Marcel Van Herpen - Putin's Wars

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] 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. Diderot made no effort to flatter the tsarina. “The Empress of Russia,” he wrote, “is certainly a despot.” [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.) 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] Cf. Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 622.

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] Israel, Democratic Enlightenment , 626. 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] 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.” 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] Palmer, Democratic Revolution , 404. Catherine remained a convinced autocrat and is mainly remembered for her exuberant love life and the Russian expansion into the Crimea.

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] 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. 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] 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. 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] 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.) 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.