905, there are three key aspects to be investigated: (a) the study of the organizational structure of Russian historiography in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, (b) the analysis of historiographical schemes developed before the 1905 revolution, and (c) the consideration of the interrelationship of historiography and politics among historians of the liberal camp.

Methodological Basis

In researching Miliukov and the Moscow School, it makes sense to consider the areas of teaching and research separately, so as to accentuate the particular specificities of these two aspects more clearly—without ignoring the interactions between them. While the first main section, Teaching, deals with the crisis phenomena of the university discipline of history and the academic milieu of the 1880s and 1890s, the second main section, Research, emphasizes the modernity of the sociological research approach of the Moscow historians and the social dimensions of Russian historiography through an analysis of Miliukov’s work. In both cases, a prerequisite chapter first explains subject-specific terms and general outlines, namely the institutional framework for the formation of the 1880s generation and historical sociology as a scientific paradigm of the Moscow School, respectively, and then uses a representative individual case—Miliukov—to illustrate their practical implications. The subsequent excursus deals with Miliukov’s role as a historian of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Russia. Methodologically, the first section is based on the ideal type of the 1880s generation (1) and the second section on the disciplinary matrix derived from the concept of the paradigm (2). Each of the aforementioned content-related complexes is then subjected to a systematic principle of structuring within the general chronological framework (3).

*

(1) In 1904, in an essay on The ‘Objectivity’ of the Sociological and Social-Political Knowledge, Max Weber introduced the term ideal type as a methodological tool to nurture attributive judgment in cultural studies.⁴ Social phenomena should be illustrated "through the one-sided accentuation of one or some points of view. The ideal type thus created then has the function of a utopia against which reality can be measured: the task of the historian is to determine in each individual case how close to or how far from reality stands that ideal image…. Ideal types are thus a means, but not the goal of research. The purpose of ideal-typical conceptualization is not to bring to consciousness the generic but, conversely, the peculiarity of cultural phenomena.⁵ In this way, through the construction of an ideal type, the specificities of individual social phenomena can be examined and, at the same time, their significance can be clarified from an overarching point of view. This concept is by no means clearly defined by Weber. In his 1913 essay On Some Categories of Understanding Sociology, he used the term Richtigkeitstypus (literally: correctness type) as a standard by which to understand social behavior.⁶ Weber retained this shift in emphasis from determining the cultural significance of social phenomena to examining social action and rational behavior in his major work, Economy and Society, published posthumously in 1922, in which he generally preferred the term pure type. At this point, the ideal type describes the a priori constructed purposive-rational course of an action, from which any deviation" caused by irrationalities becomes understandable.⁷

In this work, the achievements of Kliuchevskii’s students will be examined against the background of the situation facing young scholars at the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University. In order to conceive of the scientific middle class as a social group, the phenomenon of the 1880s generation (vos’midesiatniki), thematized in the memoir literature, is taken as an ideal type. In 1928, in an essay on The Problem of Generation, Karl Mannheim used two criteria to delineate the generational context as a social phenomenon: the generational sequence, that is, the biological rhythm in human existence, and the class situation, that is, the economic, hierarchical structure of society. In order to assign different individuals to a certain generation, the chronological simultaneity or the year of birth is not sufficient. Rather, a common historical-social living space is decisive. A generational connection exists when different persons participate in a common fate. Within this framework, dependent upon differing manners of processing, competing generational units can be formed.⁸

In the generational sequence, the 1880s generation represents the part of the intelligentsia that experienced its political socialization during the reactionary period of Alexander III’s rule (1881–1894) and which had to complete their scientific education under the authoritarian university statute of 1884. The class situation was characterized by the combination of two factors significant for the Russian university system. On the one hand, obtaining an academic degree under Russian examination conditions was only possible as preparation for a professorship. Second, the 1884 law made the acquisition of a professorship contingent on three years of the private lectureship (Privatdozentur). Therefore, the 1880s generation, which both presented its own scientific achievements and developed its own social activities in the 1890s, was bound to the private lectureship officially introduced in the 1884 statute.

Among those aged between thirty and forty years, the Privatdozent represented the penniless university teacher without any rights of his own. Despite existing vacancies in professorships, the Ministry of National Enlightenment failed to integrate the non-professorial teaching staff into the official academic establishment. Rather, fields of activity that the intellectual elite sought to pursue on their own in the sector of popular education were subject to state repression. As a result, the 1880s generation, which had grown up at the universities, found itself in the camp of opposition to the autocratic regime. This anti-state attitude was fostered by the intellectual dominance of positivist social philosophies. In the socio-political sphere, the 1880s generation was confronted with the question of how to modernize Russia in the emerging industrial age. The model propagated at the universities called for political participation and social solidarity. In the revolution of 1905, the Privatdozents of the 1880s generation then entered the political arena as ideologues of radical democratic or social reformist liberalism.⁹

This ideal-typical conceptualization of the 1880s generation highlights the general social relevance of the analysis of the legal and material situation of Privatdozents and of the scientific environment at Moscow University which follows in Chapters 1 and 2. At the same time, it also helps to explain the reasons for the deviations that Miliukov’s scientific career took from the course he had originally envisaged.

*

(2) In his 1962 essay The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn presented the thesis that progress in science does not take place through continuous change or the accumulation of factual knowledge and new findings, but through revolutionary processes, each of which represents a change in the paradigms that determine normal science. These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners. The variety of interpretations of the term paradigm sparked a discussion of Kuhn’s theses. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn had characterized the paradigm term by two features: model solutions had to be sufficiently ‘unprecedented’ to consistently attract a group of adherents, and sufficiently ‘open-ended’ to offer experts a reservoir of unsolved problems.¹⁰ In a Postscript written for a Japanese translation in 1969 and in an essay on Second Thoughts on Paradigms published in 1974, Kuhn further specified his conceptualizations. He distinguished between two variants. (1) He confessed to having introduced the term paradigm to describe the theoretical and methodological consensus of a scientific community, for which he now used the term disciplinary matrix. (2) The function of paradigm originally intended in the essay, however, should be defined by the term exemplar. Even if Kuhn later distanced himself from the concept of paradigm, due to the inflationary dimension it had taken on in the discourse on the theory of science,¹¹ his terminology does offer a useful tool for the following analytical approach based on the concept of the scientific school. One can speak of a paradigm when a certain historiographical work has the status of a model. The disciplinary matrix of historical science, on the other hand, describes the prevailing scientific paradigm.

Before determining the basic factors of the disciplinary matrix of historical science, a definition of scientific schools will first be derived from Kuhn’s theory of science. Kuhn uses the term school in the sense of a competitive struggle for the assertion of a new scientific paradigm, without however firming this up. This task was first undertaken by the German science theorist Hubert Laitko and the American sociologist Edward A. Tiryakian. Both assumed that, in addition to the cognitive component—the paradigmatic potency (Laitko)—a social component—the teacher-pupil relationship—also had to be taken into account. In the first case, in Kuhn’s logic, this meant that schools fulfilled their function at the moment when their respective positions within a scientific community attained a monopolistic position. In this context, Tiryakian proposed four criteria for the emergence of a scientific school: intellectual charismatic personality (school founder), institutional affiliation (university with a high reputation), use of a professional journal (media), and professional proclamation (program). In the second case, with regard to the personality of the teacher, Laitko described the range of variation of scientific schools by four different types: (a) school with a center-oriented structure and contact communication (grouping of students around a particular teacher); (b) a school with a center-oriented structure and indirect communication (gathering of followers around a particular theoretician); (c) a school without a center but with contact communication (cooperation of scientists of the same rank); (d) a school without a center and with indirect communication (individuals with a common research direction).¹²

Following Tiryakian’s criteria, it is possible to identify seven characteristics or preconditions which, in a modified form, can be taken as a basis for justifying the designation of the Moscow historians of Russia as a scientific school. (1) The historical-philological faculty of the University of Moscow formed the institutional framework. (2) While Kliuchevskii, as an intellectual charismatic personality, inspired the junior historians to independent research work, the universal historian Pavel Gavrilovich Vinogradov (1854–1925) promoted the formation of a group by initiating joint projects. (3) The introduction to Kliuchevskii’s Boiar Duma of Ancient Rus’, published in 1880 in Russkaia mysl’ and inaugurating the combination of administrative and social history, served as a manifesto. (4) Kliuchevskii’s doctoral dissertation, published in full in 1882, was the model against which his students measured themselves. (5) The scientific paradigm subsequently elaborated was historical sociology, influenced by Western European positivism. (6) Under Russian examination conditions, the attainment of an academic degree was reserved only for a narrow elite. In fact, the public defense of a dissertation was a prerequisite for admission to the scientific community. (7) The writing of a dissertation was in fact only feasible in Russia with a view to an academic career. According to the University Law of 1884, the young scientists who were eligible for it were obliged to pursue a private lectureship. Thus, within the school the principle of unity of research and teaching was preserved.

The Moscow historians of Russia had only a limited number of publications of their own. The preliminary publication of the extensive dissertations took place in the Uchenye zapiski Imperatorskogo Moskovskogo universiteta and the Chteniia Imperatorskogo Obshchestva istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete, but the actual research controversies or intellectual debates were generally carried out in the so-called thick journals (tolstye zhurnaly). Because of Kliuchevskii’s ambivalent role as a teaching personality, one can only speak of a school in the classical sense, following Laitko’s typology, with certain reservations. Although the professor constituted the center around which the historians of Russia orientated, direct communication was not particularly pronounced. This remained largely limited to the Imperial Society for History and Russian Antiquities, which Kliuchevskii chaired from 1893 to 1906.

Having integrated the Moscow School into Thomas S. Kuhn’s system of scientific theory, the next task is to establish the criteria for evaluating the scientific paradigm it represents. Jörn Rüsen laid the groundwork for this in his 1983 monograph Historical Reason by transferring Kuhn’s theses to historical science: Disciplinary matrix means: the factors or principles of historical thought in their systematic context that are decisive for history as a discipline. Rüsen designed a model in the form of a control circuit that captures the interaction of disciplinary and everyday factors specific to the science of history.¹³ After testing the model in research on historicism,¹⁴ Rüsen made some modifications and specifications in an essay on Historical Meaning Formation through Narrative, published in 1996. Historical meaning, with reference to everyday life, denotes an experience-based, action-oriented, and motivating conception of the passage of time in the human world.¹⁵

Rüsen defined the five regulatives or principles of historical meaning that constitute the disciplinary matrix of historical science as follows. (1) The starting point of historical thinking are the interests embedded in the practice of life. (2) Historical explanations are provided by aspects of interpretation. (3) Historical knowledge is gained from the sources with the methods of empirical research. (4) Historical knowledge gained from the research process is made accessible through forms of representation. (5) The task of historiography is to fulfill the functions of cultural orientation. In the interrelationship of these factors, Rüsen saw three dimensions of the formation of historical meaning. (1) Behind the interrelation of interests and functions lies a political strategy of collective memory. (2) The interaction of aspects of interpretation and methods results in a cognitive strategy of generating historical knowledge. (3) The relation of forms of representation to the functions of cultural orientation generates an aesthetic strategy of poetics and rhetoric of historical representation.¹⁶

In practical application, the individual factors of the disciplinary matrix of historical science developed from Kuhn’s concept of paradigm need to be filled with content. Only in this way can Kuhn’s theories which, in the proper sense, refer to the experimental natural sciences, also be of use to specialist historians. It should be noted, however, that after an initially all-too-casual use of Kuhn’s instruments, skeptical voices have arisen. Rather than paradigm shifts, researchers have begun to speak of developmental thrusts or modernization thrusts. Kuhn’s approach becomes beneficial when it succeeds in subjecting historiography to a typology. Horst Walter Blanke, for example, has tested Rüsen’s model on the scientific paradigms of Enlightenment history, historicism, and the historical social sciences for German historiography.¹⁷ On the basis of this structural-historical approach, Chapter 4 distinguishes the Moscow School of the last quarter of the nineteenth century from the State School around Solov’ev and the so-called St Petersburg School around Konstantin N. Bestuzhev-Riumin (1829–1897)¹⁸ and repudiates the Soviet thesis of the crisis of bourgeois historiography in Russia, which was taken from the debate on historicism in the Weimar Republic.

*

(3) The section Teaching focusses on the institutional level and deals with history as a university discipline. Here, the structure and the equipment of the history faculties as well as the curricula and examination regulations are considered, but so too are the social situation of teachers and students under the conditions of the university statutes of 1863 and 1884. The introduction of the private lectureship and the fee system were of particular relevance for young academics. In this context, four aspects of Miliukov’s integration into the scientific community will be examined: the study of history and the related examinations, the student movement, teaching activities, and cultural works. In the initial section, therefore, crisis phenomena in the historical-philological faculties will be elaborated, then the importance of universities for the development of political liberalism will be shown and, finally, a comprehensive picture of Miliukov’s university career will be outlined.

The overarching section Research focusses on the theoretical and methodological level and deals with historiographical questions. It deals with the crisis of Russian bourgeois historiography, which Soviet research elevated to a dogma. In this context, the comparison with German historicism forms an important basis for interpretation, since the Moscow School was characterized by the self-image of its own discipline as historical sociology. With regard to Miliukov, his main works will be analyzed and examined with regard to their reception. The innovations that Miliukov introduced into Russian historiography will be revealed by distinguishing them from corresponding contemporary works. The examination of reviews and disputes opens the view not only to research controversies, but also to ideological positions within the intelligentsia. In his Studies on the History of Russian Culture, Miliukov laid out his historical-theoretical and -methodological premises. Since the Studies have pedagogical pretensions, they must be examined in terms of their objectives and broad impact. In his other major works, Miliukov sought to dethrone two authorities who represented fixed points in pre-revolutionary historical thought, namely Peter the Great in the field of Russian historical process and Nikolai M. Karamzin (1766–1826) in the field of Russian historiography. Different standards are to be applied in the evaluation: as a standard work, the special study on The State Economy in Russia in the First Quarter of the 18th Century and the Reforms of Peter the Great is to be critically measured against the results of modern research. The historiography course on The Main Currents of Russian Historical Thought has the character of a survey and is to be distinguished from other contemporary contributions. Altogether, the second main part of this publication should thus provide new insights in three further areas: first, the concept of the Moscow School, hitherto used largely unreflectively in the research, will be given substance; second, the disciplinary matrix of Russian historiography dominated by this school at the end of the nineteenth century will be determined; and finally, Miliukov’s position in Russian historiography will be outlined.

Finally, a digression will discuss the form in which Miliukov represented the Moscow School in emigration. It should be borne in mind that the pre-revolutionary scientific paradigm was challenged not only by the Bolsheviks, but also by the Eurasians. In his contemporary historical works History of the Second Russian Revolution (1921–1923), Russia To-day and Tomorrow (1922), Russia’s Collapse (1925/1926), and Russia in Upheaval (1927), Miliukov took stock of the historical preconditions and political events that, in his view, had led to the fall of the Tsarist Empire and the establishment of Bolshevik rule. These works are important for the present study, firstly because, as a counterfoil, they illustrate the change of position that Miliukov, as a historian of the Moscow School, undertook in the course of his political career, and, secondly, because they show how Miliukov portrayed his own part in political decision-making.

Notes

1. The founders of the State School (gosudarstvennaia shkola) or Historical School of Law included, in addition to Solov’ev, the legal historians Konstantin D. Kavelin (1818–1885) and Boris N. Chicherin (1828–1904). Influenced by Hegel’s organicist conception of history, this group sought to derive the origin of the modern state from the ancient Russian clan, from the rodovoi byt. In addition to the Kievan period, research interest focused primarily on the Varangian problem and the reforming activities of Peter the Great. The central historical-theoretical category was Hegel’s construct of world-historical individuals. From the ideological point of view, the State School belonged to the camp of the so-called Westerners. The founding generation, which had already been active at Moscow University in the 1840s, was joined in the 1860s by a loose association of younger legal historians from various universities. Cf. K.-D. Grothusen, Die Historische Rechtsschule Russlands: Ein Beitrag zur russischen Geistesgeschichte in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Gießen: Schmitz, 1962), especially 235–38; G. M. Hamburg, Inventing the ‘State School’ of Historians, 1840–1995, in Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1999), 98–117; R. A. Kireeva, Gosudarstvennaia skola: istoricheskaia kontseptsiia K. D. Kavelina i B. N. Chicherina (Moscow: OGI, 2004).

2. Cf. A. S. Popov, V. O. Kliuchevskii i ego shkola: sintez istorii i sotsiologii (Moscow: Signal, 2001); N. V. Grishina, Shkola V. O. Kliuchevskogo v istoricheskoi nauke i rossiiskoi ku'ture (Cheliabinsk: Entsiklopediia, 2010).

3. [Otvetnoe slovo P. N. Miliukova], PNM SM, 260.

4. M. Weber, Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 19 (1904): 22–87, here 64. Reprint in: idem, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. J. Winckelmann, 7th edn (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1988), 146–214, here 190.

5. Ibid. (1904), 64–67, 76; (1988), 190–94, 202.

6. M. Weber, Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie, Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Kultur 4 (1913): 253–94, here 254. Reprint in: idem, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 427–74, here 428.

7. M. Weber, Grundriss der Sozialökonomik: III. Abteilung. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen, 1922), 1–4. Reprint in: idem, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der Verstehenden Soziologie, ed. J. Winckelmann, 5th rev. edn (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1972), 1–4.

8. K. Mannheim, Das Problem der Generation, Kölner Vierteljahreshefte für Soziologie 7, no. 2–3 (1928): 157–85 and 309–30, here 170–74, 180/181, 309–11. Reprint in: idem, Wissenssoziologie. Auswahl aus dem Werk, ed. K. H. Wolff (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1964) (2nd edn 1970), 509–65; here 524–28, 536, 541–44.

9. The Constitutional Democrats, referred to as the Professors’ Party, pr ovide a convincing example. In April 1906, 21 members of the 47-member Central Committee were listed as university professors. The average age was forty years. They had attended university during the reactionary era of Alexander III. Cf. the list of members in: Kadety v 1905-1906 gg. S predisloviem B. Grave, Krasnyi arkhiv 46 (1931): 42–43. Of the six historians on the Central Committee, Viacheslav E. Iakushkin, Aleksandr A. Kizevetter, Aleksandr A. Kornilov (1862–1925, educated at the Law Faculty), and Miliukov had not yet passed the level of Privatdozent. Evgenii N. Shchepkin (1860–1920) had a professorship in Odessa from 1898, although he only submitted a magister’s dissertation in 1902. Only the Kievan universal historian Ivan V. Luchitskii (1845–1918) held a full professorship. According to Valentin V. Shelokhaev’s lists of the members of the Central Committee of the Constitutional Democrats, there were 22 university teachers among the total of 54 persons in 1905–1907, and in 1907–1914 there were 19 university teachers among the total of 45 members. V. V. Shelokhaev, Kadety—glavnaia partiia liberal’noi burzhuazii v bor’be s revoliutsiei 1905–1907 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), 310–20; idem, Ideologiia i politicheskaia organizatsiia rossiiskoi liberal’noi burzhuazii, 1907–1914 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 207–11.

10. T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) (2nd enlarged edn 1970), 6, 10, citation, VIII.

11. T. S. Kuhn, Second Thoughts on Paradigms, in The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. with a critical introduction by F. Suppe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974) (2nd edn 1977), 460, 463, 471, 482.

12. H. Laitko, Der Begriff der wissenschaftlichen Schule—theoretische und praktische Konsequenzen seiner Bestimmung, in Wissenschaftliche Schulen, vol. I, ed. S. R. Mikulinskij et al. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1977), 257–90, here 277/278; idem, Nauchnaia shkola—teoreticheskie i prakticheskie aspekty, in Shkoly v nauke, ed. S. R. Mikulinskii et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 217–47, here 235; E. Tiryakian, The Significance of Schools in the Development of Sociology, in Contemporary Issues in Theory and Research: A Metasociological Perspective, ed. W. E. Snizeh, E. R. Fuhrman, and M. K. Miller (Westport, CT: Aldwych Press, 1979), 211–33, here 222/223.

13. J. Rüsen, Historische Vernunft. Grundzüge einer Historik I: Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1983), 24–29, citation, 24.

14. Cf. J. Rüsen, Historismus als Wissenschaftsparadigma: Leistung und Grenzen eines strukturgenetischen Ansatzes der Historiographiegeschichte, in Historismus in den Kulturwissenschaften: Geschichtskonzepte, historische Einschätzungen, Grundlagenprobleme, ed. O. G. Oexle and J. Rüsen (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996), 119–37.

15. J. Rüsen, Historische Sinnbildung durch Erzählen: Eine Argumentationsskizze zum narrativistischen Paradigma der Geschichtswissenschaft und der Geschichtsdidaktik im Blick auf nicht-narrative Faktoren, Internationale Schulbuchforschung 18 (1996): 501–44, here 509.

16. Ibid., 515/516.

17. H. W. Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1991), especially 47–66.

18. The term St Petersburg School is used in the literature to distinguish the historians of the University of St Petersburg from those of the University of Moscow. Cf. G. Vernadsky, Russian Historiography: A History, ed. S. Pushkarev, trans. N. Lupinin (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1978), 107 and 260; V. S. Brachev, Nasha universitetskaia shkola russkikh istorikov i ee sud’ba (St Petersburg: Stomma, 2001). There was no scientific school of St Petersburg historians in the sense defined in this work. Even Bestuzhev-Riumin’s doctoral students did not want to grant their teacher the nimbus of a school founder, since the latter had shown little openness to newer tasks and had largely withdrawn from university life in the 1880s due to his failing health. S. F. Platonov, Konstantin Nikolaevich Bestuzhev-Riumin, ZhMNP, no. 2 (1897): otd. 3-ii, 176. Reprint in: idem, Stat’i po russkoi istorii (1883–1902 gg.) (St Petersburg: Izd. A.S. Suvorina, 1903), 298. Izd. 2-oe. (1883–1912) (St Petersburg: Tip. M. A. Aleksandrova, 1912), 179; E. F. Shmurlo, Ocherk zhizni i nauchnoi deiatel’nosti Konstantina Nikolaevicha Bestuzheva-Riumina. 1829–1897 (Iur’ev: K. Mattisen, 1899), 156–57. Cf. also R. A. Kireeva, K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin i istoricheskaia nauka vtoroi poloviny XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1990).

PART I

Teaching

CHAPTER 1

Institutional Framework Conditions for the Formation of the 1880s Generation

Study Conditions and Student Numbers

The history of the Russian university can be traced back to the foundation of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg in 1725. The first functioning university was established in Moscow in 1755, but the systematic construction of a system of higher education did not take place until after the establishment of the Ministry of National Enlightenment in 1802 (Figure 1.1).¹ Therefore, Russian universities did not have the medieval tradition of their Western European counterparts. The Tsarist Empire was characterized by the monopolization of education by the state.² From 1835, the six Imperial Universities—Moscow, Kazan’, Kharkov, St Petersburg, Kiev and Odessa—had a common Imperial statute. In organizational terms, the universities were characterized by a twin structure: following the interim restriction of the statute of 1835, the German system, with its autonomous corporation of professors, which had been given preference in the university foundations of 1804, was supplemented in the university reform of 1863 by the French principle of compulsory study programs and annual examinations.³

Universities in the Russian Empire were distinctly elitist educational institutions. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were only nine universities for a total population of 125.6 million. The number of university students in 1899 was 16,703.⁴ Although the population of the German Empire in the same year was 54.3 million, barely half that of the Tsarist Empire, there were almost twice as many students enrolled at the twenty-two German universities.⁵ The rate of literacy in the Tsarist Empire in 1897 was just over 20 percent; less than 2 percent of the population had more than an elementary education.⁶ In this context, the universities, in addition to their function of introducing the country to scientific and technical progress from the West, also had the task of training educators, lawyers and doctors. They were expected to contribute to the modernization of the economy, the army and the bureaucracy, to increase the prestige of the empire and to satisfy its need for civil servants.⁷ Women had no place in this educational concept and remained excluded from the universities until they were finally admitted as guest students in the winter semester of 1905.⁸ It is striking that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the universities increasingly developed into training centers for lawyers and doctors: from the 1860s, at least 70 percent of all university students attended either the Faculty of Law or the Faculty of Medicine.⁹

The Ministry of National Enlightenment was faced with the dilemma that the universities’ wide-ranging impact could not be restricted to academic aims. From the end of the 1850s, student protests represented an important factor in social emancipation. Universities therefore not only constituted forums of public life, they also developed into potential centers of social rebellion.¹⁰ They were a barometer of society as the physician and educational politician Nikolai I. Pirogov put it in a memorandum on the University Question in 1863.¹¹ At the same time, the term university question (universitetskii vopros) became a contemporary catchword which alluded to the incompatibility of the Western model of higher education, based on academic self-government, freedom of teaching and learning and freedom of student lifestyle, with an autocratic system.¹² Following the era of the Great Reforms, during the tenure of the Ministers of National Enlightenment Count Dmitrii A. Tolstoi (1866–1880) and Count Ivan D. Delianov (1882–1897), no less than three different attempts were made at finding an answer to the politicization of the universities associated with this question: the Gymnasium Reform of 1871, the University Reform of 1884 and the initiatives in 1887 calling for a numerus clausus tied to class privileges. The solutions proposed were a classical education, state control of the universities and the regulation of student numbers.¹³ The following chapter will analyze these in terms of their consequences for the academic discipline of history.

Figure 1.1. University foundations in the Russian Empire.

Source: E. Amburger, Geschichte der Behördenorganisation Russlands von Peter dem Großen bis 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 1966), 465–67. A university had already existed in Dorpat under Swedish rule for several decades from 1632/34.

Table 1.1. Student numbers at Moscow University, 1880–1904.*

Source: Otchet o sostoianii i deistviiakh Imperatorskogo Moskovskogo Universiteta za 1880 god (Moscow, 1881), 102–3; … za 1881 god (Moscow, 1882), 90–91; … za 1883 god (Moscow, 1884), 110–11; … za 1884 god (Moscow, 1885), 116–17; … za 1886 god (Moscow, 1887), 114–15; … za 1889 god (Moscow, 1890), 128–29; … za 1893 god (Moscow, 1894), 166–67; … za 1895 god (Moscow, 1896), 208–9; … za 1897 god (Moscow, 1899), 243; … za 1898 god (Moscow, 1900), 244; … za 1899 god (Moscow, 1901), 246; … za 1900 god (Moscow, 1901), 255; … za 1901 god (Moscow, 1902), 252; … za 1902 god (Moscow, 1903), 255; … za 1903 god (Moscow, 1904), 259; … za 1904 god (Moscow, 1905), 232.

*The figures refer to 1 January in each case. No figures are available for the years 1883, 1886, 1888/89, 1891–1893, 1895, 1905.

The outward manifestation of the crisis in the humanities disciplines in the final quarter of the nineteenth century was the collapse in the number of students at the Faculties of History and Philology. Whereas the number of students in these faculties at the eight universities of the Russian Empire (excluding Tomsk) had peaked at 1,194 students in 1885, by 1899 this was down to only 685; a decline of 43 percent.¹⁴ The situation at the University of Moscow was less extreme, but just as conspicuous: by 1887, the proportion of students in the Faculty of History and Philology had risen to almost 10 percent of students in all faculties. Thereafter it fell to below 5 percent by 1897 and did not exceed the 10 percent mark again until 1904. The decline from 314 students in 1887 to 215 in 1897 represented a loss of 31.5 percent (Table 1.1). In the Brokgauz-Efron of 1902, Miliukov attributed this development to the fact that the main blow of the 1884 university reform had been to the Faculty of History and Philology. According to him, this had been transformed into a "special school for ancient languages with the supplementary subjects of history and literature."¹⁵ The university statutes stated that the prerequisite for attending university was the completion of the full gymnasia course and, following the gymnasium reform of 1871, the Maturity certificate (attestat zrelosti).¹⁶ According to the examination rules for the gymnasia issued by the Ministry of National Enlightenment, this Abitur was to testify to suitability for academic work (Art. 36).¹⁷ The rules stated explicitly that "the Abitur examination is not a questioning of memory, but a testimony as to the extent to which a young person has developed the ability to think appropriate to his age, whether he has a clear and functioning mind and a correct and sound judgement (Art. 67). The school-leaving examination covered the subjects of religion, Russian, Greek, Latin, mathematics and history (Art. 48). In the case of the ancient languages, both an oral and a written examination had to be passed, in Russian only a written examination, and in religion and history only an oral examination (Art. 49). The history exam covered the basic facts and dates" of national, Greek and Roman history, as well as aspects of geography (Art. 61).

The Tolstoian Gymnasium—named after the author of the 1871 statute—was a decidedly classically-oriented educational institution. Almost three-quarters of the weekly hours of the full gymnasium course were taken up by the ancient languages and mathematics (Table 1.2). According to the ministerial report for the year 1871, the number of hours allotted to the more difficult subjects had been increased for two reasons: …both with regard to the needs of the pupils, who can thus pursue these subjects under the more direct guidance of their teachers, and also to provide greater thoroughness to the teaching.¹⁸ In contrast to the timetable valid under the gymnasium statute of 1864, from 1871 the full gymnasium course contained forty-nine hours of Latin lessons (thirty-four in 1864) and thirty-six hours of Greek lessons (twenty-four in 1864). Mathematics and the natural sciences, which were still taught as independent subjects in 1864 (mathematics: 22; chemistry: 6; physics: 6), were allocated thirty-seven hours. The number of study hours devoted to religion was only revised in 1890 under Minister Delianov, following a demand by the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev, that they should be increased threefold. The hours for Latin were reduced from forty-nine to forty-two and for Greek from thirty-six to thirty-three. Physics was allocated seven hours as an independent subject, while mathematics was only given twenty-nine.¹⁹

In 1871, there was a reduction of two hours in the subject of history, with these being allocated to geography. This measure was justified in the official commentary on the examination regulations by the danger that teachers, in the form of lectures completely inappropriate in gymnasia, pass on to pupils either details which are far too specific and only burden the memory, or general knowledge of historical persons and events which are perfectly ideal for hindering the correct intellectual and moral development of the youth.²⁰ Official educational policy expressed hostility to history: the social status quo was not allowed to be questioned.²¹ In his memoirs, Miliukov looks back on his gymnasium years (1870–1877) with bitterness. History lessons had been limited to a chronology of battles and the genealogy of rulers, and contemporary history had not been dealt with at all: The goal had been achieved: complete indifference among the majority and an aversion among the best pupils to what was referred to here as history.²² A European comparison makes it clear that, contrary to ministerial assertions, it is by no means possible to speak of an oversupply of weekly lessons for history instruction in the Russian Empire: Russian gymnasia were still clearly in last place in this regard, even after the allotted hours were increased from twelve to thirteen in 1890 (Table 1.3).

Table 1.2. Total number of hours for the eight-year course at classical gymnasia according to the curricula of 1864, 1871 and 1890.

Source: I. Aleshintsev, Istoriia gimnazicheskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii (XVIII i XIX vek) (St Petersburg: O. Bogdanov,