Ryszard Kapuscinski: Imperium

(About Russians still: twenty-six million of them live beyond the borders of the Russian Federation, chiefly in the Ukraine land in Kazakhstan. Their future is uncertain.)

The process of the “Asiatization” of the Russian Federation caused by the rapid increase of the non-Russian population is accelerated by the emigration of Germans and especially the large emigration of Jews. The latter feel threatened by the growing anti-Semitism, the specter of new persecutions and pogroms.

This battle between the forces of integration and disintegration might also take place among the republics over the question of borders. The question concerning the borders of the territories of what was once the USSR is a potential time bomb. Between 1921 and 1980, the then republics of the union underwent more than ninety territorial changes and border revisions. In 1990, there were more than fifty border conflicts among them, and today that number is even higher. Many of these borders, as in Africa, cut across lands inhabited by the same people. (Such is the case with the border between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.)

The confrontation between Christianity and Islam might become another source of this border conflict. Islam is undergoing a violent rebirth, is the religion of people speaking Turkic languages, and there are around sixty million of these people in the territories of the former USSR.

Besides the battle between forces of integration and disintegration, a second process will be the progressive polarization of society according to the material conditions of life. At one pole the rich will congregate (and grow richer), at the other the poor (and grow poorer). As in every society with a low standard of living, the contrasts in Russia will be especially sharp, striking, provocative. This will be capitalism, or pseudocapitalism, in its most primeval, ruthless, aggressive form.

The third process will be development itself. I define the nature of this development with an awkward term — enclave development. In a highly developed European country, in Holland, for example, or Switzerland, the entire material world around us is developed at more or less the same level: the houses are neatly painted, there are panes in all the windows, the asphalt on the roads is smooth and the traffic lines well demarcated, the stores everywhere are well stocked, the restaurants are warm and clean, the streetlamps are lit, and the lawns are evenly mowed. In a country with enclave development, however, the landscape looks different. An elegant bank stands amid shabby apartment buildings; a luxurious hotel is surrounded by slums; from a brightly illuminated airport one plunges into the darkness of a grim, squalid city; beside the glittering display window of a Dior boutique, the dirty, empty, and unlit windows of local shops; next to impressive cars, old, stinking, crowded city buses. Capital (largely foreign) has constructed its fragrant and shining sanctuaries, these excellent enclaves, but it has neither the means to nor any intention of developing the rest of the country.

RUSSIANS ARE debating — what should be done? Some say: Return to the roots, to old Russia. Solzhenitsyn maintains that czarist Russia was a splendid country, “rich and flowering” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, How to Rebuild Russia ?). Then, unfortunately, the Bolsheviks came and ruined everything. And yet witnesses of that earlier epoch paint a less idyllic picture of Russia:

And once again after years I traverse your roads,

And once again I find you, the same, unchanged!

Your deadness, immobility, and senselessness.

Your fallow lands

And thatchless cottages and rotten walls.

Your squalor, foul air, boredom, the same dirt as earlier,

And the same servile gaze, now impudent, now dejected.

And although you were freed from slavery,

You do not know what to do with freedom — you, the people …

And everything is as it once was.

(Ivan Turgenev, “The Dream”)

And Anton Chekhov wrote in 1890:

… we have let millions of people rot in prison, destroying them carelessly, thoughtlessly, barbarously; we drove people in chains through the cold across thousands of miles, infected them with syphilis, depraved them, multiplied criminals, and placed the blame for all this on red-nosed prison wardens. All civilized Europe knows now that it is not the wardens who are to blame, but all of us, yet this is no concern of ours, we are not interested.

( Letters , volume 1)

Return to the old culture? But Russian culture was either aristocratic or peasant — whereas now there is no aristocracy or peasantry. The middle class, the bourgeoisie, was never numerous here — and was, frequently, foreign.

THE PROBLEMS, dilemmas, that face this society, and above all the intelligentsia, the democrats.

For instance, society and the state. How can one involve society in governing the country? How is the state to be democratized?

The Russian land, its characteristics and resources, favor the power of the state. The soil of native Russia is poor, the climate cold, the day, for the greater part of the year, short. Under such natural conditions, the earth yields meager harvests, there is recurrent famine, the peasant is poor, too poor to become independent. The master or the state has always had enormous power over him. The peasant, drowning in debts, has nothing to eat, is a slave.

Simultaneously, it is a land rich in natural resources — in oil, in gas, in iron ore. But these are natural resources whose exploitation and profits are easy to monopolize, particularly by a strong bureaucratic-authoritarian state. In this way both the soil’s poverty and its riches undermine the people and bolster the regime. It is one of the great paradoxes of Russia.

AND YET this country’s future can be seen optimistically. Large societies have great internal strength. They have sufficient vital energy and inexhaustible supplies of all kinds of power so as to be able to raise themselves up from the most grievous setbacks and emerge from the most serious crises.

China was able to lift itself up from the depths of humiliation and hunger and to begin to develop independently and successfully. Likewise India. Likewise Brazil and Indonesia. The large populations of these countries, their complex cultures, their ability to endure and their ambition to create, have produced, even under difficult circumstances, astonishing results. This general law of human evolution certainly applies to Russia as well.

And one more thing: the West, whom Russia fascinates but also fills with fear, is always ready to come to its aid, if only in the interests of its own peace. The West will refuse others, but it will always help Russia.

OVER THE FIELDS of Russia, in the winter, Nicholas from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace drives his troika:

Again checking his horses, Nicholas looked around him. They were still surrounded by the magic plain bathed in moonlight and spangled with stars.

“Zakhár is shouting that I should turn to the left, but why to the left?” thought Nicholas. “Are we getting to the Melyukóvs’? Is this Melyukóvka? Heaven only knows where we are going, and heaven knows what is happening to us—”