Putin's Wars (4 page)

In Russia internal despotism and external imperialism went hand in hand. They were,
so to speak, inseparable twin brothers. We can distinguish five factors that played
a role in establishing this link:

1. Territorial expansion gave
   extra legitimation
   to the rule of the despot.
   

2. Territorial expansion functioned as a
   surrogate satisfaction
   for the disenfranchised (serf) population.
   

3. Because despots tend to
   reign for longer periods
   than democratically elected leaders, they are in a better position to make long-term
   projects, especially those concerning imperialist territorial expansion.
   

4. Despotic rule as such
   fits better
   with imperial rule than with democratic rule. Despotic and imperial rule are
   congenial.
   

5. Despotic rule is not only more apt to generate imperialist policies than non-despotic
   rule, it also has a tendency—as in a dialectical process—to be
   strengthened
   , in its turn, by the empire, because its vast surface and the many different subjugated
   populations will hamper the establishment of a more democratic rule. In this sense
   despotic rule and imperialism are
   mutually reinforcing
   processes.
   

Despotic rule means suffering for the population, which is denied basic human freedoms
and civil rights. A despotic tsar does not legitimize his absolutist rule by a reference
to the popular will, but to divine right. This legitimacy, based upon a metaphysical
droit divin,
will be strengthened when the ruler can boast important imperial conquests. Imperial
conquests provide, so to speak, an
additional legitimacy
for his rule
.
This same mechanism can be seen to play a role in Putin’s (partial) rehabilitation
of Stalin. Stalin’s “geopolitical genius,” that is, his territorial expansionism,
is used to (re-)legitimate his regime.

Since the
Sobornoe Ulozhenie
of 1649, which is the social charter of Russian absolutism, the enserfment of the
Russian peasantry, which had already begun two centuries earlier, was definitively
established. From that moment on Russian serfs were irreversibly bound to the soil
of their master. Moreover, the towns were subjected to tight controls and sealed off
from the rest of the country. The urban poor were considered as state serfs. Only
taxpayers (that is, the aristocracy and the rich merchant class) could be legal residents.
No inhabitant could leave without royal permission.
^[28]
Rural migration was definitively stopped. Serfdom, however, was not in the interest
of the private landowners alone. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian
state owned land with twenty million serfs on it. This was 40 percent of the peasant
population.
^[29]
This population was literally the property of the state. A population that has
practically no rights, not even the ability to move freely around the home country,
cannot have the personal pride and individual satisfaction of free people. In such
a case, the home country’s imperial conquests provide an ersatz satisfaction. Feelings
of powerlessness and a lack of personal pride and individual accomplishment are compensated
by a process of identification with the power and the glory of their country. The
lack of personal respect that they receive as individuals is compensated by the respect—and
fear—that their home country inspires. “If a man is proud of his Belief, his Fatherland,
his People,” one can still read in an anonymous Russian publication of 2007 attacking
democracy, “he finds internal pride in himself as a representative of this great people
and great country.”
^[30]
This mechanism can be observed in a population of serfs that has been enslaved,
as well as in a population that gives up its original freedom and enslaves
itself
for the sake of national glory. John Stuart Mill already described this mechanism
in his
Considerations on Representative Government
(1861), where he wrote:

There are nations in whom the passion for governing others is so much stronger than
the desire of personal independence, that for the mere shadow of the one they are
found ready to sacrifice the whole of the other. Each one of their number is willing,
like the private soldier in an army, to abdicate his personal freedom of action into
the hands of his general, provided the army is triumphant and victorious, and he is
able to flatter himself that he is one of a conquering host, though the notion that
he has himself any share in the domination exercised over the conquered is an illusion.
A government strictly limited in its powers and attributions, required to hold its
hands from overmeddling, and to let most things go on without its assuming the part
of guardian or director, is not to the taste of such a people.
^[31]

According to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk this tendency to compensate one’s
lack of personal self-respect by indulging in the imperialist glory of one’s home
country can be observed especially in the nation states of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. These are for him “experiments in collective self-esteem and self-aggrandizement,
directed by the mass media.” The foreign policy of these national states, “insofar
as it included imaginary competition, was always dramatized by tensions of respect
and disrespect.”
^[32]
This element of
surrogate satisfaction
must not be underestimated. It clearly still plays an important role in present-day
Russia, where citizens, whose political freedoms are more and more restricted, long
for “national greatness” and a recovery of “Russia’s glorious past.”
^[33]

Despotic rulers are sometimes poisoned, sometimes deposed. However, as a rule, they
tend to have
longer reigns
than those of their democratic counterparts, who, at regular intervals, have to expose
themselves to elections. Their long reigns enable despots to initiate long-term projects,
such as territorial conquests, and bring them to fruition. Russia’s kings and tsars
were often blessed with long lives, which led to extraordinarily long reigns. This
was the case for the first three rulers, who may be considered the founders of the
Russian imperial project. Ivan III (the Great) reigned for forty-three years, his
successor Vassily III, for twenty-eight years, and Ivan IV (the Terrible), who was
the first to call himself tsar, for thirty-seven years. Between 1462 and 1584 these
three rulers reigned for 108 years altogether, a period that was only interrupted
for fourteen years when Ivan IV was a minor. It is, therefore, no surprise that under
this long and stable rule the foundations for Russia’s continuous expansion were laid.

Of course long reigns of monarchs were not a privilege of Russia alone. Absolutist
monarchs in Western Europe equally could reign for long periods during which they
were able to undertake ambitious expansionist projects. Louis XIV, the French
roi soleil,
is a good example of this. But with the end of absolutism in Western Europe and the
advent of parliamentary democracy, Russia’s autocratic government gained an advantage.
This advantage remained when tsarist autocracy made way for communist dictatorship.
Stalin, who ruled for almost thirty years, was as staunch an empire builder as Ivan
the Terrible, whom—in fact—he surpassed by creating the greatest Russian empire ever.
^[34]
Vladimir Putin’s attempt to rule possibly for twenty-four years must be seen within
this perspective. Putin considers this long personal rule as a necessary precondition
for his supreme geopolitical goal: the restoration of the lost empire.

There exists, furthermore, a fundamental mismatch between democratic rule and imperial
rule. Democracies are based on the principle of the fundamental
equality
of their citizens. Imperial rule is based on a basic
in
equality between the rulers and the ruled.
^[35]
Imperial rule, exercised by a despotic ruler, is, therefore, more logical and consistent,
because no distinction is made between the inhabitants of the imperial mother country
and the inhabitants of the imperial possession: in fact
no one
is a citizen. All are, in the most literal sense,
subjects.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse stressed the

direct connection, a military nexus, between the exercise of imperialist force overseas
and the application of force to repress domestic unrest; time and again we find that
not only the same methods and equipment were deployed but also the same personnel.
^[36]
. . . In Russia, with tsarist generals, the great Suvorov among them, stamping
on rebels at home and other peoples in Asia were always twin employments. This gives
a concrete significance to the saying that a people that oppresses another nation
cannot itself be free.
^[37]

The last, and fifth, point is that the
vastness
of an empire strengthens despotic rule. This was an argument that was already being
used by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers. Their argument was that
huge countries with large populations could be neither prosperous nor democratic.
This argument was used especially by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom the ideal state
was a city-state, the size of Geneva. “Size of states!” he wrote, “first and most
important source of human misery, and especially of the many disasters that undermine
and ruin the civilized peoples. Almost all small states, whether republics or monarchies,
prosper only by the fact of being small.”
^[38]
And he added: “All large states, crushed by their own mass, are suffering.”
^[39]
Rousseau’s aversion to big states was shared by Voltaire, who wrote: “Men seldom
deserve to govern themselves. This happiness seems to be the lot only of small nations
hidden in islands, or between mountains, like rabbits who hide from the carnivorous
animals; but in the end they are found and devoured.”
^[40]
Adam Ferguson, their contemporary, and one of the leading figures of the Scottish
Enlightenment, wrote, in a similar vein, in
An Essay on the History of Civil Society
(1767):

Small communities, however corrupted, are not prepared for despotical government:
their members, crowded together, and contiguous to the feats of power, never forget
their relation to the public; they pry, with habits of familiarity and freedom, into
the pretensions of those who would rule. . . . In proportion as the territory is extended,
its parts lose their relative importance to the whole. Its inhabitants cease to perceive
their connection with the state, and are seldom united in the execution of any national
. . . designs. Distance from the feats of administration, and indifference to the
persons who contend for preferment, teach the majority to consider themselves as the
subjects of a sovereignty, not as the members of a political body. It is even remarkable
that enlargement of territory, by rendering the individual of less consequence to
the public, and less able to intrude with his counsel, actually tends to reduce national
affairs within a narrower compass, as well as to diminish the numbers who are consulted
in legislation, or in other matters of government.
^[41]

And Ferguson concluded:

Among the circumstances, therefore, which . . . lead to the establishment of despotism,
there is none, perhaps, that arrives at this termination, with so sure an aim, as
the perpetual enlargement of territory . . . . In the progress of conquest, those
who are subdued are said to have lost their liberties; but from the history of mankind,
to conquer, or to be conquered, has appeared, in effect, the same.
^[42]

These early laudatory speeches in praise of
small is beautiful
were written before the American Revolution, at a time when it was almost axiomatic
that democratic rule was only possible in small territories, such as the ancient Greek
polis
or the Italian and Swiss city-states. However, even in the twentieth century authors
continued to express their doubts about the viability and utility of large states.
In 1914 the British historian Sir John Seeley made the following remark about the
size of the British empire: “At the outset we are not much impressed with its vast
extent, because we know no reason, in the nature of things, why a state should be
any the better for being large, and because throughout the greater part of history
very large states have usually been states of a low type.”
^[43]
He added: “For a long time no high organisation was possible except in very small
states.”
^[44]
This assessment led him to make the following remark about Russia: “We cannot,
it is true, yet speak of Russia as having a high type of organisation.”
^[45]

The United States was the first counterexample, showing—contrary to all historical
evidence—that it was possible to organize a democratic society over a large territory.
But the young United States was not an empire; it was a former colony with a homogeneous
population that had liberated itself from British rule.
^[46]
Russia was different. It was from its foundation an imperialist, as well as an
absolutist state: continuously expanding its territory and subjugating and incorporating
foreign peoples within its frontiers. Its mere size and its heterogeneous populations
seem, indeed, to have been determining factors that have hampered its development
into a modern, democratic polity.