Leibnitz, the great German philosopher and scientist, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, once expressed his envy of Russia. He argued that because Russia had neither civilization nor history, the reforming tsar, Peter, could start with a tabula rasa. His line of reasoning was based on the assumption that people and institutions are infinitely malleable. Of course Leibnitz lived in an age more innocent than ours, and no one today would make such a naive statement. We know that history never starts completely anew and that the past not only matters, but sometimes weighs heavily on the present.

Obviously both change and continuity are real. Modern Russia is not what it was a hundred or two hundred years ago, and to believe that Russians are condemned to repeat the past forever is a crude error. But at the same time, there are trends and mental attitudes which continue for a long, long time. Church historians, for example, have shown that some unique tenets of the Orthodox faith and ideas held by such major authors as Tolstoi and Dostoevskii reflect features of Russian paganism, even though the people had converted to Christianity over one thousand years ago. Stalin consciously modeled himself on the sixteenth-century Tsar Ivan the Terrible, and Soviet propagandists at the time of the Second World War reminded Russians how Teutonic (i.e., German) warriors had behaved in the thirteenth century. Such examples could easily be multiplied.