The Third Colloquium
The Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for World Economy and International
Relations, Moscow, Russia
Friday, December 3, 1999
Opening Session
The Deputy Director of IMEMO, Vladimir Baranovsky, welcomed participants to the institute and described national identity as a fundamental question (bazovyi vopros) for those who study how Russia is adapting to change and how this is reflected in Russia's relationships with the outside world. He then introduced James Billington, calling him a superb connoisseur (velikolepnyi znatok) of Russian culture, civilization, and history, who has done so much as a scholar, analyst, and author to spread information and increase understanding of Russia. Dr. Billington gave a brief history of the Russian identity project and stressed its importance at such a complex (neprostoe) time in relations between the two countries.
Russian faith in the objectivity and political neutrality of Americans doing research on Russian culture seems to have significantly declined. Russian studies (rusistika) in America bear some responsibility for this state of affairs. Unable to distinguish the ephemeral from deep historical tendencies, many Western observers were taken unawares by the events that transpired ten years ago. Today, many of these same experts cannot explain the revival of nationalistic sentiment that is now underway. A more complete understanding of contemporary Russia's cultural and psychological experience is necessary for the West, and for America in particular. A sense of humility in the face of what one does not know is a necessary pre-condition if we are to diminish the mutual non-comprehension between Russia and the West. I hope that our deliberations today will to some degree assist in that process.
Dr. Billington briefly touched on the other reason that brought him to Moscow this week, an organizational meeting with the heads of the National and State Libraries to officially launch the Meeting of Frontiers project. This involves setting up a virtual library (http://frontiers.loc.gov) which will tell the parallel history of Americans moving west and Russian moving east, and where they met in Alaska and California. The idea of the frontier is central to the mythology of American identity, and the goal is to present the American and Russian stories and allow people to see where there are parallel lines in development. This is a Congressionally-funded project and Rep. Charles Taylor, Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, accompanied Dr. Billington to Moscow for these meetings.
Baranovsky: The study of parallels between Russian and American identities is very interesting, and it would be easy to ask the questions under discussion today about American identity as well. At least when we reach points in our colloquium where things are not clear or where we see the biggest problems, we might learn from taking a look at what the situation is in America.
Billington: It is worth noting that you are unlikely to find the French sitting around a conference table wondering what French identity is. We don't hear the English saying things about English identity. Americans, though, do this all the time. We are always asking ourselves who we are and where we are headed, although it's not quite like asking 'Where are you flying, oh proud horse...?'18
Parthé: If you substitute 'car' for 'horse' the question works pretty well for America.
Igor Chubais: . . . . We take up such questions when they are perceived as problems. Russia is experiencing an identity crisis and that's why everyone is talking about it. Evidently in America an identity hasn't been fully formed or it's an ongoing (dinamichnyi) process. When everything is clear, people don't talk about it. So the French don't have this problem. . . . When it [identity] exists and is functioning normally, we don't have to think about it. We've experienced it as a problem and that's why since the end of the 19th century we've had an ongoing search (poisk) for an answer.
The content of national identity in the Russian (rossiiskii) context
1. What, in your view, is the most substantial quality that is characteristic of Russian national identity? What is your understanding of national identity in the Russian context of ethnic and cultural diversity?
2. Variations of Russianness: ethnic, civic, religious, cultural, and territorial definitions. According to the dominant tendencies today, can one speak of Russia moving in the direction of a strongly-centered nation-state (gosudarstvennost') based on ethnicity?
Billington: The second question helps explain what we are looking for in the first. What is the key to this identity-is it ethnic, civic, religious, cultural, or territorial? And are we talking about an ethnic (russkii) or a civic (rossiiskii) identity? I've found that in such discussions this often isn't completely clear.
. . . Chubais: .. Russia is experiencing a polysystemic crisis. . . . If the most acute (samyi ostryi) crisis is economic, then the deepest crisis is over ideas and identity. We aren't sure who we are and what our identity is, and until we can do that we won't be able to solve any of our other problems. Some people insist that there is no crisis. Others say that the crisis arose only in 1996, when President Yeltsin announced that we needed a new national idea. A third group says that the crisis arose in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed (kogda rukhnul Sovetskii Soiuz).
I'm convinced that the crisis arose towards the end of the 19th century. Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, Solovyev and other powerful Russian thinkers. . . .wrote extensively about Russian national identity. What kind of crisis was this? And what kind of identity do we have? We can only answer this question when we take into account that we are talking about a process, a dynamic process. . . . We have to talk about what has taken place, what are the tendencies and the lines [of development].
At the end of the 19th century we had a crisis of ideas. . . . Russian identity was built around three principles, three fundamental values: Orthodoxy, imperial policies such as the expansion of the nation's territory, and peasant collectivism (obshchinnyi kollektivizm). All three principles were unstable (shatalis') at the end of the 19th century. The expansion of land had exhausted itself and come to an end (ischerpalo), as it reached natural limits in the south. Western expansion was pretty much finished by the end of the 18th century. Orthodoxy, like all Christianity, was in the midst of a crisis. Nietzsche wrote about this in Europe and Dostoevsky wrote about it in Russia. And with Orthodoxy in a crisis all sorts of phenomena began to appear-nihilists, terrorists, bomb-throwers (nigilisty, terroristy, bombisty, vse eti -isty), all these types who caused problems for Russia. And the third element, peasant collectivism, was also in a crisis. As a result of the Stolypin reforms the peasants were leaving the commune (obshchina), and it began to dissolve as a social structure and as a social community (obshchnost'). . . .
What was the Bolshevik answer to all of this? The October Revolution itself-like the February revolt-did not happen by chance. The whole spiritual movement that took off at the beginning of the century, the Silver Age, with its wonderful music and art, was part of a spiritual quest (dukhovnyi poisk), a search for an answer to the questions: Who are we? How do we change the foundation (fundament) and restructure what the state is based on? The Bolsheviks won this discussion and proposed, or rather thrust upon us, their answer. . . .
In order to do what they wanted to do, they had to establish a totalitarian regime. It was unnatural, it went against the logic of Russia's prior development. So we got totalitarianism, and expansion went on. Orthodoxy, which was unstable and in need of support, was cut off, together with other religions, and the communist idea, communist ideology, was set up in its place. And the peasant collective was replaced with Soviet collectivization, all directed from above. Every Soviet person found himself in a number of collectives-the pioneers, the Komsomol, the Party, at work. . . . Bolshevism worked against the logic of a thousand years of Russian history, and the result was that after seventy years, this government fell. This was inevitable. Although seventy years seems like a long time from the point of view of one person's life, from the point of view of history, it is nothing. And today we find ourselves in what might be called the second edition of the crisis of ideas. We are again faced with the same questions we failed to answer at the beginning of the century: Where should we go? Who are we? (Kuda zhe nam idti? Kto my?).
There are only four possibilities, four paths that we can follow to restore our identity.
(1) The new Russia could become just another version of the Soviet Union, under a different name and a different flag, but it would be basically the same thing, a nomenklatura totalitarian state. This is a dead end, not a way out (eto tupik, a ne vykhod).
(2) The new Russia could renounce all its history, throw out its entire past, begin everything from the beginning (s nulia) and copy everything from the West. There are advocates of this, but it is also hopeless (besperspektivno), also a dead-end. Even if we constructed everything on a Western model, we wouldn't be comfortable with the results. . . . We have somewhat different sets of values, we live a bit differently. We are Europe, and Germany is Europe, and France is Europe, but these are all different Europes (I my Evropa, i Germaniia Evropa, i Frantsiia Evropa, no raznaia Evropa). . . .
(3) Russia can link up with its traditions, with the logic of its development, with its history. There was an unraveling of the knot (uzel) of traditions and values and texts at the beginning of the century, but this can be restored in the 21st century. The third path is the only one that is acceptable (priemlemyi). We parted the Iron Curtain, but the red substructure that was built after 1917 still has not been dismantled. We understand that we have been cut off from the outside world, but we've understood only poorly how we were torn away from our own roots and our own history. The path of self-reunification is also a path of returning to our roots, and returning to Europe, because historically Russia was always part of Europe. . . . This is the path to restore our identity.
Billington: What is this path called?
Chubais: It's called the path of continuity, of succession (preemstvo), and there is a group of scholars who study this joining up of traditions (shkola preemstva). There are philosophers, historians, legal experts, experts on religion, language, and culture who have worked out a precise mechanism, an algorithm for this reunification, for how this could be done. This is the path and school of continuity with historical Russia.
(4) There is a fourth path, and it's the one which has been implemented by those in power today, which can be called the mixed-salad alternative (put' vinegreta), which makes use of all of the first three paths, which are incompatible with each other. So, there is the official burial of the remains of Nicholas II, and the hospitably open doors of the Lenin Mausoleum, when the latter is responsible for having killed the former-and people bow respectfully to one and the other. We restore the Order of St. Andrew, and celebrate the anniversary of the KGB and the Young Communist League (Komsomol). These are things that cannot be joined together-you either go in one direction or the other. . . . But the power structure, which is very weak, tries to lean on any group or force it can, so it is playing every game you can think of.
. . . The urge for expansion that has been so important in our history has to move from an increase in quantity to an increase in quality. . . . We shouldn't rail about Sevastopol really being a Russian city-unfortunately, that train has already departed (k sozhaleniiu, etot poezd ushel). . . . We shouldn't be trying to put border guards on Georgian territory. . . . We need to rebuild our own country. The government's main expenses are for defense-what about science, health care, education, culture, new ideas, new technology, and new spiritual initiatives?. . .
We need to go from expansion to reconstruction, and we have to think about values. In order to reunite with Russia's history, we need to have a deep feeling for thinking historically and for getting our values from history. There is a special role and value for historical knowledge in Russia today. We have schools which specialize in subjects like English or biology, but all our schools should also have a historical emphasis. We need to figure out what country we're living in. We didn't begin our existence as a country in 1917 but back in the eighth century. . . .
We don't need a democracy just because we are copying from the West. . . . We need it because it flows logically from our history. During the expansion stage, we didn't need democracy-no one was demanding it. At the reconstruction (obustroistvo) stage, democracy is very necessary to the life of the country. Along with this, we must also keep in mind the importance of the Orthodox tradition. . . . If you look at Orthodoxy not from the point of view of believers and non-believers, but from the vantage-point of cultural studies (kul'turologiia), what is the specific character of Orthodoxy?. . . . The Orthodox tradition affirms the priority of spiritual values...; if we want to preserve our identity, then the spiritual (dukhovnost') must play a special role in this. A feeling for democracy, comprehensive restructuring, and spiritual values-these will be the characteristics of a revived Russian identity, and they already exist in part.
After 1917, things were completely different from the point of view of symbols and key ideas. . . . And the laws changed: in December 1917 there was a decree that forbade any use of the entire previous body of laws, which meant a total break (razryv) with the past. Today we can try to revive a Soviet Union that was severed (razorvano) from the Russian past, or we can try to reconnect with that past, with historical Russia, to restore the continuity of Russian history. . . . We need restitution [of legal traditions], we need to reconnect with Russian law, to use Russian law as a basis, and then add what is required in Russia today. . . .
Baranovsky: How far back in the past do we have to go?
Billington: Do we go as far back as something like the landed assembly (zemskii sobor)?
Chubais: The fact is that before the beginning of the [20th] century Russia had a completely normal government. I'm not saying it was the best of structures, but it was normal. What we have after 1917 is a pathology-the way a person can lose control, this state lost control.
Baranovsky: What do you think of the theory that this pathology began during Peter's time?
Chubais:. . . .There was nothing pathological about it. The reforms were complex and costly and there were many victims. . . . From the point of view of morality it's difficult to evaluate, but from a historical point of view we can see how the reforms that Peter enacted are operative up to the present day. We live in the midst of these reforms. He established the port of St. Petersburg, and that port is still part of Russia. . . . The blood that was shed during Stalin's reign was shed for nothing (vpustuiu), in vain. He expanded the Soviet Union and created the Socialist camp (sotslager'), which lasted thirty years and then fell apart, and there is nothing left of it. The Petrine reforms have been vindicated by history as being a logical development and they are still working. The Bolshevik reforms brought us catastrophe.
. . . Sergei Chugrov:. . . .I see as the main feature of our national identity the fact that we are always searching for our national identity. The West values results-we concentrate on process. We see internal contradictions (vnutrenniaia protivorechivost', antonimnost'). The Russian character lurches (mechetsia) between extremes, while trying to limit these extremes. The Western type of thinking is sufficient unto itself (samodostatochnyi), while the Russian thinker rushes from one thing to another, never achieving that feeling of self-sufficiency. There are pluses and minuses to this.
On the downside are internal disharmony (razlad), inner conflict..., an attraction to Utopias (sklonnost' k strane Utopii), doubts, a casting about between contradictory impulses. The pluses include: openness, the tendency to act in an extroverted way, the ability to make Western models and values and types of behavior work for Russia. From here we get other characteristics, like the tendency to move between the formal law (zakonnost') and conscience and the concept of justice (spravedlivost'). . . .
Baranovsky: I think that to the Russian way of thinking, legality and justice are incompatible in principle.
. . . Chugrov: Nevertheless, there is an attempt to make formal law and justice compatible. Our national character collapsed and we have to reconstruct what we understood by the word justice. It's not a formal concept. . . . It's a constant appeal to conscience. As a result it turns into a kind of compensatory mechanism where life is difficult and there is a despotic suppression of individual identity. A person thinks: "I know that we live badly, but I have a conscience, and a conscience is better than power or legality." Unfortunately, we wind up with self-affirmation by means of self-obliteration (samoutverzhdenie cherez samounichtozhenie)-a peculiar psychological mechanism. . . .
Chubais: The deepest crisis is the lack of a national idea. When they start trying to solve that, things will go differently.
Chugrov: National consciousness was exaggerated by the fall of the Soviet Union-there's a kind of post-operative shock. . . . Now we have the struggle [for power] in its pure form, without solving any economic or social questions. It's the struggle to restore national identity that is based on a new imperial idea, unfortunately. Because of that the developmental paths (puti razvitiia) of Russia and the West are going in different directions. The Kozyrev period of reckless admiration (bezogliadnoe voskhishchenie) of the West was very brief. Kozyrev was still in the cabinet when this approach began to be criticized from all sides. The West is at fault for this because they treated Russia with an eye still on Cold War barriers, and if they saw Russia as a partner, it was as a junior partner and not an equal.
The window of opportunity (okno vozmozhnosti)19 began to close in 1993. At the G-7 summit in Tokyo, U.S. Secretary of State Christopher slapped Kozyrev on the back and asked him why Russia wasn't behaving better and insisted on selling materials to India which would allow them to produce rockets. This kind of humiliation provokes an upsurge of imperial ideas and imperial pride. If the West had treated Russia as an equal partner-even without giving money, even superficially-then a lot of the upheaval [of 1993] could have been avoided. Instead, the fighters went to their respective corners, and now we have Uncle Sam and Uncle Vanya looking out [at the world] from different sides of the room.
. . . Viktor Aksiuchits:. . . .If you want to speak about their [the Russian people's] most essential (sushchestvennyi) characteristics, then you have to admit that the first act of national self-consciousness, the baptism into Orthodoxy, was a religious act. . . . It was after the baptism that we see the different neighboring tribes begin to crystallize into one people. . . . The Russian people, as the subject of a historical act, become the people who organized the state (narod gosudarstvoobrazovatel'nyi) and the people who created Russian culture and Russian Orthodox civilization. Other groups entered into this civilization, just as other cultural streams, languages, and religions fed into it. The religious side of national character has the following basic characteristics: the metaphysical, collective spirituality, universality, and binary oppositions (metafizichnost', sobornost', universal'nost', antonimichnost').
Baranovsky: Isn't antonimichnost' the same as protivorechivost' (showing a contradiction) or vnutrenniaia konfliktnost' (internal or intrinsic conflict)?
Aksiuchits: No, they're not the same. Antonimichnost' is a deeper and more complex phenomenon. Russian consciousness is shaped by these principles and everything else is grouped around them. . . . The metaphysical orientation of the Russian character is the primary reason and source for the unprecedented creation of a state system for a large territory in the tough conditions of northern Eurasia. Only the existence of an overarching ideal (sverkhideal) made it possible for the Russian people to create on this territory a unique state structure and a unique culture and civilization. You can't explain this by referring to more mundane factors.
The spiritually collective (sobornyi) aspect of the Russian national character allowed a multi-national state and a multi-national Russian (rossiiskaia) culture to take shape within the framework of Russian Orthodox civilization. . . . In forming a multi-national state, the Russian people did not destroy, forcibly convert, or enslave others. This can be attributed to a sense of spiritual collectivity and not to anything pragmatic. Universality explains the unusual openness to both Western and Eastern influences. It accounts for the ability to yield to an influence and grow from this exposure, and the fact that Russian civilization has assimilated many antithetical influences.
As for antonimichnost', there is of course a baser form of it, a tendency to extremes and polarization (sklonnost' k krainosti i poliarizatsii). But it is also tied to the Christian message: death is defeated by death, God appears as man. At the higher stages of Russian consciousness, this principle of opposites resolves itself into a special kind of harmony. For example, in this enormously strong, centralized state, with its tradition of subordination, you also see anarchy and vol'nitsa (a collective term for freemen, outlaws, runaway serfs, and Cossacks).
Baranovsky: Vol'nitsa is like freedom, only worse.
Aksiuchits: These characteristics aren't mutually exclusive, but rather simultaneously existing. Along with the strict centralization required to govern this country, we find a strong tendency to local self-government, which increases the further you get from the capital. You can see this in the 19th century Russian Empire: Finland's constitution, the Kingdom of Poland, the considerable autonomy allowed the Caucasus and Central Asia. There are a lot more examples, but this is the essence of the genotip (the basic genetic group that generates a number of related organisms) of the Russian national character. It can manifest itself in a direct or a distorted form, but it is on this base that various cultural archetypes develop (na etom naslaivaiutsia raznogo roda arkhetipy), the specific cultural and historical forms. . . . Chubais also mentioned a number of these characteristics as coming together: the metaphysical, the collective, the universal, imperial policy, and Orthodoxy. I see them more as social-historical manifestations of a primordial (iznachal'nyi) national genotype.
Baranovsky: The end of your statement shows a certain coming together of your two positions [Aksiuchits and Chubais].
Chubais: All the same, there is a lot that I would have to dispute.
Baranovsky: Igor Borisovich [Chubais], don't you see a similarity between antonimichnost' and your fourth variant, which combined the other three paths into what you called a vinaigrette?
Chubais: Those are quite different concepts.
Baranovsky: But what about your example of keeping Lenin's Mausoleum open while burying the tsar with great solemnity? Isn't this an example of things that are completely incompatible and yet coexist?
Chubais: No, it isn't at all the same. There is a difference between having hot water and cold water, and having hot water and an old boot.
Billington: What makes these oppositions significant? What do they explain? Where does it get you to say that on the one hand, we have this set of characteristics, while on the other hand, we have their opposites?
Aksiuchits: You will hardly find this degree of antonimichnost'-of both knowledge and character-in any other Christian civilization.
. . . Billington: There are similar types of oppositions in Spain. Perhaps this antonimichnost' comes from them [Spain and Russia], being at the outermost edge of Europe. The Spanish are also very religious. So you find this dualism in Spain, but not, for instance, in France, England, or Holland. This is important in understanding the history of Russia, especially when you think of times when there has been a split (raskol) in society and in religion. But what is specifically Russian about this?
Aksiuchits: I tried to show that these oppositions are at the very core (v samom genezise) of the Russian people and their identity. The first action of the Russian people was a religious one. The Russian people make their appearance on the historical stage with their baptism, and Orthodoxy is what united the different tribes into one people. This is unprecedented: the loftiest truths give birth to ethnic unification. This one act of baptism has all the elements in it: the metaphysical, the collective, the universal, and the principle of binary oppositions (antonimizm).
Billington: And of course there is dual faith (dvoeverie, the juxtaposition, even melding, of Russian folk belief and Orthodox beliefs and practices).
Aksiuchits: That kind of opposition can grow into a real split (razryv), which harms the organism. I'm talking about an opposition that brings the organism to life, that's part of its constitution. . . .
Viktor Kuvaldin: . . . .We are living through a rather curious (liubopytnyi) period. Behind the crisis of national consciousness and of identity, it's as if we are trying not to notice that what has collapsed are myths that were attached not only to the Soviet period but which have much deeper roots.
. . . Somehow I can't understand how a people who supposedly have such a well-developed identity show so little interest in the fact that [after 1991] 25 million Russians wound up living outside the country. The reaction of Russian society is inexplicable. I don't understand how a people who are supposed to be so collectively minded have evolved forms of asocial behavior that don't exist in the United States-at least I've never come across them. Russia in the 1990s has given birth to a completely wild, coarse type of individualism whose equal you will not find even in a very individualistic country like America.
Chubais: We're in the midst of a crisis, and that's why everything is breaking down.
Kuvaldin: . . . .I'm hearing about the people in terms of national self-consciousness, a strong state principle, collectivism, and a strong feeling for Orthodoxy. Even taking into consideration all the horrors of the Bolshevik terror, how is it that our religious values were so thoroughly destroyed? It didn't turn out this way in other countries. Poland, I grant, had a shorter and less intense totalitarian experience, but it is also just a more religious country, while our church turned into a branch (filial) of the KGB. I don't think that the construction of new myths is an adequate response to the collapse of the older ones, and in the nineties we have been actively engaged in new myth-making (novoe mifotvorchestvo). Rather than looking at relations in the social sphere (sotsium) for answers to our questions about Russian national identity, I think that the answer lies deeper down and that we need to look at our attitudes to space (prostranstvo) and time. We exist in a tremendous expanse and over a long period of historical time.
It seems to me that as a people we have been made sick by all that space (my bol'ny prostrantsvom). . . . We swallow up (pogloshchaem) space, and then we don't do much with it. We don't perceive it as land (zemlia), and we never have enough time to make good use of it. In this sense, we are hostages (zalozhniki) of this space. . . . Because the space we conquered doesn't support life that easily, we evolved a particular kind of agriculture which is distinguished by its very low productivity and its limited variety of crops and by special forms of economic exchange. . . . And this has led to the creation of a special kind of political organization. The fact that in some places we overcame all these obstacles in the 19th century led to a rupture (vzryv) in Russian culture and Russian thought.
Billington: In what sense a rupture? Is it because you then have a break between the city and the countryside?
Kuvaldin: Yes, a break in the sense of intellectual and artistic creation. In a few locations, in some of the major cities of European Russia, we were able to cast off the chains of that vast expanse which had shaped Russian culture up until then. And with that liberation came the great artistic and scientific achievements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. And I see this as the origin of the break in the flow of Russian history (porvannyi ritm russkoi istorii). We exchanged space for time and broke with our previous nomadic existence.
We are always behind (my vse vremia otstaivaem) with our unique forms of agriculture, economic and social organization, and government. As a result, we are always trying to catch up (my vse vremia dogoniaem). This is how we got the Petrine reforms, Aleksandr II, Bolshevism, and the attempted reforms of the Gorbachev era. Everything is very concentrated, it's like a race against time, and the country is never prepared for these changes. . . . By the beginning of the 20th century, we had exhausted the possibilities for absorbing territory without coming into conflict with neighboring countries. We exhausted the possibilities of an unmodernized society. We were substantially behind Europe and the United States and we tried to catch up economically, socially, and politically. Our problem, our task, at the beginning of the 20th century was to try to return Russia to historical time while still holding onto our vast expanse. One possibility (vozmozhnyi variant) would have been to trade space in order to buy time. But the logic of the entire period of the Bolsheviks and the Soviets was to hold onto that space while rejoining historical time. . . . That led to a crisis (krakh) at the end of the 20th century.
I don't think that we lost the Cold War. We brought it to an end in a favorable way (na ochen' pochetnom uslovii). But we lost something else: the struggle to bring this vast Eurasian territory, from the western borders of the Soviet Union to the Pacific Ocean, into the next century. . . . The problem of Russian consciousness at the beginning of the 20th century involved finding a way to give a modern form to this vast expanse of land which we had gathered with difficulty, and which we found hard to develop, but which had become part of our identity.
Aleksei Kara-Murza: I agree with Chugrov that identity in Russia is a subject of much disagreement (konfliktnyi protsess), and that there is no single Russian identity. . . . To show the conflicted character of the identity problem, I will refer to three key periods of Russian history, when what we now call an identity crisis was most sharply felt.
(1) The first major crisis comes with the Petrine reforms. You can talk about the enserfment of the peasantry and the church schism under Aleksei Mikhailovich [Peter's father and the second Romanov tsar, 1645-76], but it seems to me that the height of the pre-Revolutionary identity crisis was stimulated by reaction to Peter's reforms. The two warring parties-the Westernizers (zapadniki) and the nativists (samobytniki)-who tried to resolve what Russia is in quite different ways, formed around the question "What did Peter make of Russia?" (Chto Peter sdelal s Rossiei?). . . .
This isn't just a question of nuances and approaches, but touches on existential questions. Half of the thinkers say that Peter gave birth to Russia, created Russia, and in opening up a window to Europe led us from darkness to light and from death to life. . . . The other half, the nativists, say that he killed Russia (Petr ubil Rossiiu). There's no more critical moment than this in the history of a culture or a national consciousness. Arguments about the French Revolution, arguments about American identity don't reach this level of stark oppositions. Either he gave life or he killed (libo rodil, libo ubil). This is the most radical Russian question up till the present time.
(2) The second radical identity crisis is Bolshevism-Communism. Yesterday we got the first copies of a book that Polyakov and I have been working on for eight years. It contains everything of substance that Russians had to say about Bolshevism in Russian culture. The argument took place most freely in emigration, the question of what Bolsheviks did with Russia. You will come across the same sort of oppositions: Lenin gave birth to a new, modern state, or, Lenin killed the state. . . .
(3) The third identity crisis-the problem that Professor Kuvaldin spoke about-began in 1985 with the Gorbachev reforms, or in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev and Yeltsin gave birth to a new state, leading the country from the totalitarian darkness to the light, from non-existence into historical existence, and moved onto the broad road (stolbovaia doroga) of world civilization. Gorbachev-or Yeltsin, depending on the particular nuance-also killed the Russian state. Up until the present, Russian social consciousness has been divided in two by this question of life or death, darkness or light, so what is a plus for one side is a minus for the other side. There aren't just heroes, there are diametrically opposed heroes. Some compare Peter to Christ or to the Apostle Peter, and others call him the Anti-Christ. Lenin is the creator of a new state, or he is a murderer. And it's the same with Gorbachev and Yeltsin-we find the same model throughout Russian history.
Chubais: It's a conflict between the old and the new, over which is better.
Kara-Murza: If what we have now is the perennial situation of either/or, then Russian identity is split and in a state of great conflict. So there is no single Russian identity. . . . The second important thesis has to do with the question of what it is that makes Russia possible, what held it together?. . . . I think that there are three forms of integration that hold the community (obshchnost', sotsium) together:
(1) As an ethnocracy (etnokratiia), where the ethnic sign has a unifying power. . . .
(2) The second way is through state service, through a vertical status hierarchy. We are close because we are on the same professional ladder and we both have the same boss at the top. It's integration by means of service and power.
(3) The third principle is more contemporary. It's a horizontal integration through the reconfiguring (obustroistvo) of territories and cultures, based on the principle of the nation-state (politicheskaia natsiia). On the one hand, it's half-ethnic, because the nation is partly an ethnic construct. On the other hand, the nation is built to a significant degree on horizontal ties, while the imperial principle involves a vertical structure.
These three principles are of course not mutually exclusive, but at any given moment, one will dominate. I think that my colleague Chubais correctly names the three identity principles that, when taken together, made Russia possible before the Revolution: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. Which is the most important? Religious theoreticians, at least the liberal ones, all agree that while the wish was for the principles of Orthodoxy and Orthodox communities (pravoslavnye obshchiny) to guide the nation, in practice it is the imperial principle that has been decisive. It subordinated the church to itself, made the church part of the state (ogosudarstvil tserkov'). And that is a tragedy-I agree with Aksiuchits.
The imperial principle dominated, and it was Peter who made this happen. He brought communal structures into the table of ranks, subordinating them to the interests of the empire. And I think that Chubais is right that Communist identity recreated these structures: instead of Orthodoxy there was Communism, instead of the imperial table of ranks there was the hierarchy of Party committees, and the new Soviet collectivism took a variety of forms. What I can't say is how one can call this a violation of Russian tradition-it was a continuation of Russian (rossiiskii) tradition. These traditions were winding down, and the Bolsheviks had to use force to maintain this old imperial logic. . . . Don't say that there is a fundamental conflict between pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russia-the latter actually represents an attempt to forcibly continue this system. . . . Andropov and Stalin to an extent modeled themselves on Peter the Great. Whether they did this intentionally or not, they worked in similar ways. Stalin for all practical purposes killed his son, as did Peter. There can be no ethnic or family feeling in the imperial setting-everyone serves the ruler. Stalin said: "I'm not giving up a field marshal for a soldier." His son was in captivity and Stalin wouldn't give up Paulus to get him back. And there are many other examples of this type.
Baranovsky: But Nicholas II tried to save his son by abdicating for himself and for Aleksei.
Kara-Murza: He departed from the paradigm. Andropov in 1983 was trying to reanimate the imperial principle, especially the idea of cleaning up (ochistit') the empire-once again, a man from the security branch.
Billington: What specifically was he doing to clean up the empire?
Kara-Murza: He was trying to clean up the police force (militsiia), which was beginning to steal, to restore the honest profile of a Party member, especially by bringing in younger people, and to fight against the shadow economy because in an empire you can't have anything shady. Peter wrote that the ruler's eye has to see everything-everything has to be regulated, mechanized, and completely transparent. We learn from sociological surveys that Andropov and Peter the Great are in some ways equated in mass consciousness. I have the impression that Putin's people understand this archetype. . . . So Putin doesn't have to come up with a new model-unfortunately nothing new has come along in a while. The political nation has a hard time functioning in Russia, and I don't exclude the possibility that [post-Soviet] Russia is not possible as a political nation. . . .
Chubais: Then Russia must perish as a nation.
Kara-Murza: . . . .Let's not talk about myths, but about real political possibilities. . . . Let's clear away (ubrat') the myths and come up with some actual constructs (real'nye konstruktsii) that we can live with. I am ready to work on reestablishing the model of Russia as a political entity, although I can see that it's a lot more complicated than in America. As Solonevich-whose thinking comes close to Aksiuchits-correctly said: geography limits Russia's freedom. If in England geography guarantees their freedom, in Russia freedom is limited by geography. . . .
. . . Chubais: . . . .There are some things I need to clarify. . . . I'll start with Kara-Murza and the question of whether the Soviet Union is a continuation of Russia or not, and whether one can return to old Russia. It would be madness (bezumie) simply to return to pre-Revolutionary Russia. We would wind up with 1917 all over again, so we would just be repeating everything. What I'm talking about is a return to what there was at the beginning of the century, but having untangled the problems and contradictions theoretically, and having overcome the ideological crisis (ideinyi krizis) that was solved in the past through Bolshevism, totalitarianism, and the Gulag. Russia wore itself out (ischerpalo sebia) this way. Forty-three million people passed through the Gulag system-do we want to raise that red banner once again?
We can move another way, not directly, but along a more complex path-history isn't one line or one tendency. In trying to overcome the ideological crisis of that time perhaps we'll see another solution (inoi vykhod), not Bolshevism. In some ways the Soviet Union is a continuation of Russia, but the most primitive kind of continuation. We need to find a way out of that situation-expansion must be transformed into rebuilding.
As for what Professor Kuvaldin has said, any system can be simplified in two ways (dvoiako), quantitatively or qualitatively. At the time of the Petrine reforms, Russia wasn't outside of time or backward. It was just that the European countries had stopped their quantitative growth 100-200 years earlier than Russia, so they were small, but well-structured (obustroeny). They moved on to another historical stage much earlier. Charles XII waged war against Peter and lost. But, as they say, the winner doesn't realize how much he has lost, because we continued to grow while Western countries had cut off this process.
Peter represents an attempt to combine quantitative growth-the window he hacked through [to Europe], the northern part of the Caspian Sea region, and the 20-year war with the Swedes-with qualitative development. At the same time he was building internally, starting up over 200 factories. These dual processes cost a great deal, but on the whole he was successful. And in this sense, the Petrine reforms do not mark a rupture with Russia. . . . Orthodoxy, peasant collectivism, and imperial policy all remained. How can we say that Peter tore Russia apart? He didn't tear it apart, he continued its existence (on ne razorval, on prodolzhil), and set in motion the costly process of restructuring the country.
You [Kuvaldin] talk about the choice being space or time: we gain space and we lose time. That's a pretty good model. . . . America expanded until it reached the other shore and had gotten rid of most of the Indians, but it moved rather quickly across this space, while we expanded and gathered land for five centuries, until the middle of the 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, no amount of effort could have continued this quantitative growth. Aleksandr I understood this-he beat Napoleon, and with the Russian army moved in a triumphal march into Paris, but he didn't annex any land or people. He liberated half of Europe and then he returned. Stalin, on the other hand, occupied half of Europe and, as a result, lost everything. . . . He didn't understand what age he was living in-expansion was no longer possible. . . .
Aksiuchits: The attempt to set aside the religious and philosophical aspects of the topic impoverishes any examination of the question. There was a remark about communism being a continuation of pre-Revolutionary Russia. My dear friends, the anti-Christ is not a further development or extension of Christ-it is the direct antithesis of Christ. Communism has been defined in many ways; you can even call it a psychic disease, but it is also a religious, spiritual one. This is a sickness of self-consciousness, a sickness of the human spirit and the spirit of the nation.
Looking at matters from that point of view, a lot more begins to make sense: (1) that communism is a spiritual illness; (2) that all the people who carried this ideological obsession (ideomaniia), this spiritual sickness, were raised on European culture and that none of them were products of Russian culture, so that Russian culture didn't develop an immunity to these people. That explains why this god-bashing (bogoborcheskii) communist ideology was so destructive in Russia, why here it utterly ruined (dotla razrushil) the church, not because the Russian people or character were drawn to it, but because it was the absolute antipode of the Russian mentality and Russian religious consciousness.
. . . The revival of the Russian state structure and Russian culture is directly dependent on the rebirth of the Russian people. And identity becomes the pivotal question (sterzhnevoi vopros). Now we are at that relatively brief stage where the Russian government organism is in such a state of destruction, dismemberment, collapse, and decomposition (razrushenie, raschlenenie, raspad, razlozhenie) because of all the internal effects of this illness and all the external circumstances surrounding it, that to restore it would require a national dictatorship of the kind that [Ivan] Il'in suggested20, that is, a strong authoritarian regime with a national orientation. . . . If it gets much worse and Russia is breaking up into provinces (gubernii), then we may get a very tough fascist regime.
. . . As for the first question, "Who is a Russian?", even with a distinctive genetic source, there are some unusual criteria for national identity. A Russian is someone for whom the Russian language is native and Russian culture is one with which he identifies himself, independent of what ethnic group he belongs to. That's why Russian culture has assimilated material from so many other cultures. And in that sense, if you look at all the territory located outside the Russian Federation on which there is a Russian (russkii) majority, one of three things can happen: (1) the population can assimilate and cease to be Russian, which is possible, but painful; (2) we can repatriate this Russian population, or they can return at a more moderate pace, which means that (3) the best, most natural alternative is the peaceful reuniting of the lands on which there are large Russian populations. This will happen to the extent that Russians begin to identify themselves as Russians (samoidentifikatsiia sebia kak russkie). This self-identification takes the form of instinctive self-consciousness (samosoznanie). It exists, it is functioning, and we see the results of its functioning around us today. The Russian people lives (russkii narod zhiv), and to the extent that it lives it can try to bring this about.
Kuvaldin: Among those gathered here are political analysts, ideologists, and real-life politicians. Aleksei [Kara-Murza] is too modest to mention that he is part of the brain trust at the Union of Right Forces (Soiuz pravykh sil), and that he works on these sorts of problems for them. . . . The most important thing, and here I agree with Professor Kara-Murza, is that whether we like it or not, Communist Russia was fully a successor of the previous state. The integration took place on a number of levels, including the establishment of a secular religion (svetskaia religiia), the military-industrial complex, and a unified command economy. And [like tsarist Russia] they wound up with a set of unsolved problems (nereshaemye zadachi). During the Stalinist period, the Soviet empire stretched from the middle of Europe all the way to North Korea. The [Soviet] attempt to modernize the empire and expand it was unrealistic, and we all know how it turned out. . . .
Chubais: I need to say that I am not a supporter (storonnik) of any party-I despise all Russian politicians for having sold out. The only thing I'm a supporter of is a civil society (grazhdanskoe obshchestvo). [This is in response to a remark made by Kuvaldin about Chubais' political opinions possibly influencing his thinking on the question of continuity.]
Baranovsky: There seems to be a real rejection (ottorzhenie) of any association with the contemporary political class. That's typical of the Russian national character.
The discussion over lunch was not recorded, but included comments by Kara-Murza on the groups fielding candidates in the upcoming December 19 Duma elections, which he felt could not be called parties, since they mostly consisted of one strong personality and assorted followers. He believed that a party must include a number of people who take turns in leadership positions, unlike Yabloko, for instance). His interest in the Union of Right Forces was based in part on the fact that they were an alliance of twenty groups involving many capable people. The political scene was still structured on a power/anti-power (vlast'/anti-vlast') axis. When asked his opinion of several prominent pre-revolutionary buildings in Moscow torn down during the Soviet period and recently reconstructed, Kara-Murza said that this would create the illusion for future generations that nothing had happened. Conveying the country's historical record fully and accurately was very important.