Window on Eurasia: Russian Hatred for the ‘World as Such' is Something ‘Worse than Fascism’ Epstein Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, December 7 – The enthusiasm of Russians for the annexation of Crimea cannot be explained by the usual kind of geopolitical calculations but rather by their desire to stand up to the rest of the world by throwing off all the rules of that world and living according to their own, Mikhail Epstein, a cultural theorist at Emory University, argues.

 

And that desire, he argues in an extensive article in “Novaya gazeta,” not only has its roots in the culture perhaps best described by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his “Notes from the Underground” but means that understanding Russia today requires a recourse to psychology and philosophy rather than political science (novayagazeta.ru/comments/66388.html).

 

Moreover, Epstein suggests, it requires an appreciation of the existential quality of Russian life now, the sense that it has been constrained and put on its knees by others and that to be genuinely Russian it must break out of those constraints imposed by the hated others, rise to its full height, and take on the world even if that leads to Armageddon.

 

When one watches Russian television and hears Russian commentators threaten to use nuclear weapons against the United States and to employ its military to occupy Europe and “establishment over it the power of a Russian tsar, the Russian scholar says, a truly disturbing conclusion suggests itself.           

 

And that is this: there is in the world something more dangerous than even fascism or communism. This ideology is related to fascism in approximately the same way as nuclear weapons are related to conventional ones.” And it can be called “pan-phobia” – total hatred not to particular classes, nations or races but to the world as such.”

 

Such hatred in turn leads Russians to want to create situations in which they are able to “dictate their will” to others or “to destroy” these hated others.  This is “an insane and irrational idea,” but it is abroad in Russia today.

 

The Russian philosopher Konstantin Leontyev once observed that “Russia will give birth to the Anti-Christ.” Many had thought that this was communism and had concluded more recently that “this danger was in the past” for Russia, Epstein says. “But it is possible that communism was only a prologue” to something much worse.

 

In the catechism of the Eurasian Union of Youth, he continues, the following words are writing: “’We are empire builders of the latest type and will not agree to less than power over the world because we are lords of the earth and children and grandchildren of rulers of the earth. Peoples and countries have bowed down before us.’”

 

That some marginal groups should believe such things is one thing, but the Eurasians are now at the center of Russian political discourse, and that is terrifying because it shows just how much more Dostoyevsky’s “underground man” with his “existentialist” perspective has come to characterize Russia today than he did in Soviet times.

 

Than underground man, he continues, does not feel himself bound by any rules and sees dishonest as a virtue. Moreover, he does not want to be cured of this, not only because he celebrates his illness but because he sees those calling for him to return to rationality as the enemy and something which must be destroyed.

 

The majority of experts in both Moscow and the West think that “having acquired Crimea, Russia is losing incomparable more. It is losing Ukraine. It is losing investments, trust, and economic stability. It is losing its place in the world community. [And] potentially it is losing itself, having set a precedent” which will make it hard for it to hold the country together.

 

But that is to approach the issue from the point of view of the rational man and not his underground counterpart. For the latter, “perhaps, the case was not about the acquisition of Crimea but about the grandiose display of an act of will” unconstrained by precisely those things that would limit a rational man or a rational country?

 

What is on view in Russia today is a people who consist of “disappointed” Soviet citizens, “who have suddenly recognized their orphan status. The universe will never give them that love to which [they believe] they have the right to expect.”  And consequently, they are both more aggressive and more depressed than their Soviet predecessors.

 

Obviously, Epstein says, not everyone in Russia fits this profile. But those who oppose the regime find themselves in a very different place than did Soviet-era dissidents. Today, they are opposing not this or that policy but “senselessness” as such, and therefore they are acting in a “very Russian fashion, throwing absurd challenges in the era of the absurd.”

 

In the current situation, the Russian scholar says, “it is difficult to believe that they will win. But long ago Tertullian, the first Christian existentialist, said “Credo quia absurdum est,” and perhaps that both helps to explain Russian attitudes and actions now and gives the only basis for hope in the near or middle term.