The Agony of the Russian Idea

Tim McDaniel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN:
  9780691002484
  9780691027869
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400822157
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Boris Yeltsin's attempts at democratic reform have plunged a long troubled Russia even further into turmoil. This dramatic break with the Soviet past has left Russia politically fragmented and riddled with corruption, its people with little hope for the future. In a fascinating account for anyone interested in Russia's current political struggles, Tim McDaniel explores the inability of all its leaders over the last two centuries--tsars and Communist rulers alike--to create the foundations of a viable modern society. The problem then and now, he argues, is rooted in a cultural trap endemic to Russian society and linked to a unique sense of destiny embodied by the "Russian idea."

In its most basic sense, the Russian idea is the belief that Russia can forge a path in the modern world that sets itself apart from the West through adherence to shared beliefs, community, and equality. These cultural values, according to McDaniel, have mainly reversed the values of Western society rather than having provided a real alternative to them. By relying on the Russian idea in their programs of change, dictatorial governments almost unavoidably precipitated social breakdown.

When the Yeltsin government declared war on the Communist past, it broke with deeply held Russian values and traditions. McDaniel shows that in cutting people off from their pasts and promoting the West as the sole model of modernity, the reformers have simultaneously undermined the foundations of Russian morality and the people's sense of a future. Unwittingly, the Yeltsin government has thereby annihilated its own authority.

McDaniel lived in Russia for three years during both the Communist and post-Communist periods. Basing his analysis on broad historical research, extensive travels, countless interviews and conversations, and friendships with Russians from all walks of life, McDaniel emphasizes the perils of assuming that Russians understand the world in the same way that we do, and so can and should become like us. Challenging and provocative in its claims, this book is intended for anyone seeking to understand Russia's attempts to create a new society.

CHAPTER ONE

The Russian Idea

It must be said, however, that it is not as easy as some may think to understand and formulate the basic principles which underlie the Russian style of life.

—Ivan Kireevsky¹

THE IDEA that Russian society forms a world apart, that it departs from all other nations, cannot be absolutely true. There are universal traits shared by all societies, as well as more specific traits shared by different categories of societies. Yet the idea that Russian society and history are somehow distinctive is supported by a number of historical “firsts.” Russia was the first “backward” country, that is, the first country whose leaders so defined it with respect to Europe. Their sense that Russia lagged behind, not just in the military or technological sense, but in the social and cultural spheres as well, led them to attempt to recast Russia partially along foreign models. Russia, especially with the advent of Peter the Great around the turn of the eighteenth century, became the pioneer society of forced modernization.

Russia was also the first relatively industrialized country to witness a social revolution: Marx’s predictions that capitalist industrialization would culminate in revolution were not borne out in Europe, but in Russia a radical proletarian movement played an absolutely central role in the 1917 revolution. The process of industrialization, with all of its underlying contradictions in autocratic Russia, was one of the main underlying catalysts of the Bolshevik revolution. Nowhere else have the rigors of early capitalist industrialization been so central to the revolutionary process.

Equally significant, Russia, now no longer the Russian Empire but the Soviet Union, was the first country to embark on the project of creating a socialist society. It claimed to be pioneering a universal model on the basis of a general theory of human social development, but in fact much of the logic of modern Communist societies was rooted in Russian particularities and imposed elsewhere.

Finally, with the initiation of perestroika in 1985 and its culmination in the collapse of the old system, the Soviet Union was the first industrial country ever to self-destruct in such a dramatic way. Perhaps the closest historical parallel is Weimar Germany.

This list of historical “firsts,” which together make Russian history so fascinating for outsiders and so painful for the country’s inhabitants, is intimately connected with the centuries-old efforts to delineate a separate Russian path to the modern world. Brief reflection on the vast differences between early-nineteenth-century tsarist Russia and Stalin’s Soviet Union should be enough to dispel any simple sense of the uniformity of these efforts. Nonetheless, the repeated attempts to follow a different path from Europe’s, to create a society, economy, and government felt to be more in tune with the country’s own character, all involved the uneasy combination of despotic state power, rapid modernization, and the propagation of a model of society quite different from, and in many ways hostile to, the West.

Although the Russian vision of modernity was widely believed to embody higher moral principles than those of the West, the attempt to modernize partly on the basis of the “Russian idea” was the source of innumerable tensions and dilemmas in the society. Whether sincere or insincere, the official propagation of an alternative vision, and its partial embodiment in actual practices and institutions, conflicted with many of the fundamental imperatives of modern society. And it is the contradictions inherent in these efforts that largely explain why, as the Russian philosopher Georges Florovsky observed, “the history of Russian culture is all made up of interruptions, of paroxysms, of denials or enthusiasms, of disappointments, betrayals, ruptures.”² In broad scope, this is the story that will be told throughout the following chapters. With the collapse of the Communist regime, a whole set of perspectives and values at the heart of Russian life for centuries has come into question as never before in Russian history, leaving in its wake a sense of profound moral crisis.

Many books have been written on Russia using a fundamentally different approach. Instead of trying to identify the distinctive positive values and institutions upon which many tried to construct an alternative kind of society, writers have often focused only on what Russia lacked: for example, a developed sense of legal consciousness or a strongly rooted middle class. They have failed to see the other side of the picture, that there was in fact a well-elaborated set of alternatives. Unfortunately, an appreciation of the values upon which an alternative Russian path to modernity was to be built does not diminish our sense of the tragedies of modern Russian history, for this alternative vision has always been inconsistent with crucial imperatives of modern large-scale societies.

The very phrase “the Russian idea” is in some senses misleading; indeed, all three of the words that compose it, even the article “the,” will need to be interpreted and qualified. But whatever its limitations, the phrase cannot be avoided, since for over a hundred years this has been the formulation in use by Russian writers preoccupied with these problems. It was first introduced in a systematic way by Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyev, in an article originally published in French, based on a talk given in Paris in 1889; the article first appeared in Russian after Solovyev’s death, in 1909. The dual use of the term to encompass, first, what is seen to be most distinctive about Russian culture and institutions, and second, the ideal model of society based on and extrapolated from these elements, continues to the present time. There is an inevitable tension between the first use as an abstract historical model and the second use as a cultural ideal, as the competing perspectives in the two large anthologies mentioned in the introduction clearly demonstrate.

Yet the two meanings are inseparable, for the ideal model was held to be based on an interpretation of Russian history and institutions; and the latter, in turn, were often seen to embody the ideal model of society. The resulting ambiguity will also find expression in the following analysis. For although “the Russian idea” is a set of ideals, it is not only a phenomenon of culture. As the meaning given to, at times imposed upon, practices, institutions, and historical change, it was also made flesh in economics, politics, and society.

The tension between these two aspects of the Russian idea does not pertain only to the world of concepts. For the very friction between the ideal and the real, between the pristine vision of society and its embodiment in history, led people to judge society’s deficiencies in the light of proclaimed, but unrealized, values. Ultimately, the lack of correspondence between ideal and reality led to their mutual discrediting: “really existing socialism” undermined the ideal, just as the ideal called into judgment the system.

TOWARD A CONCEPTUALIZATION: THREE NEGATIONS

Negation One

The “Russian” idea is not entirely or exclusively Russian. It is not entirely Russian, because many of its elements were in fact borrowed from European social thought. The rejection of egotistic utilitarianism; the desire for community; the suspicion of private property; the hatred of formalism in social relations, especially as concerns law; the desire for a state that will protect the subject against social elites; indeed, the very idea of a distinctive national essence: these key themes of the “Russian” idea can be found in various currents of European thought of the early industrial period, especially romantic conservatism. Indeed, the first really visible current of thinkers to propose a fairly consistent version of the Russian idea were the Slavophiles of the mid-1800s. Some of their leading figures had in fact traveled or lived in Europe, studying with some of the leading lights of German philosophy, such as Hegel or Schelling, from whom they absorbed many of their ideas. Thus, when writers like Ivan Kireevsky or Alexei Khomiakov interpreted Russian history, they did so not as careful students of the Russian past who wanted to visualize the social world of pre-Petrine Russia, but as philosophically sophisticated opponents of the new order that was being created in Europe. From its early flowering, then, the Russian idea will in part be a kind of antibody to modernity, incubated in Europe but grown much more potent in its Russian environment.

But the Russian idea was not just an imitation of European romantic conservatism as reinvented for patriarchal and peasant Russia by a group of nativist ideologues. It was not simply an ideological construction. For indeed, Russia was very different from the West, perhaps more so by the middle of the nineteenth century than it had been for two centuries. Russian society was in many ways more communal, less individualistic, than was Germany or England; legal consciousness and the attachment to private property were truly less rooted in the population than among the inheritors of Roman tradition; and religious and political institutions had a different logic and history. When the Slavophiles, revolutionary populists, or official ideologists of autocracy proclaimed Russia’s separateness from the “West,” which they tended to regard as singular and homogeneous, and announced that Russia had a superior path to modernity, they pioneered a set of ideas that would become widespread outside of European civilization throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Every part of the non-European world was either threatened with or came under European political, economic, or cultural dominance. Intellectuals everywhere searched their societies’ heritages and analyzed their institutions in order to create the same kind of hybrid national ideas.

Everywhere these ideas, represented as “traditional” and embodying the essence of the nation, also bore the imprint of their origins as a reaction to European civilization. It is not surprising, then, that they often bear family resemblances to each other. Islamic religious ideologies, like the Russian idea, emphasize the communal nature of Islam and counterpose it to the conflictual, individualistic West. The Japanese ideology of kokutai in the late nineteenth century proposed a familial model of society that sought to validate the paternal authority of the government. Japanese social relations were held to be at heart communal and not based on individual interests. Socialist ideas in Africa and Latin America were also based on claims of a more communal and harmonious social order than existed in the decaying, individualistic West. In China at the turn of the nineteenth century the political leader and thinker Kang Youwei attempted to create a Chinese version of progress based upon a modified Confucian world view. Is the Russian idea simply the pioneer version of a more general ideological revolt against the West that had its apogee in the anticolonial struggles of the early and mid-twentieth century, but has now waned as a result of the further consolidation of an international economic and political order?

Not entirely. While it is true that the Russian idea bears obvious similarities to the responses of elites in non-Western countries to the Western threat, there are vital differences that should be stressed at the outset. First, it would be difficult to find a complex of values that are more hostile to the logic of Western institutions among other leading civilizations. For example, Islamic values embody much more respect for individual enterprise and private property than does the Russian idea. Even more significant, the sanctity of contracts and law is central to the Islamic tradition. As in Russia, communal values are given great weight in Islam, but not in opposition to law, as in Russia, where the law was seen to be a cold and external force that undermined community. Similarly, the Confucian tradition gives great positive value to this-worldly activity, as well as to the ethical norms that should regulate it. The extreme dualism between the present world of everyday life, given little positive value, and the world of the spirit, oriented toward higher values and the future, is not characteristic of Confucian ethics. In addition, both Japanese and Chinese civilizations are based on hierarchical values that help legitimize social elites. There is little of that egalitarianism, at times bordering on social anarchism, characteristic of the Russian idea. As compared with both China and Japan, social elites in Russia have always been regarded as legitimate only to the degree that they served the general goals of the state and not their own private interests: this is not a promising cultural foundation for modern capitalism.

The above comparisons indicate a deeper and more profound distinction. In Russia, the role of religion and the ancient values based upon it is posed in an entirely different way from Islamic or Far Eastern societies. For peculiar historical reasons, the Russian idea could not be mainly a “nativist” rejection of Western values on the basis of an independent cultural tradition. Similarly, its main formulators were not members of a traditional religious elite whose position was threatened by social and cultural modernization, but an educated, secular intelligentsia. There never was, and probably could not have been, a figure similar to the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran or Kang Youwei in China, who based their revolutionary goals on a great indigenous cultural tradition.

Russian thinkers from Chaadaev to Fedotov have meditated upon this profound difference. The Christian religion in Russia, borrowed from the Greeks, did not furnish the country with the same kind of independent cultural heritage to oppose to Western ideas. In the words of G. P. Fedotov, whose authority on such questions is unsurpassed, “the countries of the East were the homelands not only of great religions and artistic cultures, but also deep thought. They were not ‘speechless’ as was Ancient Rus. They had something to oppose to European reason, and they are prepared to begin their conquest of it.”³

The relative poverty of Russian tradition helps us understand Kireevsky’s remark that it is unusually difficult to formulate “the basic principles which underlie the Russian style of life.” His friend and opponent in debate Alexander Herzen traced this difficulty to the “mistake of the Slavophiles … in their thinking that Russia once had an individual culture. Russia never had this culture and never could have had it.”⁴ Similarly, the great nineteenth-century publicist Belinsky not only was skeptical of the life-giving power of Russian tradition but even argued that old Russia consisted of nothing but deformation. His consolation was: even though Russian culture was degraded by Byzantium and the Tartars, the fact that these faults were acquired and not endemic also meant that they could be cast off. The great merit of Peter, for Belinsky, was to begin this work and to attempt to bring Russia into the civilized world.

As significant as this perceived cultural poverty is another cardinal distinction of Russian society: well before the threat of the West was felt in such acute form elsewhere in the world, the Russian state began an attack on Russian tradition in the name of progress. Holding old Muscovite ways in contempt, Peter the Great, with all his enormous energy, sought to break the hold of Muscovite religion on his subjects, especially the elite, and inculcate new cultural values based on Western pragmatism. His was the first “cultural revolution” from above in modern history. His efforts were the source of one of the great schisms that afflict Russian history. State and people; educated classes and the peasantry; adherents of the old and new cultural systems: these were some of the gaps that were opened up by Peter’s reform.

The consequences for the Russian idea were of incalculable importance. From the start it was not an organic reaction of the leaders of a traditional culture against Western values on the basis of that culture but was itself largely a rejection of Western values. Of course, national self-definition always has both a positive and a negative pole. The definition of what one is necessarily implies an image of what one is not. But because of the relative weakness of an independent national cultural tradition and because modernization was identified with Europe and the state, ideas of national identity had a distinctively “anti” character in Russia. According to this logic, if Europe is based on the individual, then we do (empirically) and should (ideally) emphasize the collective. If Europe respects law, then how fortunate that we honor only the higher truth of justice!

In so rejecting Europe, many formulators of Russian identity and advocates of national distinctiveness imported antimodern ideals and practices into Russian life as well. For example, both Dostoyevsky and Nicholas II perceived Russian political life in terms of the following primitive logic. They believed that European civilization was composed of “societies,” in the specific sense of mere agglomerations of conflicting and egotistical social groups with no common purpose. By contrast, for them Russia was not and should not be a “society,” but a united people. Catastrophically, they identified the real with their ideal and so were blinded to the changes taking place around them.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cycles of Breakdown in Russia
• Chapter One: The Russian Idea
• Chapter Two: The Dilemmas of Tsarist Modernization
• Chapter Three: The Logic of Soviet Communism
• Chapter Four: A Viable Form of Modern Society?
• Chapter Five: The Failure of Yeltsin’s Reforms
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index