Putin's Wars (7 page)

The position of the tsar, however, was not unequivocal. He was, certainly, quite happy
to assume the role of “liberator” of the Slav peoples living under Ottoman rule. At
the same time he had to be cautious not to offend Austria and Prussia/Germany, which
had large Slav minorities. These countries were not enthusiastic about the Russian
Pan Slav liberation fervor that could cause upheaval within their borders. And, finally,
there were non-Russian Slavs in the Russian empire, such as the Poles, who fought
for their own independence. To accept “equal rights for all Slavs,” as was demanded
at the Second Pan Slav Congress in Moscow in 1867, was, therefore, out of the question.
^[36]
The nationalism of the tsar was an official “imperial nationalism,” based directly
on the existence and the needs of the empire. It had nothing to do with the right
of self-determination of the peoples. Because the Russian empire comprised many different
peoples with different ethnic backgrounds and different religions, it would not be
permissible for the tsar to support an exclusive ethnic Russian or Slav nationalism.
However, when the reformist tsar Alexander II was murdered in 1881, his son, Alexander
III, under the influence of his reactionary tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, wholeheartedly
adopted the ethnic “great Russian” nationalism of the Pan Slavists. The policies of
Alexander III were continued after his death in 1894 by his son, Nicholas II. This
led to a process of enforced Russification in Poland and the Baltic provinces, where
the national languages were suppressed and assimilation was imposed.

The new great Russian nationalism very soon developed ugly features. Not only did
it lead to a growing repression of non-Russian nationalities, such as the Poles, but
also of other minorities of “foreign race” (
inorodtsy
) that could not be assimilated. In the first place Jews were targeted. The discrimination
and scapegoating of Jews became an official state policy. Since 1791, during the reign
of Catherine the Great, there had existed already in Russia a policy aimed at restricting
the rights of Jews. In that year the Pale of Settlement was introduced. This measure
restricted the territory on which the Jews had the right to live. It included the
Western border region of the empire (the word “Pale” indicated “border”) and comprised
a territory that approximately covered the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
This territory consisted, globally, of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Bessarabia,
and only a small part of Russia proper. Eighty percent of the European part of the
Russian empire was “forbidden to Jews” (although there were a few exceptions). Additionally,
many towns within the Pale itself were closed to Jews. In 1795, after the third partition
of Poland, when Russia annexed Eastern Poland and Poland ceased to exist as an independent
state, the Jewish population in the Pale Settlement swelled to approximately five
million, creating the greatest concentration of Jews in the world. This concentration
within a restricted area made them vulnerable to attacks.

This is what happened after the murder of tsar Alexander II in 1881, when immediately
the Jews were accused of the murder. It led to a wave of pogroms in the South of the
empire, characterized by looting, rape, and murder. This wave of violence went on
for three years. The government not only failed to persecute the offenders, but overtly
and secretly supported the movement. The
eminence grise
of the regime, Pobedonostsev, a known anti-Semite, was quoted as having said that
“a third of the Jews will be converted, a third will emigrate, and the rest will die
of hunger.” He was the man behind many new repressive measures, such as the May Laws,
issued in 1882, banning Jews from rural areas and towns with more than ten thousand
inhabitants. Jewish property in rural areas was confiscated and at universities quota
were imposed restricting the number of Jewish students. Official, state-sponsored
anti-Semitism and popular anti-Semitism, fed by resentment, went hand in hand. According
to Leonid Luks, “in this struggle to bind the people to the regime anti-Jewish slogans
would play an increasingly important role. There was an ever-increasing tendency amongst
the conservatives to associate the sharp social and political conflicts in the country,
as well as several foreign policy drawbacks suffered by the tsarist empire (Congress
of Berlin, 1878), with the activities of international Jewry.”
^[37]
A leading role in spreading anti-Jewish sentiments was played by the chauvinist
and fiercely anti-Semitic Pan Slav movement that quickly grew in strength at the end
of the century and reached its apogee after the lost war with Japan and the subsequent
revolution in 1905.

One of the most important anti-Semitic organizations was the
Soyuz Russkogo Naroda
(the Union of the Russian People). Founded in October 1905, it enjoyed a spectacular
growth, and soon it had about one thousand local branches. Its virulent anti-Semitism
finds its equivalent only in Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
. One of its theoreticians, V. F. Zalevsky, accused the Jews of parasitism and the
secret wish to dominate the world. “The Jews are a damaging tribe,” he wrote, “they
don’t like heavy work and try to live from the labors of others, letting others work
for them.” He continued: “Even though the Jews . . . plunder the Russian people, this
still seems not to be enough; they want to completely subjugate the Russian people,
they want to be their masters.”
^[38]
In the text of a congress resolution of the organization in 1915, prepared by a
section with the name “For the struggle against Jewish supremacy,” the word “Jews”
was consequently replaced by its pejorative equivalent
zhidy
(Yids)
.
In the resolution one can read that it should be forbidden for Yids to have Orthodox
Russian employees working for them or to participate in joint-stock companies. Russian
schools should not accept Jewish children. And for Russians it should be forbidden
to visit a Jewish doctor or to eat together with Jews. The only good solution for
the “Talmudic
zhidovstvo
” (Yid people) is “that they be chased from Russia in the name of the imperial laws.”
^[39]

In the program of the anti-Semitic “Union of the Russian People” one could read that
“the Russian people, as the gatherer of Russian lands and the creator of the great
might of the state, enjoys a preferential position in national life and in national
administration.”
^[40]
One of the demands was that the number of Jewish deputies to the State Duma be
restricted to three: “Such limitation is necessary because of the disruptive, anti-state
activity of the united Jewish masses, their unceasing hatred of everything Russian,
and the unscrupulousness which they so openly demonstrated during the revolutionary
movement [of 1905].”
^[41]
It was added that “Jews could, of course, not be members of the Union.”
^[42]
In September 1903
Znamya
(The Banner), which would later become the official paper of the Union, was the first
to publish in nine articles the complete text of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, a pamphlet about a Jewish plot to dominate the world that had been forged around
1900 by the head of the tsarist secret police in Paris at the suggestion of Pobedonostsev.
^[43]
In October 1906 the Union founded the Black Hundreds (
chornye sotnye
), a terror organization with an armed wing, the
Yellow Shirts
—a predecessor and probably even a model for Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s
Braunhemde
(brownshirts). The movement mushroomed. At the height of its influence, in the years
1906–07, it had three thousand branches,
^[44]
which is astonishing in a country with a quasi-non-existent civil society. In effect
it was not so much a sign of a developing civil society as of an emerging
un
civil society, because the movement played an important role in the wave of pogroms
that ravaged Russia in this period and in which thousands of Jews were killed. According
to Walter Laqueur there were up to
seven hundred
pogroms. However, these were not only perpetrated by the Black Hundred movement,
but equally by the tsarist authorities. “Various parliamentary inquiry committees
found that the local authorities were frequently involved; in some places where the
Black Hundred did not exist . . . the pogrom was carried out by the police single-handed.
. . . It was virtually impossible to establish to what extent pogroms were spontaneous
and to what degree they were carefully planned and organized.”
^[45]

Hatred against minorities went hand in hand with hatred against foreigners and West
Europeans. This xenophobic hatred was often presented as a reaction to a real or imagined
disrespect
on the part of the Europeans. Already in 1841 Stepan Shevyrev, a conservative Slavophile,
wrote: “The West . . . expresses to us at every opportunity its aversion, which resembles
almost a kind of hatred, and which is offensive to every Russian who enters his country.”
^[46]
Another writer, Nikolay Danilevsky, a Russian Pan Slavist who gave Russian nationalism
its biological basis, wrote in a famous article,
Rossiya i Evropa
(Russia and Europe), that “Europe does not recognize us as its equal. . . . Everything
that is pure Russian and Slav, seems to him to be despicable. . . . Europe considers
. . . the Russians and the Slavs as not only a strange, but also an inimical element.”
^[47]
The Pan Slavist’s xenophobic hatred of foreigners was justified by a—largely constructed—hatred
that foreigners were believed to feel against the Russian people. Hatred of the West
was, therefore, considered a justified reaction, a sound defense, and a confirmation
of one’s own right to exist. If you are surrounded by enemies, is not the only sound
reaction that of hating your enemies and preparing for war? According to Hannah Arendt
the nationalism of the Pan Slavists was “a tribal nationalism [that] always insists
that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that
a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its
people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically
the very possibility of a common mankind long before it used to destroy the humanity
of man.”
^[48]

Masaryk spoke in this context of a
zoological
nationalism that celebrated the supposed natural, innate qualities of the Russian
people.
^[49]
Russian feelings of inferiority vis-à-vis the inhabitants of Western Europe are
overcompensated by feelings of superiority. In this process Russia’s continental imperialism
becomes much more racist than the overseas imperialism of the Western European countries.
The Pan-Slav ideology is double edged: it gives the—superior—Russians the right to
dominate the “inferior” peoples who already live in the empire. At the same time,
it gives them a mission to “liberate” the other Slav peoples. Danilevsky, for instance,
“included in a future Russian empire all Balkan countries, Turkey, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Galicia, and Istria with Trieste.”
^[50]
Nationalist
racism
was the dominant legitimation theory for imperialist expansion in pre–World War I
Russia. This racism, however, was, as such, rather fragile as an ideological foundation—for
two reasons. First, by denying the fundamental equality of mankind one exposed oneself
to the racism of other peoples that considered themselves—on the same racist grounds—to
be superior to the Russians. This is what happened in effect when Nazi racists considered
the German race superior to the “inferior” Slavs. Second, to proclaim one’s racial
superiority vis-à-vis other peoples living in the empire who, in some cases, had developed
a higher culture and standard of living, such as the Balts, reveals an arrogance that
can easily be exposed. This was the reason, according to Galbraith, that in continental,
territorially contiguous empires, such as Russia,

The tensions were far greater than in the outlying empires of the Western Europeans
because the subject peoples in this colonialism could not be persuaded that they were
inferior to their rulers. Rulers and ruled alike, when washed, were white. Many of
the ruled were the equal of their colonial masters in education, cultural achievement,
economic well-being. Some regarded themselves as superior; this was almost always
true of those who were ruled by the Russians. To be governed by one’s inferiors or,
more exactly, those so regarded is an especially bitter thing.
^[51]

The October Revolution of 1917 promised a totally new beginning. During his exile
in Switzerland Lenin himself was one of the most severe critics of tsarist imperialism
and a staunch defender of the right of national self-determination for the oppressed
nations of the empire. However, this idealism was short-lived when, after the Revolution,
in the newly independent states anti-bolshevist governments were installed. In the
resulting civil war, from 1918 to 1922, the bolshevists reconquered most of the lost
territories of the former tsarist empire.
^[52]
There followed a controversy between Lenin and Stalin over what to do with these
territories. Stalin, who headed the People’s Commissariat (Ministry) for Nationalities,
did not want to grant the Soviet republics even formal independence. He preferred
to make them autonomous republics within Russia proper. For Lenin this project smacked
too much of the old tsarist imperial dominance, and he proposed to federate the other
republics with Russia on an equal basis in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
^[53]
Should Stalin have had his way, it would certainly have made the dissolution of
the empire seventy years later more complicated and possibly bloodier. Lenin’s Soviet
Union pretended that it was
not
an empire, but a voluntary association of socialist republics. Officially, Pan Slavism,
social Darwinist racism, and Great Russian chauvinism fell into disgrace. The Soviet
Union did not define itself primarily as a
national community
, but as the representative of a
class
: the working class. Moreover, representative not only of the working class of Russia,
but of the working classes of
the whole world.
Russia’s inward-looking nineteenth-century nationalism had, apparently, changed into
an outward-looking universalism. This universalism, even if it defended only
one
class, was, in theory at least, genuine: because, according to Marxist theory, the
end result of the socialist revolution—a communist society—was supposed to be in the
interest of mankind
as a
whole
—former capitalists included.