Putin's Wars (8 page)
However, despite the fundamental difference between the communist internationalism
and the former Pan Slav nationalism, the two had some elements in common. There was,
first, their
messianism.
Similarly, communist Russia remained a special nation—not so much because of the supposed
spiritual, biological, or cultural superiority of the Russian people, but because
of its
vanguard role
in the world revolution. The second common element was its
paranoia.
The encirclement syndrome that characterized the nineteenth-century tsarist regime—at
that time engaged in the “Great Game” over Central Asia with the British Empire—was
strengthened even further in the young Soviet Union, which was declared the enemy
of the capitalist world. The communist leaders, and particularly Stalin, added another,
third element that was reminiscent of tsarist times: autocracy. It was not long before
these three elements, thoroughly mixed together, produced the same well-known result:
Great Russian nationalism and imperialist expansion. New in all this was that Russia
used the
internationalist
communist movement to further its
national
imperialist ambitions, a phenomenon that had already been observed by Joseph Schumpeter
in 1942, when he wrote:
The Communist groups and parties all over the world are naturally of the greatest
importance for Russian foreign policy. In consequence, there is nothing surprising
in the fact that official Stalinism has of late returned to the practice of advertising
an approaching struggle between capitalism and socialism—the impending world revolution—the
impossibility of permanent peace so long as capitalism survives anywhere, and so on.
All the more essential is it to realize that such slogans, useful or necessary though
they are from the Russian standpoint, distort the real issue which is Russian imperialism.
[54]
. . . The trouble with Russia is not that she is socialist but that she is Russia.
As a matter of fact, the Stalinist régime is essentially a militarist autocracy which,
because it rules by means of a single and strictly disciplined party and does not
admit freedom of the press, partakes of one of the defining characteristics of Fascism.
[55]
The secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 gave Stalin the
opportunity to annex the three Baltic states, a part of Poland, Bessarabia (Moldova),
and to attack Finland. All this had nothing to do with the international class struggle,
but everything to do with the restoration of the pre-1917 tsarist empire. During the
Second World War internationalist and universalist claims were—at least temporarily—put
aside. The war was celebrated neither as a “Great Proletarian War,” nor as a “Great
Soviet War,” which one might have expected, and even less as a war against the capitalist
“class enemy.” It went into Soviet history books as the
Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna
—the Great
Patriotic
War. After the Stalinist Purges of the 1930s
[56]
stirring up nationalist fervor was the only effective way for Stalin to unite the
people behind the regime. It is telling that even old Pan-Slav slogans emerged during
and after the war. According to Hannah Arendt, “Stalin came back to Pan-Slav slogans
during the last war. The 1945 Pan-Slav Congress in Sofia, which had been called by
the victorious Russians, adopted a resolution pronouncing it ‘not only an international
political necessity to declare Russian its language of general communication and the
official language of all Slav countries, but a moral necessity.’”
[57]
The Yalta Conference of February 1945, which gave Stalin a free hand in Eastern Europe,
was, in fact, the realization of an old Pan Slav dream: the unification of Eastern
Europe’s Slav peoples under Russian hegemony. According to George Kennan, not communism,
but territorial expansion was Stalin’s ultimate goal:
If Russia could not rely on the Western nations to save her, it then seemed to Russian
minds that the alternative lay not only in the utmost development of Russian military
power within the 1938 borders, but also in new territorial acquisitions designed to
strengthen Russia’s strategic and political position, and in the creation of a sphere
of influence even beyond these limits. In drawing up this expansionist program, Soviet
planners leaned heavily on the latter-day traditions of Tsarist diplomacy.
[58]
. . . It would be useful to the Western world to realize that despite all the vicissitudes
by which Russia has been afflicted since August 1939, the men in the Kremlin have
never abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion
which had once commended itself so strongly to Tsarist diplomatists.
[59]
In fact, despite the recurrent obligatory lip service to the ideal of “world revolution,”
the ultimate goal of the Soviet leadership was the defense and enlargement of the
Russian empire. This logic guided Soviet foreign policy until the very end of the
Soviet Union’s existence, including the—failed—invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. With
the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 the epoch of Russian imperial expansion seemed
to have come to a definitive end. The question was, however, whether Russia was prepared
to accept this new post-imperial reality—as other former European colonial powers,
such as Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal, had done before. In the next
chapter we will see how Russia struggled with the new status quo and how—after a short
period of post-communist
empire fatigue
—the old imperial habits and attitudes soon reemerged.
Carlos Malamud,
Historia de América
(Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2005), 66.
Voltaire, in his satirical novel
Candide ou l’optimisme
(1759), criticized Leibniz’s theorem that we live “in the best of possible worlds”
and gave as one of his counterexamples the case of a slave in Surinam whose leg had
been cut off because he had tried to escape. Diderot, in his
Supplément au voyage de Bougainville
(1772), criticized French Admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville who, in 1767, visited
Tahiti and had laid claim to the island for France. Diderot let an old and wise Tahitian
man describe the French visitors as follows: “ambitious and evil men: one day you
will know them better. One day they will return . . . to put you in chains, slit your
throats, or subjugate you to their extravagancies and to their vices, one day you
will serve under them.” The (French) text is available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8spvb10.txt
.
John Kenneth Galbraith,
The Age of Uncertainty
(London: BBC, 1977), 111.
The expression “the white man’s burden” came from the 1899 poem by Rudyard Kipling
in which he appealed to the United States to shoulder Britain’s imperial responsibilities:
Take up the White Man’s Burden
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.
(Quoted in Niall Ferguson,
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
(London: Allen Lane, 2003), 369.)
H. F. Wyatt, “The Ethics of Empire,” April 1897, in
Nineteenth Century Opinion: An Anthology of Extracts from the First Fifty Volumes
of
The Nineteenth Century
1877–1901
, ed. Michael Goodwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 267.
Wyatt, “The Ethics of Empire,” 268.
Quoted in Martin Gilbert,
Churchill: A Life
(London: Heinemann, 1991), 72.
Galbraith,
The Age of Uncertainty
, 124.
Galbraith,
The Age of Uncertainty
, 127.
Galbraith,
The Age of Uncertainty
, 127. Galbraith, who, in the beginning of the 1960s served as US ambassador to India,
recounted that he often met with the Indian leader Nehru and that “Nehru made no secret
of his British background and its influence on his political thought. He once said,
‘You realize, Galbraith, that I am the last Englishman to rule in India.’” (John Kenneth
Galbraith,
Name-Dropping: From F.D.R. On
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 132.)
In 1923, when this policy was at its apogee, the Dutch historian C. Te Lintum wrote:
“The ethical course or enlightened despotism that had, since 1870 (at least officially),
replaced the old egoistic exploitation policy, had also brought for the native more
transport facilities and more education, especially on Java.” (C. Te Lintum,
Nederland en de Indiën in de laatste kwart eeuw
(Zutphen: W. J. Thieme & Cie., 1923), 254.) The author added—paternalistically, “They
were a people living traditional lives, submissive and quiet, who held the Dutch rulers
in high regard.”
Cf. J. A. A. van Doorn,
Indische lessen: Nederland en de koloniale ervaring
(Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1995), 43. This Dutch self-satisfaction was still present
in 1941, when—during the German occupation!—a book titled
Daar wérd wat groots verricht
(Over there something great has indeed been achieved) was published, in which one
could read: “We brought peace and prosperity, under our government the population
on Java has grown tenfold, Indonesia has become one of the first countries of the
world in terms of production. We can point with pride to what we have achieved in
Indonesia” (ibid.). In spite of these fine words the Dutch—unlike the British—were
too obstinate to recognize the new post–World War II realities and, some years later,
would fight two colonial wars—euphemistically called “police actions”—which would
cost the lives of thousands of Dutch soldiers and tens of thousands of Indonesians.
Van Doorn,
Indische lessen
, 38. Van Doorn added: “That these high sentiments did not fit the existing colonial
interests, was still the least objection one might make. More questionable was the
sense of superiority hidden behind the ethical responsibility: the certainty that
it was the Netherlands especially that had had the calling to ‘elevate’ the indigenous
population and, after a while, the conviction, just as strongly held, that it had
completed this task in an excellent way. The myth of the Netherlands as a
gidsland
(guiding country) would, in particular, block the ability to assess the emerging nationalism
in a positive way, or even merely to notice it” (Van Doorn,
Indische lessen
, 38–39).
Hendrik Spruyt,
Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 57.
V. G. Kiernan,
America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony
(London: Zed Press, 1978), 269.
Vilfredo Pareto,
Trattato di sociologia generale,
Volume secondo, “I residui” (Milano: Edizione di Comunità, 1981), 123–124.
Aimé Césaire,
Discours sur le colonialisme
suivi de
Discours sur la Négritude
(Paris: Présence Africaine, 2004), 27–28 (emphasis in original).
Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man
(New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 148.
Karl Marx, Letter of June 18, 1862,
Marx Engels Werke
(Berlin/DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1974), Band 30, 249.
Quoted in Friedrich Meinecke,
Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte,
Werke Bd. I, Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Walther Hofer (Munich: R. Oldenbourg,
1976), 466.
Meinecke,
Staatsräson
, 466.
Meinecke,
Staatsräson
, 466.
Hans-Ulrich Wehler,
Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 181.
Wehler,
Kaiserreich
, 181.
Helge Pross,
Was ist heute deutsch?: Wertorientierungen in der Bundesrepublik
(Reinbek-Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), 62.
Pross,
Was ist heute deutsch?
49.
Wehler,
Kaiserreich
, 179.
Anthony D. Smith,
National Identity
(London: Penguin, 1991), 37. Cf. also E. J. Hobsbawm,
Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 49–50.
Herfried Münkler drew attention to the fact that for Roman authors, such as Virgil
and Horace, “empires are of world-historical importance, in a cosmological or salvationist
sense, as well as in terms of power politics. . . . Empires take it upon themselves
to shape the course of time. The strongest expression of this is the sacral charge
of the imperial mission. . . . In an age when decline and fall were seen as the natural
tendency of history, the world-historical role of empire was to arrest the decline
and to prevent the end of the world. . . . Once Christianity became the state religion,
it was necessary to give up some of the sacral components of the imperial mission
. . . . But the sense of sacrality remained so strong that in the eleventh century
the Hohenstaufen chancellery began to speak of the
sacrum
imperium—a term that then passed down into the Holy Roman Empire (of the German Nation).”
(Herfried Münkler,
Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 88–89.)
Cf. Laura Engelstein,
Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 103.
In Russian:
Pravoslavie: Samoderzhavie: Narodnost.
On the exact connotation of the Russian word
narodnost
(nationality), see note 35.
Alexander Chubarov,
The Fragile Empire - A History of Imperial Russia
(New York: Continuum, 2001), 61.
David Beetham,
Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics
(London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974), 186.
Perry Anderson,
Lineages of the Absolutist State
(London: Verso, 1979), 347.
The German equivalent of
narodnost
is
Volkstum
. Volkstum, however, has a more cultural connotation: it stands mainly for the
cultural
expression of the people (
Volk
) in folklore, customs, language, poems, popular myths, and so on. The Russian word
narodnost
has a more
spiritual
connotation and refers to the unique psychological and spiritual qualities that are
ascribed to the Russian people. This different focus probably results from the fact
that, unlike Germany’s population, the majority of the Russian population was illiterate
and excluded from (higher) culture. At the end of the nineteenth century, both German
Volkstum
and Russian
narodnost
—originally conceived as counterconcepts against the cosmopolitism of the French Revolution—would
acquire clearly
racist
overtones.
Cf. Frank Golczewski and Gertrud Pickhan,
Russischer Nationalismus: Die russische Idee im 19. und 20: Jahrhundert. Darstellung
und Texte
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 36.
Leonid Luks, “Die politisch-religiöse ‘Sendung’ Russlands,” in
Freiheit oder imperiale Größe: Essays zu einem russischen Dilemma
, ed. Leonid Luks (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2009), 48. Dostoevsky fully shared this
anti-Semitism and did not hesitate to use the pejorative word “Yid” in his
Writer’s Diary
. In a chapter titled “The Jewish Question,” he depicts a Jewish plot for world dominance,
writing, “the Jews reign over all the stock exchanges there . . . they control the
credit . . . they are the ones who control the whole of international politics as
well; and what will happen hereafter is, of course, known to the Jews themselves:
their reign, their complete reign, is drawing nigh!” (Dostoevsky, Fyodor.
A Writer’s Diary, Volume II: 1877–1881
, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997),
914.)
V. F. Zalevsky, “Chto takoe Soyuz Russkogo Naroda i dlya chego on nuzhen?” Excerpts
published in Golczewski and Pickhan,
Russischer Nationalismus
, 210–216.
“Resolution of the ‘Section for the Struggle against Jewish Supremacy’ of the Congress
of the Union of the Russian People in Nizhny Novgorod, November 1915,” in Golczewski
and Pickhan,
Russischer Nationalismus
, 216–221.
V. Ivanovich, ed.,
Rossiyskie partii, soyuzy i ligi
(Saint Petersburg, 1906), 117–122.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/a.k.harrington/urpprog.html.
Ivanovich,
Rossiyskie partii
.
Ivanovich,
Rossiyskie partii
.
Cf. Walter Laqueur,
Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 35. Cf. also Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 241.
Laqueur,
Black Hundred
, 20.
Laqueur,
Black Hundred
, 21.
Stepan Shevyrev, 1841, “Vzglyad Russkogo na sovremennoe obrazovanie Evropy” (A Russian’s
View of the Contemporary Development of Europe). In Golczewski and Pickhan,
Russischer Nationalismus
, 163.
Nikolay Danilevsky, “Rossiya i Evropa” (Russia and Europe), in Golczewski and Pickhan,
Russischer Nationalismus
, 181–183.
Arendt,
Totalitarianism
, 227.
Quoted in Arendt,
Totalitarianism
, 224.
Arendt,
Totalitarianism,
226.
Galbraith,
The Age of Uncertainty
, 136.
According to Yegor Gaidar, “Russia is unique in restoring a failed empire, which it
did in the period 1918–22. This required an unprecedented use of force and violence.
But that was not the only factor in the Bolshevik’s success. Messianic Communist ideology
shifted the center of political conflict from a confrontation between ethnic groups
to a struggle among social classes. That struggle garnered support from people in
the non-Russian regions, who fought for a new social order that would open the way
to a brilliant future, and played a large role in forming the Soviet Union within
borders resembling those of the Russian Empire.” (Yegor Gaidar,
Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), 17.)
