Putin's Wars
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An important push factor for Russia’s imperial expansion was Russia’s economic system. It was based on agriculture in feudal properties, and the labor force consisted largely of serfs. This agriculture was not capital-intensive, as was mostly the case in Western Europe, but coercion-intensive.[20] This meant that it was neither innovative nor efficient and rendered only marginal profits to the landlords who disposed of two methods only to raise their profits: increasing the exploitation of the serfs or adding new land. Because the exploitation of the serfs could not be increased beyond certain physical limits, this led to a continuous search for new land and territorial expansion. This tendency was reinforced by the fact that “the Russian state took shape in a capital-poor environment.”[21] The state simply did not have enough money to pay or reward faithful servants of the state and successful military commanders. “[T]he logic of warmaking and statemaking in a region of little capital led rulers to buy officeholders with expropriated land,”[22] and with newly acquired land. The two above-mentioned factors led to Russia developing a tradition of territorial expansion from an early stage. Territorial expansion became, as it were, the normal “way of life” of the Russian state. It was like an organism that grows and grows and continues to grow until it has reached its full size, preordained by its biological nature. But unlike an organism, Russia did not have a genetically preordained “normal size.” It could go on and on, growing beyond any limit. And in a certain sense that was what happened. According to Colin Gray, territorial expansion was “the Russian way,” just as it has been “the Soviet way.”
It is estimated, for example, that between the middle of the 16th century and the end of the 17th, Russia conquered territory the size of the modern Netherlands every year for 150 years running. Furthermore, unlike the case of most other imperial powers conquest by Russia became a permanent and nonnegotiable political fact (save under conditions of extreme duress, as with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918).[23]
Traditions can be upheld and followed with more or less constancy and enthusiasm. A country can become an imperial power by making this an explicit choice or in a more or less accidental way. The British Empire, according to the nineteenth century British historian Sir John Seeley, was acquired “in a fit of absence of mind.” There existed no previous, elaborated British plan to build an empire. Edward Dicey, a British journalist and writer, wrote in 1877:
We have never been a conquering nation. Since the days when the Plantagenets essayed the conquest of France we have never deliberately undertaken the conquest of any foreign country; we have never made war with the set purpose of annexing any given territory. We have had no monarchs whose aim and ambition it has been to add fresh possessions to the crown, in order simply and solely to extend the area of their dominions.[24]
Although the British perception that their empire was created in “a fit of absence of mind” may be exaggerated, it is not an exaggeration to say that from its early beginnings the Russian empire has been conceived as a deliberate project. The twin objectives of territorial expansion and the subjugation of other peoples were consciously and purposively pursued by Russia’s political elite. An exemplification for this mindset is tsarina Catherine the Great’s famous dictum: “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.”[25] It was not only a supposed fragility of the Russian state that was at the root of its continuous expansion. “The fact that, unlike Western Europe, the formation of the empire does not succeed the construction of the state, but accompanies it, has also blurred the dividing lines. The concept of the nation and imperial ambition merge as soon as Moscow, the first centre of the modern state, gains the upper hand over rival Russian principalities and, then, over the weakened mongol overlord.”[26] The fact that in Russia empire building was a constitutive part of the process of state formation indicates a fundamental difference with empire building by the Western European states, which only began after the national states had been consolidated. While Russia was a “product of empire,” this was not the case here. John Darwin, for instance, emphasized the fact that Britain “was not in any obvious way a product of empire. It was not ‘constituted’ by empire—a modish but vacuous expression. The main reason for this was that its English core was already an exceptionally strong and culturally unified state (taking language and law as the most obvious criteria) long before it acquired an empire beyond Europe.”[27] The same was true for Portugal, Spain, France, and even the Netherlands (which from 1568 to 1648 was fighting a war of independence against Spain).
Russian Despotism and Russian Imperialism: Inseparable Twin Brothers?
In Russia internal despotism and external imperialism went hand in hand. They were, so to speak, inseparable twin brothers. We can distinguish five factors that played a role in establishing this link:
Territorial expansion gave extra legitimation to the rule of the despot.
Territorial expansion functioned as a surrogate satisfaction for the disenfranchised (serf) population.
Because despots tend to reign for longer periods than democratically elected leaders, they are in a better position to make long-term projects, especially those concerning imperialist territorial expansion.
Despotic rule as such fits better with imperial rule than with democratic rule. Despotic and imperial rule are congenial.
Despotic rule is not only more apt to generate imperialist policies than non-despotic rule, it also has a tendency—as in a dialectical process—to be strengthened, in its turn, by the empire, because its vast surface and the many different subjugated populations will hamper the establishment of a more democratic rule. In this sense despotic rule and imperialism are mutually reinforcing processes.
Despotic rule means suffering for the population, which is denied basic human freedoms and civil rights. A despotic tsar does not legitimize his absolutist rule by a reference to the popular will, but to divine right. This legitimacy, based upon a metaphysical droit divin, will be strengthened when the ruler can boast important imperial conquests. Imperial conquests provide, so to speak, an additional legitimacy for his rule. This same mechanism can be seen to play a role in Putin’s (partial) rehabilitation of Stalin. Stalin’s “geopolitical genius,” that is, his territorial expansionism, is used to (re-)legitimate his regime.
Since the Sobornoe Ulozhenie of 1649, which is the social charter of Russian absolutism, the enserfment of the Russian peasantry, which had already begun two centuries earlier, was definitively established. From that moment on Russian serfs were irreversibly bound to the soil of their master. Moreover, the towns were subjected to tight controls and sealed off from the rest of the country. The urban poor were considered as state serfs. Only taxpayers (that is, the aristocracy and the rich merchant class) could be legal residents. No inhabitant could leave without royal permission.[28] Rural migration was definitively stopped. Serfdom, however, was not in the interest of the private landowners alone. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian state owned land with twenty million serfs on it. This was 40 percent of the peasant population.[29] This population was literally the property of the state. A population that has practically no rights, not even the ability to move freely around the home country, cannot have the personal pride and individual satisfaction of free people. In such a case, the home country’s imperial conquests provide an ersatz satisfaction. Feelings of powerlessness and a lack of personal pride and individual accomplishment are compensated by a process of identification with the power and the glory of their country. The lack of personal respect that they receive as individuals is compensated by the respect—and fear—that their home country inspires. “If a man is proud of his Belief, his Fatherland, his People,” one can still read in an anonymous Russian publication of 2007 attacking democracy, “he finds internal pride in himself as a representative of this great people and great country.”[30] This mechanism can be observed in a population of serfs that has been enslaved, as well as in a population that gives up its original freedom and e
nslaves itself for the sake of national glory. John Stuart Mill already described this mechanism in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), where he wrote:
There are nations in whom the passion for governing others is so much stronger than the desire of personal independence, that for the mere shadow of the one they are found ready to sacrifice the whole of the other. Each one of their number is willing, like the private soldier in an army, to abdicate his personal freedom of action into the hands of his general, provided the army is triumphant and victorious, and he is able to flatter himself that he is one of a conquering host, though the notion that he has himself any share in the domination exercised over the conquered is an illusion. A government strictly limited in its powers and attributions, required to hold its hands from overmeddling, and to let most things go on without its assuming the part of guardian or director, is not to the taste of such a people.[31]
According to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk this tendency to compensate one’s lack of personal self-respect by indulging in the imperialist glory of one’s home country can be observed especially in the nation states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are for him “experiments in collective self-esteem and self-aggrandizement, directed by the mass media.” The foreign policy of these national states, “insofar as it included imaginary competition, was always dramatized by tensions of respect and disrespect.”[32] This element of surrogate satisfaction must not be underestimated. It clearly still plays an important role in present-day Russia, where citizens, whose political freedoms are more and more restricted, long for “national greatness” and a recovery of “Russia’s glorious past.”[33]
Despotic rulers are sometimes poisoned, sometimes deposed. However, as a rule, they tend to have longer reigns than those of their democratic counterparts, who, at regular intervals, have to expose themselves to elections. Their long reigns enable despots to initiate long-term projects, such as territorial conquests, and bring them to fruition. Russia’s kings and tsars were often blessed with long lives, which led to extraordinarily long reigns. This was the case for the first three rulers, who may be considered the founders of the Russian imperial project. Ivan III (the Great) reigned for forty-three years, his successor Vassily III, for twenty-eight years, and Ivan IV (the Terrible), who was the first to call himself tsar, for thirty-seven years. Between 1462 and 1584 these three rulers reigned for 108 years altogether, a period that was only interrupted for fourteen years when Ivan IV was a minor. It is, therefore, no surprise that under this long and stable rule the foundations for Russia’s continuous expansion were laid.
Of course long reigns of monarchs were not a privilege of Russia alone. Absolutist monarchs in Western Europe equally could reign for long periods during which they were able to undertake ambitious expansionist projects. Louis XIV, the French roi soleil, is a good example of this. But with the end of absolutism in Western Europe and the advent of parliamentary democracy, Russia’s autocratic government gained an advantage. This advantage remained when tsarist autocracy made way for communist dictatorship. Stalin, who ruled for almost thirty years, was as staunch an empire builder as Ivan the Terrible, whom—in fact—he surpassed by creating the greatest Russian empire ever.[34] Vladimir Putin’s attempt to rule possibly for twenty-four years must be seen within this perspective. Putin considers this long personal rule as a necessary precondition for his supreme geopolitical goal: the restoration of the lost empire.
There exists, furthermore, a fundamental mismatch between democratic rule and imperial rule. Democracies are based on the principle of the fundamental equality of their citizens. Imperial rule is based on a basic inequality between the rulers and the ruled.[35] Imperial rule, exercised by a despotic ruler, is, therefore, more logical and consistent, because no distinction is made between the inhabitants of the imperial mother country and the inhabitants of the imperial possession: in fact no one is a citizen. All are, in the most literal sense, subjects. Jan Nederveen Pieterse stressed the
direct connection, a military nexus, between the exercise of imperialist force overseas and the application of force to repress domestic unrest; time and again we find that not only the same methods and equipment were deployed but also the same personnel.[36] . . . In Russia, with tsarist generals, the great Suvorov among them, stamping on rebels at home and other peoples in Asia were always twin employments. This gives a concrete significance to the saying that a people that oppresses another nation cannot itself be free.[37]
The last, and fifth, point is that the vastness of an empire strengthens despotic rule. This was an argument that was already being used by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers. Their argument was that huge countries with large populations could be neither prosperous nor democratic. This argument was used especially by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom the ideal state was a city-state, the size of Geneva. “Size of states!” he wrote, “first and most important source of human misery, and especially of the many disasters that undermine and ruin the civilized peoples. Almost all small states, whether republics or monarchies, prosper only by the fact of being small.”[38] And he added: “All large states, crushed by their own mass, are suffering.”[39] Rousseau’s aversion to big states was shared by Voltaire, who wrote: “Men seldom deserve to govern themselves. This happiness seems to be the lot only of small nations hidden in islands, or between mountains, like rabbits who hide from the carnivorous animals; but in the end they are found and devoured.”[40] Adam Ferguson, their contemporary, and one of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, wrote, in a similar vein, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767):
Small communities, however corrupted, are not prepared for despotical government: their members, crowded together, and contiguous to the feats of power, never forget their relation to the public; they pry, with habits of familiarity and freedom, into the pretensions of those who would rule. . . . In proportion as the territory is extended, its parts lose their relative importance to the whole. Its inhabitants cease to perceive their connection with the state, and are seldom united in the execution of any national . . . designs. Distance from the feats of administration, and indifference to the persons who contend for preferment, teach the majority to consider themselves as the subjects of a sovereignty, not as the members of a political body. It is even remarkable that enlargement of territory, by rendering the individual of less consequence to the public, and less able to intrude with his counsel, actually tends to reduce national affairs within a narrower compass, as well as to diminish the numbers who are consulted in legislation, or in other matters of government.[41]
And Ferguson concluded:
Among the circumstances, therefore, which . . . lead to the establishment of despotism, there is none, perhaps, that arrives at this termination, with so sure an aim, as the perpetual enlargement of territory . . . . In the progress of conquest, those who are subdued are said to have lost their liberties; but from the history of mankind, to conquer, or to be conquered, has appeared, in effect, the same.[42]
These early laudatory speeches in praise of small is beautiful were written before the American Revolution, at a time when it was almost axiomatic that democratic rule was only possible in small territories, such as the ancient Greek polis or the Italian and Swiss city-states. However, even in the twentieth century authors continued to express their doubts about the viability and utility of large states. In 1914 the British historian Sir John Seeley made the following remark about the size of the British empire: “At the outset we are not much impressed with its vast extent, because we know no reason, in the nature of things, why a state should be any the better for being large, and because throughout the greater part of history very large states have usually been states of a low type.”[43] He added: “For a long time no high organisation was possible except in very small states.”[44] This assessment led him to make the following remark about Russia: “We cannot, it is true, yet speak of Russia as having a high type of organisat
ion.”[45]
The United States was the first counterexample, showing—contrary to all historical evidence—that it was possible to organize a democratic society over a large territory. But the young United States was not an empire; it was a former colony with a homogeneous population that had liberated itself from British rule.[46] Russia was different. It was from its foundation an imperialist, as well as an absolutist state: continuously expanding its territory and subjugating and incorporating foreign peoples within its frontiers. Its mere size and its heterogeneous populations seem, indeed, to have been determining factors that have hampered its development into a modern, democratic polity.