Notes on the Holy Mother Russia
The Notepad of Michael the Great
As Vittorio Strada observed in a masterful essay from which these notes are taken (Empire and revolution, Marsilio, 2017), the date of birth of the Russian empire is not unique: in the historical registry it is officially registered on 22 October 1721, when in St. Petersburg, Peter I (1672-1725) was solemnly proclaimed emperor, assuming together the titles of "Great" and "Father of the country". In reality, that coronation sanctioned the existence of an ante litteram empire, which had been profoundly strengthened and transformed by this czar. In fact, another tsar, Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), had been, if not the creator, the coder, the one in whose power the work of reunification of the "Russian lands" under the aegis of Moscow carried out by his predecessors had merged, “receiving from him a further impulse and the awareness of constituting a power that cannot but be defined as imperial.
In that ante litteram empire that was the Muscovite kingdom, starting from the mid-nineteenth century a specific Russian nationalism was established in parallel with other nationalisms of peoples making up the empire, such as the Pole and the Ukrainian, who claimed their own identity and autonomy, giving rise to a set of "national issues" that endangered the compactness of the imperial system, later destroyed and recreated by the October revolution.
Returning to the period of the formation of the empire, the expression "empire of the tsars" is appropriate as it was the tsarist power that constituted it, unifying Russians and non-Russians in total subjection to the autocracy. Ivan the Terrible felt invested with absolute power directly from God, which made him consider his subjects servants or slaves ("cholopy") of which he was unquestionable and enlightened master. This empire, not yet officially such, was the son of two other great empires which later disappeared from the historical scene: the Mongol one, under whose dominion Moscow and the other Russian principalities had been in the XIII-XV centuries, and the Byzantine one, whose spiritual influence is pervaded Russian culture, receiving from the former the formation of the state and from the latter the creed of Christianity.
The conversion to Christianity of Russia, which Stalin considered positive not for religious reasons (obviously), but because it had favored the unification of the country and its entry into the European world, was an initiative taken from above by the Grand Duke of Kiev Vladimir ( 988). The "baptism" of those populations predetermined the subsequent historical development of Russia. In fact, if on the one hand the adoption of Christianity demarcated Russia from Asia and brought it closer to Europe, on the other hand, being that "Eastern" Greek Christianity, it detached it from "Latin" Western European Christianity. And, when the original Christian unity was broken, the differences between the two confessions sharpened up to the split (1054).
After the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Turks (1453), Orthodox Christianity became a sort of Russian national religion, while maintaining all its universal value: Russia proposed itself as the stronghold and sanctuary of the true faith, and the Tsar (Ivan the Terrible) as the "defensor fidei" against the falsely Christian Latin West. In this sense, the Russian empire in its early stage was a sacred empire, a theocratic absolutism fed on theological hatred of a corrupt West.
With Peter the Great , however, the geopolitical expansion of the empire undergoes a transformation. The sovereign understands that Russia is not the center of the world as the only Orthodox state, and that Europe, an impure civilization but dynamic and evolved in a technical and intellectual sense, was central. In short, the political culture of Russia had to change, becoming secularized. The extraordinary expansion of the empire under Peter and his heir Catherine II (1729-1796) is thus accompanied by the transition from an almost exclusively Russian-speaking reality to a cosmopolitan one. A gigantic and composite reality from an ethnic-national point of view, but at the same time unitary thanks to a policy that combined the lure of integration with the force of repression, co-opting the national elites into the upper echelons of state administration. A strategy that entered into crisis when the central autocratic power began to weaken under the pressure of the revolutionary opposition inside, and outside under the impact of military collapses such as that of the war with Japan for the control of Manchuria and Korea ( 1904-1905).
Two events mark the beginning of the decline of the Soviet empire. The first was the XX Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 and Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's "personality cult". The death of Lenin's successor in 1953 freed the Soviet ruling class from the threat of a repeat of 1937, that is, a violent purge from the top of political and bureaucratic power. The "cold war" within the USSR was an era of bitter transformations, in the wake of the previous National-Communist policy enhanced by the victory against Nazism. Khrushchev understood that he would become leader of the regime if he guaranteed the interests of the ruling class of the Soviet empire, the bureaucracy, and the safety of the party's top. With the ousting of Stalin from the Marxist-Leninist altar, it was subjected to a long process of desacralization, which could not be blocked by the strengthening of the alternative cult of Lenin.
With Khrushchev, a reformer not by vocation but by necessity, and in any case very far from the idea of passing from the totalitarian system to an open society, the critical process that would overwhelm the ideological pantheon of "realized socialism" began. The collapse would have occurred with perestroika, even here despite the intentions of Mikhail Gorbachev, who wanted to save the system and ideology by reforming the entire regime building, but in fact undermined its foundations by making the empire collapse. The Chernobyl disaster delivered the coup de grace.
The other event that marks the decline of the Soviet empire is the Afghan war, waged with imperial ambitions and in the name of an intervention in favor of the local "progressive" forces, so much so that there was talk of Afghanistan as a possible sixteenth republic of 'USSR. Begun in 1979, it closed ingloriously ten years later. Furthermore, when glasnost was granted in the last period of perestroika, freedom of expression (banned since October 1917), the last barrier fell. After the clumsy coup d'état in August 1991 failed, the Soviet mutinational team melted like snow in the sun.
The will of the Baltic republics and, above all, of Ukraine to regain lost independence, the fall of the Berlin wall: there is no need to retrace the chronicle of the breakdown of the Soviet system here. Suffice it to recall that it took place against the backdrop of the erosion of the legitimacy of totalitarian political power and the fall in oil prices, on which the state of the budget, consumer goods market and balance of payments depended in the early 1980s. .
A protagonist of those years, Egor Gajdar (prime minister in 1992 replacing Boris Yeltsin), in the preface to his book The end of the empire puts forward an analogy between post-Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic. An illuminating comparison, while taking into account the due differences between Russia after the collapse of 1991 and Germany after the defeat of 1918, between the advent of Nazism and the birth of a strongly authoritarian power, albeit formally democratic, but currently in a phase characterized by totalitarian tendencies.
We are seeing it these days, with Ukraine invaded by Vladimir Putin's armored vehicles . In fact, the design of an anchronistic fourth territorial Russian empire is outlined with European hegemonic ambitions, which with a term in which geography and ideology merge can be called "Eurasian". Against this perspective, which is disturbing due to its external military and internal involutionary aspects, given the current revival of the myth of Stalin as the architect of the great Russian power, a complex opposite perspective cannot be excluded: a disintegration of the current federative order. Russia, as a result of a stagnant authoritarian policy. Moreover, history is full of heterogenesis of ends.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/noterelle-sulla-santa-madre-russia/ on Tue, 01 Mar 2022 08:15:23 +0000.