Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 3 – Vladimir Putin
has “no problem with combining nostalgia for the monarchy with Soviet
patriotism” and forming “an alliance consisting equally of ‘nationalists,’ ‘communists’
and ‘social democrats’” who agree that “empire is the only acceptable form of
post-communist and in general Russian statehood,” Vladimir Pastukhov says.
The St. Antony’s scholar says that “the
main ideological discussion within the pro-Kremlin elites has been reduced to a
choice of one of three positions: Russia must be an Empire, Russia can only be
an Empire, and Russia cannot be anything if it is not an Empire” (polit.ru/article/2015/01/02/empire/).
But this consensus and these
discussions are replete with cognitive dissonance because they treat the
post-communist empire as “the heir of all preceding imperial forms despite the
fact that each of those was a denial of the preceding one – tsarism was a
denial of Moscovia, the USSR denied tsarism, and even ‘the liberal empire’ of
Chubais and Gaydar denied the USSR.”
This represents a significant political
change, Pastukhov argues, because until recently Putin “formally” pushed the idea
that he was building a political system in the form of “’sovereign democracy.’”
But now he is pursuing something else, something that more closely corresponds
with the methods he has chosen to use.
But a new and more serious problem
has arisen: “the post-communist empire” Putin is trying to construct “does not
fit at all into the Russian historical matrix.” That is because, the Russian
historian says, “all empires of the past in Russia were consistently
modernizing, while the post-communist empire is being established for opposing modernization.”
That earlier empires in Russia were
committed to modernization is something that few in Moscow want to acknowledge
because then they would not be in a position to insist that what they are doing
is rooted in the Russian tradition. In fact, their state “is not a continuation
of tradition but a complete break with it, a move against almost 600 years of
Russian history.”
“To paraphrase Marx,” Pastukhov
continues, “one can say that all previous empires only intensified the
modernization and European components of Russian statehood while the
post-communist empire has set as its goal their destruction.”
Within Putin’s “imperial consensus,”
there is little understanding of that. Instead, each group thinks it is engaged
in restoring one or another pasts: Soviet, tsarist, or even Muscovite. And thus they fail to see that the
post-communist empire is “a political anti-utopia … a negation of the communist
system” and “not a return to realism but the replacement of one type of
mythological consciousness with another.”
“Putin’s ‘Russian world,’” he
writes, “is the USSR upside down.” And that has especially tragic consequences
because with all its shortcomings, the Soviet Union was able to address real
historical challenges, Putin’s “post-communist empire does not have any
historical tasks.” It is thus an empty place in the history of the country, one
for which Russians will pay dearly.
The current “return to the imperial
idea,” Pastukhov says, “is a nervous breakdown of the nation,” a reflection
that its members could not stand the tensions of the transition they were
engaged in and have fallen into “social and political hysterics.” Consequently,
they rarely understand that what is on offer is a hollow shell that in fact
offers nothing.
Russian elites, he suggests, must face
the fact that the pursuit of an imperial anti-utopia will cost them and their
nation dearly and choose instead to work toward “the construction of a national
constitutional state.” That won’t be easy, but the historian says, but he
concludes, the biggest losers aren’t those who make mistakes but “those who don’t
want to correct them.”
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