Russian Liberals Must Not Cede Historical Debate to Putin Because to Do So is to Lose the Future, Sidorov Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 28 – Vladimir Putin’s vision of the future is based on his vision of the Russian past, and that means, Vadim Sidorov says, that those who oppose his vision of the future must challenge that vision of the past rather than as now effectively ceding it to the Kremlin leader by accepting the idea that empire is the basic matrix of Russian history.

            Putin’s vision of the past, the Prague-based analyst says, is that “both Peter I and Catherine II viewed Russia not simply as ‘part of Europe’ but as its leading part or at least as one of the leaders with whose will all the rest must take into consideration” even when it opposed Europe (freerussiainstitute.org/ru/publications-ru/kak-vyigrat-u-putina-istoricheskuju-vojnu/).

            But that is far from the only vision of the past and thus vision for the future that Russian history offers, and it is time for liberals to wake up to that fact rather than passively accept what Putin is saying. Unless they do, Sidorov argues, they will lose the argument because they will never have entered it.

            Russian liberals should consider those parts of Russian history which present an alternative past and an alternative future. Among these was the Constituent Assembly of 1918. Putin condemns the communists for supposedly indulging the non-Russians, “but in fact,” the communists opposed the non-Russians while the SRs and other parties supported them.

            And because the SRs did, they received more votes in the elections to the Constituent Assembly than any other and then, during the Civil War, “actively cooperated with the independent national forces of the people of Russia,” a position that defined the approach of Boris Savinkov in the 1920s and General Vlasov during World War II.

            Indeed, Sidorov says, “if one analyzes from this point of view the Declaration of the Independence of Russia of June 12, 1990, and the constitutional acts of post-Soviet Russia, it is not hard to see that they too represented a form of development of these ideas” and not the view that Putin says set the weather for the country.

            According to the Prague-based analyst, “the rejection of empire in favor of a nation state is a popular idea among the Russian radical opposition … but few of its representatives are ready to make the historical conclusions which should follow from this appeal.” And yet Russian history provides many arguments for doing exactly that.

            Before Muscovy became the Russian Empire, there were many cases of national democracy. That is something Ukrainians need to remember as well. “Ukraine was conquered not by Muscovy” but by the Russian Empire. Had a NATO existed when Russia did so, “Ukraine would have restored its independence, and Russia would have remained Muscovy.”

            That Muscovy would have had much greater opportunities to become “an organic nation state than did the Russian Empire,” Sidorov says. While it might seem strange at a time of Putin’s war with Ukraine to call for the revival of Muscovy, that would represent a way forward, one that would give both Russians and non-Russians more opportunities.

            At the very least, Sidorov continues, Russians opposed to Putin who now speak out against Russian imperialism need to reject the idea that their country is the heir of the Russian Empire, an idea that Putin insists upon. And he adds:

            “If the revanchist imperialist regime of Putin fights with national revolutions and democracies, then the Russian radical opposition draw on the political traditions of the Constituent Assembly, the ideas of the Russian Political Committee and the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia and the sources of early post-Soviet Russia before the shelling of the Parliament and the introduction of forces into Chechnya.”