Sinister Russia
Those of us who grew up in the Cold War clearly remember who the bad guys were. Even if they called themselves the Soviet Union and we generally called them “the Soviets,” we also knew them informally as “the Russians.” And by “we”, I mean just about everyone in the world not involved in formal diplomacy or academic study.
Anyone who has ever studied Russia knows of it as a concept that contains a country in search of a clear definition. What is Russia? What makes it distinct? The answer to such questions always seems to involve opposition to “the West.”
Now that Russia has spent untold blood and treasure trying to consume its Ukrainian neighbor, negative traits stand out. British-based international analyst Kyle Orton discusses a recent paper arguing that Russia is sinister because it can only ever stand for ruthless imperial rule and subjugation—never for any western values such as freedom, democracy, rule of law, much less equality in whatever form.
In this view, Russia emerged as a nation historically with more land to defend than other countries. Defending vast borders from outsiders meant that strong autocrats were obligatory. Unlike in western empires, where monarchs had to share power with a class of nobles, Russian emperors ruled with absolute authority, with the power to grant the noble class their jobs and titles—forever with the clear threat that the emperor could take these away at any time. Thus, a norm evolved from tsarist rule through communist dictators, on down to a reformer like Boris Yeltsin and a spy like Vladimir Putin. None of them could permit rival power centers to emerge with whom they would share authority.
The Bolshevik revolution introduced a new level of brutality to the autocracy, the argument goes. Russia never had a chance to attempt democracy because the new power center had to create loyal surrogates—analogs to the tsarist nobles—in the form of party members working for the oppressive state. The nation’s bureaucracy was manned by loyalists, and the “secret” state police that became the KGB enforced that loyalty. In the post-Soviet era, the grip on power of these enforcers weakened, but was never superseded. Instead, most of the Russian market reforms after 1991 resulted in former loyalists holding all the property assets. These largely became today’s oligarchs.
Orton delves into the important roles of the successor organizations to the KGB and how they ended up retaining power. A large part of it had to do with coopting organized crime syndicates.
[There] is more room for debate […] when considering the temptation, especially widespread at the present time for understandable reasons, to cite Russia’s history under Tsarism to argue that Russia is fated for despotism: in this view, with the passing of the Communist interlude, Putin is simply a restoration of the natural order. The problem with this is that it is not true. What one finds in the actual history of the Tsardom is that the Russian State tradition—a form of despotism far more total than anything the “absolute” monarchies of Europe managed, undergirded not only by centuries of habit but a theoretical and ideological dedication to autocracy—culminated in constitutional monarchy.
Faced with a massive terrorist uprising in 1905, Russian Emperor Nicholas II had the choice of reinforcing the (belated) repressive measures he had taken by instituting military rule, or granting political concessions in the hope of peeling liberals away from the terrorist-revolutionaries. Setting aside the convictions of a lifetime, Nicholas opted for the latter, issuing the October Manifesto that promised an elected Duma (Parliament) and a written constitution guaranteeing civil liberties […]. For the next ten years, Russia had an elected legislature—where even revolutionaries sat—and broad rights of speech, press, and association, notably powerful legal trades unions that wrung serious improvements in workers’ conditions from the State.
Four hundred years of autocracy had been ended and a constitutional political process had been implemented that, even in its nascent condition, compared favourably with Russia’s sister States in Europe […].
Kyle Orton’s essay provides a lot of depth and nuance to the long-running analysis of Russia. It is long, but recommended.
If I understand Mr. Orton’s thesis correctly, acknowledging that I’m a full remove from it at this point, it rests on the core premise that geography is dispositive in determining the character of a people and the governance that evolves around them. In the case of Russia, the geographic determinant is the huge mass of land. Or is it the vast stretch of border? It’s not clear to me which. But to the extent it can be discerned, it might be worthy of consideration by those living in other large nations, and/or those living in nations with long, difficult to police and defend, borders, or…those living in large nations with long, difficult to police and defend borders, and having a society of at least two minds about whether and how policing and defending the borders should be taken on.
Great masses of land, with enough of it having useful resources/potential, are attractive targets for needy or greedy residents of other lands. Such might be called “lands of promise” or similar, and it of course surprises no one that these lands of promise and opportunity are also attractive to people wishing to escape bad circumstances and restart their lives in a place with lots of space and opportunity. Invasions can occur forcefully, or insidiously, even without intent, as something like a slow transmogrification powered by human nature.
If this particular hypothesis has sufficient validity, it behooves the U.S. and the people therein to think carefully about the current political climate, the polarization of affairs public and private, and what is a growing tendency towards authoritarianism. On the right most noticeably, and most energetically advanced, but not absent on the political left, where, for instance, the urge to muzzle free speech so as to not suffer the pain of hearing people say things which one finds objectionable is more common than one might like to think about. And both sides have large factions devoted to the absolute imposition of certain positions; consider guns and, perhaps especially, abortion.
Is the U.S. going to find itself cursed to become an authoritarian, autocratic state? Not today, no. And not tomorrow. But sooner than we might expect, perhaps? And for the rest of the nation’s life, such as it might be?
Funniest Trump line is this headline in USA Today online: "Donald Trump Georgia co-defendant asks why he isn't paying legal fees." LMAO. Just found out who Trump is? and that's all from never-Trump land.