Jüri Ratas and Nils Ušakovs
The phrase ‘Russian World’ or ‘Russkiy Mir’ has been making quite a bit of headway in various think-tank output as well as religious news recently. There is, after all, a Russkiy Mir Foundation that promotes both the idea and the various forms of cultural and political production (i.e. soft power, in the Hu Jintao-era Chinese sense) that are associated with it. In the Western press, the idea is treated in an almost-monotonously negative fashion. It is emblematic of Russian revanchism, Russian nationalism, Russian resurgence, Russian ‘aggression’. There is a vague sense as well that the idea of the Russian World is connected to both the Orthodox Church and to Eurasianism. These are partial attempts to grasp the nature of the phenomenon, but they wilfully exaggerate some parts of Russia’s orientation to the outside under the banner of ‘Russian World’, wilfully downplay some others, and wilfully misunderstand yet others.
This is not to be wondered at. As the great American labour journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair put it: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ That applies just as much to people in Western think tanks which ‘analyse’ Russia with specific corporate-strategic or profit-driven aims in mind. It suits the interests of American and Atlanticist élites to have the ordinary English-speaker persist in the belief that contemporary Russian thinking is a blind fanatical repetition of Tsarist Stalinist ambitions for Soviet empire or global domination. Even they might genuinely believe it themselves; psychological projection is indeed often ‘genuine’ at a certain level. However, given that the ‘Russian World’ does describe a certain orientation of the Russian state to the outside, it’s necessary to clarify what it is and is not. In short, it becomes necessary to demystify the concept.
Unfortunately, most of the English-language resources on the ‘Russian World’ are of extraordinarily little help in this task, since they skip over great swathes of Russian history and interpret the Russian national project solely in the light of Soviet nostalgia and post-Soviet insecurities. There are, from the outset, several major problems with this approach. It is necessary to understand, first of all, that the Russian ‘national question’ has long had, and still has, a different tenor than the nationalisms associated with mass politics in continental Europe. The ‘national question’ in Russia is far older than that, and has its roots not in a mass ethnic awakening among the deprived as in the Balkans, but instead in a highbrow left-‘Tory’ critique of Russia’s contributions to the European culture of belles-lettres. Though I do have certain minor quibbles with Dr Rabow-Edling’s thesis (less now than then, actually), she is absolutely right that the ‘national question’ in Russia (at least for those who articulated it first) was more a question of literary-cultural authenticity than one of political unity, still less one of military strength or ‘hard power’. Though this explores the politics of Russian distinctiveness at its historical roots, the literary-cultural, quasi-anarchist Herderian tenor of Russian nationalism has largely been preserved down to the present, and that is also the case with the concept of the ‘Russian world’, a term which is thoroughly Slavophil in orientation.
From the beginning, ‘Russian World’ thinking has been oriented toward the West – toward the Slavic nations and specifically the Russian populations living in Russia’s western ‘Near Abroad’. It is therefore not to be confused either with the Eurasian plans for continental political integration eastward and southward, nor with Russian engagements with supposedly-‘Russophile’ political parties outside the Slavic world. Russian political priorities sort fairly close to home, and it is worthy of note that Russophile political engagements in the Russian diaspora proper tend to be fairly benign centre-left social-democratic political engagements. This is the result of ethnic Russians in the diaspora being fairly numerous in their new host countries but also relatively powerless on the political level.
A case-in-point: Saskaņa, the ‘Harmony Party’ in Latvia led by Nils Ušakovs, which won the largest share of the vote in the national Saeima elections last month. The issues that matter most to Latvia’s sizeable Russian minority, who regularly vote for Saskaņa statesmen, are: protection of pensions, status of non-citizens and minority rights in education – usually in that order. The latter two can be broadly considered ‘Russian World’ cultural priorities even though Saskaņa is no longer affiliated with Putin’s party and is trying hard to ‘face west’ in light of the generalised hostility and unwillingness to coöperate that they face from ethnic Latvian parties. The same holds true for Estonia’s centre-left Keskerakond led by Jüri Ratas: which is similarly dominated by Russian-diaspora voters and statesmen; which similarly pursues left-reformist œconomic policies (like progressive income tax), combined with mildly-conservative ‘Russian World’ cultural politics which do not always align with Russian gæopolitical interests; and which has similarly (though to a lesser extent) faced difficulties forming a government.
The cartoon caricature of the ‘Russkiy Mir’ which sees ethnic Russians in the ‘near abroad’ as an ideologically-uniform fifth column in lockstep at the service of the revanchist imperial state to their east is therefore, to put it mildly, badly in need of revision. (At worst, it’s just a mutated form of Yellow Peril anti-Asian prejudice.) Even if it did hold true in Crimea, that is no indication that it holds true everywhere, and it is certainly not true in the Baltic states, whose general anti-poor neoliberal policy-making has done far more to alienate Russians living there than political alignments toward the EU have done – though the two are closely linked.
On the topic of the Russian diaspora and its politics as with so many others regarding Russia, it is always best to keep Metternich’s maxim about Russia in the front of one’s mind, that ‘Russia is never as strong as she looks; Russia is never as weak as she looks’. There is definitely something Hu-ish about Putin’s general approach to the Russian diaspora – he is keenly aware of the present limits of the ‘Russkiy Mir’ idea in the political imagination of the ethnic-Russian populations of countries like Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Moldova, the Ukraine, the Central Asian Stans and so forth. Their political calculus, both individually and as groups – struggling minorities wherever they fall – is always going to be a mixture of œconomic self-preservation and cultural aspiration. The example of the Baltic states shows that they are not necessarily a fifth column. But the bloody example of the Ukrainian East, and the blessedly less-bloody example of the Crimea, shows us exactly what happens when these beleaguered populations are forced (by belligerent governments at the behest of Atlanticist gæopolitical masters) to make the fateful choice between Russia and their countries of residence.
No comments:
Post a Comment