Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

Perhaps because of this ambiguity about what it meant to be Russian, the elite grappled with the issue by focusing not so much on ethnicity but on the uniqueness of Russian civilization. Over the years, the Russian Idea became a powerful cornerstone of the country’s evolving identity. Its core was “the conviction that Russia had its own independent, self-sufficient, and eminently worthy cultural and historical tradition that both sets it apart from the West and guarantees its future flourishing.” 5Russian rulers early on defined themselves by how they differed from Europe, stressing their Eurasian vocation. That, rather than comparing themselves, say, to Asia, was their starting point. In the nineteenth century, deputy minister of education and classical scholar Count Sergei Uvarov summed up the essence of the Russian Idea in the famous triad “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” This is what defined the Russian state. Its three basic institutional pillars were the Orthodox Church, the monarchy, and the peasant commune.

Inherent in this nineteenth-century definition of what it meant to be Russian was the belief in the superiority of a communal, collective way of life, as opposed to the competitive individualism of the more developed European countries. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for instance, vividly portrays the contrast between the artificial, mannered lives of the Saint Petersburg courtiers who spoke only French to each other and the pure, simple, moral life Levin leads on his country estate. The organic ties between the monarch, the peasants, and the Church had little room for an emerging middle class, which might eventually challenge the power of the absolute monarch. The peasant commune, or mir (which also means both “world” and “peace”), formed the basis not only of the Russian Idea but also of an incipient political system that still influences the way Russians view relations between rulers and the ruled.

Harvard historian Edward Keenan elaborated on the distinctive aspects of the Russian system, which began in medieval times and arguably persists today. He described it in a pioneering article published just before the Soviet collapse. The political culture of both the Russian peasant commune and the Russian court, he argued, emphasized the importance of the group over that of the individual and discouraged risk-taking. At the court, it was important for the boyars (nobles) to act as though they supported a strong tsar, even if the reality was otherwise and the tsar was weak. Informal mechanisms were far more important than formal institutions of governance, and it was important to obscure the rules of the game from all but a small group of power brokers who were privy to these rules. Moreover, foreign emissaries in Russia were largely kept ignorant of what was really happening at court. Over centuries, the persistence of opaque rules of the game within the Kremlin walls has always made it difficult for outsiders and foreigners to understand how Russia is ruled and what motivates its foreign policy. 6

The traditional tendency to emphasize Russia’s uniqueness also focused on the moral and spiritual qualities of the Russian Idea. The nineteenth-century poet Fyodr Tyutchev famously wrote:

The notion that Russia was somehow beyond a rational understanding became part of the image of a country that could not adhere to norms constructed in the West.

Indeed, Russians have long been divided over whether they should look to the West or the East. Although the Russian Idea had a significant number of adherents in the nineteenth century, it also had its opponents. Dissent and opposition have as long a tradition in Russia as has autocracy. After Russia’s humiliating defeat by Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War in 1856, there was growing pressure at home for reform. The serfs were emancipated in 1861, and Tsar Alexander II created local legislative councils, reformed the judiciary, and introduced other measures designed to give a small portion of the population a voice in the political system. But it was not enough for those who wanted Russia to adopt European institutions. Indeed, Alexander was assassinated in 1881 by members of a revolutionary group seeking radical change.

As the nineteenth century wore on, those who believed in Russia’s unique and superior destiny—the Slavophiles—were challenged by the Westernizers, those who wanted Russia to adopt European values and institutions, the rule of law, and greater democracy. More radical elements turned to socialism or anarchism, but they all looked west to construct the socioeconomic model they wanted Russia to adopt. Although successive Russian tsars, beginning with Peter the Great, had looked to Europe as a technological and economic model they wanted to emulate, they resolutely rejected the idea of emulating Europe’s political model, because that would have spelled the end of Russian absolutism. 8In today’s Russia, those committed to perpetuating Russia’s unique system and protecting their own vested interests continue to battle the minority who would like Russia to become a fully modern state with the rule of law and institutions that serve the population.

Just as Russians have been ambivalent about the West, the West has been ambivalent about—if not downright hostile toward—Russia. The scathing—and ultimately incorrect—criticism in the Twittersphere of the shoddy state of Russian hotels in Sochi in 2014 on the eve of the Olympics had echoes of many past criticisms of Russia’s backwardness. Indeed, for centuries the outside world was generally suspicious of Russia. A series of Western travelers to Russia in the nineteenth century described a Russia that shocked many of their readers: backward, even barbaric, and the antithesis of what an enlightened society should be. The French Marquis de Custine published La Russie en 1839 after a trip to Russia, in which he wrote:

He must have sojourned in that solitude without repose, that prison without leisure that is called Russia to feel all the liberty enjoyed in other European countries, whatever form of government they may have adopted. If ever your sons should be discontented with France, try my recipe: tell them to go to Russia. It is a useful journey for every foreigner; whoever has well examined that country will be content to live anywhere else. It is always good to know that a society exists where no happiness is possible because, by law of nature, man cannot be happy unless he is free. 9

Another renowned traveler was the American George Kennan, a cousin of the grandfather of the famous diplomat and historian George Frost Kennan. George Kennan the elder traveled extensively in Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, producing the two-volume Siberia and the Exile System, for which he interviewed political exiles sent to Siberia by tsarist bureaucrats. He became a fierce critic of the repressive tsarist system but soon became disillusioned with the Bolsheviks, writing, “The Russian leopard has not changed its spots…. The new Bolshevik constitution… leaves all power just where it has been for the last five years—in the hands of a small group of self-appointed bureaucrats which the people can neither remove nor control.” 10

How have ideas influenced Russian foreign policy? And does Russia need an ideology to guide its foreign policy? Or is nostalgia for the nineteenth-century days when Russia was a great power enough to inspire today’s Kremlin? Certainly the current occupants of the Kremlin are fond of invoking the 1815 Congress of Vienna, when the great powers divided Europe, as a model to be admired. Tsarist Russia’s ideological trilogy of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality was directed mainly toward Russia’s internal evolution. There was no official foreign policy ideology in an era when Russia became a major player in the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe. When the Bolsheviks took power, however, that changed. Marxism-Leninism became the official ideology with an explicit foreign policy component. Of course, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin took the writings of the German Karl Marx—and adapted them to the Russian environment. Marx had been dubious that the largely peasant Russia was ripe for revolution, and Lenin had to explain why it was. Nevertheless, what appeared revolutionary at the beginning increasingly began to resemble the imperial era as time went on. “Soviet socialism turned out to bear a remarkable resemblance to the Russian tradition it pretended to transform.” 11This was equally true in foreign as in domestic policy. Soviet ideology blended the rhetorical aspects of Leninism with a heavy dose of Russian nationalism. And whatever the formal ideology, the predominant feature of the Soviet attitude toward the international arena was a dialectical view of the world. It was the USSR against the West, which was out to defeat the Soviet Union. Agreement with the West might be possible on a case-by-case basis, but in the long run, the interests of Russia and the glavnyi protivnik (main enemy) were opposed. This dialectical view and suspicion of the outside world has been remarkably durable throughout the reign of tsars, communist general secretaries, and post-Soviet presidents.