For centuries Russian leadership has vacillated between seemingly good rulers bent on reform and tyrannical rulers bent on holding the line with, if necessary, methods ranging from the harsh to the cruel. We all remember Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), the grand prince of Moscow who became Russia's first tsar. Putting an end to the last remnants of Mongol rule, Ivan expanded his country's territory into a vast Eurasian empire, but at the cost of many lives. He managed to murder his own son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, and effectively killed off his own Ryurik dynasty, leading directly to the Time of Troubles between 1598 and 1613, when the first Romanov came to the throne. After this pivotal period in its history, Russia would see its leadership occupied by several more seemingly vicious rulers, during the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras.
Yet even the reformers would generally employ autocratic means to accomplish their goals. Peter the Great, who reigned from 1682 to 1725 and was an admirer of everything European, sought to bring his backward country into the modern age, even if it required compulsion. Ordinary men were famously forced to shave their beards off, threatened with a steep beard tax if they refused. When the Patriarch of Moscow died in 1700, Peter neglected to appoint a successor and, after 21 years, placed the Church under the governance of a Holy Synod. Consisting of bishops and lay bureaucrats, the Holy Synod was effectively a cabinet department in his government, a status that continued until the 1917 Revolution. Traditional Russian Orthodox Christians were so alienated by Peter's reforms that they thought him to be the Antichrist.
Later in the 18th century, the German-born Empress Catherine the Great saw herself as an enlightened ruler bringing the blessings of modernity to her people. Admiring the French philosophes of her era, she had a lively correspondence with Voltaire, although the outbreak of the French Revolution frightened her into a posture of retrenchment during the final years of her reign. While Ivan the Terrible expanded Russia's territory to the east, Catherine expanded it westwards, most notably conquering from Ottoman Turkey the lands in southern Ukraine that would come to be known as Novorossiya (Новороссия), or New Russia. Today these lands are the setting for the current war between Russia and Ukraine. Yet if Catherine saw herself as enlightened, she was still a despot in the long Russian tradition.
If we fast forward into the late 20th century, we find Gorbachev inheriting a moribund Soviet Union from his geriatric predecessors. A fresh youthful personage with new ideas for reform, he was greeted with relief by his foreign counterparts, including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Coming to power in 1985, Gorbachev launched his ambitious reform programme under the labels of glosnost and perestroika, terms that quickly made it into the languages of other countries that were following developments there. Glasnost (гласность) means openness, reflecting the Soviet leader's intention to open up the country and to allow freedom of speech and political debate. Perestroika (перестройка) means reconstruction and covered both economic and political reforms.
These were intended to revitalize the Leninist legacy of the Soviet Union, but, as we all know, they resulted in its death. It turned out that, despite Gorbachev's efforts, the system put in place after 1917 was incapable of being reformed. Once the dominant ideology had been discredited, there was very little to keep the country together, and it quickly broke up into its fifteen constituent republics, with other regions as well testing the unity of its newly emerging fragments.
I believe that Gorbachev himself was a decent man who genuinely had the interests of his country and its people at heart. Unlike many of his predecessors, he seemed to respect the rule of law, a principle with shallow roots in the larger Russian political culture. In particular, he was highly respected by his fellow heads of government, with Thatcher famously observing: "I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together." However, ordinary Russians, despite their acquiring new freedoms, had little love for their leader because the near-term results of his reforms had made their lives more difficult. The cracks in the edifice of what was once a global superpower had become too obvious to ignore, and many Russians felt that foreign powers were taking advantage of their country's weakness for their own benefit.
Moreover, and true to Russia's past, Gorbachev's efforts to democratize the country had to be imposed from the top against a recalcitrant population. When in 1990 he established a state presidency for the Soviet Union, he decided he had to occupy the position himself, fearing that his efforts would be derailed if he submitted his name to the people too soon in a competitive election. Yet the forces he had unleashed by his reforms eliminated the Soviet Union, the new presidency, and his own position less than two years later. As the country broke up and the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin and the Russian tricolour raised in its place, those of us outside the country had high hopes for a post-Soviet Russia, despite the obvious flaws of especially Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation.
For centuries, Russia has been an expansive power, with expansive tendencies seemingly built into its very culture. In the 16th century, the Grand Principality of Moscow was hemmed in by, among others, the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, remnants of the Mongol hordes which had dominated Eurasia from the 13th century. Fearing for its own existence, Moscow acted to neutralize its neighbours in order to remove the threat posed by their existence. As it absorbed one after another of its neighbours, some of which were Russian-speaking, it found itself with an increasingly larger territory to defend and with longer, more vulnerable borders. Thus an effort to achieve greater security left Russia more insecure than before. The cycle would begin anew as Russia's rulers absorbed yet another adjacent realm, thereby expanding borders it would need to defend against new neighbours. Eventually this would take Russia into Alaska in the 18th and 19th centuries and into the heart of Europe at the end of the Second World War. With the end of the Cold War, Russia was forced by its own Borshevik-drawn internal borders to retreat into its current formal boundaries, something that Putin has described as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."
Putin is not entirely wrong. In many respects, Russia is a precarious state, cursed simultaneously by its sheer size and by its internal diversity. During the Soviet era, it was held together by a Marxist-Leninist ideology claiming Russia to be in the vanguard of global progress. After the collapse of the ideology, Russia was badly in need of a similarly strong glue to hold together its far-flung territories. Yeltsin's shock therapy, opening Russia too quickly to global trade and commerce, was a failure as far as most Russians were concerned. Furthermore, it provided none of the spiritual mortar needed to unite a fractious country. When Putin came to power, he anchored his regime in the apparently tried and true—a focus on Mother Russia, or even Holy Russia, coupled with the harsh strong-arm tactics used by so many of his predecessors, from Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander III to Lenin and Stalin. Indeed, we might be forgiven for wondering whether, in the absence of these tactics, Russia would survive in its present form.
For most of its history, Russia has been perched precariously between tyranny and chaos, with seemingly benign rulers incapable of reining in the centrifugal forces threatening it, interspersed with the tyrants compelled to clamp down on these same forces to keep the country unified. As this toxic cycle has worked itself out over the centuries, its neighbours have so often had to pay a steep price. It is not easy to have Russia as a neighbour. Just ask the Finns and the Poles, not to mention Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. Those of us with high hopes for a post-Soviet Russia three decades ago have been disappointed as its noxious past refuses to stay buried, accompanying its people as they look to the future.
During the current war with Ukraine, many of us think that Russia would be considerably better off without Putin and wish that his underlings in the Kremlin would take action to remove him from power. It's happened before, as in 1964 when Nikita Khrushchev was toppled. However, removing one man will not change Russia's political culture, which persists tenaciously despite the efforts of dissident Russians favouring democracy. Putin's despotism might have been curtailed two decades ago if enough civic-minded Russians had moved to counter his early efforts to consolidate personal power. Sad to say, while civic-minded Russians do exist, their numbers are too small to have a lasting impact.
What then are the chances of Russia embracing a more civic culture? In considering this issue, I keep returning to the writings of the late novellist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), who authored some key political tracts, beginning in the 1970s. Although we know his negative view of the Marxist-Leninist ideology then in control of the Kremlin, less known is his embrace of local governance as a training ground for Russian democracy. Solzhenitsyn believed that Russia's best hope for the future lay in a "democracy of small areas," once embodied in the zemstvos (земство), or local councils, established after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 but abolished during the Bolshevik Revolution. Reviving the zemstvos would enable Russians to govern themselves at the local level and thereby learn the ways of democracy. He believed this gradual bottom-up approach would be far more productive than any effort to impose democracy from the top. This accords well with the recognition that political institutions can thrive only under the conditions of a supportive political culture. It seems unlikely that Putin will move to implement such an approach to local governance, but perhaps a wiser successor will do so after Putin's centralizing and bellicose policies have been discredited.
Sources:
- Gorbachev, Mikhail. Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. 1987.
- Koyzis. Russia: Political culture and the weakness of institutions.
- Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. Letter to the Soviet Leaders. 1974.
- ________. Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals. 1990, 1991.
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