Putin's Wars
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A New Legitimation Theory: Pan Slavism
However, with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century there emerged, alongside Orthodox religion, a new legitimation theory. National expansion was no longer the exclusive domain of ruling dynasties. It became increasingly a concern for the populations as well. This growing popular interest in national politics found expression in the Pan Movements that aimed to bring peoples of the same language and culture together within the framework of a single nation-state. In Germany this took the form of Pan Germanism. In Russia it led, first, to Slavophilia, a romantic movement that ascribed unique ethnic and spiritual qualities to the Slavic peoples, and, then, to Pan Slavism, a political movement with the goal of uniting all Slavic peoples under the Russian aegis. The reaction of the tsarist government to this movement was in the beginning somewhat reserved. The reason for this was that the movement gave a quasi-mystical importance to narodnost—a word derived from narod, which means “people.” Narodnost is usually translated as “nationality,” but, in fact, it was more. It referred to a supposed quasi-mystical “essence” of the Russian people, its unique character that would express itself in a supposed inborn, natural goodness, in its patience, in its childlike faith, in its capability to suffer, and its quiet subservience to “father” tsar.[35]
The government in Saint Petersburg—especially after the revolt of the Decabrists in 1825—feared the democratic potential of the populist narodniki, a movement of young radicals who idolized the life of the simple Russian. The incorporation of the word narodnost into a national ideology by Sergey Uvarov eight years after the revolt was a clever attempt by the government to appropriate the new concept of the Slavophiles and change its potentially subversive connotation by making it a pillar of the autocratic, tsarist state. However, the word remained a double-edged sword, because it could refer both to a popular support of the tsar, as well as to a democratic revival. The government, therefore, regarded with mistrust the First Pan Slav Congress, held in Prague in 1848, the year of European revolutions. After the Crimean War, however, things changed. The Pan Slav movement—like its Pan German counterpart—lost its already weak, liberal-democratic credentials and started to accommodate itself with autocratic rule. There were two reasons for this. The first reason was that, unlike in Germany, where the Pan German ideas were supported by a broad middle class, in Russia no such middle class existed. Pan Slav ideals were propagated by a small group of urban intelligentsia who were doubly isolated: they were isolated from the people as well as from the autocratic state bureaucracy. There was simply not enough support in Russian society for liberal-democratic ideas. A second reason for the Pan Slav movement’s embrace of autocratic rule was that the task of unifying all Slavs was considered more important than internal democratic reforms. A strong and autocratic Russia was thought the best guarantee to liberate the oppressed “brother peoples” in Southern Europe from Ottoman rule.
The position of the tsar, however, was not unequivocal. He was, certainly, quite happy to assume the role of “liberator” of the Slav peoples living under Ottoman rule. At the same time he had to be cautious not to offend Austria and Prussia/Germany, which had large Slav minorities. These countries were not enthusiastic about the Russian Pan Slav liberation fervor that could cause upheaval within their borders. And, finally, there were non-Russian Slavs in the Russian empire, such as the Poles, who fought for their own independence. To accept “equal rights for all Slavs,” as was demanded at the Second Pan Slav Congress in Moscow in 1867, was, therefore, out of the question.[36] The nationalism of the tsar was an official “imperial nationalism,” based directly on the existence and the needs of the empire. It had nothing to do with the right of self-determination of the peoples. Because the Russian empire comprised many different peoples with different ethnic backgrounds and different religions, it would not be permissible for the tsar to support an exclusive ethnic Russian or Slav nationalism. However, when the reformist tsar Alexander II was murdered in 1881, his son, Alexander III, under the influence of his reactionary tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, wholeheartedly adopted the ethnic “great Russian” nationalism of the Pan Slavists. The policies of Alexander III were continued after his death in 1894 by his son, Nicholas II. This led to a process of enforced Russification in Poland and the Baltic provinces, where the national languages were suppressed and assimilation was imposed.
From Pan Slavism to Racism:
Pogroms and Anti-Semitism
The new great Russian nationalism very soon developed ugly features. Not only did it lead to a growing repression of non-Russian nationalities, such as the Poles, but also of other minorities of “foreign race” (inorodtsy) that could not be assimilated. In the first place Jews were targeted. The discrimination and scapegoating of Jews became an official state policy. Since 1791, during the reign of Catherine the Great, there had existed already in Russia a policy aimed at restricting the rights of Jews. In that year the Pale of Settlement was introduced. This measure restricted the territory on which the Jews had the right to live. It included the Western border region of the empire (the word “Pale” indicated “border”) and comprised a territory that approximately covered the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This territory consisted, globally, of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Bessarabia, and only a small part of Russia proper. Eighty percent of the European part of the Russian empire was “forbidden to Jews” (although there were a few exceptions). Additionally, many towns within the Pale itself were closed to Jews. In 1795, after the third partition of Poland, when Russia annexed Eastern Poland and Poland ceased to exist as an independent state, the Jewish population in the Pale Settlement swelled to approximately five million, creating the greatest concentration of Jews in the world. This concentration within a restricted area made them vulnerable to attacks.
This is what happened after the murder of tsar Alexander II in 1881, when immediately the Jews were accused of the murder. It led to a wave of pogroms in the South of the empire, characterized by looting, rape, and murder. This wave of violence went on for three years. The government not only failed to persecute the offenders, but overtly and secretly supported the movement. The eminence grise of the regime, Pobedonostsev, a known anti-Semite, was quoted as having said that “a third of the Jews will be converted, a third will emigrate, and the rest will die of hunger.” He was the man behind many new repressive measures, such as the May Laws, issued in 1882, banning Jews from rural areas and towns with more than ten thousand inhabitants. Jewish property in rural areas was confiscated and at universities quota were imposed restricting the number of Jewish students. Official, state-sponsored anti-Semitism and popular anti-Semitism, fed by resentment, went hand in hand. According to Leonid Luks, “in this struggle to bind the people to the regime anti-Jewish slogans would play an increasingly important role. There was an ever-increasing tendency amongst the conservatives to associate the sharp social and political conflicts in the country, as well as several foreign policy drawbacks suffered by the tsarist empire (Congress of Berlin, 1878), with the activities of international Jewry.”[37] A leading role in spreading anti-Jewish sentiments was played by the chauvinist and fiercely anti-Semitic Pan Slav movement that quickly grew in strength at the end of the century and reached its apogee after the lost war with Japan and the subsequent revolution in 1905.
One of the most important anti-Semitic organizations was the Soyuz Russkogo Naroda (the Union of the Russian People). Founded in October 1905, it enjoyed a spectacular growth, and soon it had about one thousand local branches. Its virulent anti-Semitism finds its equivalent only in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. One of its theoreticians, V. F. Zalevsky, accused the Jews of parasitism and the secret wish to dominate the world. “The Jews are a damaging tribe,” he wrote, “they don’t like heavy work and try to live from the labors of others, letting others work for them.” He continued: “Even though the Jews . . . plunder the Russian people, this still seems not to be enough; they want to completely subju
gate the Russian people, they want to be their masters.”[38] In the text of a congress resolution of the organization in 1915, prepared by a section with the name “For the struggle against Jewish supremacy,” the word “Jews” was consequently replaced by its pejorative equivalent zhidy (Yids). In the resolution one can read that it should be forbidden for Yids to have Orthodox Russian employees working for them or to participate in joint-stock companies. Russian schools should not accept Jewish children. And for Russians it should be forbidden to visit a Jewish doctor or to eat together with Jews. The only good solution for the “Talmudic zhidovstvo” (Yid people) is “that they be chased from Russia in the name of the imperial laws.”[39]
In the program of the anti-Semitic “Union of the Russian People” one could read that “the Russian people, as the gatherer of Russian lands and the creator of the great might of the state, enjoys a preferential position in national life and in national administration.”[40] One of the demands was that the number of Jewish deputies to the State Duma be restricted to three: “Such limitation is necessary because of the disruptive, anti-state activity of the united Jewish masses, their unceasing hatred of everything Russian, and the unscrupulousness which they so openly demonstrated during the revolutionary movement [of 1905].”[41] It was added that “Jews could, of course, not be members of the Union.”[42] In September 1903 Znamya (The Banner), which would later become the official paper of the Union, was the first to publish in nine articles the complete text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pamphlet about a Jewish plot to dominate the world that had been forged around 1900 by the head of the tsarist secret police in Paris at the suggestion of Pobedonostsev.[43] In October 1906 the Union founded the Black Hundreds (chornye sotnye), a terror organization with an armed wing, the Yellow Shirts—a predecessor and probably even a model for Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s Braunhemde (brownshirts). The movement mushroomed. At the height of its influence, in the years 1906–07, it had three thousand branches,[44] which is astonishing in a country with a quasi-non-existent civil society. In effect it was not so much a sign of a developing civil society as of an emerging uncivil society, because the movement played an important role in the wave of pogroms that ravaged Russia in this period and in which thousands of Jews were killed. According to Walter Laqueur there were up to seven hundred pogroms. However, these were not only perpetrated by the Black Hundred movement, but equally by the tsarist authorities. “Various parliamentary inquiry committees found that the local authorities were frequently involved; in some places where the Black Hundred did not exist . . . the pogrom was carried out by the police single-handed. . . . It was virtually impossible to establish to what extent pogroms were spontaneous and to what degree they were carefully planned and organized.”[45]
Hatred against minorities went hand in hand with hatred against foreigners and West Europeans. This xenophobic hatred was often presented as a reaction to a real or imagined disrespect on the part of the Europeans. Already in 1841 Stepan Shevyrev, a conservative Slavophile, wrote: “The West . . . expresses to us at every opportunity its aversion, which resembles almost a kind of hatred, and which is offensive to every Russian who enters his country.”[46] Another writer, Nikolay Danilevsky, a Russian Pan Slavist who gave Russian nationalism its biological basis, wrote in a famous article, Rossiya i Evropa (Russia and Europe), that “Europe does not recognize us as its equal. . . . Everything that is pure Russian and Slav, seems to him to be despicable. . . . Europe considers . . . the Russians and the Slavs as not only a strange, but also an inimical element.”[47] The Pan Slavist’s xenophobic hatred of foreigners was justified by a—largely constructed—hatred that foreigners were believed to feel against the Russian people. Hatred of the West was, therefore, considered a justified reaction, a sound defense, and a confirmation of one’s own right to exist. If you are surrounded by enemies, is not the only sound reaction that of hating your enemies and preparing for war? According to Hannah Arendt the nationalism of the Pan Slavists was “a tribal nationalism [that] always insists that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it used to destroy the humanity of man.”[48]
Masaryk spoke in this context of a zoological nationalism that celebrated the supposed natural, innate qualities of the Russian people.[49] Russian feelings of inferiority vis-à-vis the inhabitants of Western Europe are overcompensated by feelings of superiority. In this process Russia’s continental imperialism becomes much more racist than the overseas imperialism of the Western European countries. The Pan-Slav ideology is double edged: it gives the—superior—Russians the right to dominate the “inferior” peoples who already live in the empire. At the same time, it gives them a mission to “liberate” the other Slav peoples. Danilevsky, for instance, “included in a future Russian empire all Balkan countries, Turkey, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Galicia, and Istria with Trieste.”[50] Nationalist racism was the dominant legitimation theory for imperialist expansion in pre–World War I Russia. This racism, however, was, as such, rather fragile as an ideological foundation—for two reasons. First, by denying the fundamental equality of mankind one exposed oneself to the racism of other peoples that considered themselves—on the same racist grounds—to be superior to the Russians. This is what happened in effect when Nazi racists considered the German race superior to the “inferior” Slavs. Second, to proclaim one’s racial superiority vis-à-vis other peoples living in the empire who, in some cases, had developed a higher culture and standard of living, such as the Balts, reveals an arrogance that can easily be exposed. This was the reason, according to Galbraith, that in continental, territorially contiguous empires, such as Russia,
The tensions were far greater than in the outlying empires of the Western Europeans because the subject peoples in this colonialism could not be persuaded that they were inferior to their rulers. Rulers and ruled alike, when washed, were white. Many of the ruled were the equal of their colonial masters in education, cultural achievement, economic well-being. Some regarded themselves as superior; this was almost always true of those who were ruled by the Russians. To be governed by one’s inferiors or, more exactly, those so regarded is an especially bitter thing.[51]
How the Russian Revolution Forged a New Legitimation Theory for Imperialist Expansion
The October Revolution of 1917 promised a totally new beginning. During his exile in Switzerland Lenin himself was one of the most severe critics of tsarist imperialism and a staunch defender of the right of national self-determination for the oppressed nations of the empire. However, this idealism was short-lived when, after the Revolution, in the newly independent states anti-bolshevist governments were installed. In the resulting civil war, from 1918 to 1922, the bolshevists reconquered most of the lost territories of the former tsarist empire.[52] There followed a controversy between Lenin and Stalin over what to do with these territories. Stalin, who headed the People’s Commissariat (Ministry) for Nationalities, did not want to grant the Soviet republics even formal independence. He preferred to make them autonomous republics within Russia proper. For Lenin this project smacked too much of the old tsarist imperial dominance, and he proposed to federate the other republics with Russia on an equal basis in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.[53] Should Stalin have had his way, it would certainly have made the dissolution of the empire seventy years later more complicated and possibly bloodier. Lenin’s Soviet Union pretended that it was not an empire, but a voluntary association of socialist republics. Officially, Pan Slavism, social Darwinist racism, and Great Russian chauvinism fell into disgrace. The Soviet Union did not define itself primarily as a national community, but as the representative of a class: the working class. Moreover, representative not only of the working class of Russia, but of the working classes of the whole wo
rld. Russia’s inward-looking nineteenth-century nationalism had, apparently, changed into an outward-looking universalism. This universalism, even if it defended only one class, was, in theory at least, genuine: because, according to Marxist theory, the end result of the socialist revolution—a communist society—was supposed to be in the interest of mankind as a whole—former capitalists included.
However, despite the fundamental difference between the communist internationalism and the former Pan Slav nationalism, the two had some elements in common. There was, first, their messianism. Similarly, communist Russia remained a special nation—not so much because of the supposed spiritual, biological, or cultural superiority of the Russian people, but because of its vanguard role in the world revolution. The second common element was its paranoia. The encirclement syndrome that characterized the nineteenth-century tsarist regime—at that time engaged in the “Great Game” over Central Asia with the British Empire—was strengthened even further in the young Soviet Union, which was declared the enemy of the capitalist world. The communist leaders, and particularly Stalin, added another, third element that was reminiscent of tsarist times: autocracy. It was not long before these three elements, thoroughly mixed together, produced the same well-known result: Great Russian nationalism and imperialist expansion. New in all this was that Russia used the internationalist communist movement to further its national imperialist ambitions, a phenomenon that had already been observed by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942, when he wrote: