The Russian Revival

Paul Starobin, writes about the Russia in the latest National Journal. Excerpt:

Today's Russia, under Putin, is in a period of "post-revolution stabilization," Gaidar said, and this period could last "one generation." (By "revolution," Gaidar means the shift from Soviet central planning to a market economy.) "Stabilization" is a rather antiseptic term -- other disenchanted liberals speak darkly of the "re-Sovietization" of society. "It's not Soviet at all," Gaidar firmly countered. "It's Russian. Those who now say it is the Soviet Union probably do not remember the Soviet Union."

Putin himself is perceived by his countrymen as a product of hardscrabble Russia, not merely the elite Soviet police organs. The son of a worker whose family survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad, he grew up in a rat-infested apartment building, mastered the martial arts, and was secretly raised in the Orthodox faith by his mother.

Nor does Putin's approach, except in his battles with business oligarchs, rely on Soviet-style coercion. A centerpiece, an initiative to increase the birthrate and thus halt Russia's steady decline in population, now 143 million, proposes to pay mothers large sums from state coffers to have a second child. But on this matter, for sure, Russian women will have the final word. A popular saying among those weary of the recent turbulent times is "Mui xhatim pazhit dlya sebya," which translates, "We want to live for ourselves."

Regime-imposed media controls exist -- but in their relative slackness they resemble the clampdowns of czarist-era Russia. A Kremlin with a Soviet-like "iron grip" on the public, "stifling civil liberties at every turn," as the critic Anna Politkovskaya rails in her new book, "Putin's Russia," surely would not allow her subversive tract to circulate. And yet there it was, on prominent display in Moskva bookstore, just up from Red Square on Tverskaya Street.

The current wave of interest in pre-Soviet Russian ideas and pursuits began gathering force early in the Yeltsin era. The trend can be seen in the renewed attention paid to the philosopher Ivan Ilyin, a late-19th-century espouser of monarchy and Orthodoxy who was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for his anti-Communist activities, sentenced to death, and later expelled along with other prominent White intellectuals, never to return to Russia again.

Ilyin believed that Europe was rotting because of the anti-Christian, secular creeds of Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx -- and he saw Orthodox Russia as a gift to the world for overcoming this disease. Russian history, in his view, was the story of "morality triumphing over difficulties, temptation, danger, and enemies." He embraced the traditional idea of Russian separateness and tended to see the West as conspiratorially aligned against Russia. And he believed that the Russian character was in need of a strong, guiding, paternal hand: "Not having a mature, strong-willed nature himself," Ilyin wrote, "the Russian demands that his ruler have a will."

Kissinger, in both Diplomacy, his seminal work, and the later Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, refers to Russia as a cause, not a nation. Excerpt from the latter:

[After the fall of the Soviet Union] the Western democracies began to act as if Russia's domestic reform were the major, if no the sole, key to a stable relationship. Russia was treated not as a serious power, but as the subject of occasionally condescending disquisitions on the state of its internal domestic reform.

Equating foreign policy with Russian domestic politics tended to identify the United States in the minds of many Russians with the weird Yeltsin-era hybrid of black markets, reckless speculation, outright criminal activity, and state capitalism in which huge industrial combines were run by their erstwhile Communist managers, all in the guise of privatization. This state of affairs enabled Russian nationalists and Communists to claim that the entire system was a fraud perpetrated by the West to keep Russia weak.

[T]he world is dealing with a new type of Russian leader. Unlike his predecessor, who cut his political teeth in the power struggles of the Communist Party, Putin emerged from the world of the secret police. Advancement in that shadowy world presupposes a strong nationalist commitment and a cool, analytical streak. It leads to a foreign policy comparable to that during the tsarist centuries, grounding popular support in a sense of Russian mission and seeking to dominate neighbors where they cannot be subjugated.

Both Russia and the United States have historically asserted a global vocation for their societies...American idealism tempts isolationism; Russian idealism has prompted expansionism and nationalism.

So long as it remains parameterized, a Russian revival would be a net gain -- certainly for the Russian people, but perhaps even for the rest of us.