Marc Raeff As Correspondent: Letters to Isaiah Berlin, 1950-19731

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G. M. HAMBURG (Claremont, CA, USA)

MARC RAEFF AS CORRESPONDENT: LETTERS TO ISAIAH BERLIN, 1950-19731

Marc Raeff (1923-2008) was perhaps the most prolific historian of imperial Russia to be active in the West in the last half century.2 Born in Moscow just after the end of the Russian civil war, educated in Berlin and Paris before coming to the United States in 1941, he was a genuine cos- mopolitan who moved between languages and cultures with ease. At Har- vard University, where he was a student of Michael Karpovich, Raeff specialized in the political and intellectual history of pre-emancipation Russia. His doctoral dissertation analyzed Russian social thought in the

1. I wish to thank Mrs. Lillian Raeff for granting permission to publish Marc Raeff's letters to Isaiah Berlin. Works of Isaiah Berlin are reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of the Estate of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust. Copyright information for Berlin's published works is as follows (Full bibliographical cita- tions can be found in the notes, below): "Historical Inevitability," from Liberty copyright © Isaiah Berlin, 1954, 1969, 1997; "Two Concepts of Liberty," from Liberty, copyright ®Isaiah Berlin, 1958, 1969,_1997; "Montesquieu, " from Against the Current, copyright 0 Isaiah Berlin 1955; Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament, copyright ®Isaiah Berlin, 1970, 1972, 19073, 1975, 1978; The Hedgehog and the Fox, copyright (j) Isaiah Berlin, 1953; "Joseph de Maistre and Origins of Fascism," from The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Copyright (D The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust, 2003; "The Silence in Russian Culture," from Foreign Affair 36, copyright © Isaiah Berlin, 1957; "The Soviet Intelligentsia" from Foreign Affair 36, copyright ® Isaiah Berlin 1957. The unpublished letters from Berlin's papers housed in the New Bodleian Library, Oxford, are cited under copyright (j) the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2009. Finally, 1 owe gratitude to Professors Semion Lyandres, Samuel C. Ramer and Terence Emmons for reading and commenting on this article. 2. See Molly Molloy and Edward Kasinec, "Marc Raeff: A Bibliography," Russian Re- view 41, no. 4 (Oct. 1982): 454-71. See also Molloy and Kasinec, "Marc Raeff: A Bibliog- raphy," in Imperial Russia 1700 - 1917: Essays in Honor of Marc Raeff, edited by Ezra Mendelson and Marshall S. Shatz (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 289-311. For an updated version, see Malloy and Kasinec, "Mark Raeff: A Bibliography (1946-1993)," in https:www.questia-online-library.com/read/8608580? title= %20Raeff%3 A%20. emancipation and post-emancipation eras.3 His early books on the re- former Mikhail Speransky treated the intellectual roots of Speranksy's statecraft and addressed the most vital dimensions of Russian politics dur- ing the first third of the nineteenth century.' Raeff classic 1966 book on the Russian intelligentsia investigated the political, social and psycho- logical factors responsible for its genesis.5 His editions of materials on the Decembrist movements and on Russian intellectual history' served two generations of students as introductions to basic problems in imperial history. Later books, such as his 1983 study of the well-ordered police state in Russia and Germany8 and his marvelous 1990 analysis of the Russian emigration9 employed rich cross-cultural and comparative perspectives in treating political ideas. His 1983 survey of imperial Russian politics and society was a stimulating overview of that complex subjects.10 These landmark books were accompanied by a torrent of learned articles on vir- tually every aspect of Russian history from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. One of the most important influences on Raeff intellectual formation and early career was Isaiah Berlin, who taught a course at Harvard in 1949 on Russian intellectual history and who became, in the 1950s and 1960s, the leading public authority on the Russian intelligentsia, the European "counter-Enlightenment" and European liberalism. Berlin com- bined a rare liveliness of personality, precision of mind and philosophical erudition to produce a series of public lectures and essays focusing on the central problems of modem political thought - individual freedom and

3. See "The Peasant Land Commune in the Thinking of Russian Publicists: Laissez- Faire Liberalism in the Reign of Alexander II," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1950. 4. Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822 (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1956); idem.,Michael Speranksy: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772-1839 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957). 5. Raeff, The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Russian Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace � World, 1966). 6. Raeff, editor, The Decembrist Movement (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966). 7. Raeff, editor, Russian 1intellectual History. An Anthology (New York: Harcourt, Brace � World, 1966). 8. Raeff, 77re Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change Through Law in Germany and Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1983). 9. Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919-1939 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press 1990). 10. Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia. State and Society in the Old Regime, trans- lated by Arthur Goldhammer, forward by John Keep (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983).