Putin's Wars (9 page)

In retrospect, 1991 offered the first real chance in modern Russian history to break
the infernal cycle of imperialist expansion and colonial subjugation of neighboring
peoples. It was not a war that caused the breakup of the empire. The empire collapsed
because of its
internal
tensions: its inefficiently planned economy, its lack of freedom, its corruption,
and its bureaucratic overload. “Many Russians were weary of supporting and subsidizing
the economies of poorer regions of the USSR, such as Central Asia, and argued that
economic reforms and modernization in Russia had a better chance if Russian statehood
was dissociated from its colonial past.”
^[1]
For the young, liberal reformers the loss of empire was a real liberation, it was
like the loss of a historical ballast. They knew, intuitively, that Russia could only
proceed further on the road toward a liberal, Western-style democracy if it were able
to shake off its centuries-old legacy of imperial conquest and oppression. According
to Igor Yakovenko, “the collapse of the USSR was the luckiest event in the past half-century.”
^[2]
Why? Because, as Brzezinski rightly remarked, “Russia can be either an empire or
a democracy, but it cannot be both.”
^[3]
Democracy and empire mutually exclude each other.
^[4]
According to Charles Tilly, “segments of empire can in principle achieve some democracy
but
whole empires remain undemocratic by definition
; at an imperial scale their segmentation and reliance on indirect rule bar equal
citizenship, binding consultation, and protection.”
^[5]
Zbigniew Brzezinski, therefore, was right when he wrote: “In not being an empire,
Russia stands a chance of becoming, like France or Britain or earlier post-Ottoman
Turkey, a normal state.”
^[6]

The demise of the Russian empire was an atypical event. Apart from an independence
movement in the Baltic republics that had started earlier, it found its basis not
so much in the periphery—in the nationalism of the colonized nationalities—as in the
nationalism of the colonizing
center
: Russia. This was one of the contradictory outcomes of the Soviet Union, in which
ethnic Russians were in control of the party, the army, the KGB, and the heavy industry,
but, at the same time, the Russian national identity was suppressed in favor of an
invented, mostly artificial “Soviet” citizenship. Indeed, “a strong Russian nationalist
movement . . . was in fact the most potent mobilizing force against the Soviet state.
It was the merger of the struggle for democracy, and the recovery of Russian national
identity under Yeltsin’s leadership in 1989–91, that created the conditions for the
demise of Soviet communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union.”
^[7]

There existed in the center even a certain
resentment
against the other nationalities, some of which had a higher standard of living.
^[8]
Others, poorer ones, got subsidies from Moscow to balance their budgets. In the
end
all
profited from the center by buying their energy at cheap, subsidized prices. The
subsidies were significant. In 1991, for instance, seven Soviet republics received
substantial subsidies from the Union Budget, which, in the cases of Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan amounted to almost one half of their state budgets (46.6 percent and 42.9
percent, respectively).
^[9]
It was, therefore, no surprise that in the eyes of the average Russian the empire
was no longer considered to be advantageous, but, on the contrary, a heavy burden
that only cost them money.
^[10]
Russian nationalism, instead of being a motor of Russian expansionism, had become
the motor of the Soviet Union’s disintegration in a process of
empire fatigue.
This empire fatigue could have been the starting point for a revival of the Russian
nation on a fundamentally new basis—that of a democratic Russia that had freed itself
from its imperialist drive. Severing the old colonial ties can be advantageous for
both the colonial power and the former colonized peoples. Adam Smith had already written
during the American Revolution:

“Under the present system of management, therefore, Great Britain derives nothing
but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies. To propose that Great
Britain should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies, and leave them
to elect their own magistrates, to enact their own laws, and to make peace and war
as they might think proper, would be to propose such a measure as never was, and never
will be adopted, by any nation in the world. No nation ever voluntarily gave up the
dominion of any province, how troublesome so ever it might be to govern it, and how
small so ever the revenue which it afforded might be in proportion to the expense
which it occasioned. . . . The most visionary enthusiast would scarce be capable of
proposing such a measure with any serious hopes at least of it ever being adopted.”
. . . If Great Britain, however, would decide to do so and would sign a free trade
treaty with its former colony, it would not only save money, but “by thus parting
good friends, the natural affection of the colonies to the mother country which, perhaps,
our late dissensions have well nigh extinguished, would quickly revive. It might .
. . favour us in war as well as in trade, and instead of turbulent and factious subjects
to become our most faithful, affectionate, and generous allies.”
^[11]

Adam Smith spoke wise words. But he also considered it unthinkable that a colonial
power would voluntarily give up its colonies. However, this was what happened in 1991
in Soviet Russia. It was not only a huge historical opportunity for developing a democracy
in Russia, it was also a unique opportunity for Russia to establish new, friendly
relations with the former Soviet republics.

Unfortunately the reality was different. The empire fatigue was of short duration.
Almost immediately after the empire had actually collapsed, it was followed by post-imperial
pain.
This is a natural syndrome in former empires. As early as the nineteenth century British
authors predicted a national—and international—disaster if the British Empire should
ever cease to exist.
^[12]
After the Treaty of Saint-Germain, in September 1919, and the dismemberment of
the Hapsburg Empire by the Allies, the inhabitants of the new rump state of Austria
experienced, apparently, such a “shock of lost empire.” They lived “in a climate of
apathy and general depression.”
^[13]
In the Netherlands, after World War II, there was a popular proverb, “Indië verloren,
rampspoed geboren” (“If Indonesia is lost, it will be the beginning of catastrophe”).
^[14]
A similar feeling of national disaster could also be found in decolonizing France,
where it led to the emergence of the OAS, a right-wing terrorist resistance organization.
Yegor Gaidar described this post-colonial pain in Russia as follows:

There is a medical phenomenon in which a person who has had a limb amputated perceives
that limb to be still causing pain. The same phenomenon applies to the post-imperial
consciousness. The loss of the USSR is a reality. It is a reality that has led to
social pain caused by separated families, the suffering of fellow-countrymen abroad,
nostalgic reminiscences of former glory, longing for the geography of the homeland
that has shrunk or been lost.
^[15]

Decolonization is always a painful process. According to the Dutch sociologist Van
Doorn, “to colonize is to ‘imprison’ others, but it is also to imprison oneself.”
^[16]
This is because to colonize is for the colonizing nation “an investment, not only
in the economic sense, but also culturally and morally.”
^[17]
Van Doorn spoke of the “broad, almost total deception” of the Dutch after the loss
of Indonesia, which could explain why “the mourning process of the end of [Dutch]
Indonesia has been so difficult.” He mentioned as “an additional fact . . . that Indonesia
was almost our entire empire. All colonial powers have wrestled with decolonization
after World War II, but while England and France in particular were driven step by
step from their global positions, the Netherlands lost everything at once.”
^[18]
This fact, to lose “everything at once,” played a role also in Russia. The decolonization
was sudden, unexpected, and total. The Russian frontiers were completely redrawn,
and after centuries of almost uninterrupted expansion, the map of the country resembled
that of sixteenth-century Russia.

There are two reactions to the loss of empire: to accept or not to accept the loss.
Unfortunately, in the Russian situation, after a short period of shock, the loss of
empire did not result in a gradual acceptance, but in a swelling tidal wave of chauvinism
and nationalism. It resulted in nostalgia for lost greatness mixed with revanchism
and hatred of the “enemies” who had brought the Soviet Union down. Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s
reform minister, told how this process took place. “In Russia,” he wrote, “the peak
of the post-imperial syndrome mixed with radical nationalism did not come immediately
after the collapse of the USSR, as I had expected, but later.”
^[19]

And he continued:

[W]e had assumed that overcoming the transitional recession and the beginning of economic
growth and an increase in real income for the population would allow people to replace
the impossible dreams of empire restoration with the prosaic cares of personal well-being.
We were mistaken. Experience showed that in times of profound economic crisis, when
it is not clear whether there will be enough money to feed the family until the next
paycheck and whether there will be a next paycheck or whether you will be fired, most
people do not worry about imperial grandeur. On the contrary, when economic security
is growing and confidence that this year’s salary will be greater than last year’s,
and that unemployment . . . will not affect you, and you see that life has changed
but is returning to stability, you can come home and watch a Soviet film with your
family in which our spies are better than theirs, where we always win, and the life
depicted onscreen is cloudless, and then talk about how enemies have destroyed a great
country and we’ll still show them who’s best.
^[20]

Gaidar shows very clearly that the Russian nationalist revival was not the consequence
of some quasi-Marxist
Verelendung
of the population, but, on the contrary, developed parallel to a growing material
well-being and security that enabled people to look further than the worries of their
daily life. But the growing material security was not the only factor that explained
the emergence of the new Russian nationalism. There were at least two additional factors
that played a role. The first was the almost predictable
counterrevolutionary drawback
that takes place after
every
revolution and, second, the
deliberate
nationalist propaganda campaign that was conducted by the political leadership.

The counterrevolutionary drawback that takes place after every revolution has been
described by Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), who, before World War I, was a young liberal
opponent of the autocratic tsarist regime. Imprisoned several times under tsar Nicholas
II, he became in 1917 the personal secretary to Kerensky, the leader of the democratic
Provisional Government that was installed after the February Revolution. He was sentenced
to death by the Bolsheviks, but ultimately exiled in 1922. He went to the United States,
where he became one of the leading sociologists and founded the sociology department
of Harvard University. His personal experiences led him to analyze the phenomenon
of revolution and its implications for society. In his book
Man and Society in Calamity
(1946) he distinguished different phases in revolutions.

Theoretically, we can distinguish in any revolution two phases: first, destructive
and “liberating,” second, constructive and “restraining.”
^[21]
. . . [In the first phase] all ideologies that attack the oppressing institutions
and values from which the revolutionary group suffers gain rapidly in popularity and
acceptance.
^[22]
. . . If the revolution is mainly political, the ideologies are primarily political;
if the revolution is also economic the ideologies have an economic character; and
if the revolution is religious, the ideologies assume a religious nature.
^[23]
. . . However, since economic revolutions are much deeper than political ones,
they hardly ever occur without having at the same time their political, religious,
or nationalistic aspects. Ordinarily the greatest revolutions become economic.
^[24]