The origins of Russia was a major battlefield in this war between historians. Monarchists subscribed to the so-called Norman theory, originally devised by German historians in the eighteenth century, which maintained that the first ruling princes had arrived in Russia from Scandinavia (in the ninth century) by invitation from the warring Slavic tribes. The only real evidence for this argument was the Primary Chronicle - an eleventh-century account of the founding of the Kievan state in 862 - which had probably been written to justify what actually amounted to the Scandinavian conquest of Russia. The theory became increasingly untenable as nineteenth-century archaeologists drew attention to the advanced culture of the Slavic tribes in southern Russia. A picture emerged of a civilization stretching back to the ancient Scythians, the Goths, the Romans and the Greeks. Yet the Norman theory was a good foundation myth for the defenders of autocracy - supposing, as it did, that without a monarchy the Russians were incapable of governance. In Karamzin's words, before the establishment of princely rule, Russia had been nothing but an 'empty space' with 'wild and warring tribes, living on a level with the beasts and birds'.164 Against that the democrats maintained that the Russian state had evolved spontaneously from the native customs of the Slavic tribes. According to this view, long before the Varangians arrived the Slavs had set up their own government, whose republican liberties were gradually destroyed by the imposition of princely rule. Versions of the argument were made by all those groups who believed in the natural predilection of the Slavic people for democracy: not just the Decembrists but left-wing Slavophiles, Polish historians (who used it to denounce the Tsarist system in Poland), and Populist historians in the Ukraine and (later on) in Russia, too.
Another battlefield was medieval Novgorod - the greatest monument to Russian liberty and, in the Decembrist view, historic proof of the people's right to rule themselves. Along with nearby Pskov, Novgorod was a flourishing civilization connected to the Hanseatic League of German trading towns prior to its conquest by Tsar Ivan III and its subjugation to Muscovy during the late fifteenth century. The Decembrists made a cult of the city republic. As a symbol of the people's long-lost freedoms, they saw its veche, or assembly, as a sacred legacy connecting Russia to the democratic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. The teenage members of the 'holy artel' (1814-17) - among them several of the future Decembrists - opened all their meetings with the ceremonial ringing of the veche bell. In their manifestos the Decembrists used the terminology of medieval Novgorod, calling the future parliament the 'national veche'.165 The myth of Novgorod took on a new meaning and subversive power after the suppression of their uprising. In 1830 Lermontov wrote a poem entitled Novgorod ('Brave sons of the Slavs, for what did you die?'), in which it was left deliberately unclear whether it was the fallen heroes of medieval Novgorod or the freedom fighters of 1825 whose loss was to be mourned. The same nostalgic note was struck by Dimtry Venevitanov in his pro-Decembrist poem Novgorod (1826):
Answer great city:
Where are your glorious days of liberty,
When your voice, the scourge of kings,
Rang true like the bells at your noisy assembly?
Say, where are those times?
They are so far away, oh, so far away!166
The monarchist perception of medieval Novgorod formed a stark contrast. According to Karamzin, Moscow's conquest of the city was a necessary step towards the creation of a unitary state, and was recognized as such by its citizens. This submission was a sign of the Russian people's wisdom, in Karamzin's view: they recognized that freedom was worth nothing without order and security. The Novgoro-dians were thus the original consenting members in the leviathan of autocracy. They chose the protection of the Tsar in order to save
themselves from their own internal squabbles, which had played into the hands of the city's boyars, who became despotic and corrupt and who threatened to sell out to the neighbouring state of Lithuania. Karamzin's version was almost certainly closer to the historical truth than the Decembrists' vision of an egalitarian and harmonious republican democracy. Yet it too was a justifying myth. For Karamzin the lesson to be learned from his History was clear: that republics were more likely to become despotic than autocracies - and a lesson well worth underlining after the collapse of the French republic into the Napoleonic dictatorship.
