The Times, UK
June 3 2006
Russian Russia, not Soviet Russia
review by Simon Sebag Montefiore
RULERS AND VICTIMS: The Russians in the Soviet Union
by Geoffrey Hosking
Belknap Press, £22.95; 436pp
RUSSIA, WHETHER under Putin, Stalin or Peter the Great, has always
been almost impossible to fit into the usual categories of nationhood
and empire. The USSR was often called `Soviet Russia’ and in many
ways became a Russian Empire with the Russians the `older brother’ of
its peoples – yet Russians were often its chief victims.
By the time of Soviet senescence, it was the Russians who took
greatest pride in its creaky glories. But on its downfall in 1991, it
was the Russians, under President Yeltsin of the Russian Federation,
who destroyed President Gorbachev’s USSR, the source of their
greatest pride. As Geoffrey Hosking tells it: `the Russians destroyed
the Soviet Union not because they wished to, but because of the logic
of their republic ‘s position in the country’s institutional
structure’.
The Russians, Hosking believes, are, apart from the Jews, the world’s
most messianic people. `Most European nations have gone through at
least one period in their history when they assumed their religion,
civilisation or political system was especially beneficial and ought
to be spread to the whole of humanity,’ he writes. But the ruling
nation was often `subordinated to the supranational idea’ – so Spain
was bankrupted by the Catholic mission of the Spanish Empire. Often
such empires are linked to a crown/class-system that weakens until
the whole edifice collapses.
In Russia’s case, the Tsar-Emperors propagated the Orthodox mission
of Muscovite Third Rome. Hosking compares its mission to the
Caliphate of the Ottoman Padishahs. In both, by the 20th century,
monarchy was an empty husk, shorn of sanctity. Both fell almost
simultaneously, but while the Turks lost their empire the Russians
regained theirs, even increased it.
There were two reasons for this – the Bolshevik state was capable of
extraordinary levels of military-economic mobilisation allowing it to
reconquer the empire. The second is that there are two strains of
messianic mission in Russian culture – the Orthodox and the
socialistic. When Tsardom fell, `the vacuum was filled by Russian
messianic socialism’.
At the heart of Lenin’s Bolshevik state was the pragmatic
multi-ethnic structure that he and Stalin had envisioned in Cracow in
1912-13: it cleverly promised autonomy with the right of secession to
the many nationalities in the `prison of nations’ but it was a right
that would never need to be exercised. On seizing power in 1917, they
had no choice but to release Poland and the Baltic States, and they
let Finland go .
But when they had the chance in 1921 they reconquered Georgia,
Armenia and Azerbaijan, then the Baltics in 1940 and, ultimately,
Eastern Europe, with Poland, in 1945.
When Lenin and his People’s Commissar of Nationalities constructed
the USSR, Russia received no central committee of its own while
Ukrainians, Belarussians and Kazakhs, among others, were promoted,
given the trappings of statehood and encouraged to teach their
languages. Until the 1930s, the USSR was prejudiced against Russians.
Lenin loathed what he called `great Russian chauvinism’ .
The Jewish part in the Soviet nightmare has to be faced, but I think
that it can be exaggerated. Hosking argues that the original Soviet
project was a Russian-Jewish creation and certainly in August 1917
six of the 21 central committee members and in 1936 six of the 20
people’s commissars were Jewish. Yes, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Sverdlov
were Jewish but I think a case can be made for the Caucasian
influence on the Revolution: the Georgians and Armenians had a hugely
disproportionate influence on the Bolshevik state. The Caucasian
culture of clans, loyalty and violence made them more effective and
influential than the Jews – although this has hardly been studied.
During the 1930s, Stalin started to change the nature of the Soviet
Union. Historians used to claim that the Georgian suddenly became
Russian and adopted Russian nationalism but Hosking is much too
sophisticated to repeat this cliché. Stalin did cull the Jews and
internationalists in the leadership, but men such as Kaganovich and
Mekhlis remained in high positions.
Stalin started to promote pride in Russian history but he thought
hard and created Soviet nationalism, the idea that a Soviet person
may or may not be Russian but co-opted both messianic socialism and
Russian nationalism/imperialism.
The Second World War changed this again: Stalin saw it as a Russian
victory so he tweaked his Soviet patriotic idea to promote the
Russians as `first among equals’.
The strange complexity of Soviet Russianness is best glimpsed by
looking at Stalin himself: the dictator existed as a man of at least
four `nationalities’ – he never ceased seeing himself as a Georgian,
he spoke it, ate it, holidayed there, read its literature; secondly,
he was a fanatical Marxist internationalist; thirdly he was a
Russian, indeed a tsar – the successor to Ivan the Terrible and Peter
the Great – and above all, he was the Soviet father of peoples, a
Soviet patriot.
No one understood the dangerous fragility of this complex structure
better than him, in the 1949 Leningrad Case, Stalin learnt that two
of his top grandees, Voznescensky and Kuznetzov, both Leningraders
and Russians, were promoting a Russian capital in Leningrad (leaving
the Soviet one in Moscow), with the creation of a separate Russian
Communist Party. Stalin knew this would destroy his own power as a
non-Russian and would tear asunder the USSR.
He reacted by brutally killing these close associates. He foresaw
exactly what happened in 1991 when the Russian Federation destroyed
the USSR.
After Stalin, the USSR was sustained by its obsessive pride in
Glorious October 1917 and Victorious 1945, which restored Russian
national morale, its international Communist role and its real
mission – rivalry with America. By the 1960s, the USSR was `in a real
sense Russian’ but in this backward-looking way.
Hosking’s analysis of the failure of the internal Soviet state is
peerless: `Though the Soviet state assumed and performed many
functions of a modern state, it did so without creating a political
community. Its conduits of power were largely directed from above
through personal channels. The trust of ordinary people was in
patron-client hierarchies’ – not laws or institutions.
Hosking has always been a deeply thoughtful historian. Here he
delivers a beautifully written, profound and brilliant analysis not
just of the USSR but of Russianness itself: anyone who wants to
understand Russia today or who wonders why the Russians are special
should read this outstanding, sensitive book.
He concludes: `Most Russians agree the disintegration of the USSR was
a disaster, not because they are inveterate Stalinists, but because
it was `their’ country. They are now building a nation state few of
them wished for. They have no choice though.’