Part I
Russia and the Curse of Empire
Chapter 1
Despotism and the Quest for Empire
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
—Winston Churchill, speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943
Russia has always been, and still is, a very special country: first, because of its geographical size, and second, because of its history. Russia is huge. It covers the biggest landmass in the world. But this huge country is mostly landlocked and has only some sparse outlets to the sea—on the Baltic and the Barents Seas in the north, the Black Sea in the south, and the Pacific Ocean in the east. If the sea is a “window on the world” (as tsar Peter the Great thought, which was why he built his new capital in Saint Petersburg), then Russia resembles a huge bunker with high closed walls and only a few small apertures. Is this the reason for the “bunker mentality” that foreign visitors often observed and which led Russians to view their Western neighbors with mixed feelings of distrust and jealousy?: jealousy because of the economic progress and technical prowess of these neighbors (which Russia was eager to copy) and distrust because of the dangerous democratic ideas that were considered a contagious disease that should be stopped at the frontier. This country on the fringes of Europe was known for the despotism of its leaders, its lack of freedom, and its eternal drive for territorial expansion.
Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot: Early Critics of Russian Despotism
In the eighteenth century especially, when in Western Europe philosophers of the Enlightenment started to attack absolutist rule and formulated their first radical democratic projects, Russia became the counterexample to everything the philosophes stood for. Montesquieu, for instance, considered Russia a huge prison: “The Moscovites cannot leave the empire,” he wrote, “not even to travel.”[1] The tsar, he continued, was “the absolute ruler over the life and the goods of his subjects, who, with the exception of four families, are all slaves.”[2] In De l’esprit des lois Montesquieu wrote that despotic governments, like Russia’s, are exclusively based on fear: “One cannot speak without trembling about these monstrous governments.”[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau was hardly more friendly in his assessment of the Russians, who were for him not only “cruel fellows,” but who “will always regard free people as they themselves should be regarded, that is to say as nobodies on whom only two instruments bear any influence, namely money and the knout.”[4] Rousseau wrote these words in a recommendation for reform of the Polish government that he sent to his Polish interlocutors shortly before Poland’s first partition in 1772. It was not without foresight that he warned the Poles: “You will never be free as long as there remains one Russian soldier in Poland and your freedom will always be threatened as long as Russia interferes in your affairs.”[5]
It is interesting to note that Rousseau wrote this text during the reign of tsarina Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 to 1796 and was a great admirer of the French encyclopaedists. She corresponded with Diderot and Voltaire, and she actually invited Diderot to Saint Petersburg for five months. Like Peter the Great before her, she displayed an energetic drive to modernize the country, and she herself wrote the 655 articles of the Nakaz, a radical law reform based on the works of Montesquieu. She even introduced some pseudo-democratic measures, such as convening an All-Russian Legislative Commission. But all this had no lasting consequences. Back in Paris, Diderot wrote his Observations, in which he expressed a sharp critique of the Nakaz. “There is no true sovereign except the nation,” he wrote. “There can be no true legislator except the people. It is rare that people submit sincerely to laws which have been imposed on them. But they will love the laws, respect, obey and protect them as their own achievement, if they are themselves the authors of them.”[6] Diderot made no effort to flatter the tsarina. “The Empress of Russia,” he wrote, “is certainly a despot.”[7] Catherine only saw Diderot’s critical Observations after the death of the philosopher, when his library was transferred to Saint Petersburg under a contractual agreement. When she finally read Diderot’s comments, wrote Jonathan Israel, “she flew into a rage and apparently destroyed the copy she received.”[8]
However, Catherine, this modern, enlightened despot, became less enlightened and more despotic during the Pugachev revolt (1774–1775). This popular uprising in the southwestern part of her empire, led by a Cossack leader who claimed to be acting on behalf of the assassinated tsar Peter III, Catherine’s former husband, changed her ideas. During this peasants’ revolt over a thousand noblemen and their families were killed, which was approximately 5 percent of the Russian nobility.[9] Instead of abolishing serfdom and giving the Russian people a parliament as she had promised to do, she signed in 1785 the Charter of Nobility, which gave the Russian nobility the same special rights as in Western Europe. Ironically, this happened at a time when in Western Europe these rights began to be questioned and would be abolished some years later during the French Revolution.[10] In the end Catherine’s “democratic revolution” created precisely the opposite: it “created an aristocracy, the better to govern, or rather to dominate the mass of the people. For some to have a sphere of rights due to special birth or rank was doubtless better than for no one to have any assured rights at all.”[11] Catherine remained a convinced autocrat and is mainly remembered for her exuberant love life and the Russian expansion into the Crimea.
How Lost Wars Led to Short-Lived Reforms
The despotic character of Russian rule was criticized not only by foreigners, but equally by the Russian intelligentsia. However, reform periods in Russia were, in general, short-lived. They were mostly introduced after lost wars, when the absolute power of the tsar and the ruling elite was temporarily weakened. In the last two centuries there were at least four such lost wars that led to deep and important reforms: the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the First World War, and the Cold War.[12] The Crimean War had the effect of a wake-up call. Despite the fact that tsarist Russia mobilized 1,742,297 officers and men, plus 787,197 irregulars and militia, it was unable to deal with a force of 300,000 French, British, Sardinian, and Ottoman troops.[13] The rank and file of the Russian army consisted of serfs, who were conscripts for life. The officers came from the nobility. It became clear that in an epoch of mounting nationalism one could not win a war with an army of unmotivated and illiterate serfs.[14] A direct consequence of the lost war was the Era of the Great Reforms, initiated by tsar Alexander II, who during his reign (1855–1881) abolished serfdom in Russia.
However, these social reforms were less inspired by a genuine concern for the situation of the exploited Russian muzhik, as by the geopolitical needs of the Russian empire. Walter Pintner rightly remarked that it was “Russia’s military requirements [which] dictated major social changes.”[15] A similar situation arose in 1905 after the defeat in the war against Japan. This defeat led to a revolution and subsequently to the formation of the first parliament, the State Duma in Saint Petersburg. Another lost war: the defeat of the tsarist army in the First World War gave birth to the February Revolution of 1917 that laid the foundation for a Western-style democracy. Unfortunately, at the end of the same year the fragile democratic government of Kerensky was swept away by the Bolsheviks, who installed an autocratic and totalitarian system that endured for the next seventy years. Although during the communist era Khrushchev’s rule brought a short period of cultural “thaw” after Stalin’s death, it did not bring internal democratization, and one had to wait until 1989 before the autocratic communist system began to crumble.
The High Expectations of 1989
When this finally happened expectations were high. At last Russia would take its rightful place amongst the ranks of the democratic countries of Europe. At last it would build a viable Rechtsstaat with an independent judiciary and abolish the almost inborn fear that the police and secret services instilled in Russian citizens. Inside, as well as outside, Russia there was a sense of relief: finally Russia would become a “normal” country. Western powers were so eager to let this transformation happen that they offered Russia access to democratic forums even before Russia had shown itself worthy of this honor and had acquired the necessary democratic credentials. Rather prematurely Russia was invited to the G7 meetings (renamed G8) and became a member of the Council of Europe. In retrospect this early embracing of a new democratic Russia was too optimistic and too hasty, granting Russia a position among the democratic nations it did not yet deserve.[16] It was as if the West, by granting Russia the status of a fully fledged democratic state, wanted to invoke a “democratic spirit,” hoping that Russia, having been accepted as a member of the club, would automatically behave as a member of the club.
A few critical voices in the West warned against too much optimism. One of them was Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Unfortunately,” he wrote as early as 1994, “considerable evidence suggests that the near-term perspectives for a stable Russian democracy are not very promising.”[17] Brzezinski was right. It did not take long, indeed, before the West grew disappointed. After the chaotic, but democratically still promising decade of the 1990s under Yeltsin the Russian spring turned into a chilly winter. While the façade of a multiparty democracy was kept in place, elections were falsified and stolen, corruption was rampant, democratic freedoms were trampled upon, journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists were killed, the judiciary lacked independence, and not the people, but the spymasters of the KGB—rebaptized into FSB—became the country’s supreme masters. Despite Medvedev’s repeated mantras on modernizatsiya, it was not the modernization of the country, but its own self-perpetuation that was the real objective of the regime.
Three times—in 1856, 1905, and 1917—modern Russia had tried to reform itself after a lost war. Three times it failed. The only enduring success was the abolition of serfdom by tsar Alexander II. After the end of the Cold War it had—probably for the first time in its history—a real chance to join the democratic mainstream. Unfortunately, Russia missed this unique historical opportunity. Russian despotism could be likened to a mythical monster: every time it lies down on the ground and appears finally defeated, it rises to power again. This despotic nature of the Russian polity is not only a problem for the Russian population, its immediate victim, but also for the neighboring peoples, and—ultimately—for the whole world. The reason for this is that Russian despotism is intimately linked with Russia’s imperial drive.
The Four Roots of Russian Imperialism
This “eternal” Russian imperialism has four origins:
Russia’s geographical position
Russia’s economic system
Russia’s expansionist tradition
A deliberate expansionist policy conducted by the Russian ruling elite
Historically it was Russia’s geographical position, near Siberia—a huge and almost empty space—that made expansion easy. This was a great advantage for Russia compared with the countries of mainland Europe that competed for territorial expansion in an area where land was scarce. Russia’s opportunities for territorial expansion were enhanced after Ivan III (The Great), who reigned from 1462 to 1505, had succeeded in driving the Mongols back. Under his grandson Ivan IV (The Terrible), who reigned from 1547 to 1584, Russia—as if driven by a horror vacui—started to conquer the vast expanses of Siberia. Within a century the Russians had reached the Pacific. They did not stop there, but crossed the Bering Strait and went on to conquer Alaska. In the early nineteenth century Russian colonists went as far as California, where, in 1812, they founded Fort Ross north of Bodega Bay on the Pacific coast, just above San Francisco.[18] According to the American geopolitician Nicholas J. Spykman, “It was fair to assume that if the grip of Spain in California ever weakened, Russia would be eager to take her place.”[19] However, Russian territorial expansion into the South, the West, and the North was less easy. Here it was less pull factors of an easy expansion than the push factors of a deliberate imperialist policy that prevailed.
An important push factor for Russia’s imperial expansion was Russia’s economic system. It was based on agriculture in feudal properties, and the labor force consisted largely of serfs. This agriculture was not capital-intensive, as was mostly the case in Western Europe, but coercion-intensive.[20] This meant that it was neither innovative nor efficient and rendered only marginal profits to the landlords who disposed of two methods only to raise their profits: increasing the exploitation of the serfs or adding new land. Because the exploitation of the serfs could not be increased beyond certain physical limits, this led to a continuous search for new land and territorial expansion. This tendency was reinforced by the fact that “the Russian state took shape in a capital-poor environment.”[21] The state simply did not have enough money to pay or reward faithful servants of the state and successful military commanders. “[T]he logic of warmaking and statemaking in a region of little capital led rulers to buy officeholders with expropriated land,”[22] and with newly acquired land. The two above-mentioned factors led to Russia developing a tradition of territorial expansion from an early stage. Territorial expansion became, as it were, the normal “way of life” of the Russian state. It was like an organism that grows and grows and continues to grow until it has reached its full size, preordained by its biological nature. But unlike an organism, Russia did not have a genetically preordained “normal size.” It could go on and on, growing beyond any limit. And in a certain sense that was what happened. According to Colin Gray, territorial expansion was “the Russian way,” just as it has been “the Soviet way.”
It is estimated, for example, that between the middle of the 16th century and the end of the 17th, Russia conquered territory the size of the modern Netherlands every year for 150 years running. Furthermore, unlike the case of most other imperial powers conquest by Russia became a permanent and nonnegotiable political fact (save under conditions of extreme duress, as with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918).[23]
Traditions can be upheld and followed with more or less constancy and enthusiasm. A country can become an imperial power by making this an explicit choice or in a more or less accidental way. The British Empire, according to the nineteenth century British historian Sir John Seeley, was acquired “in a fit of absence of mind.” There existed no previous, elaborated British plan to build an empire. Edward Dicey, a British journalist and writer, wrote in 1877:
We have never been a conquering nation. Since the days when the Plantagenets essayed the conquest of France we have never deliberately undertaken the conquest of any foreign country; we have never made war with the set purpose of annexing any given territory. We have had no monarchs whose aim and ambition it has been to add fresh possessions to the crown, in order simply and solely to extend the area of their dominions.[24]
Although the British perception that their empire was created in “a fit of absence of mind” may be exaggerated, it is not an exaggeration to say that from its early beginnings the Russian empire has been conceived as a deliberate project. The twin objectives of territorial expansion and the subjugation of other peoples were consciously and purposively pursued by Russia’s political elite. An exemplification for this mindset is tsarina Catherine the Great’s famous dictum: “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.”[25] It was not only a supposed fragility of the Russian state that was at the root of its continuous expansion. “The fact that, unlike Western Europe, the formation of the empire does not succeed the construction of the state, but accompanies it, has also blurred the dividing lines. The concept of the nation and imperial ambition merge as soon as Moscow, the first centre of the modern state, gains the upper hand over rival Russian principalities and, then, over the weakened mongol overlord.”[26] The fact that in Russia empire building was a constitutive part of the process of state formation indicates a fundamental difference with empire building by the Western European states, which only began after the national states had been consolidated. While Russia was a “product of empire,” this was not the case here. John Darwin, for instance, emphasized the fact that Britain “was not in any obvious way a product of empire. It was not ‘constituted’ by empire—a modish but vacuous expression. The main reason for this was that its English core was already an exceptionally strong and culturally unified state (taking language and law as the most obvious criteria) long before it acquired an empire beyond Europe.”[27] The same was true for Portugal, Spain, France, and even the Netherlands (which from 1568 to 1648 was fighting a war of independence against Spain).
Russian Despotism and Russian Imperialism: Inseparable Twin Brothers?
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:
Territorial expansion gave extra legitimation to the rule of the despot.
Territorial expansion functioned as a surrogate satisfaction for the disenfranchised (serf) population.
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.
Despotic rule as such fits better with imperial rule than with democratic rule. Despotic and imperial rule are congenial.
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 inequality 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.
Notes
1.
Montesquieu, “Lettres persanes,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 89.
2.
Montesquieu, “Lettres persanes,” 89.
3.
Montesquieu, “De l’esprit des lois,” in Oeuvres complètes, 539.
4.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée,” Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Part III (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1039.
5.
Rousseau, “Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée,” Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Part III, 1039.
6.
Cf. Denis Diderot, “Observations on the Instruction of the Empress of Russia to the Deputies for the Making of Laws,” in Diderot: Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81.
7.
Diderot, “Observations,” 82. Another contemporary who expressed his doubts concerning Catherine’s democratic credentials was the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. “The monarch of Russia,” he wrote, “presupposes a motivating force that her language, nation, and empire do not possess: honor. One should read Montesquieu on this and the Russian nation and state of mind is exactly its opposite: one should read him on despotism and fear, and both are exactly present.” (Johann Gottfried Herder, Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1976), 99.)
8.
Cf. Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 622.
9.
Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 626.
10.
Cf. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, I. The Challenge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 403. These special rights of the nobility included that “they could not lose their status, honor, property or life without judicial proceedings, and could be judged only by judges of equal birth with themselves. . . . They received permission to leave state service at will, to take service with foreign governments, and to travel outside the country. They were given the right to sign their names (like European nobles) with territorial titles. They were reconfirmed in their right to ‘buy villages’ (that is serfs), and to engage in wholesale or overseas trade.”
11.
Palmer, Democratic Revolution, 404.
12.
It is still a subject of discussion whether the Cold War could be called a “war” that ended in a defeat. This interpretation is defended by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote: “The Cold War did end in the victory of one side and in the defeat of the other. This reality cannot be denied.” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Cold War and its Aftermath,” Foreign Affairs 71, no. 4 (Fall 1992), 31.) Ernst-Otto Czempiel, on the other hand, stated: “It is easy, but erroneous, to argue that NATO won the conflict, . . . that the NATO alliance defeated the Warsaw Pact without firing a single round, so to speak. . . . The Warsaw Pact remained a strong military alliance until the very end. It was in many respects superior to NATO. No, a proper explanation lies elsewhere. It is more accurate to view the end of the East-West conflict as having been produced not by the military defeat of the Warsaw Pact.” (Ernst-Otto Czempiel, “Governance and Democratization,” in Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, eds. James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 251.) Of course, Czempiel is right: it was not a military defeat. However, it certainly was an ideological, economic, political, and moral defeat. It was this moral defeat, in particular, that led to the breakdown of the empire and—ultimately—to the disestablishment of the Warsaw Pact.
13.
Cf. Walter Pintner, “Russian Military Thought: The Western Model and the Shadow of Suvorov,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 360.
14.
According to Benedict Anderson, as late as 1840, almost 98 percent (!) of the Russian population was illiterate. (Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 75–76.) However, the Russian defeat in the Crimean War was caused not only by the illiteracy of the Russian serf soldiers, but also by the use of obsolete military technology. According to Daniel Headrick, “During the Crimean War, while French and British soldiers carried modern rifles, almost all Russian soldiers used smoothbore muskets, the same kind of guns used in the war against Napoleon. The Russian government tried to purchase new guns from the American Samuel Colt and from gun makers in Liège but were not able to import them in time.” (Daniel R. Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 169.)
15.
Pintner, “Russian Military Thought,” 362.
16.
As concerns Russia’s membership of the G-8, even Moscow’s mayor and 1999 presidential hopeful, Yury Luzhkov, remarked: “Its [Russia’s] full membership of the ‘Big Eight’ is obviously also a self-deceit.” Luzhkov, however, was here not so much referring to Russia’s deficient democratic credentials, as to its insufficient economic potential. (Y. M. Luzhkov, The Renewal of History: Mankind in the 21st Century and the Future of Russia (London: Stacey International, 2003), 151–152).
17.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March/April 1994), 71.
18.
Daniel Headrick contrasts this smooth, swift, and easy conquest of Siberia by the Russians with the slow conquest of its Western frontier by the young United States, where, due to the fierce resistance of the Native American tribes, “the conquest was slow, difficult, and costly” (Headrick, Power over Peoples, 277). “The contrast with the Russian expansion into Siberia is striking,” wrote Headrick. “In the 1590s, Russia was confined to the west of the Ural Mountains. By 1646, Russian explorers and fur traders had reached the eastern edge of Siberia and had founded Okhotsk off the sea of that name and Anadyrsk in northeastern Asia. By 1689—after only a hundred years—Russia controlled almost all of Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, 3,500 miles from European Russia” (Headrick, Power over Peoples, 278).
19.
Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, with a new introduction by Francis P. Sempa (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 69.
20.
Cf. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 31.
21.
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 140.
22.
Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 141.
23.
Colin S. Gray, “The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartland, Rimlands, and the Technological Revolution,” Strategy Paper No. 30, National Strategy Information Center, Inc., (New York: Crane, Russak & Company, Inc., 1977), 35. Charles Tilly even spoke of “two and a half centuries, [in which] Russian expansion scarcely ceased” (cf. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 189). The Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen estimated that “every seven years from 1500 until his day [around 1910, MHVH], Russia gained an amount of territory equal to that of his own country, the Kingdom of Norway.” (Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Inside the Kremlin (London: W. H. Allen & Co Plc, 1988), 262–263.) The land surface won by Russia in four hundred years, was, according to Nansen, approximately fifty-seven times that of Norway, which is about 17 million square kilometers. The surface of the tsarist empire in 1910 was about 23 million square kilometers. Nansen’s estimate seems rather plausible.
24.
Edward Dicey, “Mr Gladstone and Our Empire,” September 1877, 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), 261. Dicey added: “But our conquests have come to us as the accidents of war, not as the objects of our warfare. I do not deduce from this that our annexations of territory have been obtained more justly or more rightfully than those of other powers who have conquered for the sake of conquering. What I want to point out is that our Empire is the result not so much of any military spirit as of a certain instinct of development in our race. We have in us the blood of the Vikings; and the same impulse which sent the Norsemen forth to seek new homes in strange lands has, for century after century, impelled their descendants to wander forth in search of wealth, power, or adventure” (Dicey, “Mr Gladstone,” 262).
25.
Quoted in Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, “The Spectre of a Multipolar Europe,” Policy paper (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2010), 32.
26.
Claire Mouradian, “Les Russes au Caucase,” in Le livre noir du colonialisme: XVIe–XXIe siècle: de l’extermination à la repentance, ed. Marc Ferro (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003), 393 (emphasis mine).
27.
John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin, 2013), 399.
28.
Cf. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 337.
29.
Anderson, Lineages, 346.
30.
Anonymous authors, Proekt Rossiya: Vybor Puti, Vtoraya Kniga (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007), 395.
31.
John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, with a preface by F. A. Hayek, reprint of the original edition of 1861 (Indiana: Gateway Editions, 1962), 88. This compensatory function of imperialist policies had also been observed by the sociologist Max Weber: “Weber saw Russia as a typical imperialist power, its pressure for expansion coming from a combination of elements within Russian society: from the landhunger of the peasants; from the power interests of the bureaucracy; from the cultural imperialism of the intelligentsia, who, ‘too weak to secure even the most elementary demands for a constitutional order and guaranteed freedoms at home . . . find a support for their damaged self-esteem in the service of a policy of expansion, concealed under fine-sounding phrases.’” (David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974), 140.)
32.
Peter Sloterdijk, Die Verachtung der Massen: Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 33.
33.
Instead of seeking refuge in the ersatz self-esteem, provided by empire, a more authentic way to reappropriate the self-esteem that has been denied, is described by Axel Honneth in his book The Struggle for Recognition. “In the context of the emotional response associated with shame,” he wrote, “the experience of being disrespected can become the motivational impetus for a struggle for recognition. For it is only by regaining the possibility of active conduct that individuals can dispel the state of emotional tension into which they are forced as a result of humiliation.” The praxis thus opened up makes it possible, according to Honneth, “to take the form of political resistance.” (Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 138.)
34.
Stalin was a great admirer of Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny), whom he considered as his great historical role model. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, “[H]e regarded Ivan the Terrible as his true alter ego, his ‘teacher.’” (Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 177.) Montefiore described how Stalin, at the very moment that the German armies stood before Moscow, “kept reading history: it was now that he scribbled on a new biography of Ivan the Terrible: ‘teacher teacher’ and then: ‘We shall overcome!’” (Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 396). Stalin admired in Ivan not only his imperialist policies, but also—if not more—his ruthless killing of the boyars, the Russian nobility. (On Stalin’s self-identification with Ivan the Terrible, see also Benedict Anderson, Lineages, 160, and Vladimir Fédorovski, “Le Fantôme d’Ivan le Terrible,” in Le Fantôme de Staline (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2007), 175–181).
35.
An example of this imperial inequality was the fact that even when, in 1946, the Algerians obtained civil rights, they did not get the same voting rights as French colonists. They got these only in 1956 after the war of liberation had already started.
36.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Empire & Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World Scale (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 187.
37.
Nederveen Pieterse, Empire, ibid.
38.
Rousseau, “Considérations,” 1039.
39.
Rousseau, “Considérations,” 970.
40.
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (London and New York: Penguin, 2004), 193.
41.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, reprint of the original, Edinburgh, 1767 (Milano: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2001), 417.
42.
Ferguson, An Essay, 418.
43.
Sir John Rober Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan & Co, 1914), 294.
44.
Seeley, Expansion of England, 347.
45.
Seeley, Expansion of England, 348.
46.
The young and democratic United States had an important flaw, which was the status of black slaves who were not considered citizens. However, in its territorial expansion the United States did not act as an empire (at least not until 1898, when it took the Philippines from Spain). Neither did it incorporate the native American tribes. Their land was “bought,” and they were driven from their lands, finally ending up in extraterritorial reservations. Alexis de Tocqueville, a profound admirer of American democracy, who, in December 1831, witnessed the deportation of the Chactas Indians, denounced the silent extermination that went on behind a juridical façade, writing that “the Americans of the United States, more humane, more moderate, more respectful of the law and legality [than the Spaniards in South America], never bloodthirsty, are more profoundly destructive of their race [Chactas tribe] and it is beyond doubt that in one hundred years there will remain in North America not one single tribe, nor even one single man, belonging to the most remarkable of the Indian races.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, “Contre le génocide des Indiens d’Amérique,” in Textes essentiels, Anthologie critique par J.-L. Benoît, (Paris: Havas, 2000), 305.)
Chapter 2
Comparing Western and Russian Legitimation Theories for Empire
Imperial rule needs legitimation. But it would be an exaggeration to state that imperialist rule always needs legitimation. In the first phases of modern imperialism territorial expansion just happened. Often it could not even be called imperialism, especially when expansion took place in empty territories where no native populations lived that could be subdued. However, it was a different matter when imperialist expansion implied wars of conquest, as in South America where the Spanish conquistadores conducted bloody wars against the indigenous Indian populations. It is, therefore, no coincidence that “Spain was the only conquering country . . . that asked itself questions about its capacity and the legality to exercise its rights and dominate other peoples.”[1]
Imperialist Legitimation Theories: Christianity, a Superior Civilization, and the White Man’s Burden
In its search for a legitimation theory Spain fell back on the old medieval theory of the “just war” waged by Christians against the infidels. The “infidels,” in this case, were not Muslims, but pagans. An additional argument was found in the fact that the population of the Caribbean included cannibals, which was considered a reason for them to be enslaved. Thus, in this early period the Christian faith and the superiority of Europe’s civilization were used as arguments to support imperialist rule. In Western Europe the inherent hypocrisy of these theories began to be attacked in the eighteenth century when Enlightenment philosophers, such as Voltaire and Diderot, formulated the first fundamental criticism of slavery and colonial rule.[2] These critical voices found resonance in the nineteenth century, when a widely supported anti-slavery movement emerged. This led to a new legitimation theory, the theory of the white man’s burden, which was the result of the bad conscience caused by the new moral criticism. It became more difficult to legitimate imperialist expansion by referring to the Christian faith (in both its catholic, as well as its protestant variants). In the words of John Kenneth Galbraith,
[Colonialism’s] real motives, were they stated, would be altogether too uncouth, selfish or obscene. So where colonization has involved people—where it has not meant merely the appropriation and settlement of unused lands—the colonialists have almost always seen themselves as the purveyors of some transcendental moral, spiritual, political or social worth. The reality [however] has as regularly included a considerable component of pecuniary interest, real or anticipated, for important participants.[3]
The bad conscience about colonial practice that emerged in the nineteenth century necessitated the forging of a new legitimation theory in which the concept of moral duty had a central place. This was especially the case in protestant countries, such as Britain and the Netherlands. This new legitimation theory was dubbed the white man’s burden,[4] because imperialist expansion was considered not so much an interest- and profit-driven exploitation of foreign countries and foreign peoples, but rather a civilizing mission. Of course this civilizing mission had already played a role when the Christian faith was used as a legitimation theory. But then the emphasis was still on the spiritual salvation of the indigenous populations by their conversion to Christianity. Now this legitimation theory was turned upside down: what was at stake was not their spiritual salvation in the afterlife, but their earthly salvation here and now. The colonial ruler—far from being an oppressor and exploiter—was a helper and a coach of native populations, bringing them the benefits of modern governance, modern transport systems, modern industry and trade, and, in addition, the whole rich Western culture that became available to local elites by giving them access to higher education. In 1897 H. F. Wyatt, the founder of the British Imperial Maritime League, wrote:
In Asia and in Africa great native populations have passed under our hands. To us—to us, and not to others, a certain definite duty has been assigned. To carry light and civilization into the dark places of the world; to touch the mind of Asia and of Africa with the ethical ideas of Europe; to give to thronging millions, who would otherwise never know peace or security, these first conditions of human advance . . . .[5] To sustain worthily the burden of empire is the task manifestly appointed to Britain, and therefore to fulfil that task is her duty, as it should also be her delight.[6]
The young Winston Churchill, twenty-two years old, delivered his first political speech in Bath in the same year (1897). He told his audience “that our determination is to uphold the Empire that we have inherited from our fathers as Englishmen,” adding: “we shall continue to pursue that course marked out for us by an all-wise hand and carry out our mission of bearing peace, civilization and good government to the uttermost ends of the earth.”[7] Was this merely a new hypocrisy replacing the old? One might be tempted to reply in the affirmative. However, this is not completely true. Galbraith, for instance, stressed the important role Britain played in building a Rechtsstaat in India. Introducing a functioning independent and impartial judiciary in this large country was, indeed, a matter of great historical progress.
“The new faith was law,” wrote Galbraith. “The British were in India to trade and make money. There was nothing wrong with that. But the redeeming purpose was to bring government according to law. It was an idea of genuine power.”[8] “Largely in consequence,” he continued, “India was one of the best-governed countries in the world. Persons and property were safe. Thought and speech were more secure than in recent times. There was effective action to arrest famine and improve communications. The courts functioned impartially and to the very great pleasure of the litigiously-minded Indians.”[9] And Galbraith concluded: “The British rulers were snobbish, race-conscious and often arrogant. But if colonialism could anywhere have been considered a success (the empty lands always apart), it was in India.”[10]
At the end of the nineteenth century the theory of the white man’s burden became widely accepted in the Netherlands also. Here it was called de ethische koers (the ethical course). This “ethical course” was intended to repair the historical ereschuld (honorable debt) to the indigenous populations.[11] It is telling that even a Dutch socialist MP, Henri van Kol, who, in 1901, in an article in the press had severely attacked the imperialist policies of the Dutch government, was much more positive after a visit to the Dutch Indies (Indonesia) some years later. In a report he wrote of having felt “a feeling of pride” during his visit: “There is over there something great and noble being achieved.”[12] According to the Dutch sociologist Van Doorn, “this sense of mission, the feeling of being ‘responsible’ for Indonesia grew between the world wars to almost mythical proportions.”[13] The Dutch were even praised by outsiders:
In the 1920s American perceptions of Dutch colonial rule had been positive, even if such assessments were colored by paternalistic, racial overtones. Consul-General Chas Hoover spoke approvingly of Dutch colonial rule over the “apathetically conservative people of these islands.” His successor argued that “the whites—particularly the 30,000 Dutch who are doing it—are experts in the art of government” who were willing to “discuss with friendly interest the aspirations of the brown people to learn how to govern themselves.”[14]
Although recognizing the fact that “every empire has been both Jekyll and Hyde,”[15] ex-colonial powers, generally, have stressed the credit balance of their imperial rule. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, who was anything but a pure democrat, criticized the hypocrisy of the European powers. “An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Belgian, an Italian,” he wrote, “when he fights and dies for his fatherland, is a hero; but an African, when he dares to defend his fatherland against these nations, is a vile rebel and a traitor. And the Europeans carry out their holy duty to destroy the Africans, as, for instance in the Congo, in order to teach them to be civilized.”[16] Despite the moral self-satisfaction of the former colonial powers concerning the supposed blessings of their colonial rule, it is good to remember the words of Aimé Césaire, the founder of the négritude movement in France, who wrote:
I maintain that colonial Europe is dishonest in legitimating colonialism a posteriori by the evident material progress which has been realized in certain domains under colonial rule; . . . that nobody knows at what stage of material development these same countries would have been without European intervention; that the technical equipment, the administrative reorganisation, in a word: the “Europeanization” of Africa or Asia was in no way linked to a European occupation—as is proved by the example of Japan; that the Europeanization of the non-European continents could have been achieved in other ways than under the Europan boot.[17]
Social Darwinism: The Primacy of Naked Power
Theories of the white man’s burden reflected the growing feelings of moral uneasiness with imperialist policies amongst the enlightened metropolitan elites. However, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century we can witness in Western Europe a rude and cynical reaction against this new moral criticism with the emergence of legitimation theories based on social Darwinism. As the term indicates, these theories were inspired by Charles Darwin, especially by his theories of “natural selection” and the “survival of the fittest,” which he had developed in The Origin of Species (1859). Darwin’s theory was biology. It was not sociology or political science. However, already Darwin himself had given his theory a wider interpretation when he applied it to the human world in his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). In this work he spoke of the “lower races,” a term that he not only used to refer to colonized peoples outside Europe, but also to some peoples inside Europe. For instance, he quoted uncritically an author who compared the Scots, supposed to be “frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, [and] ambitious,” with the Irish, who were considered to represent an “inferior and less favored race.”[18] Many of Darwin’s contemporaries were eager to grant his theory of the survival of the fittest, including its implicit conclusions of racial superiority and inferiority, an almost universal validity. It was a theory, considered not only useful to explain the biological world, but also human society, and even international relations.
Darwin’s theory became popular because it responded to the ideological needs of the imperial powers of his time. Already Marx noted in 1862, “It is strange how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthus’ struggle for life. It is Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes.”[19] Although for Marx Darwin’s biological theory presented a surprisingly accurate description of the capitalist society of his time, for many of his contemporaries Darwin’s theory provided rather a mandatory prescription of policies to be followed. This was especially the case for recently unified nations, such as Germany and Italy, both aspiring to become colonial empires. These countries were historical latecomers. It was only after unification in the second half of the nineteenth century that they had the strength and the ambition to build a colonial empire. By that time, however, apart from Africa, most of the territories of the globe were already occupied by the older colonial powers. What arguments could they bring forward to claim their share? The Christian faith? The established colonial powers had already done this before them, and, in addition, this claim had in the meantime become obsolete. Or should they provide support for their territorial claims by stressing their unique civilizing mission? Could the white man’s burden not also be shared by Germany and Italy? The other powers were not convinced. While complaining about the unbearable weight of their burden, they were not in a hurry to share it with others. It was the new theory of social Darwinism that provided them with a solution. Neither Germany nor Italy needed new moral legitimation theories, such as the white man’s burden. These were, according to them, merely hypocritical veils cast over the naked economic interests of the old, established colonial powers. They only claimed a “rightful place under the sun.” They just claimed their part of the cake. Their only legitimation was their newly acquired power and their military strength, expressions of their racial superiority. This new social Darwinist legitimation theory of the latecomers found a staunch defender in the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896). Treitschke confirmed that “it was the highest moral duty of the state to take care of its power.”[20] However, this was challenged by Friedrich Meinecke, because it “leads, first, to suspending the definitive character of international treaties and, further, to inciting the praising of the glory of war. . . . He [Treitschke] considers war the only remedy for sick nations on the verge of sinking into egoistic individualism.”[21] Meinecke commented: “The new German theory says: ‘Our interest is our right,’ the old, very old English theory is: ‘Lawfulness is our interest.’”[22]
Germany’s and Italy’s claims for colonial expansion were based on the slogan Might Makes Right. In Germany social Darwinism expressed itself also in pan German theories, which were “a racist variant of those legitimation and expansion attempts.”[23] “Economic advancement and the subjugation of overseas territories seemed due to the ‘natural qualities’ of the nation, ‘that means its racial qualities.’ In any case, massive demands could be deducted from these. Out of the racist pan Germanism, that would heal the world, emerged a pseudo-scientifically ‘disguised legitimation’ for permanent expansion.”[24] Theories of the white man’s burden, even if they might have appeared hypocritical, still preserved a moral legitimation for imperial rule and justified this rule by the benefits that this rule was supposed to bring to the colonized populations. Pan Germanism and social Darwinism, on the contrary, did away with any bad conscience and proclaimed loudly and without any moral restraint the right of the strongest. “The general basic values in Imperial Germany,” wrote Helge Pross, “. . . were order, obedience, subordination, duty, work, performance, discipline, functioning. In the thinking of very many bourgeois men and women the state, monarchy, national greatness and [Germany’s] international standing equally had the status of values, they were desirable and should be realized.”[25] “Many citizens dreamt of German greatness, German international standing, a policy that would give Germany its rightful place as one of the leading world powers. . . . The state became a value in itself.”[26] Worshipping an almighty state that was able to extend its imperial rule overseas went hand in hand with feelings of racial superiority. According to the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler the logical conclusion of these theories was fascism: “Undeniably since the 1870s–1880s this social Darwinism has spread throughout the western industrial nations and it has exercised a demonstrably great influence, but it reached its apogee only in the racist radicalization by National Socialism.”[27]
Three Russian Legitimation Theories for Imperial Expansion: Orthodoxy, Pan Slavism, and Communism
It is now time to turn to Russia and to ask what kind of legitimation theories were used during the expansion of the Russian empire. As was already mentioned, in the first centuries of Russian expansion no special legitimation theory seemed necessary. Territorial expansion was “the normal way of life” of the Russian state. It was something akin to breathing: you are doing it, but you are not conscious of doing it. This was especially the case when the empire expanded into quasi-empty, sparsely populated territories. However, when the expansion began to take place in territories occupied by foreign populations there emerged a need for legitimation theories. We can distinguish at least three:
The Orthodox religion
Pan Slavism
Communism
Sometimes these legitimation theories overlap. But they will be represented here as different, sequential phases.
The first, Orthodoxy, is a religious legitimation theory, and it resembles, therefore, the religious legitimation theories that played a role in the early colonial expansion of Western Europe, especially of Spain. In Russia religion played an important role from an early stage. That role, however, was different from that in Western Europe, where Protestantism and Catholicism were not the religions of one state, but of groups of states. In 1453, after the fall of Constantinople, Russia had become the only Orthodox country in the world. This led to a deep sense of Russian religious uniqueness. Moscow began to call itself the “Third Rome,” and a specific Russian messianism emerged: Russia considered itself to be the only real source of salvation for mankind. The resemblance here with the young Soviet Union is striking. In 1917 Russia became, again, the only state in the world with its own creed: communism. As the only communist country in the world, it considered itself to be a beacon for mankind. The messianism of the early communist era, expressed in the phrase “socialism in one country” was, in fact, a secularized version of the messianism of tsarist, Orthodox Russia, expressed in the slogan svyataya Rus, “Holy Russia.” To call your country “holy” is an immense pretention. “To see oneself as potentially ‘a holy nation’ is to link chosenness indissolubly with collective sanctification.”[28] But Russia was not the first to call itself “holy.” In the West there existed a precedent—and a competitor—in the Holy Roman Empire, headed by the emperor of Austria.[29] Both the emperor in Vienna and the tsar in Moscow pretended to be the legitimate heirs of the late Christian Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire in the heart of Europe, led by the Austrian emperor, however, was a weak and semifederal construction, a conglomerate of German principalities that would finally be dissolved in 1806 under pressure from Napoleon. The tsars, on the contrary, stood at the helm of a centralized and strong military power, and they were able to conduct an uninterrupted policy of territorial annexation.
The Symbiosis of Church and State
The Russian Orthodox religion gained in importance as a legitimation theory for Russian expansion, when, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia began its southward expansion into the territories of the Ottoman Empire. There Russia was no longer confronting “fellow Christians,” such as the Protestant Swedes or the Catholic Poles, but a non-Christian, Muslim power. The peoples over whom the Ottomans ruled, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians, and Serbs, shared the Orthodox faith of the Russians, a faith of which the Russian tsar considered himself to be the official defender. Consequently Russian imperialist expansion in the south took place under the banner of a defense of the Orthodox religion. The Crimean War, for instance, started with a conflict with the Ottoman Empire and France over Russia’s role as a protector of the Orthodox Christians and the Holy Places in Jerusalem. The Orthodox religion could play its role of legitimation theory for imperial expansion better than other religions in Europe because it was, in the most literal sense, a state religion. Tsar Peter the Great had subordinated the Church to bureaucratic state control when he introduced the lay function of Ober Procurator (Ober Prokuror) of the Holy Synod, which was a state official who exercised ultimate authority over the episcopal body.[30] Tsar Peter, the Westernizer, wanted to dominate the Church, which he considered, in his heart, a reservoir of primitive beliefs. His successors, however, wanted to use the Church and from the middle of the eighteenth century we can witness a growing symbiosis of the Church and the state. At the end of the eighteenth century, under the enlightened tsarina Catherine the Great, this symbiosis was still progressive in nature: she appointed modern, educated bishops who shared her ideas. But under the rule of the reactionary tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855), who was called the gendarme of Europe, the Church became the instrument of a repressive state. The right hand of Nicholas I, his deputy minister of Public Education, Sergey Uvarov, coined the ideological triad Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationhood,[31] which was to become Russia’s official state ideology. Priests were paid by the state and had the status of civil servants. They were spied upon: “The church itself was firmly under the control of the state so that even sermons were vetted by the police.”[32] In their turn the priests themselves were used as informants. They reported irregular behavior and the emergence of subversive ideas in their local parishes to the police, acting as unofficial spies for the state. “The doctrine of the Church provided Tsarism with a powerful ideological justification, and its priests acted as instruments of police rule in rural areas.”[33] They had also “to report confessions which revealed ‘evil intent’ towards the State.”[34] The iron grip of the state on the Church was further strengthened under tsar Alexander III (1881–1894), who made his tutor, the reactionary Pan Slavist Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Ober Procurator of the Holy Synod.
A New Legitimation Theory: Pan Slavism
However, with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century there emerged, alongside Orthodox religion, a new legitimation theory. National expansion was no longer the exclusive domain of ruling dynasties. It became increasingly a concern for the populations as well. This growing popular interest in national politics found expression in the Pan Movements that aimed to bring peoples of the same language and culture together within the framework of a single nation-state. In Germany this took the form of Pan Germanism. In Russia it led, first, to Slavophilia, a romantic movement that ascribed unique ethnic and spiritual qualities to the Slavic peoples, and, then, to Pan Slavism, a political movement with the goal of uniting all Slavic peoples under the Russian aegis. The reaction of the tsarist government to this movement was in the beginning somewhat reserved. The reason for this was that the movement gave a quasi-mystical importance to narodnost—a word derived from narod, which means “people.” Narodnost is usually translated as “nationality,” but, in fact, it was more. It referred to a supposed quasi-mystical “essence” of the Russian people, its unique character that would express itself in a supposed inborn, natural goodness, in its patience, in its childlike faith, in its capability to suffer, and its quiet subservience to “father” tsar.[35]
The government in Saint Petersburg—especially after the revolt of the Decabrists in 1825—feared the democratic potential of the populist narodniki, a movement of young radicals who idolized the life of the simple Russian. The incorporation of the word narodnost into a national ideology by Sergey Uvarov eight years after the revolt was a clever attempt by the government to appropriate the new concept of the Slavophiles and change its potentially subversive connotation by making it a pillar of the autocratic, tsarist state. However, the word remained a double-edged sword, because it could refer both to a popular support of the tsar, as well as to a democratic revival. The government, therefore, regarded with mistrust the First Pan Slav Congress, held in Prague in 1848, the year of European revolutions. After the Crimean War, however, things changed. The Pan Slav movement—like its Pan German counterpart—lost its already weak, liberal-democratic credentials and started to accommodate itself with autocratic rule. There were two reasons for this. The first reason was that, unlike in Germany, where the Pan German ideas were supported by a broad middle class, in Russia no such middle class existed. Pan Slav ideals were propagated by a small group of urban intelligentsia who were doubly isolated: they were isolated from the people as well as from the autocratic state bureaucracy. There was simply not enough support in Russian society for liberal-democratic ideas. A second reason for the Pan Slav movement’s embrace of autocratic rule was that the task of unifying all Slavs was considered more important than internal democratic reforms. A strong and autocratic Russia was thought the best guarantee to liberate the oppressed “brother peoples” in Southern Europe from Ottoman rule.
The position of the tsar, however, was not unequivocal. He was, certainly, quite happy to assume the role of “liberator” of the Slav peoples living under Ottoman rule. At the same time he had to be cautious not to offend Austria and Prussia/Germany, which had large Slav minorities. These countries were not enthusiastic about the Russian Pan Slav liberation fervor that could cause upheaval within their borders. And, finally, there were non-Russian Slavs in the Russian empire, such as the Poles, who fought for their own independence. To accept “equal rights for all Slavs,” as was demanded at the Second Pan Slav Congress in Moscow in 1867, was, therefore, out of the question.[36] The nationalism of the tsar was an official “imperial nationalism,” based directly on the existence and the needs of the empire. It had nothing to do with the right of self-determination of the peoples. Because the Russian empire comprised many different peoples with different ethnic backgrounds and different religions, it would not be permissible for the tsar to support an exclusive ethnic Russian or Slav nationalism. However, when the reformist tsar Alexander II was murdered in 1881, his son, Alexander III, under the influence of his reactionary tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, wholeheartedly adopted the ethnic “great Russian” nationalism of the Pan Slavists. The policies of Alexander III were continued after his death in 1894 by his son, Nicholas II. This led to a process of enforced Russification in Poland and the Baltic provinces, where the national languages were suppressed and assimilation was imposed.
From Pan Slavism to Racism:
Pogroms and Anti-Semitism
The new great Russian nationalism very soon developed ugly features. Not only did it lead to a growing repression of non-Russian nationalities, such as the Poles, but also of other minorities of “foreign race” (inorodtsy) that could not be assimilated. In the first place Jews were targeted. The discrimination and scapegoating of Jews became an official state policy. Since 1791, during the reign of Catherine the Great, there had existed already in Russia a policy aimed at restricting the rights of Jews. In that year the Pale of Settlement was introduced. This measure restricted the territory on which the Jews had the right to live. It included the Western border region of the empire (the word “Pale” indicated “border”) and comprised a territory that approximately covered the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This territory consisted, globally, of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Bessarabia, and only a small part of Russia proper. Eighty percent of the European part of the Russian empire was “forbidden to Jews” (although there were a few exceptions). Additionally, many towns within the Pale itself were closed to Jews. In 1795, after the third partition of Poland, when Russia annexed Eastern Poland and Poland ceased to exist as an independent state, the Jewish population in the Pale Settlement swelled to approximately five million, creating the greatest concentration of Jews in the world. This concentration within a restricted area made them vulnerable to attacks.
This is what happened after the murder of tsar Alexander II in 1881, when immediately the Jews were accused of the murder. It led to a wave of pogroms in the South of the empire, characterized by looting, rape, and murder. This wave of violence went on for three years. The government not only failed to persecute the offenders, but overtly and secretly supported the movement. The eminence grise of the regime, Pobedonostsev, a known anti-Semite, was quoted as having said that “a third of the Jews will be converted, a third will emigrate, and the rest will die of hunger.” He was the man behind many new repressive measures, such as the May Laws, issued in 1882, banning Jews from rural areas and towns with more than ten thousand inhabitants. Jewish property in rural areas was confiscated and at universities quota were imposed restricting the number of Jewish students. Official, state-sponsored anti-Semitism and popular anti-Semitism, fed by resentment, went hand in hand. According to Leonid Luks, “in this struggle to bind the people to the regime anti-Jewish slogans would play an increasingly important role. There was an ever-increasing tendency amongst the conservatives to associate the sharp social and political conflicts in the country, as well as several foreign policy drawbacks suffered by the tsarist empire (Congress of Berlin, 1878), with the activities of international Jewry.”[37] A leading role in spreading anti-Jewish sentiments was played by the chauvinist and fiercely anti-Semitic Pan Slav movement that quickly grew in strength at the end of the century and reached its apogee after the lost war with Japan and the subsequent revolution in 1905.
One of the most important anti-Semitic organizations was the Soyuz Russkogo Naroda (the Union of the Russian People). Founded in October 1905, it enjoyed a spectacular growth, and soon it had about one thousand local branches. Its virulent anti-Semitism finds its equivalent only in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. One of its theoreticians, V. F. Zalevsky, accused the Jews of parasitism and the secret wish to dominate the world. “The Jews are a damaging tribe,” he wrote, “they don’t like heavy work and try to live from the labors of others, letting others work for them.” He continued: “Even though the Jews . . . plunder the Russian people, this still seems not to be enough; they want to completely subjugate the Russian people, they want to be their masters.”[38] In the text of a congress resolution of the organization in 1915, prepared by a section with the name “For the struggle against Jewish supremacy,” the word “Jews” was consequently replaced by its pejorative equivalent zhidy (Yids). In the resolution one can read that it should be forbidden for Yids to have Orthodox Russian employees working for them or to participate in joint-stock companies. Russian schools should not accept Jewish children. And for Russians it should be forbidden to visit a Jewish doctor or to eat together with Jews. The only good solution for the “Talmudic zhidovstvo” (Yid people) is “that they be chased from Russia in the name of the imperial laws.”[39]
In the program of the anti-Semitic “Union of the Russian People” one could read that “the Russian people, as the gatherer of Russian lands and the creator of the great might of the state, enjoys a preferential position in national life and in national administration.”[40] One of the demands was that the number of Jewish deputies to the State Duma be restricted to three: “Such limitation is necessary because of the disruptive, anti-state activity of the united Jewish masses, their unceasing hatred of everything Russian, and the unscrupulousness which they so openly demonstrated during the revolutionary movement [of 1905].”[41] It was added that “Jews could, of course, not be members of the Union.”[42] In September 1903 Znamya (The Banner), which would later become the official paper of the Union, was the first to publish in nine articles the complete text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pamphlet about a Jewish plot to dominate the world that had been forged around 1900 by the head of the tsarist secret police in Paris at the suggestion of Pobedonostsev.[43] In October 1906 the Union founded the Black Hundreds (chornye sotnye), a terror organization with an armed wing, the Yellow Shirts—a predecessor and probably even a model for Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s Braunhemde (brownshirts). The movement mushroomed. At the height of its influence, in the years 1906–07, it had three thousand branches,[44] which is astonishing in a country with a quasi-non-existent civil society. In effect it was not so much a sign of a developing civil society as of an emerging uncivil society, because the movement played an important role in the wave of pogroms that ravaged Russia in this period and in which thousands of Jews were killed. According to Walter Laqueur there were up to seven hundred pogroms. However, these were not only perpetrated by the Black Hundred movement, but equally by the tsarist authorities. “Various parliamentary inquiry committees found that the local authorities were frequently involved; in some places where the Black Hundred did not exist . . . the pogrom was carried out by the police single-handed. . . . It was virtually impossible to establish to what extent pogroms were spontaneous and to what degree they were carefully planned and organized.”[45]
Hatred against minorities went hand in hand with hatred against foreigners and West Europeans. This xenophobic hatred was often presented as a reaction to a real or imagined disrespect on the part of the Europeans. Already in 1841 Stepan Shevyrev, a conservative Slavophile, wrote: “The West . . . expresses to us at every opportunity its aversion, which resembles almost a kind of hatred, and which is offensive to every Russian who enters his country.”[46] Another writer, Nikolay Danilevsky, a Russian Pan Slavist who gave Russian nationalism its biological basis, wrote in a famous article, Rossiya i Evropa (Russia and Europe), that “Europe does not recognize us as its equal. . . . Everything that is pure Russian and Slav, seems to him to be despicable. . . . Europe considers . . . the Russians and the Slavs as not only a strange, but also an inimical element.”[47] The Pan Slavist’s xenophobic hatred of foreigners was justified by a—largely constructed—hatred that foreigners were believed to feel against the Russian people. Hatred of the West was, therefore, considered a justified reaction, a sound defense, and a confirmation of one’s own right to exist. If you are surrounded by enemies, is not the only sound reaction that of hating your enemies and preparing for war? According to Hannah Arendt the nationalism of the Pan Slavists was “a tribal nationalism [that] always insists that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it used to destroy the humanity of man.”[48]
Masaryk spoke in this context of a zoological nationalism that celebrated the supposed natural, innate qualities of the Russian people.[49] Russian feelings of inferiority vis-à-vis the inhabitants of Western Europe are overcompensated by feelings of superiority. In this process Russia’s continental imperialism becomes much more racist than the overseas imperialism of the Western European countries. The Pan-Slav ideology is double edged: it gives the—superior—Russians the right to dominate the “inferior” peoples who already live in the empire. At the same time, it gives them a mission to “liberate” the other Slav peoples. Danilevsky, for instance, “included in a future Russian empire all Balkan countries, Turkey, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Galicia, and Istria with Trieste.”[50] Nationalist racism was the dominant legitimation theory for imperialist expansion in pre–World War I Russia. This racism, however, was, as such, rather fragile as an ideological foundation—for two reasons. First, by denying the fundamental equality of mankind one exposed oneself to the racism of other peoples that considered themselves—on the same racist grounds—to be superior to the Russians. This is what happened in effect when Nazi racists considered the German race superior to the “inferior” Slavs. Second, to proclaim one’s racial superiority vis-à-vis other peoples living in the empire who, in some cases, had developed a higher culture and standard of living, such as the Balts, reveals an arrogance that can easily be exposed. This was the reason, according to Galbraith, that in continental, territorially contiguous empires, such as Russia,
The tensions were far greater than in the outlying empires of the Western Europeans because the subject peoples in this colonialism could not be persuaded that they were inferior to their rulers. Rulers and ruled alike, when washed, were white. Many of the ruled were the equal of their colonial masters in education, cultural achievement, economic well-being. Some regarded themselves as superior; this was almost always true of those who were ruled by the Russians. To be governed by one’s inferiors or, more exactly, those so regarded is an especially bitter thing.[51]
How the Russian Revolution Forged a New Legitimation Theory for Imperialist Expansion
The October Revolution of 1917 promised a totally new beginning. During his exile in Switzerland Lenin himself was one of the most severe critics of tsarist imperialism and a staunch defender of the right of national self-determination for the oppressed nations of the empire. However, this idealism was short-lived when, after the Revolution, in the newly independent states anti-bolshevist governments were installed. In the resulting civil war, from 1918 to 1922, the bolshevists reconquered most of the lost territories of the former tsarist empire.[52] There followed a controversy between Lenin and Stalin over what to do with these territories. Stalin, who headed the People’s Commissariat (Ministry) for Nationalities, did not want to grant the Soviet republics even formal independence. He preferred to make them autonomous republics within Russia proper. For Lenin this project smacked too much of the old tsarist imperial dominance, and he proposed to federate the other republics with Russia on an equal basis in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.[53] Should Stalin have had his way, it would certainly have made the dissolution of the empire seventy years later more complicated and possibly bloodier. Lenin’s Soviet Union pretended that it was not an empire, but a voluntary association of socialist republics. Officially, Pan Slavism, social Darwinist racism, and Great Russian chauvinism fell into disgrace. The Soviet Union did not define itself primarily as a national community, but as the representative of a class: the working class. Moreover, representative not only of the working class of Russia, but of the working classes of the whole world. Russia’s inward-looking nineteenth-century nationalism had, apparently, changed into an outward-looking universalism. This universalism, even if it defended only one class, was, in theory at least, genuine: because, according to Marxist theory, the end result of the socialist revolution—a communist society—was supposed to be in the interest of mankind as a whole—former capitalists included.
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.
Notes
1.
Carlos Malamud, Historia de América (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2005), 66.
2.
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.
3.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty (London: BBC, 1977), 111.
4.
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.)
5.
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.
6.
Wyatt, “The Ethics of Empire,” 268.
7.
Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1991), 72.
8.
Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 124.
9.
Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 127.
10.
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.)
11.
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.”
12.
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.
13.
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).
14.
Hendrik Spruyt, Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 57.
15.
V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony (London: Zed Press, 1978), 269.
16.
Vilfredo Pareto, Trattato di sociologia generale, Volume secondo, “I residui” (Milano: Edizione di Comunità, 1981), 123–124.
17.
Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme suivi de Discours sur la Négritude (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2004), 27–28 (emphasis in original).
18.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 148.
19.
Karl Marx, Letter of June 18, 1862, Marx Engels Werke (Berlin/DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1974), Band 30, 249.
20.
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.
21.
Meinecke, Staatsräson, 466.
22.
Meinecke, Staatsräson, 466.
23.
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 181.
24.
Wehler, Kaiserreich, 181.
25.
Helge Pross, Was ist heute deutsch?: Wertorientierungen in der Bundesrepublik (Reinbek-Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), 62.
26.
Pross, Was ist heute deutsch? 49.
27.
Wehler, Kaiserreich, 179.
28.
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.
29.
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.)
30.
Cf. Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 103.
31.
In Russian: Pravoslavie: Samoderzhavie: Narodnost. On the exact connotation of the Russian word narodnost (nationality), see note 35.
32.
Alexander Chubarov, The Fragile Empire - A History of Imperial Russia (New York: Continuum, 2001), 61.
33.
David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974), 186.
34.
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 347.
35.
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.
36.
Cf. Frank Golczewski and Gertrud Pickhan, Russischer Nationalismus: Die russische Idee im 19. und 20: Jahrhundert. Darstellung und Texte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 36.
37.
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.)
38.
V. F. Zalevsky, “Chto takoe Soyuz Russkogo Naroda i dlya chego on nuzhen?” Excerpts published in Golczewski and Pickhan, Russischer Nationalismus, 210–216.
39.
“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.
40.
V. Ivanovich, ed., Rossiyskie partii, soyuzy i ligi (Saint Petersburg, 1906), 117–122. http://www.dur.ac.uk/a.k.harrington/urpprog.html.
41.
Ivanovich, Rossiyskie partii.
42.
Ivanovich, Rossiyskie partii.
43.
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.
44.
Laqueur, Black Hundred, 20.
45.
Laqueur, Black Hundred, 21.
46.
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.
47.
Nikolay Danilevsky, “Rossiya i Evropa” (Russia and Europe), in Golczewski and Pickhan, Russischer Nationalismus, 181–183.
48.
Arendt, Totalitarianism, 227.
49.
Quoted in Arendt, Totalitarianism, 224.
50.
Arendt, Totalitarianism, 226.
51.
Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 136.
52.
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.)
53.
Cf. Robert Service, Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 129.
54.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947), 404.
55.
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, 404.
56.
On the devastating consequences of the purges, not only for the general population, but also for the communist elite, George Kennan wrote: “And the great old names of communism had not died alone. With them had gone a full 75 percent of the governing class of the country, a similar proportion of the leading intelligentsia, and over half of the higher officers’ corps of the Red army.” (George F. Kennan, “Russia: Seven Years Later,” Annex to George Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 503–504.)
57.
Arendt, Totalitarianism, 222.
58.
Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950, 519.
59.
Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950, 519.
Chapter 3
Putin and the End of Russian “Empire Fatigue”
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]
Empire Fatigue: A Chance of Becoming a
“Normal State”?
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.
Handling Post-Imperial Pain
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.
Two Reactions to the Loss of Empire:
To Accept or Not To Accept
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.
Pitirim Sorokin and the Eternal Cycle
of Ideologies in Revolutions
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]
Sorokin mentioned the Paris Commune and the October Revolution of 1917 as examples of such economic revolutions. It is clear that the Russian Revolution of 1991, that put an end to communism with its planned economy and, after an absence of more than seventy years, reintroduced a market economy, was not a purely political revolution, but equally an economic revolution and consequently as deep and fundamental in impact and scope as the October Revolution of 1917 that it, finally, buried.
But revolutions are dialectical processes. They carry, as a rule, their negation—the counterrevolution—in their womb. After the first period of revolutionary fervor follows a second period in which the pendulum swings in the opposite direction. Sorokin described this process as follows:
Everyone knows the refrain “It was the fault of Rousseau and Voltaire,” sung in the second period of the French Revolution, when the ideologies of the first phase were giving way to those of Chateaubriand, J. de Maistre, de Bonald, and others. The story repeated itself in the Russian revolution [of October 1917]. In the first period bourgeois science, philosophy, Pushkin, Tschaikovsky and other representatives of the “degenerate aristocracy” and the “bourgeoisie” were assailed. Religion, the emperors and the great military generals of the past, the family, marriage, and sexual chastity were likewise attacked. In the second period, the Revolution banned the Marxian texts of history, restored the family, praised sexual chastity, and elevated Pushkin and Tschaikovsky to even higher positions than they had before. It idealized the great Russian Czars, the famous generals, and even the religious leaders of the past. It exalted patriotism, “Our Soviet Fatherland.” . . . Soviet Russia resumed exactly the same foreign policy as that of the Czarist regime.[25]
According to Sorokin, “ideologies of the second stage represent a revival of the living ideologies of the prerevolutionary society in new dress and colors. The revolution itself, when successful, inherently and necessarily consumes its earlier ideologies and resurrects the living prerevolutionary ideologies. This explains why in practically all great revolutions the ideologies of the first phase turned out to be unpopular in the second.”[26] This process may explain why in present-day Russia the capitalist liberalism of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys,” which guided the reforms of the early 1990s, has fallen into disgrace, together with the protagonists of the perestroika period. Not only of its leaders: Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but also of the liberal reform ministers, such as Yegor Gaidar and Andrey Kozyrev, who are now accused of being responsible for the economic breakdown and the loss of empire. Putin is clearly the representative of Russia’s “restoration” after the chaotic transformation years. It was Putin who called the loss of empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” Although he does not want to restore communism, he is the man who exalts in the second phase what had been destroyed in the first: a centralized, strong state, a positive assessment of Stalin’s “geopolitical genius,” a leading role for the secret services, and the eternal glory of the Russian empire.
The Use of Nationalist Propaganda
by the Leadership
A second factor that played a role in Russia’s reemerging nationalism and nostalgia for the lost empire is the deliberate use of chauvinist and nationalist propaganda by the leadership. Putin was not only the providential man, welcomed as the leader who would “restore order” in the second cycle of Russia’s anti-communist revolution, he was also a lucky man, because of the huge rise in export prices of oil and gas that coincided with his first two presidencies. It led the Russian population to ascribe its newfound wealth and prosperity not to blind market forces, but to their active president, who, while not deserving their praise, was quite eager to accept it. His popularity helped him spread the nationalist message. Stalin was rehabilitated as the vozhd (leader), the genial brain behind the victory in the Great Patriotic War. His massacres, purges, executions, and genocides were reduced to historical details, necessary to modernize a backward country, or—even better—they were forgotten and banned from public debate. The archives of the KGB, which had been temporarily opened, were closed again. The great autocratic and imperialist tsars, especially Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Nicholas I, and Alexander III, were rehabilitated and reestablished in their full glory. In September 2000 tsar Nicholas II was canonized and became an official Orthodox saint. This official revival of old imperial pomp and glory coincided with an increasingly aggressive behavior vis-à-vis the former Soviet republics.
The deliberate nationalist propaganda employed by the new power elite of siloviki who—like the nomenklatura in old Soviet days—once again ruled both the state and the economy, served another goal: to create foreign and internal enemies in the good, old Stalinist tradition. The regime needed vragi naroda (enemies of the people) to absorb the aggression that was building up in a society where there exists no independent judiciary, where democratic freedoms have become a farce, political parties are created by the Kremlin, elections are stolen, the police is not considered as a security force but as a threat by the population, and journalists and human rights activists are regularly murdered. Nationalism is a well-known Ventil—a safety valve—for oppressed populations. This policy of the Russian power elite to deliberately foster nationalism and to propagate fear has been analyzed by the Russian sociologist Lilia Shevtsova, who wrote that “the regime is deliberately trying to keep the minds of the public in a schizophrenic state, obstructing the formation of a civic culture and legal mentality. If the demand for a ‘special path’ and an ‘iron hand’ strengthens in Russia, it will not be because of the inability of Russians to live in a democratic and free society, but because they have been deliberately disoriented and trapped by fears, phobias, and insecurity intentionally provoked by the ruling elite.”[27] By propagating nationalism and stirring up xenophobia—not only against foreigners, but also against Russia’s Muslim minorities, who are often indiscriminately depicted as “terrorists,” the leadership is trying to unite the people under what Hayek has called a negative program.
It seems to be almost a law of human nature, that it is easier for people to agree on a negative programme, on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task. The contrast between the “we” and the “they,” the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the great advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive programme.[28]
This officially propagated nationalism with its xenophobia and enemy stereotypes (Chechen terrorists, NATO, investigative journalists, democratic opposition, NGOs, and human rights activists) is not only meant to bind the people in an unconditional way to the “negative program” of the regime (its positive program is still today largely kept secret from the Russian population—and possibly also from the regime itself). It also has another, second, function, which is to legitimate the suppression of democratic rights. This mechanism is described by Ulrich Beck as follows:
In all previously existing democracies, there have been two types of authority: one coming from the people and the other coming from the enemy. Enemy stereotypes empower. Enemy stereotypes have the highest conflict priority. They make it possible to cover up and force together all the other social antitheses. One could say that enemy stereotypes constitute an alternative energy source for consensus, a raw material becoming scarce with the development of modernity. They grant exemption from democracy by its own consent.[29]
Apart from these two aspects, mentioned above—binding the people to the regime and suppressing democracy—the propagation of nationalism by an autocratic leadership serves yet another goal. Because nationalist fervor can be used in two ways: first, as an instrument for its internal policy, and second, as an instrument for its foreign policy. In the first case nationalism and xenophobia are used to meet objectives of domestic policy: to divert the attention of the people from the real problems in the country, to knit them together behind the regime and to repress democracy and/or to stifle demands for (more) democracy. In the second case nationalism and xenophobia, while still serving the first function, additionally promote a revisionist and neoimperialist foreign policy agenda that aims to change the international status quo. The key question is, therefore, is Russia’s new nationalism of the first kind or of the second kind? Yegor Gaidar had dark forebodings, when he wrote:
It is not difficult to exploit that pain [of the loss of empire] politically. Say a few words that make the point that “we were stabbed in the back,” “it’s all the fault of foreigners who have misappropriated our wealth,” or “now we will take their property and live well again,” and the deed is done. You do not have to make up the phrases; read any textbook on Nazi propaganda. Success is guaranteed. Such populist tactics appealing to social pain are a political nuclear weapon. They are rarely used. Those who do exploit them end up tragically as a rule. Such leaders bring their countries to catastrophe. Unfortunately, for the past few years Pandora’s box has been left open in Russia. The appeals to post-imperial nostalgia, nationalistic xenophobia, the usual anti-Americanism, and even to a not quite habitual anti-Europeanism have become fashionable and might soon become the norm. It is important to realize how dangerous this is for the country and the world.[30]
The present regime is very secretive about its long-term foreign policy goals and keeps its cards close to its chest. But there are many disconcerting signals. Russia is playing a dangerous “Great Game” in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, destabilizing its neighborhood and trying to reestablish itself as the dominant power. After the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the subsequent dismemberment of this small neighboring country, an acceleration of measures and actions could be observed that—taken together—were rather disconcerting. These actions began with the combined massive Zapad (West) 2009 and Osen (Fall) 2009 maneuvers in August and September 2009 in which up to thirty thousand troops participated. For these maneuvers Khadafi’s son was invited, but not Western observers (OSCE rules for the invitation of observers were circumvented by simply dividing the maneuver into two smaller parts). The Zapad maneuver ended in September 2009 in the Kaliningrad oblast with a simulated tactical nuclear attack on Poland—an action that led to protests from the Polish government. Moreover, Russia’s nuclear doctrine was changed, to allow the preventive use of tactical nuclear weapons in local wars—even against nonnuclear states, which is a flagrant breach of the Nonproliferation Treaty. On August 10, 2009, a law was signed by Medvedev, permitting the use of Russian troops in foreign countries “to protect citizens of the Russian Federation.” These measures seemed to be meant as a legal preparation for eventual armed interventions in Russia’s Near Abroad and were interpreted as a growing Russian bellicosity, experienced as a threat by its neighboring states. According to the French geopolitician Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, “the Russians seem to be seriously convinced that in the end the empire will always return to where it [once] reigned.”[31] The existence of the Russian empire is, indeed, for many Russians so self-evident, that it is almost a law of nature, a necessity hidden in la nature des choses. The problem is that this is not self-evident for the formerly colonized peoples, who—at last—have gained or regained their national independence. A reconstitution of the former empire on a new basis will, therefore, necessitate a huge, prolonged, and concentrated effort by the Russian leadership, an effort involving making use of all the means the Russian state has at its disposal: from economic investments and economic cooperation to economic boycotts, from pipeline diplomacy to energy blackmail, from using its “soft power” to diplomatic pressure and corruption of local political elites, from charm offensives to provocative actions and military threats.
In Search of a New Legitimation Theory
for a Post-Soviet Empire
However, this new Russian imperialism needs an ideological justification. What kind of justification can the Russian leadership give to their neoimperial ambitions? It is clear that it can no longer invoke a specific mission, as in the case of the Soviet Union, which was considered as the global vanguard of the working classes. Nor can it rely on theories of the white man’s burden, which have definitively been discredited. Furthermore “spreading democracy” and the defense of human rights cannot be used as an argument. The democratic credentials of Russia are not much better than those of Belarus. What we are seeing rather are elements of the old Pan Slavism when the Kremlin calls the Ukrainians or the Belarusians “brother peoples” who should not remain separated from the “mother country” Russia. But the old Pan Slavism was meant to liberate Slav peoples from a foreign yoke. Today Belarus and Ukraine are sovereign countries and are in no need of being liberated. The new Russian Pan Slavism vis-à-vis Belarus and Ukraine has, therefore, rather the character of an annexationist Pan-Russianism. (This finds, by the way, support in the name Russians use for Ukraine: Malaya Rossiya—Little Russia.) Do Russia’s imperial ambitions stop there? Or do they equally include Moldova, Kazakhstan, the South Caucasus, and the Central Asian republics?
What—in the end—remains as a justification for a renewed Russian imperialism vis-à-vis the former Soviet republics is not much more than the naked Russian state interest. I am referring here deliberately to the Russian state interest and not to the Russian national interest, because the new Russian imperialism is clearly in the interest of Russia’s ruling political and military elite, whose positions are strengthened and consolidated by a neoimperialist policy. However, this policy is not in the interest of the average Russian citizen. And this is a forteriori the case for the citizens of the other former Soviet republics. Mongrenier spoke in this context of an “ideology of power for the sake of power.”[32] Another French geopolitician wrote that “Pragmatism is one of the characteristics of the Russian foreign policy of our early twenty-first century: a pragmatic quest for power characterized by coercive methods and an absence of morals.”[33] “Power for the sake of power,” “absence of morals”: it is clear that we have here a legitimation theory: it is the old social Darwinism of the end of the nineteenth century, the right claimed by the strong to dominate the weak for the sole reason that he is stronger.
A New Ideological Triad: Orthodoxy, the Power Vertical, Sovereign Democracy
Russia’s return to power politics had already started under Yeltsin, who demanded from the West a droit de regard in its “Near Abroad,” which came close to reestablishing the old Brezhnev doctrine of “limited sovereignty.” The West, however, did not give in to these demands. An overt neoimperial policy would also contradict the liberal democratic principles that Russia at that time still claimed to share with the West. Under Putin the principles of Russian democracy have been fundamentally changed. Russia no longer adheres to a Western-style liberal democracy with fair elections and the alternation of power. It has introduced “sovereign” democracy. This concept, forged by Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s former deputy head of the presidential administration, means that “democracy” is no longer a universal concept, the reality of which can be measured by applying universal criteria that are valid in different countries. On the contrary, “sovereign” democracy means that Russia (i.e., the leadership) itself can determine whether its system fulfills the democratic criteria. The regime is, therefore, immune against criticism from international organizations, foreign governments, or human rights organizations.
We are here back at the “Russian specificity,” proclaimed in the nineteenth century by Russian Slavophiles, for whom Russia was a special and incomparable country with its own, unique nationhood (narodnost). Initially, Putin’s “sovereign democracy” was only conceived as a defensive concept against the universalist, Western interpretations of democracy, which made the Russian democratic praxis vulnerable to criticism. Recently, however, sovereign democracy has become an offensive concept in the ideological war with the West. Russia considers itself the vanguard of an anti-Western alliance of sovereign democracies (read: autocracies with pseudo-democratic façades). A second pillar of the new Kremlin ideology is the “power vertical,” a euphemism for an authoritarian top-down government. These two pillars are complemented by a third ideological pillar, which is the Orthodox religion, which has been given a prominent place by the regime in recent years. Surprisingly, this new ideological triad closely resembles the famous nineteenth-century triad Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Narodnost of Sergey Uvarov, the Minister of Education of the reactionary tsar Nicholas I. Orthodoxy has regained its former status of semistate ideology. Autocracy has found its modern translation in the “power vertical,” and Narodnost, expressing a unique Russian specificity, has become “sovereign democracy.” These have become the three ideological pillars of Russia’s internal policy. They combine seamlessly with the renewed social Darwinism of Russia’s foreign policy. Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow, wrote:
A paradoxical situation has emerged in Russian politics today. The élite, and society at large, holds predominantly outmoded ideological notions which surfaced when the layer of communist ideology was removed. Take, for instance, the invented dilemma of “who to be friends with”—the East or the West—which echoes the futile and mainly fabricated arguments of irreconcilable people. . . . This also comes from the lack of a modern vision of the world in the absence of the all-embracing communist idea. Society and the élite have not succeeded in borrowing to any significant degree either Western liberalism or Western social democratic ideas. What we have instead are ideas about a 19th century model of a great power which, unlike communist and liberal ideologies, have nothing useful or practical for the sphere of foreign policy, and moreover, lack an international element.[34]
Luzhkov, although himself not exactly an example of a “crystal clear democrat,” has identified very clearly here the weak spot of present day Russia: the ideological void and, especially, the lack of an international (read: universal) element.
Notes
1.
Vicken Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier (London: Hurst & Company, 2008), 220.
2.
Igor Yakovenko, “Ukraina i Rossiya: suzhety sootnesennosti,” Vestnik Evropy 26, no. 64 (2005).
3.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (1994), 72.
4.
It is not correct, therefore, to speak of an American “empire” as, for instance, the Marxist economists Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy did in their book Monopoly Capital (1968). They wrote: “Legitimate differences of opinion will of course exist as to whether this or that country should be counted as belonging to the American empire. We offer the following list as being on the conservative side: The United States itself and a few colonial possessions (notably Puerto Rico and the Pacific islands); all Latin American countries except Cuba; Canada; four countries in the Near and Middle East (Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran); four countries in South and South-East Asia (Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and South Vietnam); two countries in East Asia (South Korea and Formosa); two countries in Africa (Liberia and Libya); and one country in Europe (Greece).” (Paul A. Baran, and Paul M. Sweezy. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 183.) Clearly this hotchpotch of sovereign countries does not make an empire. Alexander Motyl’s description of the relationship of the United States with many Latin American countries as a “hegemonic nonimperial relationship” comes closer to the reality. (Alexander J. Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 20 (emphasis mine).)
5.
Charles Tilly, “How Empires End,” in After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires, eds. Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 7 (emphasis mine).
6.
Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” 79.
7.
Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture: Volume II: The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 37.
8.
In 1990 Estonia’s per capita GDP was 119.3 percent, and Latvia’s 107.5 percent of Russia’s. (Source: Statistical Handbook: States of the Former USSR, Studies of Economies in Transformation, Paper No. 3 (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1992), 4–5 and 14–15). This also occurred sometimes in other colonial empires. Piers Brendon, for instance, indicated that Hong Kong, at the time of its handover to China in 1997, had “£37 billion in reserves and inhabitants who were richer per capita than those of the United Kingdom.” (Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 655.)
9.
The figures for 1991 for the other republics are: Armenia 17.1 percent, Belarus 16.3 percent, Kazakhstan 23.1 percent, Turkmenistan 21.7 percent, and Ukraine 5.9 percent (Statistical Handbook: States of the Former USSR, 14–15). This dependence on the Union Budget could be one of the factors that explain the Central Asian republics’ initial, sometimes almost reluctant, attitude to “accepting” their independence in 1991.
10.
The Russian situation resembled, therefore, that of the British in India, of which A. N. Wilson wrote: “[T]he British incursion into India, which had begun as a profit-making enterprise for merchants, had become a drain on British resources.” (A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 489.)
11.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Volume II, with an introduction by Prof. Edwin R. A. Seligman (London: Dent Dutton, 1971), 112–113.
12.
In 1881, for instance, the Earl of Dunraven wrote: “The future of England certainly depends upon her relationship with her colonies. She may remain the centre of a great empire, or become a small, scantily populated, and unimportant kingdom.” A prospect that was considered totally unacceptable by the author: “British possessions will remain British as long as we can hold them, by force if necessary.” (The Earl of Dunraven, “The Revolutionary Party,” August 1881, in Michael Goodwin, Nineteenth Century Opinion, 272–273.)
13.
Franz Cede, “The Post-Imperial Blues,” The American Interest, 7, no. 2 (2011), 118.
14.
Despite these doomsday prophecies the Netherlands experienced a protracted economic boom after the loss of Indonesia. This certainly helped to assuage post-imperial pain, but did not eradicate it. According to Thomas Beaufils, “In the Netherlands the workings of memory still prove difficult . . . . Fifty years [!] is a too short period to hope that wounds that are still open can be healed.” (Thomas Beaufils, “Le colonialisme aux Indes néerlandaises,” in Le livre noir du colonialisme: XVIe–XXIe siècle: de l’extermination à la repentance, ed. Marc Ferro (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003), 262.)
15.
Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, xiv. The same image was used by the Russian sociologist Yury Levada, who said: “The phantom pain from the loss of the Soviet empire remains vivid, like an amputated limb that one still feels.” (Quoted in Marie Jégo, Alexandre Billette, Natalie Nougayrède, Sophie Shibab, and Piotr Smolar, “Autopsie d’un conflit,” Le Monde (August 31–September 1, 2008).)
16.
Van Doorn, Indische lessen, 72.
17.
Van Doorn, Indische lessen, 72.
18.
Van Doorn, Indische lessen, 73.
19.
Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, xvi.
20.
Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, xvi.
21.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity: The Effects of War, Revolution, Famine, Pestilence upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization and Cultural Life (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1946), 277. Sorokin was not the first to analyze the different phases of revolutions, nor their immanent tendency toward restoration of prerevolutionary trends. In his classic book, The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), Crane Brinton made a similar analysis. Sorokin, whose book was published four years later (the first printing was in 1942), did not quote Brinton.
22.
Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 277.
23.
Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 277.
24.
Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 280.
25.
Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 284.
26.
Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 283.
27.
Lilia Shevtsova, Russia: Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), 320.
28.
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 103.
29.
Ulrich Beck, “Nation-States without Enemies: The Military and Democracy after the End of the Cold War,” in Democracy without Enemies, ed. Ulrich Beck (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 143 (emphasis mine).
30.
Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, xiv.
31.
Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, La Russie menace-t-elle l’Occident? with a preface by Yves Lacoste (Paris: Choiseul, 2009), 202.
32.
Mongrenier, La Russie menace-t-elle l’Occident? 98.
33.
Michel Guénec, “La Russie face à l’extension de l’OTAN en Europe,” Hérodote no. 129 (2008), 224.
34.
Yuri M. Luzhkov, The Renewal of History: Mankind in the 21st Century and the Future of Russia (London: Stacey International, 2003), 156 (emphasis mine).
Chapter 4
Putin’s Grand Design
Many Russians consider Putin a providential man. In July 2011 the Kremlin’s political strategist Vladislav Surkov, with no hesitation, said that Putin was sent to Russia by God to save his country in turbulent times. “I honestly believe that Putin is a person who was sent to Russia by fate and by the Lord at a difficult time for Russia,” Vladislav Surkov was quoted.[1] Putin himself, probably, would agree, because Putin—a former KGB Chekist—is a man with a mission. “The Chekists consider themselves completely above the law,” wrote Yevgenia Albats. “Worse, they tend to believe they are their homeland’s salvation, the only voice of authority amidst the political and economic chaos that has engulfed the country.”[2] Putin came to power almost exactly eight years after what he considered to have been the “greatest geopolitical catastrophy of the twentieth century”: the demise of the Soviet Union. This catastrophy was followed by the chaotic, weak, and erratic rule of Boris Yeltsin and his kleptocratic “Family” (of which, we should not forget, Putin himself was a prominent member). When, in December 1999, Vladimir Putin was appointed acting president by Yeltsin it became immediately clear that his priority was not so much to put an end to kleptocracy and lawlessness, because his first move as president was to grant Yeltsin amnesty and immunity from prosecution. His real priorities lay elsewhere. These were to put an end to Russia’s “humiliation” and to restore the lost empire. This reconquista could not, of course, be a simple reconstitution of the former Soviet Union of which the ideological glue that held it together, communism, was no longer available. The neoimperialism of the new Russia had to be based on new foundations. These new foundations were Russian ultranationalism and economic imperialism, a policy that was, in itself, not totally new. It had already been initiated during Yeltsin’s presidency, but could not at that time be fully implemented due to the chaotic economic and political situation. Putin’s policy had two main goals:
To reestablish at least a Union of the Slav core countries of the former Soviet Union.
To reestablish a close economic and political-military cooperation with the non-Slav former countries of the Soviet Union under exclusive Russian leadership.
Back to the USSR? From Commonwealth to the Russia-Belarus Union State
When the Soviet Union was dissolved by the presidents of the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Ukraine on December 8, 1991, they immediately created a successor organization, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). This organization—called in Russian Sodruzhestvo Nezavisimykh Gosudarstv (SNG)—functioned more or less as a receptacle for the broken pieces of the former empire. It was, in reality, not even a faint shadow of the former Soviet Union. The participating countries—including Russia—stressed the fact that it was a commonwealth of independent states. In addition, not all former republics were represented. The three Baltic states preferred to remain outside, Ukraine was not a formal member, Turkmenistan only an associate member, and Georgia left the organization in August 2009. Although the CIS managed to play a certain role in the post-Soviet space, especially in the field of collective security, it remained a loosely structured organization that did not satisfy the Russian ambition to strengthen its grip on the former Soviet republics.[3] Also the economic clout of the CIS was restricted: only 17 percent of Russia’s foreign trade took place within this bloc.[4]
A much more serious and far-reaching initiative was, therefore, the creation of the Union State of Russia and Belarus. The initiative for this Union State was taken on April 2, 1996, by the two presidents, Boris Yeltsin and Aleksandr Lukashenko, and a treaty was signed one year later. Apart from the economic benefits the Union was supposed to bring to both countries the two leaders had their own, hidden motives: “Lukashenko hoped to become president of a large Union State and . . . Yeltsin felt guilty for presiding over the dissolution of the Soviet Union. . . . He wanted to be remembered as the leader who started the reunification of the former Soviet republics by signing the Union State agreement with Belarus.”[5] The Union of the two countries was an ambitious project, organized in grand style. It included the creation of a series of common institutions, including a Supreme State Council, a Council of Ministers, a Court, a House of Audit, and a bicameral parliament consisting of a directly elected House of Representatives and an indirectly elected House of the Union. Neither the House of Representatives, nor the Court, however, ever came into existence. The reason for this was that the objectives of both sides diverged too much. Belarus sought a rapprochement for economic and financial reasons; Russia’s motivation was almost exclusively geopolitical. This did not prevent the two countries signing, on December 8, 1999, an even more far-reaching “Treaty on the Creation of a Union State of Russia and Belarus” that resembled the resurrection of a mini-Soviet Union. The Union would have a common president, a flag, an anthem, a constitution, a common currency, common citizenship, and a common army. It was a last attempt of Lukashenko to realize his ambition to become president of the Union State and—in this indirect way—to become the ruler of Russia. This ambition had to be taken seriously, so seriously, indeed, that Anatoly Chubais, who was the chief of Yeltsin’s presidential administration between July 15, 1996, and March 7, 1997, later said: “It was total madness . . . . It was a constitutional coup d’état, a change of power, not because of a political conflict, but quite simply because we had seen nothing coming.”[6] According to the treaty the supreme power in the Union State of Russia and Belarus would be shared by the two presidents and the presidents of the respective parliaments. With an ailing Boris Yeltsin and the communist Gennady Seleznev as Russian Duma president, Lukashenko would have had a real chance to become the de facto president of the Union State. The Russian press wrote at that time, therefore, that “Lukashenko intends to realize his integrationist plans not with Boris Yeltsin, but through his allies in the Duma.”[7]
However, with the nomination by Yeltsin, on December 31, 1999, of Vladimir Putin as acting president of the Russian Federation, Lukashenko knew that his ambitions were definitively blocked. Reluctant to become the local satrap of the new Kremlin boss Lukashenko resisted any infringements on Belarusian sovereignty, even after Russia continued to support the economy of his country with generous subsidies. The Russian energy subsidy equalled 14 percent of Belarusian GDP and Belarus was able to buy Russian oil dutyfree, to refine it, and to sell the products on the international market.[8] Putin’s generosity was not without a price. In 2003 he revealed his annexationist agenda when he proposed a fully fledged merger of both states. The proposed model, wrote Dmitri Trenin, was “essentially, Anschluss on the model of West Germany in 1990 absorbing the six East German Laender. Thus, Belarus received an offer to join the Russian Federation as six oblasts.”[9] The offer was flatly rejected by Lukashenko. Thereafter the project for the Union State stalled. Soon conflicts emerged over price rises for imported natural gas from Russia. When Moscow declared its intention to quadruple the price in 2007, Lukashenko threatened to quit the bilateral project and form instead a Union State with Ukraine, which, under President Viktor Yushchenko, was pursuing a pro-Western course.[10] Although the proposal was not realistic, the Kremlin did not hide its irritation. Another irritant was the fact that Putin, when he left the Russian presidency in 2008, expected to be appointed president of the Russia-Belarus Union State. Lukashenko, who did not want Putin as his formal superior, only agreed to appoint him prime minister of the Union State.[11] The sensitivities in Belarus were such that in November 2009 President Medvedev felt himself obliged to reassure his Belarusian neighbor that “Moscow wants to build a closer union with Belarus, but has not invited the country to become part of Russia,”[12] contradicting Putin’s merger proposal of 2003. Belarus, Medvedev continued, “is an independent, sovereign state . . . . All political life in the country follows its own scenario, and we have nothing to do with this scenario.”[13] However, these words did not reassure Lukashenko, nor did they bring more dynamism to the project. In the fall of 2010 Putin declared that the future of the Union State of Russia and Belarus “is increasingly becoming problematic.”[14]
Despite the reassurances given by Dmitry Medvedev the fears of Belarus of being absorbed by its big eastern neighbor were well founded. This became clear not only from Putin’s annexation proposal of 2003, but also from declarations by Russian politicians and political experts. Pavel Borodin, the state secretary of the Union State and a former member of Yeltsin’s presidential administration, for instance, said that “it would be counterproductive to scrap the Union State due to the recent political disputes between Moscow and Minsk,” adding, “we are the same people. We have lived together and will continue to live together. We are one country.”[15] Also President Medvedev continued to express himself ambiguously in his personal blog. He not only called Belarus “the closest of its neighbors,” united with Russia “by a long shared history, culture, common joys and grief,” but added: “We will always remember that our people—I am tempted to say ‘our one people’—endured great losses during the Great Patriotic War.”[16] It could, indeed, be questioned why the “same people” or “our one people,” constituting “one country,” would need to have two separate national governments. Yuri Krupnov, a Russian political analyst nostalgic of the Soviet past, openly pleaded that the Union State should, ultimately, encompass the whole former USSR. Far from criticizing Belarus for its lack of economic and political reforms, he hailed “Belarus’ experience of preserving USSR ‘achievements,’ the best things that existed during the Soviet period.”[17] Zbigniew Brzezinski has warned that “Russia’s absorption of Belarus, without too much cost or pain, would jeopardize the future of Ukraine as a genuinely sovereign state.”[18]
The Kremlin’s policy is one of wait and see, and, in the meantime, to increase its economic and political pressure. The objective of the Union State is firmly maintained by the Kremlin, which is hoping to extend the existing dance à deux to more partners. Overtures have been made in the direction of Ukraine that under President Yanukovych pursued a pro-Russian course. The pressure exercised by Russia on Ukraine was such that Volodymyr Lytvyn, the parliamentary speaker of the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, felt himself obliged to declare that “Ukraine’s entry into the Union State of Belarus and Russia is impossible.”[19] “I think that this is utopia,” he said, adding that “Ukraine and Russia should stop ritual dancing and give direct answers to direct questions.”[20] The Kremlin will certainly continue to put more pressure on Ukraine. A sign of this is an article by the German political scientist Klaus von Beyme that has been given a prominent place on the official portal of the Union State (www.soyuz.by). Von Beyme declared himself to be against EU or NATO membership for Ukraine. “From my point of view,” he wrote, “the optimal solution to the issue would be [a] Slavic Federation of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. It would be a natural partner for the EU and NATO, there is potential for widespread co-operation.”[21] Why such a “Slavic Federation,” a neoimperialist Russian project that under the Kremlin’s leadership would be directed against the EU and NATO, would be “a natural partner” for the EU and NATO is not explained. Von Beyme has excellent relations with the Kremlin. The portal of the Union State mentions that Von Beyme is “the first Western politician awarded the title of Honorary Professor of Moscow State University.” On his Wikipedia curriculum vitae one can read that he was the “first West German university student in Moscow after World War II.”
There are reasons not to underestimate the role of the Union State in the Kremlin’s neoimperialist strategy. The Kremlin’s objectives could be more ambitious than creating only a Slavic Federation. Kazakhstan could also be a candidate that is on Moscow’s wish list. The government of South Ossetia, a halfway annexed part of dismembered Georgia, has already expressed its interest in being incorporated into the Union. “South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity has said that the republic may join the Union State of Russia and Belarus if Minsk recognizes the independence of South Ossetia.”[22] Another candidate is possibly the Moldovan breakaway region Transnistria. Already in 2003, Pavel Borodin, the secretary of the Russia-Belarus Union, indicated that Russia wanted to expand the Union into all the countries of the CIS. “Mr Borodin said that Russia would first join with Belarus, then Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” wrote the Financial Times. “Two, four, then 12 [countries], he said, in a reference to the CIS.”[23] The Union State may not be a Soviet Union-bis, but it will be a Union in which Russian hegemony is assured and in which the formally preserved national sovereignties of the member states are made subservient to Russian geopolitical interests.
A Politically Inspired Customs Union
The Russia-Belarus Union State is only one piece in the mosaic of Russia’s neoimperialist strategy. Because this model of a reintegration of the former Soviet Union, focusing on a direct political integration, has shown its limitations, being too dependent on the whims of the political leadership of Russia’s partner country, Moscow had already developed a parallel approach, based on economic integration. Although this approach initially seemed less promising than straightforward political integration, it might, in the end, prove more successful. There are two reasons for this: first, because it is more focused on mutual economic benefits, and, second, because it is experienced by Russia’s partners as less threatening to their national sovereignty. Economic cooperation projects had already started under Yeltsin. On March 29, 1996, the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEc) was founded with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan as its members. During Putin’s reign, in October 2000, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan joined, followed by Uzbekistan in January 2006. The goal of the Eurasian Economic Community was to create a Free Trade Area among its six member states.
However, the three founding members of EurAsEc—Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—decided to go further and form an inner circle with a fully fledged customs union, leading to a single market. The Customs Union (Tamozhennyy Soyuz) was ratified on July 5, 2010. It included plans to adopt a common currency. In this instance, Russia was following the logic of European integration in which a deepening of economic integration leads, via a process of functional spillover, to a gradual political integration of the member states. Unlike the Union State the Customs Union is making progress and Russian officials are busy expanding its scope beyond the existing three members. Ukraine, here again, is the main target. The Ukrainian Economy Minister, Vasyl Tsushko, announced in December 2010 that Ukraine will act as an observer in the negotiations between Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan on the creation of a Customs Union.[24] He emphasized that “it is interesting for us to see what they are discussing there.” According to him, “Ukraine is not yet considering participating in the customs union.” It would be “primarily interested in [the] creation of a free trade zone within the Commonwealth of Independent States.”[25] But Russia is constantly raising its pressure on the Ukrainian government. In July 2012 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said that Kiev and Moscow “were discussing, are discussing, and will continue to discuss” the question of Ukraine’s joining of the Customs Union, a question, he said, that was “directly connected with national interests.”[26] Yanukovych was also discussing with the EU. After six years of negotiations he was expected to sign an Association Agreement with the EU during the Eastern Partnership summit, organized on November 28–29, 2013, in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. At the last minute, however, he refused to sign and turned to Moscow. Putin had offered $15 billion in loans and an important discount in the price of imported gas. Yanukovych’s U-turn led to massive demonstrations in the center of Kiev.
The great geopolitical interests that are at stake here must not be underestimated and the choices that are made now will have deep and lasting consequences for the future of the European continent. What, exactly, is at stake becomes clear from the comment of the EU Commissioner for Enlargement, Štefan Füle, who said that the “creation of a free trade zone between Ukraine and the European Union, to which Ukraine aspires, is incompatible with Ukrainian membership of the [Russia dominated] Common Economic Area’s customs union.”[27] Anders Åslund, a political analyst, declared that he “does not believe there are any real economic benefits in the customs union for Russia.”[28] Economic benefits were certainly not Putin’s main motivation for launching this project. In the long run also the benefits for the eventual partner countries are restricted—in particular for Ukraine. Putin, however, did his best to minimize the benefits for Ukraine of an association agreement with the EU, saying that “Ukraine sells Europe two litres of milk, [while] the Customs Union brings her 9 billion dollar per year.”[29] One may ask oneself why the customs union—despite its limited economic rationale for Russia—is so important for Moscow. One reason was possibly Russia’s aspiration to become a member of the World Trade Organization. After the Russian invasion and dismemberment of Georgia it was clear that Georgia, which already was a WTO member, would be inclined to block Russian membership. Putin first declared that Russia was no longer interested in becoming a member of the WTO. Later, however, he changed his tactics, and in June 2009 he announced that Russia wanted to join the WTO as a single customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. This collective application would make it more difficult for Georgia to block Russia’s WTO membership. But this option had to be dropped because there were too many technical obstacles. Thereupon Moscow declared that the three countries would negotiate individually, but harmonize their positions and enter the WTO together. Putin sought—and got—the support of the United States and the European Union to put pressure on Tbilisi. Things were, however, not so easy. The government of Mikheil Saakashvili said it could accept a Russian WTO membership only if Georgian customs officials would man the border posts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, a demand that was unacceptable to Moscow because it would mean that the Kremlin would recognize Georgian sovereignty over the two breakaway territories.[30] Finally, in November 2011, a compromise was signed, brokered by the Swiss government. The parties agreed on international monitoring of trade along the mutual borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
WTO membership, however, was not the real reason behind the launch of the customs union. The real reason was political rather than economic. The customs union served the same goal as the other Russian projects in the post-Soviet space, which is to reestablish Russian hegemony over the former Soviet republics. Moscow is ready to pay and does not hesitate to take up its former Soviet-era role when it generously subventioned the economies of the other republics. In the year 2011 the price Moscow was ready to pay for its customs union with Belarus, for instance, amounted to cancelling the customs duties for oil exported to Belarus, which cost the Russian budget about $2 billion.[31] Putin boasted in July 2012 that due to the low energy prices Belarusian GDP was raised with 16 percent.[32] In the meantime Russian officials are busy traveling around in the post-Soviet space, proselytizing and spreading the word. One of the envoys, Georgy Petrov, vice president of the trade-industrial chamber of Russia, went to Yerevan in December 2010 to woo the Armenians. According to an Armenian news agency, “Petrov implied Armenia’s joining the union will be advantageous for the country.”[33]
The CSTO: A Mini-Warsaw Pact?
Another vector used to project Russian power in the post-Soviet space is security cooperation. This was originally organized within the framework of the CIS. Immediately after the demise of the Soviet Union, in May 1992, a Treaty on Collective Security, the “Tashkent Treaty,” was signed. It was Putin, who, in May 2002, took the initiative to transform this platform and make it into a new, separate organization and rename it the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Six former Soviet republics became members of this mini-Warsaw Pact: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan (the core states that also form the customs union), plus Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Armenia. Uzbekistan joined in 2006. The member states are not allowed to join other military alliances, and there is a collective security guarantee (article 4), similar to article 5 of the Washington Treaty. Membership is made attractive by Moscow by offering the member states the possibility of buying military equipment in Russia at cost price. With the CSTO Moscow pursued two main objectives:
First, to bind the participating countries in such a way that it would become more difficult to leave the organization.
Second, to declare an exclusive zone of operation from which other security organizations and third countries (meaning: NATO, but implicitly also China) are excluded.
The first objective is pursued by a progressive integration of the command and control functions, including a common air defense, and the formation of a CSTO rapid reaction force. The second goal—to claim for the CSTO an exclusive zone of operation from which other security organizations are excluded—was one of the objectives of President Medvedev’s proposal for a new Pan European security treaty, launched in 2008.[34] Neither NATO, nor the United States, has agreed to grant Moscow via the CSTO such an exclusive droit de regard in the former Soviet space. Moscow, however, will continue its efforts to become the “Gendarme of Eurasia.”[35] That this role for the Kremlin also has its limitations became clear in June 2010, when during the ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan the Kyrgyz government asked for Russian peacekeepers in the region and Moscow did not respond—notwithstanding the fact that the events took place in a region in which Moscow claims to have “privileged interests.” Apparently the Kremlin knew that peacekeeping in this case would not bring any direct benefits to Russia, but would rather be an ungrateful and costly job. These were not the only problems. After his comeback as president in May 2012, Putin went to Uzbekistan. According to Fyodor Lukyanov this visit was “an attempt to reset relations with this recalcitrant and most unreliable CSTO ally whose position stands in the way of making this organization a working military and political alliance.”[36] Putin’s visit did not help. On June 28, 2012, Uzbekistan, the country that has the most significant armed forces in Central Asia, suddenly suspended its membership of the organization. The reason was the deep mistrust in Tashkent concerning the Russian intentions. These intentions evoke the specter of the infamous Brezhnev doctrine, because they include inter alia “to lower the threshold for intervention within the organization’s region, shift the respective decisionmaking mechanisms from a consensus to a majority rule, and develop a joint task force.”[37] According to the defense specialist Vladimir Socor, Uzbekistan’s departure showed that “this organization is purely symbolic. . . . The CSTO is mainly a symbol of Russia’s aspiration to become a great power and to be regarded as the leader of a bloc.”[38] But also symbolic organizations can bite. On April 11, 2013, Serbia was granted observer status at the Parliamentary Assembly of the CSTO (PA CSTO), showing that the CSTO had a certain attraction for a future EU member state. Afghanistan was equally granted observer status. “This is another confirmation,” said Sergey Naryshkin, president of the Duma and the Parliamentary Assembly of the CSTO, “that the PA CSTO has weight and is taken seriously on the international stage.”[39]
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization:
A Double-Edged Sword?
Another initiative that needs to be mentioned here is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). This forum also has its origin in the Yeltsin era. “Steps toward a closer Russian-Chinese relationship were outlined in March 1992 in a policy paper by Yeltsin’s former political advisor, Sergei Stankevich.”[40] It led to the foundation, in 1996, of the Shanghai Five, consisting of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan and emerged from the border talks between China and the Soviet successor states. It was—again—Vladimir Putin, who took the initiative to expand this organization and give it a more powerful structure. In 2001, when Uzbekistan joined the organization, it got its new name and began to implement many activities, ranging from fighting terrorism and drugs trafficking to economic and cultural cooperation and the organization of joint military exercises. Pakistan, India, and Iran were invited as observers, while the United States was refused observer status. The SCO proudly claimed that—including the observer states—it represented “half of humanity.” The organization has an undeniable anti-US and anti-NATO focus. Used by Putin to project Russia’s power in the region, it is, however, a double-edged sword, and for Moscow it also brings inconveniences. Although it may be instrumental to the Kremlin’s objective of keeping NATO and the United States out of Central Asia, it simultaneously facilitates the Chinese penetration of the Central Asian republics. This penetration has for the moment a predominantly economic character, but it will undoubtedly soon acquire more political dimensions. For this reason two opposition politicians, Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, severely criticized Putin’s China policy. “It would be more appropriate to call Putin’s policy toward China ‘capitulationist,’” they wrote. “In the years of Putin’s rule the Russian military-industrial complex has, in particular, armed the Chinese army.”[41] In the medium term, and certainly in the long run, the SCO could, indeed, become an asset for Beijing more than for Moscow, and their struggle for influence, markets, and energy, in the countries of Central Asia could soon become a zero-sum game.
BRIC, BIC, BRICS, or BRIICS?
Putin has “made clear that Russia has no intention of joining anybody else’s ‘holy alliances,’” wrote Eugene Rumer.[42] This is, indeed, true. Putin prefers to build his own organizations. He is a staunch organization builder and undertakes initiatives in all possible directions, building organizations when only the slightest oportunity arises. An example is the first BRIC summit convened in Yekaterinburg on June 16, 2009. BRIC is a term coined by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs to indicate the four most important emerging economies in the world: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. It was meant by him only as an investment term and had nothing to do with politics. Putin, however, jumped at the opportunity, seeing another prominent role for Russia in a global forum. The first meeting of the presidents of the BRIC countries immediately exposed their fundamental differences. Two of them, Brazil and India, are democracies. The other two, China and Russia, are non-democratic dictatorships. While the first two are in effect newly emerging powers, the other two are already long-established and recognized powers on the world scene, both being permanent members of the UN Security Council. The four disagree on most issues: human rights, democracy, trade, climate change, and the reform of global governance. The year in which the first BRIC conference took place was also the year in which the term “BRIC”—in itself already an artificial construction—lost the last remnants of its initial meaning of fast-growing emerging economies: while in the crisis year 2009 the other countries continued to grow, Russia’s GDP plunged 7.9 percent—which was the worst performance among the Group of Twenty leading economies. Participants at a business conference in Moscow in February 2010, therefore, ironically, suggested changing the name from BRIC into BIC.[43] This did not prevent the BRIC from organizing its second conference in Brazil’s capital Brasilia in April 2010. Even if Russia, with its inefficient state capitalism, cronyism, and rampant corruption, remained the economic dwarf of the four, the BRIC format offered Moscow an extra forum to project its political influence on the world stage.
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