“Cambierebbe la Russia se Putin morisse?”
Ma, secondo voi, se Putin morisse la Russia cambierebbe? L’autore di questo articolo e del libro qui recensito ritengono che non cambierebbe un bel nulla. Non si può fare a meno di pensare che se Vladimir Putin uscisse di scena domani qualcuno come lui prenderebbe il potere. “La tradizione di tutte le generazioni morte pesa come un incubo nel cervello dei vivi”, scrisse Karl Marx. E da nessuna parte quell’incubo è più spaventoso che in quello che una volta era il primo stato marxista del mondo. Se avete voglia di leggere e conoscete l’inglese questo articolo recensione di un libro sulla storia della Russia vi chiarirà le idee …
Suppose Vladimir Putin drops dead tomorrow — he has to drop dead one day, after all. Will a chastened Russian elite and public decide to abandon dreams of empire and vow never again to fall for the lure of the autocratic strongman?
Putin will leave a sick country that ought to be yearning for change. The myth that Russia is a military superpower, which did so much to intimidate its neighbours, lies broken amid the burned-out ammunition dumps. Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine provoked Finland and Sweden to join Nato. His aggression has reinvigorated the West and pushed it into supplying Ukraine with advanced weaponry. Russia is poorer, weaker and looking to a future as a Chinese client state condemned to pay homage to the Middle Kingdom as it once paid homage to the Mongol empire.
Unverified Russian sources claim that Vladimir Putin himself is sick: suffering from either cancer or Parkinson’s disease. The CIA doesn’t believe them, and says the dictator is ‘entirely too healthy’.
But just suppose he’s gone by tomorrow. According to Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia (out this week from Bloomsbury) the chances of the Ukraine disaster pushing Russia towards liberalism when Putin belatedly takes his leave of us vary from the faint to the non-existent. Despite its grim themes, I need to say before I go any further that this is a wonderfully generous book. Figes has distilled a lifetime of scholarship on Russian history to produce a sweeping account of the burden of its past.
As Stalin rewrote history in the 1930s, the Soviet joke went that ‘the past changes so often you don’t know what’s going to happen yesterday’. In the 21st century it is dispiritingly clear that the worst aspects of Russia’s past have not changed. Imperial nationalists can always revive them. They mythologise them for their own purposes, of course, and wrench them out of their context, but there is always enough in Russian political culture to justify violence, self-pity, exceptionalism, paranoia, autocracy and wars of imperial aggrandisement.
Take today’s oligarchs, who once seemed to be leaders in modern excess and vulgarity. For all their success in seducing western bankers and politicians in the 2010s, they were not powerful, independent figures, which is why western sanctions against them have not changed Russian policy. Their wealth was always dependent on Putin. Since he forced Boris Berezovsky into exile in 2000 and arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003, Putin has delivered an old and blunt message. As long as the oligarchs’ interests remain subjugated to those of the regime, he would allow them to enjoy their fortunes. If they crossed him by supporting opposition politicians, or by refusing to pay the required bribes, he would destroy them.
Little has changed since the tsar told the boyars of Muscovy that their wealth and power depended on his whims. Early modern Russia never developed concepts of private property or of strong independent institutions that might have tamed autocracy, and their absence is felt to this day.
Figes makes the controversial argument for Russian nationalist historians that the domination of Moscow by the Mongol empire from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries did more than any other factor to ‘fix the basic nature of its politics’. First Moscow’s princes and then the Tsars emulated the Mongol khans and ‘demanded and mercilessly enforced complete submission to their will from all classes of society’.
In this reading of Russian history, Soviet communism was not a complete break with the past. The Communist strongman was different from the khan or the tsar only in the extent of his power, and Stalin knew it. He berated Sergei Eisenstein for showing Ivan the Terrible as haunted by the consequences of his violence. ‘This is not a film, it is some kind of nightmare,’ he complained in 1947. Eisenstein should have realised that the trouble with Ivan was not that he was cruel but that he was not cruel enough. A mistake Stalin never made.
‘When Ivan had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer. God was a hindrance to him in this respect. He should have been more ruthless.’
Putin’s rule has reinforced the view of Russia as an ‘Asiatic despotism’ that was so popular among nineteenth century liberals and socialists. (Alexander Herzen described Tsar Nicholas I as ‘Chingiz Khan with a telegraph’.) The toadying Patriarch Krill’s blessings of Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine and Syria follows a millennia of religious subservience to the state that the orthodox believed could make Moscow ‘the third Rome’ with the messianic right to dominate all orthodox peoples. Of the 800 saints the church created between the conversion of the Rus to Christianity at the end of the first millennium until the eighteenth century over 100 were princes or princesses. ‘No other country in the world has made so many saints from its rulers,’ Figes says. ‘Nowhere else has power been so sacralised.’ Maybe one day we will see the church venerate St Vladimir the patron saint of saturation bombers.
Putin’s 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukranians’ portrayal of Ukrainians as ‘little Russians’ was a prelude to the war. It showed where the combination of a bitter nostalgia for lost imperial grandeur and messianic fantasy lead. Little Ukrainian children have no right to escape Big Brother, and if they try they must be punished.
Although Russian liberals hate the denial of its European traditions for good reason, Russian imperialists have always seen the empire as a supranational civilisation defined by its opposition to the secular and liberal West. Apart from brief moments in its history, that view has always triumphed.
In the 1980s, I was lucky to be taught by Archie Brown, a specialist on the Soviet Union. One day he suggested to his students that, even if communism fell, Russia’s history meant that its peoples would accept a new form of dictatorship. We were young and idealistic and rebelled against the notion. Was it not determinist, almost racist, to suggest that Russians were programmed to reject freedom? The subsequent decades have not vindicated us,
Figes hates the idea too, while offering no plausible escape from it. You cannot help but think that if Vladimir Putin drops dead tomorrow someone like him will take power. ‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,’ wrote Karl Marx. And nowhere is that nightmare more lurid than in what was once the world’s first Marxist state.
Maybe one day we will see the church venerate St Vladimir the patron saint of saturation bombers
Originally published at https://www.spectator.co.uk.
