Freedom and Unfreedom in the Russian Empire in the Debate between Chicherin and Rennenkampf at the End of the Nineteenth Century

This article treats the polemic between the conservative-liberal Boris Chicherin and Nikolai Rennnenkampf on the Polish and Jewish questions. Some portions of the exchange appeared in legal, and others in clandestine editions. The initial critical encounter between them in the early 1880s was an abstract debate about the metaphysical grounding of rights. But already at that time, the two opponents raised the fundamental question as to whether Russia’s political future would focus on individual liberty or on the will of state officials and that of the majority in society. The polemic continued in the mid-1890s with Chicherin’s publication of Kurs gosudarstvennoi nauki, in which the conservative-liberal criticized the Church and the national policy of the Empire. The more conservative Rennnenkampf answered with two open letters,in which he castigated Poles for threatening the social equilibrium in the Western provinces of the Empire. Rennenkampf also viewed the Jewish question as “incomparably more complex” than the Polish question. Chicherin responded to Rennenkampf in a short book published abroad. He did not agree with Rennenkampf ’s assertion that the Jewish problem was “more complex” than the Polish question; indeed, Chicherin thought it “much simpler”. By the 1890s, Chicherin had changed his ideas about the Polish question but also about Russia’s readiness for constitutional government. Indeed, he had reached the conclusion that Russia itself was ready for a representative assembly. He was troubled by the Petersburg government’s promotion of Orthodoxy and of Russian language on the Empire’s western periphery. For Chicherin, the encounter with Rennenkampf had the highest possible stakes — the choice between freedom and unfreedom inside Russia itself. Rennenkampf called for unrelenting pressure on Russia’s “enemies”.