Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

What is closer to me is the theory of the progressive development of mankind, according to which – from the point of view of social evolution – society can be on different levels of civilization… The gradual transformation of non-Europeans into Europeans is a long, difficult and painful process; but from the point of view of the development of society and the country, there is no alternative to this. [27] https://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2013/10/29/obschestvo-ne-spravlyaetsya-s-pritokom-migrantov . ‘Integration: Society Can’t Cope with the Flow of Immigrants’ (in Russian), 29 October 2013.

Progressive thinkers in the late nineteenth century could argue this way, as when Kipling wrote about ‘the white man’s burden’ and the Count de Gobineau spoke of racial superiority; when non-Europeans were touted around the world in cages and put on display in circuses; and when the English advertisement for Pears soap suggested that it could wash clean black skin. It is impossible to imagine such ideas being put forward now in Western newspapers or at Wharton; but in Russia in the second decade of the twenty-first century it is still considered a normal level of discussion.

The key misconception of Russian advocates of racial purity is the idea that there is a certain understanding of what is ‘our’ identity; ‘our’ city, in which ‘we’ are the ‘landlords’ and ‘they’ are simply ‘tenants’. This is an ideological statement, but does not represent social reality. Russia – and Moscow, what’s more – is a veritable cauldron of life, in which the process of ethnic integration has been operating for longer and more successfully than in the most tolerant of European countries; we simply stubbornly refuse to acknowledge this fact. As a Eurasian civilization, Russia stands at the junction of various cultures. Aliens who were conquerors (Tatars) or the conquered (from the Caucasus) were easily assimilated. Russia has never been a ‘pure’ nation, but an eternal colonial frontier, with its Slav-Ugric genes, its soul from the steppes, and its elite, made up of descendants of Tatar mirzas (royal princes), Baltic barons and Caucasian princes. And the main melting pot of this potpourri was Moscow, which for more than six hundred years has been mixing together these human tides, races and religions.

Even the names of streets in Moscow speak of this multicultural heritage: Ordynka was the road to the Golden Horde; on the Arbat stood the Tatars with their carts called arbas; then there are also Great Tatar Street and Little Tatar Street, with its mosque, within walking distance of the Kremlin; there’s Armenian (Armyansky) Lane near Lubyanka Square; Georgian (Gruzinsky) Streets, both Large and Small, just off Tverskaya; Maroseyka Street, a short form of Malorossiki, or ‘Little Russians’, where the ‘Little Russians’ – as the Ukrainians were known – settled.

It is true, though, that Russia was never a haven of tolerance. In our ethnopolitical history there are plenty of classic examples of colonialism, barbarism and violent russification: the Pale of Settlement and the Black Hundreds; pogroms and uprooting of whole peoples. But this was, after all, an empire. The empire could accommodate different peoples and they could serve the empire. And Moscow, unlike St Petersburg, was always a giant marketplace, a massive transit hub; and in the age of globalization the capital’s role as a giant valve for the transfer of resources – be they raw materials, finance or people – has only grown.

And here we have the second blunder of modern Russian nationalism: in their search for ‘blood and soil’, the nationalists are turning away from Russia’s massive imperial heritage, from the breadth of a great power and its ability to live with Others. It is surprising that the nationalists cannot see this as they march under their black and yellow banners of the Russian Empire in the ‘Russian March’ in Biryulyovo. They are unaware that Russia has an imperial, not a Russian, ethnos; that it was the empire which gave Russia its great history, but at the same time replaced the Russian nation. By demanding that the city should be cleansed of migrants, that the Caucasus should be cut off from Russia or that visa regimes should be established for the Central Asian states, the nationalists want to turn the Russian Federation once and for all from the successor state of the empire into just another provincial country.

This is the main difference between Russia and other former empires, such as France, Britain or the Netherlands. In the postcolonial era, they have managed to transform their experience of empire into a sense of responsibility for the peoples whom they oppressed for centuries, into a proactive policy of immigration, assimilation and tolerance. In recognition of their moral responsibility for colonialism, the great nations have demonstrated generosity, having no fear for their gene pool and cultural immunity. If Russia wants to be a global player, if it wants to influence events in Syria and in the Balkans, to hold talks on a par with the USA and China, it must accept its responsibility for the centuries of colonialism, for ‘its’ Tajiks and Dagestanis, for their markets and their ethnic quarters, for the builders and cleaners from these regions, for the mosques and the doner-kebab kiosks. This is normal; this is the legacy of empire. And today, holding ‘great nation’ status includes being welcoming.

Unfortunately, the word ‘welcoming’ does not come into the Russian political lexicon. With its discordant ‘Russian March’, with its pretend Cossacks, its Nazis, its heathens and its football fanatics, Russia is turning away from an empire and becoming a mere province; as is evident in the distant Moscow suburb of Biryulyovo.

Political scientists have always had a hard time in Russia. It’s a country where there have never been free universities; where independent political thought has led to prison sentences; and where critical thinking has remained the stuff of dreams. This is a country where political science has been simply a timid servant, at the beck and call of those in power, and where you could count genuine political scientists on the fingers of one hand.

There is, however, one sphere of knowledge in which political thought in the Fatherland has been allowed to develop fully: the secretive and mystical discipline known as ‘geopolitics’. One hundred years ago, at the time of the fathers of geopolitics, Rudolf Kjellén and Friedrich Ratzel, the concept was infused with a particular intellectual freshness; but in the past fifty years it has grown considerably stale, and in Western political science it has been kicked into a far-off corner of a cupboard as one of the guises of the theory of political realism. It has become the destiny of veterans of the Cold War, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski or John Mearsheimer, whose article in Foreign Affairs in July 2014, talking about how the West had ‘missed its chance’ with Russia, was greeted with delight by Russian experts.

On the contrary, in post-Soviet Russia, with its virginal political thought, geopolitics became the queen of the sciences. Provincial teachers of Marxism, military philosophers in military uniform and mere charlatans flocked to it, covering up their lack of knowledge of the humanities with this deceptively thin theory, which, to the kind Russian heart, looked like a conspiracy containing pretty words such as ‘Eurasia’, ‘heartland’ and ‘Atlantic civilization’. In Russia, for the ruling class geopolitics removed the need for a critical outlook on the wider world, suggesting instead messianic myths and simulacra such as ‘national interests’ and ‘the struggle for resources’.