To defenders of monarchism

There are some texts that raise a burning problem in fine words, but still something seems to be wrong. The Russian version of Forbes has published a text like this by Sergei Medvedev on Russian nationalism. The same applies to Aleksandr Baunov’s text in the Sion.ru website. Such texts are always conspicuous: they are verbose, full of bombast and abundant in generalities and pious lamentations.

Should the Russians continue to oppress other peoples, Russia will never be a great power, Medvedev says. Then comes something really wonderful: “Russia as a Eurasian civilization at the junction of cultures” – a cliche of the “bombshell effect” type.

Baunov says the same in other words which are equally difficult to grasp – the Russians will be reduced to a tribal level if things go on like in Biryulevo. Let us put it bluntly: if things go the way the allegedly democratic Alexei Navalny-supporting opposition wants. Now they have a new thesis: the Bolotnaya Square democratic movement is of the same nature as the Biryulevo riots. Not a new thesis, indeed. Earlier, it was a call “to set up mental links” between the Arch of Triumph (where democrats used to gather every month) and Manezhnaya Square (where Nazis and soccer fans once came running to).

Both trends seem to be interconnected, but we will dwell on one of them. Medvedev, a professor at the Higher School of Economics, a pro-establishment conglomerate of intellectuals, entreats the authorities not to beat migrants, for this will hinder implementation of the great-power program. It is like in an Odesa joke:

“What a disgrace! Why is your Vova hitting my Misha?”

“O how awful! Vova, don’t hit Misha – you’ll be sweating.”

This joke has been popular in Russia over the past 10 years because, almost in this way, loyal liberals have been asking Putin (Vova) not to harass Khodorkovsky (Misha). Let us call it enlightened great-power attitude.

As for Baunov, he, a diplomat turned journalist, is still taking a cavalier and scornful attitude, so typical of Russian diplomacy, to Ukraine and the Ukrainian language, which is noticeable in some of his publications. Style-wise, he is closer to glossies than to Medvedev’s academism. It is a glamour-style great-power attitude.

In other words, the Russian intellectual establishment is saying: you should not hit migrants not because it is a bad thing to do but because it is not in the interests of Russian great-power attitudes.

Besides, the Russian Empire is being extolled as a model of supranational harmony. And the Russians are being asked to show the same magnanimity as the British and French did with respect to the former colonial peoples.

But I wonder how you can explain the fact that the Russification component in the policies of autocracy-supporters was increasing as the country was developing and modernizing. Incidentally, the British began to groom the local administration in India as early as in the 1930s. And not only the British and not only in India – the elites and cultures of colonial peoples developed alongside with those of the parent countries. The opposite was the case in Russia.

Why, for example, such a profound thinker as Vladimir Solovyov sometimes sang praises of Nicholas I, a “chivalrous tsar”? Because the latter restricted the Russification of Poland and was against the coercive imposition of Orthodoxy there. From this angle, Solovyov opposed him to the Russfying tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II.

It is not Nicholas I, Yermolov or Paskevich who conquered the Caucasus. Their names are associated with the romantic period of Caucasian wars. The Circassians were deported by General Nikolai Yevdokimov and Prince Aleksandr Bariatinsky under the stardom of Alexander II. The latter is known not only for the abolition of serfdom, but also for the crushing of the Polish uprising, seizures in Central Asia, and attempts to conquer Bulgaria.

Russia does not wish to recall the 1916 Turkestan Uprising, when, long before the Bolsheviks launched a labor mobilization, the tsar coerced hundreds of thousands of Muslims to work in the front-line areas. And he issued a decree to this effect during the Ramadan. So the basmachi [Muslim rebels. – Ed.] emerged well before the Soviet era.

This list is endless. But one question remains unanswered: if such bliss reigned in the Russian Empire, why did all the peoples, except for the Russians, lose no time in establishing their own statehood with all the institutions, including the army, during the short-time change of the empire’s historical form – from autocracy to Soviet power? This statehood survived in Poland, Finland, and the Baltic countries, and Russia failed to occupy them.

Ukraine is a special case, for, among other things, it had suffered more than anybody else – since the time of Catherine II’s secret ukases – from linguicide that was caused not only by the government. Cultural and linguistic arrogance was typical of the Russians of all classes – from those who came out in the press against the “khokhlomania” [admiration for Ukraine. – Ed.] of Kostomarov and Kulish, denying the very existence of the Ukrainian language, to grassroots hostility in the places of joint residence. Among those who confirm this is, for example, Lev Tikhomirov who admits that Russian children learned fast the Ukrainian language, but, as they were growing up, they were forced to think it was a second-rate tongue.

Russification grew as the country was developing because Russian autocracy was a form of ethnic – no other than Russian – statehood. All the other peoples of the empire were to be subordinate to a foreign ethnic force. Therefore, it was necessary to bring nation genesis to a halt throughout the empire. Switching from autocracy to Soviet power meant the application of other methods to freeze national development – without previous conventions.

The Russians remained on the tribal level in this case, and it is mindless to scare them with this, as Baunov is doing, now. There is no danger of “a big historical nation turning into a small prehistoric ethnic group” because the Russians have never been a historical nation.

“Master of the Russian land” is what Nicholas II wrote in the census questionnaire’s entry about occupation. This is the most precise description of the autocrats’ private-law status and self-identification.

This sociopolitical model ruled out the possibility of the formation of a nation along the West European lines – via self-assertion of the subjects led by the third estate. Unable to self-organize, the elite was being constantly watered down, while the town in Russia was of an entirely different nature in comparison with that of Western Europe – it was not a self-contained sociopolitical entity. Unlike the West European nations, the Russian ethnos was deprived of a crystallization center, such as the bourgeoisie which was going through a revolutionary epoch of its development. West European nations were born in confrontation with monarchs, in the establishment of the principle of people’s sovereignty. Russian unity was being cemented by autocracy through the vertical chain of command rather than through inner horizontal social links.

Putin and his agitprop are now talking about some new ties. There was only one tie in Russian history. The vertical chain of command used imperial expansion – inherited from the Byzantine Empire, having no rational explanation, economically unviable and politically dangerous – as the chief method to cement the community. Imperial expansion was in place of the making of a nation state which was never built in Russia. The Russians would assert themselves as Russians by way of imposing themselves on other peoples rather than by way of inner self-organization.

This is what the great-power status boils down to – there is no enlightenment or glamour in it, no matter how hard you try to find some. This status can only be based on paranoia. When Peter I was abolishing patriarchy and establishing the synod, he was guided by Protestant countries, where the monarch was the primate of a national church, but this setup superimposed on far more archaic ideas of a tribal chieftain-cum-priest. These ideas had also occurred among some other European peoples, but they received a longer lease of life in Russia.

The Russian monarch, an autocratic tsar, is not only the father of the nation, but also part of every representative of the people, a tribal chief, an inevitably sacral figure that needs both physical and spiritual protection:

And the neighboring spies / and the tunnel from Bombay to London. / What used to be long ago, what used to be in the movies / is now in reality. / A well-fed Russian is not at all kinder than a hungry one. / It doesn’t matter whose side I am on. / All I need is to cry out: I will tear anyone to pieces.

Of all the peoples that populated the empire, only the Russians could identify themselves with the tsar so deeply, personally, bodily and spiritually, i.e., magically, at the same time. And autocracy recognized no civil loyalty – a non-Russian was always suspicious. We can find the echoes of this now in the attempts of agitprop to proclaim the entire population of Russia as Russians (this has happened before) and, of course, in the stories of a single Russo-Ukrainian nation. Under autocracy, the concept of a triune Russian nation was not only official – it sank deep into and continues to exist in the common awareness of Russians.

As Pushkin said, there can be strange convergences in history. In this case, it is coincidences. The Slavophil Ivan Aksakov warned in a newspaper titled Den [it came out in 1861-65]: “The Little Russian language, being coined by khoklomans, is just an empty pretext, and the real goal is a separate Little Russian state.” Here is a true “love” for Slavic peoples, the particularities of which could not be hidden.

Speaking about the results of the Bulgaria liberation war, Otto von Bismarck noted venomously that the southern Slavs were glad to receive aid from a white tsar, but they were not striving to replace the government of a Turkish aga with that of a Russian general. With the experience of Ukraine and Poland in mind, the Balkan Slavic peoples were aware that the so-called liberation was a conflict between the two empires and the domination of any of them would mean isolation from Europe.

What is proudly called Russian civilization is a fringe version of the European civilization, its imitative model, which very selectively copies some parts of the original. But backwardness and imitativeness are being touted as special qualitative condition, while the concept of “Russian civilization” results in rejecting both European and any other civilizations.

Hence is the so-called Russian idea.

It is impossible to define this idea in meaningful terms, but is quite possible to offer a functional description. In my view, the “Russian idea” should be interpreted as a compensatory reaction of the Russian nation to the country’s insufficient modernization. The main contradiction that prodded the intelligentsia to seek the “Russian idea” was a discrepancy between the European nature of Russian culture and Russia’s civilization-related inferiority and defectiveness vis-a-vis Europe.

And as this inferiority is still gnawing the Russians, it may come out differently in each case. Some cannot forgive the Ukrainians the attempts of rapprochement with Europe, and some are trying to protect human rights in Russia. The Russian idea can foster catch-up development or else lay the groundwork for rejection of development and isolation of the country.

But any great-power policy, even with intellectual and esthetic pretences (or, maybe, this type above all), will only exacerbate the culture- and civilization-related contradiction of Russian history and affect Russian position in the world.