Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 17 – There is near
universal agreement that the erection of statues to Ivan the Terrible,
something no Russians had done before, is not about the past but about the
present and future. But one aspect of
this revival of what began under Stalin has attracted less attention than it
should.
The current cult of Ivan, Mikhail
Pozharsky says, is all about his efforts to strengthen the state against anyone
who could have challenged his regime rather than about his foreign policies which,
when one considers what happened after he died, the occupation of Moscow by
Poles, were anything but successful (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=58046AD6A293E).
“In the Russian tradition,” the
Moscow commentator writes on the Kasparov.ru portal, the most important thing
that separates those whom Russians view as a good ruler from those they see as
bad is the leader’s “contribution to the construction of the state and the
increase of state property.”
A good leader, he continues, “can be a
bloodsucker and a psychopath, who reduces society to poverty, drives it into
slavery and spends all the budget on uninterrupted wars. But if he leaves after
his reign a strong state which has increased in size, he becomes a Russian
national hero.”
But in an important way, Ivan the Terrible
represents an exception, Pozharsky continues.
“The end of [his] rule was unsuccessful. He was the ruler who handed
over the capital to the enemy and completely lost the Livonian war. Imperial
historiography couldn’t forgive him for this.”
“If he had ended the Livonian war on
favorable conditions,” Pozharksy says, “they could have forgiven him all the
bloody excesses in Novgorod just as they forgave Peter [the Great] mass
executions” or Alexander I because he took Paris after he surrendered Moscow to
Napoleon.
That is why there was no cult of
Ivan the Terrible in tsarist times. It “appeared
[only] in Soviet times, specifically under Stalin” because “Stalin put above
everything else not foreign policy successes but the struggle for the centralization
of power” in his own hand and centralization not based on contract as in Europe
but on absorption.
When the statue of Ivan the Terrible
was dedicated in Oryol last week, the oblast’s governor directly compared
Vladimir Putin to Ivan the Terrible clearly viewing that as praise for the
current Kremlin ruler (newsorel.ru/fn_225122.html)
even if many others view it as anything but (See, for example, novayagazeta.ru/articles/2016/10/15/70192-memorializatsiya-uzhasa).
But given that the statue almost
certainly could not have been erected without Putin’s approval, Pozharsky’s
insight about what the revival of the Stalinist cult of Ivan the Terrible may
provide an important clue to the thinking of the Kremlin leader. Like Ivan and
Stalin, Putin is more concerned with domestic power than foreign policy.
While the current denizen of the
Kremlin may use the one to promote the other, he may see his own future
reputation being defined not by his successes against the West but by his construction
of a powerful state at home. If indeed that
is Putin’s priority, as Pozharsky’s argument implies, putting up statues to
Ivan the Terrible will help him promote that view.
And that in turn has important
consequences for those who are trying to figure out how to counter him. If Putin’s priorities are domestic rather
than foreign, then he needs to be confronted there and not just elsewhere.
Otherwise, he may use this cult of Ivan the Terrible to retreat abroad but
repress the peoples of Russia even more.
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