The Birth of Russian Exceptionalism

As just noted, over the course of its millennium-long history, “Russia” has gone through a number of incarnations. It first emerged in the mid-ninth century as a Viking-governed union of Slavic tribes covering a vast area of Europe’s east, from Novgorod in the north to Kiev in the south. What later became known as Kievan Rus was an eastern version of Charlemagne’s empire, very much part of medieval Europe’s political set-up, and a common birthplace of present-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. All three countries rightly claim the whole of this historical legacy, but none can claim it as exclusively its own. The most important lasting achievement of that first version of this European-born Russia remains Orthodox Christianity, which it embraced from Constantinople in 988.

Kievan Rus lasted longer than Charlemagne’s realm, but it, too, eventually fragmented into a collection of feudal principalities ruled by a single large family. Kiev first became a coveted prize, and then lost political significance. In the early thirteenth century, Russian lands were invaded and quickly overrun by the Mongols. Mongol rule was subsequently established in the north-east of the country, which now forms the nucleus of the Russian Federation. Russians living in that area spent the following 250 years within the great Asian empire built by Genghis Khan. By contrast, western (now Belarus) and south-western (Ukraine) principalities were incorporated into Lithuania, Hungary, and later Poland.

The implications of this division were crucial. North-eastern Russians lost their independence and their contacts with the West, but kept their religion. For these Russians, the principal takeaways from the trying period were the mortal danger of political disunity and the unifying nature of Orthodox Christianity. By contrast, western and south-western Russians, having escaped Mongol rule, formed Orthodox minorities within the predominantly Catholic countries of Eastern Europe. They never recovered political independence, but some of them became integrated into the social order of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. This split of the early Russian nation has produced different political cultures and outlooks in Russia, on one hand, and Ukraine and Belarus, on the other.

Rebirth of an independent Russian state was championed by Moscow, initially a tiny town on a small river whose rise owed a lot to the entrepreneurship, thriftiness, cunning, and ruthlessness of its dukes. Physically unprotected on the great Eastern European plain, they constantly faced danger from all corners and had to be able to mobilize for defense quickly. Strategically, these dukes followed the behest of Alexander Nevsky, a mid-thirteenth-century Novgorod prince, who, wedged between the German crusaders and the Mongol hordes, chose to fight the former and accommodate the latter. His rationale was that paying tribute to foreigners and accepting their suzerainty – i.e., losing the country’s body – was preferable to the abandonment of Orthodoxy and conversion to Catholicism – i.e., losing the people’s soul.

The choice was hard, but it proved right. It was the Orthodox Church that, from the fourteenth century, became the spiritual guide of national revival in Russia’s north-east. It was then that the Moscow dukes managed to make their town the seat of the metropolitan of all Russia, who heretofore had sat in Kiev. Political and spiritual unity, echoing the Byzantine harmony of the emperor and the patriarch, and Alexander Nevsky’s geopolitical choice have since become key features of “Russianness.”

By the late fifteenth century, Moscow’s rulers had again “reinvented” Russia. Grand Duke Ivan III managed to found the first unified Russian state. Not only did he reassemble disparate principalities of the north-east under a centralized state, he also overthrew the “Mongol yoke.” In a historic reversal, Moscow’s rulers would soon overtake the former, mostly Turkic khanates of the disintegrated Golden Horde and absorb them into the new Russian state, also allowing the new Muslim subjects to keep their religion, and letting their nobles join the Russian ruling class as equals. Such integration later became the method of the Russian Empire. The Russians also adopted an authoritarian political culture that made their state strong and their people subservient to it.

But that was not all. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Turks in the mid-fifteenth century, Moscow claimed spiritual leadership of the entire Orthodox world, as a “Third Rome” – after Rome itself and Constantinople. Coming from the same dynasty as the old Kievan princes, the Moscow grand dukes also claimed all the lands of the former Kievan Rus as their patrimony. Symbolically, Russia adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle as its coat of arms and the “Monomach cap” as its rulers’ crown, so called after the last prince of unified Kievan Rus. In the mid-sixteenth century, Moscow’s Duke Ivan IV promoted himself to tsar – i.e., caesar – and a few decades later the metropolitans of Moscow and all Russia became patriarchs. Thus, they put themselves on a par with the Holy Roman emperors and the patriarchs of Constantinople. Accepting no higher authority in the world, whether temporal or religious, has since lain at the foundation of Russia’s brand of exceptionalism. Alongside the authoritarian political culture, this became deeply entrenched in the Russian psyche.

“Moscow Rus,” or “Muscovy,” as it became known, went through the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century, brought about by the end of the dynasty that had founded Kievan Rus; fought off an attempt by neighboring Poland to take it over; established a new dynasty, the Romanovs; added eastern Ukraine to the realm; and experienced a most traumatic religious schism within the Orthodoxy. In many ways, however, Russia was lagging behind its neighbors in Europe. In 1700, its modernizing monarch, Tsar Peter I, sought to gain direct access to the Baltic Sea to be able to trade with the advanced countries of Western Europe. In order to achieve this, Peter started a war with Sweden, which controlled the Baltic shores. The long war endowed Russia with a modern state structure and turned it into a great European power, with a capital in St. Petersburg, a city built from scratch, amid Baltic swamps. Westernization became the thrust of the government’s policy.

The Russian Empire lasted almost 200 years. It expanded to include a wide swath of land in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, and the Far East. It thwarted Napoleon’s invasion and became an indispensable element of the Concert of Europe and the global balance of power. It began to modernize late, essentially after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, but by the early twentieth century was developing at a fast pace. It produced a long line of world-class writers, poets, composers, and ballet dancers. However, Russia’s European façade and its huge, very traditional backyard remained at odds with each other. Its staunchly conservative political system stifled freedom and bred some of the most radical opposition elements, from Nihilist terrorists to Bolsheviks. And the center was too weak. Like during the Time of Troubles three centuries before, the loss of control by the top leadership spelled disaster. Nicholas II, Russia’s last emperor, a respectable family man, turned out a complete failure as a leader. The result was the 1917 revolution that totally destroyed the regime, the system, the state, and the country. Soon a new state was born: it was the Soviet Union, which saw its predecessor as a class enemy.

Like the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union was not doomed to fall when it did. Yet, as with Nicholas II, the loss of control by Mikhail Gorbachev spelled its fate. Three decades on, however, the Russian Federation looks less like a “new Russia,” signifying another clean break with the past, than a continuation state of the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, and the tsardom of Muscovy. This inclusivity is new, and it means neither indifference nor moral relativism. The Russian people, imagined as a national jury, are still in the process of passing judgment not only about their leaders and the regimes they instituted or represented, but also about themselves. Questions such as “Who are we?” and “Where do we belong?” are once more on the agenda. History supplies a major part of the answer.

Recurring Features

What stands out from this briefest possible outline is that Russia is a succession of states and represents the continuity of a country. Russia periodically changes its “garb,” but each time it retains some key features.

To begin with, there has been strong rejection of any form of dependence on outside powers and simultaneous acquiescence in often harsh authoritarian rule at home. In other words, Russian people take pride in the sovereign freedom of their state in the international arena while they are willing to forfeit their own domestic sovereignty vis-à-vis that same state. It is the state with power vested in its titular head that has dominated the Russian nation. Not only the rulers, but even most ordinary people regard it as the supreme national value. Indeed, it is the common state, rather than ethnicity or religion, that unites Russian people. The collapse of the state, which has happened three times in the last 400 years, lets loose demons which are considered worse than authoritarianism.

Russia also demonstrates a high degree of physical connectivity, while remaining essentially lonely. To the west, in Europe and more recently in the United States, Russia has faced socially and politically different and technologically advanced countries, which it regards as both main external sources of modernization and geopolitical competitors; in Asia to the east, it faces civilizations even more different from its own than those of the West; to the south lies the Muslim world, elements of which Russia has managed to integrate within the country, but whose rumblings make it feel vulnerable.

Russians have an ambivalent attitude toward the country’s place in the world and among other peoples: Is Russia part of Europe or is it apart from Europe? If it is Eurasia, what does this mean, precisely? Is it a great power on a par with the strongest in the world, or is it simply a big and rather backward country with outsize ambitions? The trouble is that none of these questions has a clear finite answer. Russia is European, but it is not part of Europe. If anything, it is a part of the world. Its geography and sheer size – 11 time zones – have been both a blessing and a curse. The distinction between “Europe” and “Asia” within Russia is blurred: de Gaulle’s famous phrase about a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” never made sense there. And, in order to stay in the power game, Russia has always had to punch above its weight.

Russia demonstrates its own version of exceptionalism. From the Third Rome of Orthodoxy to the Third International of Communism, religious faith or its secular equivalent was central to it. When the idea weakened and waned, that had dire implications for the state and the nation. “Saintly Russia” first eroded from within, before it drowned in the revolutions and wars of the early twentieth century; and Communist Russia, hollowed out by the real experience of the Soviet Union, went down with a whimper toward the end of the same fateful century.

Unbroken Whole

This book treats Russia’s history as an unbroken whole. It does not pretend that the Russian Federation is a different country to the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, or that the Soviet Union was just a painful aberration to be treated separately from the rest of Russian history. As a Russian who was 36 when the Communist system collapsed, and served in the Soviet military at the time, the author naturally acknowledges that the Soviet Union was us. The USSR was an important chapter in the 1,250-year-long history of Russian statehood; in that history, it is anything but a “lost” period. The book also takes a broad look at the Russian past. It does not limit itself to political developments only, although it focuses on them; it also looks at Russia’s economy, society, ideology, and culture to give a comprehensive picture of a country through one of its most trying, and often tragic, periods of existence.

Each of the six chapters that follow covers on average 20 years of history. The first, spanning 1900 to 1920, deals with the revolutionary upheaval of the early twentieth century and its aftermath. It describes a vibrant economy, unstable society, static autocracy, and a state-run Orthodox Church increasingly distant from society: the basic ingredients of Russia’s revolution. It addresses the spiritual sources of revolution, first described by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his 1872 novel The Demons. The chapter looks at Russia’s first battle in the twentieth century: the unfortunate war with Japan and the first Russian revolution. It passes through the charming but decadent Silver Age culture before plunging the reader into World War I, the prime catalyst of the violent change to come. It seeks to make sense of the revolutionary developments of 1917, from the fall of the Romanov dynasty in February to the Bolshevik takeover in October. Finally, the chapter seeks to understand the reasons for the Reds’ victory in the Civil War and for the restoration – albeit in a very different form – of a centralized state covering most of the territory of the Russian Empire.

The second chapter (1921–38) examines the rise of Soviet socialism as a totalitarian system with its salient political, economic, and social features. In particular, it looks at political unification under a single monolithic party and its bureaucratization; economic industrialization; collectivization, which was in fact a war on the peasantry; official atheism and the war on religion; as well as mass repression on a gigantic scale and the emergence of the GULAG. It discusses the cultural revolution and the birth of socialist realism, which was the dominant ideology in the arts, in addition to the tragedy of traditional Russian culture inside the country and the Russian emigration abroad.

Chapter 3 (1939–52) discusses the run-up to the Great Patriotic War, the war itself, and post-war reconstruction. It pays particular attention to Moscow’s foreign policy and diplomacy and its prosecution of the war. It features the behavior of the Soviet people in the period of ultimate trial, and seeks to understand the sources of their resilience and of the Soviet victory in World War II. In its treatment of the post-war period, the chapter looks at the origins of the Cold War from a Russian perspective. It also covers the final years of Stalin’s rule.

The fourth chapter is devoted to the Soviet system in its three decades of maturity, from 1953 till 1984. This was the Soviet Union as it is still remembered by the living generations. Very limited political liberalization replaced totalitarianism with a brand of authoritarianism. Economic and technological development at first spurred ahead, but having exhausted the easily available resources, and unable to reform due to rigid ideology, it stagnated. Political stability, initially a welcome change from the perennial purges and repressions of the previous period, eventually led to gerontocracy. The tremendous prestige won as a result of World War II was converted into geopolitical dominance in Eurasia, but insistence on absolute control eroded that system from the inside, and imperial overstretch to the four corners of the world undermined it from the outside. The supreme achievement of the era, strategic parity with the United States, required a degree of militarization of the Soviet economy that plunged it into crisis. By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was in deep trouble.

Chapter 5 deals with the new time of troubles, from 1985 through 1999. One important question posed in this chapter is whether the Soviet system was reformable during this period. A definite answer is probably not available, but an analysis of the policies of perestroika and glasnost suggests that those policies, within a few short years, made any successful reform impossible. A total collapse followed – of the Communist power system and the Soviet Union itself; of the Soviet economy and its technological capacity; of science and culture; and, not least, of the societal morals, norms, and values. The up-side was sudden freedom – of speech, movement, entrepreneurship, religion, but essentially without law and order. Another major question that this chapter seeks to understand is the reasons for the failure of political democracy in Russia and of the country’s integration into the expanding West.

The final chapter of this book must remain openended. It begins on January 1, 2000, the first full day of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, and will naturally end with Putin’s abdication from supreme power in Russia. In 2019, this still seems a long way off. Coming to the Kremlin after the period of upheaval, Putin was above all a stabilizer. His (so far) almost two decades in power have been a period of relative peace, prosperity, and personal freedom. Putin has restored order, and created the belief that the Russian state is back. He has managed to keep the country in one piece, and it has the clout of a great power once more – albeit at the cost of a confrontation with the United States. Putin has become the godfather of contemporary Russian capitalism, with its state corporations, tame tycoons, and crass inequality. Yet he is also a transitional figure. The regime that he has built will probably not survive after he is gone.

The secret of Putin’s Russia is that it is a regime posing as a state. Installing a regime in place of chaos was a big step forward in the 2000s, but this is not enough. Contemporary Russia is very un-Russian. It has few things that are common to all its people. Money has become its central organizing principle. This frees the elites from any responsibility and accountability, even to the head of the regime. There are no informal rules that apply to all, only conventions as in criminal societies. In most advanced countries, people get rich before joining government or civil service and after they leave it. In Russia, most wealthy people enrich themselves while in government, or thanks to their links to it. Such a system is inimical to any values, norms, principles, solidarity, national ideas, and the like. Nor is it is sustainable in the long term. The issue is how, by whom, when, and by what it is replaced. For all these questions, to be raised in the Conclusion, there is ample food for thought in the main body of the book.

The journey begins. Welcome aboard.