Paul Goble
Staunton, Mar. 23 – As has happened so often in the past, many in the West and in Russia too are inclined to believe that when a particularly evil leader leaves the scene, all will be well, Vladimir Pastukhov says. But that is not the case because the source of Russia’s failed trajectory lies not in particular leaders but in “the bad ideas” which continue to inform Russian elites.
Forty years ago, the London-based Russian scholar reminds, this was highlighted by the findings of two groups of advisors to US President Ronald Reagan about what to expect when the Brezhnev generation left the scene. The first, which consisted of government experts, suggested that Moscow would moderate (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2022/03/23/vladimir-pastukhov-operatsiia-russkaia-khromosoma).
But the second, famous as Team B and led by outside experts such as Richard Pipes, concluded the opposite. Its members pointed out that the ideological heritage of Russia was such that it was likely that Moscow would become more authoritarian and aggressive unless the West increased its efforts to contain and then defeat communism.
Reagan accepted their vision and acted on it, leading to the demise of the Soviet system. Today, something similar is needed because all too many people believe that Russia will recover once Vladimir Putin departs. Instead, Pastukhov argues, things may get worse unless the underlying ideological drivers in that country are addressed and defeated.
“Nothing arises from nothing,” the scholar says. And “the new paranomality [in Russia] is not the result of the imagination of Putin. The mythology of ‘a special operation’ is not the creative product of Putin himself or his administration.” It is something with deep historical roots in Russia, roots that keep flowering in ever more destructive ways.
This ideological world consists of three basic parts: Orthodox fundamentalism, Slavophilism, and Stalinism, the last of which is “the radical version of Russian Bolshevism,” Pastukhov argues. To this day, he continues, “Russia remains a theocratic state either in an open or in latent form.”
Because of the truncated development of a civic society, he continues, in the 19th century, two competing sets of ideas appeared: Westernism, which sought to take Western models and apply them to Russia, and Slavophilism which “rejected this and demanded the isolation from the West with the goal of preserving its uniqueness.”
Each, of course, had elements of the other; and this led to a situation in which the pattern of Russian development subsequently alternated between Orthodox Westernism and Orthodox Slavophilism. Bolshevism was a hybrid of this kind, and “Stalinism was not some accidental zigzag but lay in the general course of development of Russian ideology,” being “most closely connected with the non-Western component of Bolshevism.”
According to Pastukhov, “Bolshevism as a movement died in 1953 not because Stalin died but as the result of an anti-Beria revolution carried out by Stalin’s heirs which put an end to the era of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ that is, the theory and practice of unlimited use of political force.”
Over the succeeding 40 years, this led the Soviet system to gradual decay with “Bolshevism, earlier a quite integral movement beginning to split into its component parts,” something that led to an internal conflict between the Orthodox Westernizers and the Orthodox Slavophiles both within the regime and within the dissident communities.
Everything Putin is talking about today has its roots in this conflict, one that he had assumed he would have to overcome by developing a new ideology. But he suddenly discovered that he didn’t need to invent one. Instead, a real ideology widely accepted by the population was on offer. All he had to do was articulate it.
The basic features of this ideology include the supremacy of the Russian nation, the lack of capacity of other nations in Eurasia to take full shape unless they are supported by outsiders, a natural enemy in the Anglo-Saxon world, the recovery of Ukraine as “the sacred grail” of Russian life, and the appropriateness of using military force to achieve that end.
“The ideology of Russian hyper-nationalism has been able to unite the Kremlin elites not by external but by internal means, not by fear but by faith,” Pastukhov argues. Those around Putin believe in what he is saying because it is so much a part of the Russian experience; and many in the population believe it to.
Because that is so, the London-based Russian analyst says, “the militance and aggressiveness of the regime will only grow. It will seek to fill with itself all the space which circumstances have left available to it” until it is confronted by forces that it cannot in any sense defeat.
No matter how terrible individual Russian rulers like Putin may be, “’Russian ideas’ look even more terrible,” Pastukhov argues, because they keep the Russian people “inside a totalitarian matrix which reproduces itself again and again. Russia ideas create this matrix.” And for Russia to change, they must be destroyed.
“Ideological lustration must be total,” he says. Russia must be subject to the harshest form of anti-clericalism in order to destroy the baleful influence of the Russian Orthodox Church which has discredited itself by its service to the Kremlin in all things. And it must be “decommunized” far more thoroughly than the half-hearted measures of the 1990s did.
Such things may seem impossible now, but “tomorrow they will be real.” The pendulum of Russian history has swung “too far to one side” under Putin to stay there. But that imposes real burdens on those who want to see a different and better Russia in the future, Pastukhov concludes.
“The time of simple half-measures is past,” he argues. “In taking these decisions, we must remember that Russia was driven into an historical dead end in the first instance not by bad people but by bad thoughts.”
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