Paul Goble
Staunton,
January 4 – Muscovite historiography has always insisted that the ingathering
of Russian lands and the formation of a unified state are Russia’s most
important goals, Russian regionalist commentator Aleksey Shiropayev says; but
in fact, the only “clear measure of progress” for Russia is the degree of its
integration with the West.
That
logic, he continues, has resulted in the formation of “a Eurasian empire” that
is even now experiencing the agony of decay, the result of the fact that the
imperial system “blocked the establishment of bourgeois relations, normal law
of a European kind, and in the final analysisled to failure in the GULAG” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5C2E707F401CC).
What was “progressive”
about the destruction of “pro-Western Novogorodian democracy?” What was
progressive in the destruction of “the sovereign Cossack republic of the Don”
or “in the Muscovitization of Ukraine which on the level of legal development
and culture stood far ahead of Moscow?” Shiropayev asks rhetorically.
In the view of Russian historians
like their Soviet and tsarist predecessors, “’a great state,’ the growth of
territory and empire are fetishes valuable in and of themselves and unqualified
criteria of ‘progressiveness.’”
But to anyone thinking clearly, “it
is obvious that the victory of Novgorod or the inclusion of Russian lands
within Lithuania or Poland would have been really progressive” because they
would have led to one or another kind of integration in Europe, the only real “criterion
of progress.”
Something similar can be said about
the value Russian and Soviet historians place in a hyper-centralized state, Shiropayev
continues. Such a state is harmful in
and of itself because it allows the state to exploit the population beyond
belief and because it makes the integration of Russia into Europe more difficult
if not impossible.
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