Russian Imperialism Very Different from Western and Soviet Variants, Igor Chubais Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 19 – Many analysts distinguish Western and Russian imperialism because the former involves overseas possessions while the latter is based on the spread of power to contiguous areas. But there is a more fundamental difference, one that helps to explain the difficulties Russians today have in dealing with their various pasts, Igor Chubais says.

            Western imperialism was based on controlling overseas territories to provide economic benefits to the metropolitan countries, while Soviet imperialism was predicated on the spread of an ideological system to the entire world rather than on gaining economic benefits for the center, the historian says (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=617C2A5CCE248).

            Russian imperialism is different from both, Chubais says. The Russian imperial state arose in the course of its clash with the Mongol Horde, an experience that led Russians to conclude that “Russia should not dissolve and merge with other religions and that its state must be preserved as a separate entity.”

            And further it led them to decide that “the preservation of Russia is possible [only] by means of the collection and unification of lands. In other words,” he continues, “the Russians were not born imperialists, as many of their opponents claim.” Rather, “the creation of a great empire was their answer to the yoke and the basis for preserving their own identity.”

            That meant, Chubais argues, that “when it unified new peoples and territories to itself, Rus did not strike to impose on them either its own system of administration or its own economic diktat.” Instead, its rulers recognized that the country had the best chance of surviving if it preserved as much as possible “the rules, traditions and norms” of the peoples it now ruled.

            “I repeat,” the historian and commentator continues, “that these are the principles and main goal of the formation of the Russian Empire. In practice, various deviations took place” and the center did impose its order on some of the borderlands and did seek to extract economic benefits from them. But those were exceptions to the general pattern.

            The Bolsheviks rejected that pattern in the name of spreading their ideological model on the borderlands as a first step to spreading it on the world beyond their existing borders, and the post-Bolshevik Russian state thus views the pre-1917 model of empire as one it does not wish to follow either with respect to extracting benefits or imposing its model on others.

            Thus, the decision not to mark the 300^th anniversary of the formation of the Russian Empire makes complete sense and explains a great deal. “For example,” Chubais argues, it underscores that “the Russian Federation like the USSR is not a legal successor of the Historical Russia” but something else, a pastiche of aspects of both its predecessors and the Western model.