In my last few months of renewed Russia-watching, I have come across two assumptions that seem quite wrong—both of which were expressed in these pages last month by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser in the late 1970s. One is the claim that Russia is no longer driven by ideology, only money. The other is that Russia's heritage is incontestably western. The story of Russia does not support either contention.
Modern Russian ideology has been driven by Russia's sense of its place in the world. This ideology has no more gone away with the end of communism than has the need to define Russian identity. It is ingrained in the culture that Russia owes itself a clear self-definition, and that the rest of the world should take notice. The problem that defines Russian intellectual history is the degree to which the country is, or should be, western; and if not, what?
Every student of Russian history knows some funny or tragic story illustrating Russia's ambivalence towards the west. German-born Catherine the Great was torn between the more civilised norms of her native background and the needs of the powerful outsider whose empress she became. Hence her ambivalence towards the Enlightenment—while flirting with its luminaries, she quashed any signs of liberal thinking in Russia.
In every Russian generation since the late 18th century, instances can be found of thoughtful individuals in more or less high places who, once confronted by some western idea perceived as hostile to Russia, have ditched their liberalism and behaved as the state required them to do. A typical figure in the 19th century was Sergei Uvarov (pictured, below right), who as minister of public enlightenment regulated the degree of Russia's openness to the west in the 1830s and 1840s. Edward Lucas, in The New Cold War, his new call to the west to wake up to the rebirth of totalitarian Russia, quotes Uvarov as the first codifier of a Russian state ideology which, with its central tenets of orthodoxy, autocracy and nationalism, has survived to the present day.
The struggle between westernising and Slavophile tendencies in Russian culture continued throughout the Soviet era. Seen through certain Russian eyes, this was a period of westernisation in which Russia modernised its society, politics and economy, but in its own fashion, involving a high degree of centralised discipline. For latter-day Slavophiles like Solzhenitsyn, Lenin was a westerniser who harmed Russia's religious essence. Neither of these opposing visions entailed a notion of Russia as a free country in a western sense.
The last 20 years in Russia, and the present apparent reinvention of authoritarianism, may dismay western liberals, but in the context of the country's history it makes perfect sense that there should be a Putin, that he should be massively popular, and that few should care if he fixes his own succession so that he can continue in power. The Russian tradition has one word written all over it: order.
If one wanted something beyond patriotism and order, one might turn to Eurasianism. This ideology, invented as an alternative to Soviet communism by exiled intellectuals in the 1920s, conceived Russia as a continental power, deriving its strength from its geographical position and natural resources and sharing world dominance with the US. The fact that this binary vision is dead is probably more worrying for Russia than we realise, and once Putin begins his work as prime minister, when his protégé Dmitry Medvedev is elected president on 2nd March, Russia's relations with non-western powers will be the area to watch.
Brzezinski castigates Putin for his "childish machismo." Yes, the political procedure may be illegitimate and the posturing crude, but the people in charge at the Kremlin are trying to do a necessary job.
