Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 2 – None of the
many myths now circulating about the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire is
more dangerous than the notion that the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the
Russian Federation are merely different names for one country, Russian economist
Vladislav Inozemtsev says.
Vladimir Putin has promoted this
idea, insisting on numerous occasions that “the Soviet Union was the very same
Russia only under a different name.” Not
only is that “an extremely strange simplification of history,” but it is an
idea which can become fatal for the country” (mk.ru/politics/2019/12/29/pochemu-igra-v-sssr-gubit-rossiyu.html
“The Russian Empire was in no way a
synonym for that Russia which arose as a resut of the consolidation of
historical ‘ethnic Russian’ lands and colonization by settlement by the middle
of the 17th century.” More to the point, Inozemtsev says, “the
Russian empire was not a national state.”
Instead, it resembled the two other
empires which were formed at about the same time and disintegrated in World War
I, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.
That Lenin largely saved the territory of the Russian Empire in
constituting the USSR shows his genius but does not mean the two “Russian” states
were in any way the same.
“Lenin’s talent as a politician and
visionary consisted in that he recognized the impossibility of reestablishing a
state in its former borders without a complete revision of its fundamental founding
principles.” For him, the USSR was not about
saving Russia: it was about promoting “the spread of a system of Soviet
republics throughout the globe.”
As Inozemtsev puts it, “the Soviet
Union again united the territory of the former Russian Empire only rejecting any
national-ethnic definition in the name of the state and completely eliminating
its Russianness, ethnic and non-ethnic.”
Thus, “the USSR was hardly ‘a new Russia.’”
Instead, it was a radically
different formation, an imperial state in which the metropolitan center
financed the development of the colonies on the periphery rather than the other
way around as is usually the case and did so in ways that left the center in
many cases poorer than the periphery.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union
“became inevitable not as a result of the crisis arising from the essentially
confederal principle Lenin had inserted but as a result of the economic
bankruptcy of socialism and the growing recognition of the lack of prospects of
the communist idea.”
“The relatively peaceful division
into national stats is more the contribution of the communists: for precisely
there where the borders were drawn without the national factor being taken into
sufficient account sooner or later arose conflicts and tensions,” the Russian
commentator argues.
“The Russian Federation, the
borders of which were first drawn in 1918 and which became the formal legal
successor of the Soviet Union, is not in any sense except one -- as the sides of
a number of international agreements inherited from the USSR – is not the heir
of the USSR however strange this assertion may seem.” (emphasis supplied)
“It is the heir of the historic
Russia which existed from the end of the 16th to the beginning of
the 18th centuries. In this sense, its statehood today acquired the
very same definition which the statehood of Britain, France, or Spain did not
lose even during the period of the existence of empires beyond the seas.”
According to Inozemtsev, “the only
fundamental distinction is that in our case, the fact that Russia of the 15th
century was consolidated not as a national but more as a religious state, which
defined its subjects above all as Orthodox and in the period of its existence
in the framework of both imperial and Soviet structures did nothing for the development
of its national self-consciousness.”
What this means, he continues, is this:
“the main task at a minimum of the next century of Russian history is ‘the new
mastery’ of its own territory and the working out of relations between the
center and the regions, and the final definition of the optimal political structure
of this young but at the very same time very old state.”
In the past, it could be a unitary
state, “but under present-day conditions of the changed world, this is
practically impossible, and therefore the issue of the internal organization of
the country and the character of its administration is most significant for us
and for our children,” he writes. ands
“Unfortunately, today’s Russian
political and intellectual elite looks at the history of its own country from a different point of view,” conceiving Russia
as being the Soviet Union stripped of part of its territory and requiring either
“a reconquest” or new “gathering” of territories lost as it were “’by pure
chance.’”
Not only does that create tensions
around almost the entire periphery of the country, Inozemtsev says, but it is
also even more dangerous because this “new expansionism is based on the content
of ‘the Russian world’ which leads us from a non-ethnic Russianness to an ethnic
Russian one – and at times even to Russian-language and Orthodoxy” narrowly
understood.
And that gives rise to “significant threats
for Russian statehood itself, given that unlike the USSR, the Russian Federation
consists of both Russian territories and national republics under a common ethnic
Russian vision of the state. That makes
the country’s constitution fundamentally contradictory, far more so than the
Soviet ones.
“The Soviet Union has been dead
already almost 30 years. It created an enormous unified cultural space which
remains to a significant degree tied together even today. But it did not create
a political nation … give rise to an integral patriotism … and could not do so
because it was the heir not of a country but of a power, not of Russia but of the
Russian Empire.”
“Today,” Inozemtsev concludes, “our
country and our people must do everything to escape from the imperial past, one
that it is not in a position to restore. Any other choice seems to me to be
fatal.”
No comments:
Post a Comment