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[applause]
Good evening. Uh, thanks for having me.
It's nice to be here.
I'll begin with an anecdote concerning this gentlemen, Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadayev.
Chaadayev was born in Moscow in 1794.
He came from a well-respected, wealthy family of nobles.
He traced their lineage back five centuries.
He served with distinction in the campaign against Napoleon in 1812.
He saw action at the battle of Borodino and received the order of St. Anna--
one of the highest medals that could be bestowed in the Imperial Period--
uh, received that from the Emperor's own hands.
After the war, he resigned his officer's commission and, like many Europeans of his day,
made the grand tour of the continent.
He visited France, Switzerland, England, uh, Italy, Germany.
And to be a Russian traveling in Europe in the 1820s, as Chaadayev was,
was to be something of a celebrity,
because the prestige of the Russian Empire at that point was at an all-time high.
It was the Russians, after all, who had dealt Napoleon his fatal blow
it brought nearly 25 years of uninterrupted war to an end.
Now, the British had won at Waterloo, but it was really
what the Russians and the Russian winter had inflicted on Napoleon three years before
that made Waterloo possible.
It was Russia who had played a leading role in brokering the peace,
laying the framework for a post-Napoleonic concord of nations
at the Congress of Vienna.
And so Russia, which had so long looked in to Europe from the outside,
had, by the 1820s, become fully established, fully recognized as an integral part of Europe.
And for many Russians, particularly the Russian elite,
that acknowledgment of belonging to a greater European culture and society
was a source of immense pride.
But for Chaadayev, it was occasion for anxiety.
Sure, we speak French, we dress in European clothes,
we dance to European music, we eat European food and drink European wine,
our armies fight now in the European style,
we defeated Napoleon, preserved Western ideals of freedom, and rights, and liberty
but do we Russians really belong to that tradition?
And despite what all the continent seems to be saying,
Chaadayev wondered, "Are we Russians, in fact, really Europeans?"
And these questions and concerns over Russia's belonging,
over Russia's cultural identity, haunted Chaadeyev throughout the 1820s.
And by decade's end, back in Russia, very nearly on the brink of suicide,
Chaadeyev gave vent to his apprehensions
in a polemical piece entitled "The Philosophical Letter."
And this article tackled a series of basic questions.
What is Russia? Where is Russia going?
What does it mean to be Russia?
And to these seemingly simple questions, Chaadayev provided answers
that flew in the face of conventional wisdom.
He claimed that Russia was an anomaly,
because Russia alone among the nations had never really belonged
either to the West or to the East, he said.
Russia had always been torn between the two.
Geographically, certainly, lying at the crossroads of two continents.
But even more so culturally, Chaadayev said,
Straddling the borders of two worlds, two traditions, but really belonging fully to neither.
Russia, in Chaadayev's eyes,
had borrowed much but contributed nothing to world culture.
And he said, "Look at the Greeks. Look at the Romans.
And the English and the French." "What has Russia given the world,"
Chaadeyev asked, "comparable to these great cultures?"
"Nothing."
The Russia of his day was defined in negative terms.
Defined by what it was not.
He writes, "We were neither of the West nor of the East,
and we have not the traditions of either.
Isolated in the world, we have not given anything to the world.
We have not added a single idea to the mass of human ideas.
We have contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit."
Russia, he lamented, was a gap in the intellectual order of things.
You can see why he was very nearly about to end it all. [chuckles]
Uh, he finished the article in 1829,
but not surprisingly, he could not find a publisher for many years.
And no publishing house in Russia would touch this unprintable piece.
Finally, the editor of one of the most prominent literary journals in the country, The Telescope,
published Chaadayev's article a full seven years after it was first written.
And so, by the sheer coincidence of a bold publisher
and a careless government censor who approved publication of the piece without having first read it,
Chaadayev's Philosophical Letter appeared in print in 1836.
And the response to Chaadayev's article was electric and immediate.
And within a matter of months, every reader in Russia
had an opinion on the piece. Some of them, in fact, had even read it.
And Alexander Herzen, the great Russian radical,
described Chaadeyev's article as "a pistol shot fired into the dark Russian night."
And Russian intellectuals, members of the intelligentsia,
educated critical Russian society,
battled over Chaadayev's questions, conclusions
in the salons and drawing rooms of Moscow, St. Petersburg.
The one person in Russia, perhaps, who did not debate Chaadayev's article--
for him there was no debate, was the Emperor,
Czar Nicholas I, who was not amused by Chaadayev's piece.
Nicholas was a man unshakeable in his commitment to tradition, conservatism.
A man described by one observer at the time as "the most consistent of autocrats."
And convinced that he was ruling by the grace of God over the finest country,
the richest culture in the world, absolutely certain as he was
that Russia's past, present, and future were impeccable and unimpeachable,
that Russia's position as a European power was permanent and unassailable,
Nicholas was outraged by Chaadayev's article and by his conclusions.
Nicholas wrote to one of his ministers,
"Having read the article, I find it a muddled mixture, of audacious absurdity worthy of a madman."
And the emperor's diagnosis stuck.
Chaadayev was declared bereft of his senses, insane,
and placed under house arrest.
The fact that he was a decorated war hero of noble birth
spared him more extreme punishment,
but others involved in the publication of this piece were not so fortunate.
The journal that published Chaadayev's article was shut down by Nicholas's secret police,
the editor exiled to Siberia, and the government's chief censor fired
for permitting this incendiary, heretical article
to see the light of day in His Imperial Majesty's realm.
One year later, in 1837, still under house arrest,
Chaadayev was obliged to publish a retraction of his piece
entitled "Apology of a Madman."
[audience laughter]
So, [clears throat] it's fitting, perhaps, that a man like Chaadayev, with a last name of Tatar origins,
who wrote his letter in French and dreamed of converting to Roman Catholicism
should tackle these questions of national identity, of what it meant to be Russian.
Uh, Chaadayev crystallized these questions, but Russians and outsiders, too,
had been wrestling with them long before Chaadayev ever put pen to paper.
These questions of identity: what is Russia?
Who are we Russians? What does it mean to be Russian?
Does Russia and its culture properly belong to the European tradition or to Asia
or is it something else entirely, something unique and of its own?
Now, at first glance, these may seem to be rather simple questions to resolve.
Russia's fairly easy to identify geographically; it's hard to miss.
We can situate it spatially on a map and any map of Europe, like this one,
shows Russia as part of Europe.
But only part of Russia is ever shown as part of Europe, right?
Europe, by convention, is said to end at the Ural mountains.
And that's really more out of convenience than out of any sort of
discernible geographical difference that lies on either side of those mountains.
But if Europe ends at the Ural mountains, Russia itself keeps going
across nearly a dozen time zones, across the steppes of Central Asia,
through Siberia, all the way to the Pacific,
along the way, encompassing a total territory
more than twice the size of the continental United States.
Three quarters of Russia's population lives west of the Ural mountains,
but three quarters of Russia's territory lies to the east, beyond.
So massive was the Russian realm that not until the middle of the 18th century--
a full hundred years before Chaadayev-- was it mapped in its entirety.
The first scientific map of the Russian empire, drawn to precise scale,
was commissioned by the Russian Academy of Sciences
and published in the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg in 1745.
You can see one of the maps here.
Uh, this is a map of Europe from this atlas of 1745, and you see up in the top left corner,
Europe, Europa in Cyrillic lettering.
And the map shows Russia as part of the European continent.
Africa is clearly labeled. At the bottom, maybe not so clear, uh, in the back,
but it's clearly labeled, Asia as well.
But there's no such line of demarcation here in the East.
Europe is shown to stretch from the Atlantic eastward
and to encompass those Russian lands unproblematically all the way to the Ural.
So, a sort of, uh...
cartographical confirmation of the Emperor Nicholas's later assertion
that Russia, by proper rights, belongs to, and is part of, the European continent.
Earlier maps, however, were not quite so sure.
If we jump back just a half century to 1685, this map of Europe comes to us
from the workshops of the Dutch mapmaker Willem Blaeu.
And it draws the borders of Europe a bit more ambiguously.
At the top, the map is framed by this series of rosettes,
with skylines and aerial views of each of the great European cities--
Amsterdam, Paris, London, Rome.
As far east as Prague, even Constantinople included.
But not so far east as Russia.
St. Petersburg has yet to be built at this time, but there is no Kiev, there is no Moscow.
And on either side of the map, on the left and right sides,
you see these intricate illustrations of national dress,
depicting all the peoples of Europe.
The English are there, the French, the Belgians, Venetians, the Germans, the Hungarians,
Bohemians, Greeks, as far eastward as the Poles. But no further.
No Russians appear in this taxonomy of European peoples.
And if we look at the map itself, Russia appears relegated
to some sort of geographically autonomous status.
Even the size of the font compared to that used in labeling the European country,
even the size of the font suggests that Russia is something else.
Something bigger, certainly. But also, something liminal,
something in-between Europe and Asia.
The mapmakers, too, have taken other steps
to suggest the otherness of this borderland territory.
Realistically, there's only so many towns and cities you can draw
or depict on a map of Russia in the 17th century.
And so, the illustrators filled in the empty spaces
with depictions of these vast forests.
And you can see the little, uh-- they're kinda hard to make out here,
but most of that territory labeled 'Russia' on this map is simply forest,
suggesting a land that is barely inhabited, barely civilized.
And to cement further that view, we see these three enormous bears
that are threatening to invade Russia from the Northeast.
This is an early modern mapmaker's convention for indicating the exotic
and to fill in unpopulated spaces.
We see these sea monsters floating around the Atlantic, lions gambling in North Africa.
So, sometime between 1685 when this map was made
and 1745, when this map was made, something happened.
In that brief window, Russia came to be seen as part of Europe.
And Europeans came to recognize this and to depict this new convention on their maps.
And most Russians, or at least the Russian elites, or at least most of the Russian elites,
came to see themselves as part of the European continent,
as part of European culture, tradition.
And without understanding that shift in perception that takes place so quickly, so suddenly
at the end of the 17th, turn of the 18th century,
it's hard to understand why, 100 years later,
Chaadayev's heretical assertion that Russia is something else,
not part of Europe-- why that assertion
brings down the wrath of the Emperor upon him.
Russia had developed historically along a very different path
than much of the rest of Europe.
Uh, Russia had had no Renaissance, no reformation,
no scientific revolution.
And so in terms of politics, culture, religion,
social structures, economic systems, Russia was very different
from much of the rest of Western Europe.
And by the 17th century, when this map was made,
relations between Russia and the West
could best be characterized as strained.
Having fought back invasions from the Catholic Poles and the Protestant Swedes
in the early 1600s-- the so-called Time of Troubles--
the new Romanov Dynasty took a rather dim view
of the Western World and Russia's relation to it.
Orthodox Christians' sermons and religious tracts warned Russian audiences
that prolonged contact with the Latins and heretics of the West
was injurious to the salvation of the souls of the faithful.
Russian texts from the 17th century refer to Europeans sneeringly
as "Shavers who wore trimmed moustaches," or who went clean-shaven,
but in either case chose not to wear their beards long
like Russian men, ostensibly in imitation of the Old Testament patriarchs
Orthodox preachers warned that those heretics would truly stand in the left hand of the Lord
when the day of judgment came. And this is a 17th century icon
of the last judgment
and you see at the bottom, in this close-up, a cohort of unrepentant
and not accidentally clean-shaven Westerners
in decidedly European dress languishing in the fires of Hell.
And you see this steady stream of beardless Westerners
pouring straight down into the Devil's mouth.
To cut down on cultural intermingling,
European merchants and diplomats who traveled to Russia in the 17th century
were confined by the Czar's decree
to reside in a special walled enclave, the so-called German Quarter
on the eastern outskirts of Moscow.
And this is a contemporary print of the so-called German Quarter.
You can see in the right foreground
that some homesick Dutchman have built themselves a windmill
to remind them of the old country.
And this foreigner's enclave was known as the German Quarter
because in the 17th century, Russians called all Europeans Germans.
Not because they couldn't tell an Englishman from a Frenchman or a Swede,
but because the Russian word for German, nyemets, comes from the word meaning "mute."
One who cannot speak; one who cannot make himself understood.
So it's sort of a linguistic way of conveying a cultural difference,
just like the ancient Greeks called those who mangled their tongue
"barbarians"--those who babble.
So Russians were suspicious of those from the West
whose speech they could not understand, whose ways seemed alien to them.
But to be fair, early modern Europeans were, if anything,
more dubious of their Russian hosts.
The German traveler and diplomat, Adam Olearius,
visited Moscow during the reign of the first Romanov czar, Mikhail,
and his travel narratives are important sources, less for what they tell us
about what Russia was really like in the 17th century,
but rather, for what they tell us about how Europeans saw Russia and its people.
And lamenting the crude customs, the ignorant superstitions,
the habitual drunkenness that he claimed to have seen in Russia,
Olearius concluded that the Russians were hearty folk,
good stock for soldiers, but they were not Europeans.
He writes, "if the Russians be considered in respect to their character,
customs, and way of life, they are justly to be numbered
among the barbarians."
One English traveler in the 17th century summed it up,
Russia was a "rude and barbarous kingdom."
So, given this culture of mutual misunderstanding,
how did Russians ever come to think of themselves as Europeans?
How did Europeans come to regard Russians as their own?
Uh, the short answer is money, because over the course of the 17th century,
more and more Western merchants are coming into Russia to trade, to do business,
particularly to gain a foothold in the lucrative fur trade.
Olearius estimates that there were at least a thousand Germans
in Moscow in the early 17th century,
to say nothing of the Swedes and English and Dutch and so forth.
Now 1000 is a suspiciously round number, obviously,
but it's a growing number. There are many thousands
in Moscow by century's end.
And there's an enormous amount of money to be made here.
This painting shows the Russian czar delighting Western merchants
with a show of his treasury.
In the 17th century, over the course of that century,
Europe agents took seven million sable furs out of Russia
to make hats, coats, and stoles for the aristocracy,
and also for the new rising commercial class.
And a full quarter of the money coming into the czar's coffers
in the 17th century came from the fur trade.
So when valuable commodities are at stake, the people who possess those commodities
suddenly become more attractive to those who want those commodities.
Barbarians come to look a lot less barbarous
when they possess something that the self-styled civilized desire.
So that's part of the answer. The second portion of the answer--
how did Europeans come to regard Russians as part of the club--
is that they came round to this view after the Russians trounced European armies
on the battlefield time and again in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
In the 18th and early 19th century, Russia's claim to European status
stood foremost on the basis of its military prowess.
Victories against the Swedes, the Poles, the Turks, the Prussians, the Bavarians, the French,
all of this created a mystique of the belligerence Russian bear
who had won its seat at the table of nations by virtue of its might, not its manners.
And that new notion of belonging, I think, is expressed nicely
in this French painting of the Russian victory at the Battle of Poltava in 1709,
a decisive engagement in Russia's long Northern war with the Swedes.
And the artist, the French painter Pierre [inaudible]
had spent most of his career painting famous scenes from French history,
particularly painting scenes glorifying the career of his wealthy sponsor Louis XIV, the sun king.
But after the Russian victory at Poltava, sensing, perhaps, a shift in the prevailing winds,
preferences of his new potential patrons, [inaudible] began to paint canvases
depicting the newest member of the European family, Russia.
And here you see in this painting of the Battle of Poltava
the Swedish armies about to be routed and the hero of Poltava in the foreground,
the Russian emperor Peter the Great.
It was Peter the Great who first sought to transform Russia into a European state,
and it was Peter who first won for Russia the reputation of the European [inaudible].
It was Peter who dragged Russia-- at least, Russia's elites--
sort of kicking and screaming onto the European stage.
He shaved the beards of the noble elite, shearing them of their muscovite identity,
outfitting them in western dress, replacing old muscovite titles of rank
with new western ones like count, duke.
It was Peter who brought in western architects
to design the most western-looking of Russian cities, St. Petersburg,
named with typical lack of modesty after his own patron saint.
It was Peter who created a modern standing army to make a victory at Poltava possible.
The first Russian Navy, which is proudly about to crash right into this building
where Peter is standing. It was Peter who put Russia
onto a Western-style calendar, a Western-style numerical system.
It was Peter who introduced a western lifestyle, at least for the privileged elite.
During Peter's reign, more than 4500 new words entered the Russian language--
words borrowed from German, French, Dutch, English, Italian--
new words that were needed to express these fresh objects and ideas and concepts,
that were pouring into Russia from the West after Peter opened Russia, after 1700.
And to put that number in perspective--
4500 new words, what does that mean-- that's 600 times the number of words
that had come into the Russian language in the entire century preceding.
So in less than a generation,
Peter had transformed Russia, transformed the Russian elite.
And he had not just encouraged the adoption of Western ways and norms,
Peter had mandated it--
or at least made it economically unattractive to resist his changes.
A nobleman could elect to remain unshaved
in defiance of the czar's will but he would be subject to the new Beard Tax,
which was an annual excise which amounts to about $58000 a year
in today's money.
So, whether through personal inclination or state coercion,
by the time of Peter's death in 1725, a Russian nobleman or noblewoman
like the couple on the right would not have recognized their grandparents
if they had met them in the street.
Which they wouldn't have anyway, because prior to Peter,
Russian noblewomen were expected to lead lives of domestic seclusion.
So among his other innovations, Peter brings Russian women
into the public sphere, what with the kinds of balls and drawing rooms
and salon culture that was emerging in the west.
Peter's European style reforms proceeded haphazardly,
in fits and starts, as the monarch, headstrong, sort of careened from idea to idea,
occupying any moment with whatever happened to strike his fancy.
And that impulsive quality of Peter's character I think is best expressed in this painting from 1907,
long after his death, by the Russian painter Valentine Serov.
And you see Peter, larger-than-life, a sort of Colossus,
striding forward, and his advisors trailing behind, sort of bent double by the wind,
trying to keep up with this man whom even the elements cannot subdue.
So Peter's reforms—
haphazard, scattershot as they were--
aimed at European acculturation in order to serve a larger purpose of statecraft.
Peter recognized that if Russia were to become and maintain great power status,
it would have to end the insularity of generations past
and embrace much of what Europe had to offer.
Much, but tellingly, not all.
It's often said that Peter westernized Russia.
But if he did, if that's in fact the write verb to use, it was a selective westernization.
Peter did not simply import all of Western European
social, political, cultural institutions wholesale
and transplant them in their entirety onto Russian soil.
But rather, Peter sort of picked and chose what he wanted to copy from the West.
And just as importantly, he rejected what he had no use for.
Most notably, anything that would undercut or limit his power as absolute monarch.
So for all his admiration of the latest ship-building methods
and artillery techniques coming out of England or the Netherlands,
Peter had no desire to borrow the political structures of those countries.
No desire to import parliamentary systems
or to bring in constitutional restraints on royal powers such as existed in England
and the Netherlands at this time.
Nor for all his vision did Peter seek to address the single most glaring social difference
between Russia and the rest of Europe-- the peculiar institution of serfdom,
which reduced some 80% of the Russian population, the peasantry,
to the status of mere chattel. Movable property
that could be bought and sold at auction by those of noble status.
And if any institution reflected the social distance
between the Russian lands and its newly claimed cousins to the West,
it was serfdom.
So while Peter may be said to have Europeanized Russia,
he Europeanized the face of Russia. Those changes did not alter
the fundamental structure of the system.
Autocracy as a political model remained intact.
And if anything, serfdom increased on Peter's watch.
A peasant serf of 1725 looked and lived
more or less exactly as his grandparents had before him,
even if his noble owner now spoke French and wore a powdered wig.
Peter's successors followed the same path.
Perhaps more gently, but followed the same path that Peter had forged.
Catherine the Great, a great admirer of Peter.
Catherine, in the preamble to her instructions
to the legislative commission of 1767, writes that Russia is a European country. Period.
And she presented this, not as a matter for debate,
but as a sort of axiomatic statement of fact.
And here you see a painting of Catherine,
the bust of Peter the Great smiling down upon her labors.
And she is writing her instructions to the Legislative Commission.
And this was a body created by Catherine, entrusted with the task
of drafting a new, enlightened code of laws for the Russian Empire.
Which it didn't do, but it sounded like a great idea at the time.
And here you see the printed edition
of Catherine's instructions to the Legislative Commission.
And the Empress ordered that the document be published,
not only in Russian, but in Latin, German, and French
as you can see in this copy so that European readers could read
that Russia was, in fact, a European country.
But the matter was far from resolved, the Empress's declarations notwithstanding.
Chaadeyev, of course, was not convinced that Russia was, indeed, part of Europe,
no matter how much he might have wished it to be.
The question of what Russia was was very much an open one.
And for some, the questions that Chaadeyev raised were very simple.
Of course we're part of Europe.
Peter the Great made us so. He shaved us and dressed us,
figuratively and literally, as you see in this 18th century woodcut.
And now, a century on, after Peter, many Russians said we speak like Europeans,
we eat and drink like Europeans. We worship the same god,
albeit with slightly different rituals.
We wage war in the same way. We inhabit now the same map.
So we're part of Europe, at least the good part of us,
the part that counts for anything. The elite.
We're part of Europe, and must remain so. If anything, these self-styled Westernizers argued,
we should become more so than we are today.
Other readers took Chaadeyev's point and went in the opposite direction with it.
They took Chaadeyev's point that Russia was unique,
but they rejected the intimation that different equaled bad.
And, inspired by the stirrings of romantic nationalism
which are very much in the air all across Europe in the early 19th century,
these champions of all things Russian styled themselves "slavophiles,"
lovers of Slavic culture.
And the slavophiles said "we Russians have our own culture
"that's distinct from the West.
"We have our own political traditions, very different from the West.
"Our faith is pure, less compromised, than the Christian denominations of the West.
"Our people are more truthful, more honest,
"our society more cooperative and harmonious, less divided and fractious
"than the civil societies of the West, separated into classes
and spoiled by democratic divisiveness.
And those ways work for other nations and for other peoples,"
the slavophiles maintained, "but Russia is different."
And the slavophile historian, Mikhail Pogodin, emphasized this difference.
He writes, "Our climate is different from that of the West.
"We have a different terrain, a different temperament and character,
"a different blood, a different physiognomy, a different outlook, different ways of thinking,
"different beliefs, different hopes, different desires, different pleasures, different social relations,
different conditions, a different history," and finally he gives up, "everything is different."
So different, in fact, that in his later years, Pogodin came to embrace more fully
his newfound Russian identity.
He scorned western coats and cravats for authentic Russian clothing
and a full-blown, pre-petrine beard as you see in this portrait by Vasily Perov.
So wittingly or not, Chaadeyev's article,
this acerbic piece-- this sort of early 19th century equivalent
of a ranting blog post-- had managed to provoke
the single greatest intellectual debate in 19th century Russian history.
Splitting the Russian intelligentsia, the educated society,
into two warring camps, the westernizers and the slavophiles.
The westernizers who saw Russia as part of the grand European tradition,
and thus capable of traveling down the same road of political and social development
as the rest of Europe. Whether that lead to liberal democracy
or to a socialist utopia, Westernizers differed in their views.
And on the other hand, of course, you have the slavophiles,
who praise Russian exceptionalism, Russian difference,
who saw their Russian culture and traditions as unique from--
and superior to-- those of the West and East alike.
Over the course of the 19th century,
these questions, heatedly debated though they were,
ceased to be purely academic ones.
As Ivan Turgenev depicted in his great novel, Fathers and Sons,
the new generation at mid-century was no longer content to debate issues
while seated on drawing room sofas, as their fathers and uncles had been.
This new generation, from the 1860s forward, chose, rather, to put their theories
and ideas into practice. They came to advocate a philosophy of action.
So the rise of Russian radicalism in the latter half of the 19th century
is a continuation by other means of those debates concerning identity
that had been smoldering ever since Chaadeyev fired his pistol in the dark.
So by the middle of the 19th century, the question of "what is Russia"
had taken explicitly political form and shifted from the present tense into the future tense.
What will Russia be?
This present system of autocracy was intolerable and unsustainable
to a new generation of educated Russian men and women,
to say nothing of Russian peasants and workers, who certainly felt that way,
even if they didn't articulate their discontent in such lofty terms.
But the idea was that this present system shall pass,
and we, the revolutionaries, like this cell of student revolutionaries
photographed in St. Petersburg in 1908, we will be the ones to make it pass.
But when we do, when we sweep away the old, what form of government will the new Russia have?
What kind of society, what kind of culture will this new Russia possess?
Do we look within, do we look to the peasants
as models of sort of cooperative agrarian collectivism?
This is what the slavophiles, sort of political heirs, the populists, suggested.
Or, as the westernizers suggested, liberals and socialists,
do we do what Peter the Great did?
Do we look abroad, do we look once more to the West for our inspiration?
And if we do, where do we look? Do we seek to pattern ourselves
after liberal England, a cultivated representative form of government
undergirded by the dignity of the individual, the rule of law?
Or in looking westward, do we draw upon the theories of Marx and Ingalls
and do what has not yet been done?
Do we seek to create the socialist utopia here in the borderlands between East and West?
This latter vision won out, of course, with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917,
intended by its architects to be the first stage of a global revolution
that would topple the capitalist order and remake the world.
When that failed to materialize,
and when dreams of spontaneous worldwide revolution
seemed to be indefinitely deferred, the leaders of the fledgling Soviet Union
had once again to revisit this question of identity.
This Bolshevik poster from 1920
suggests that political events in recent years have shifted the cartography once more.
Through victory in the Great October Revolution, Red Russia has now detached itself
from capitalist Europe and now looks at its continental class enemy
from behind a bayonet. The caption reads, "Be on guard."
And the new political and cultural elites of the Soviet State
regarded the European West very differently than their Imperial predecessors had.
What had once been a model of sophistication to emulate
had, by the Stalinist 1930s, come to be seen warily.
The West was a site of decadent lifestyle, deceptive politics.
And officially, at least, that view comes to dominate
Soviet/Western relations throughout the years of the '30s
into the Cold War and beyond.
At the end of the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev began speaking once again
of a common European home.
And statements like these were greeted with enthusiasm by audiences,
particularly audiences abroad
who were unaccustomed to hearing a Soviet leader
speak not of confrontation with the West, but rather of collaboration, coexistence.
And like Gorbachev, many Russians-- and even more foreign observers, I think--
anticipated— somewhat blithely, looking back--
but anticipated that post-communist Russia could simply be grafted back into or onto Europe.
That Russia could, in essence, sort of pick up where it hads left off in 1913,
the last year of peace before World War I and the revolution that followed.
This time, of course, substituting democratic institutions
for Romanov autocracy.
Looking back at the past 20 plus years, of course, that transition
has proved to be more fraught with difficulties than many had expected.
This is Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s.
During Yeltsin's presidency,
Radio Moscow conducted a poll on this very question.
An overwhelming majority of respondents, 79% of Russians polled,
said that they considered Russia to be a European country.
Since 2000, a lot has happened to change that perception,
to change the way that Russians think about what Europe represents today,
what comparisons to Europe mean in the 21st century.
Much of what had been held up as Western models,
Western institutions to emulate hadn't worked so well.
Economic reforms, privatization campaigns
that had been touted as these Western-style reforms
had done little to shore up security, stability for ordinary Russians.
The West began to lose some of its luster
when efforts to implement Western-style democratization seemed to stall,
at first under Yeltsin and then to idle altogether
under Putin, Medvedev, and then Putin again.
The image of the West seemed tarnished in the eyes of many Russian cultural figures,
social and political leaders.
Add to that misgivings over the multinational campaign in Kosovo in 1990s.
Or questions over the extension of the European Union.
The eastward expansion of NATO's presence into regions
that had once been considered to lie indisputably in Russia's sphere of influence--Georgia, Poland.
So what you have is a very different view today of what the West means,
and a very different notion now, I think,
of how Russians imagined where they stand in relative position to the West.
A 2007 poll, sponsored by the EU-Russia Centre-- a think tank--
and the Levada Institute-- an independent sociological think tank in Russia
not affiliated with the government--
a 2007 poll sponsored by these bodies
delivered results that were the exact inverse of the 1990s study.
Only 21% of Russian citizens polled in the 2007 survey
identified as Europeans. 71% did not.
7% didn't know what they were.
Nor did the respondents seem nearly as enthusiastic in 2007
as they had before to embrace all things Western.
45%--nearly half— indicated that the European Union
might prove in some form, be it financial, political, or cultural,
a potential threat to Russia in the 21st century.
And nearly half of the respondents said that Western democracy and culture
had but little to offer Russia today.
So what does it mean? I don't mean to suggest
that Russia and the West are entering
into a new cultural and political cold war.
That'll be good for me, professionally speaking, but I don't think that's, uh, true.
Nor do I mean to imply, by any stretch of the imagination,
the average Russian has reverted to a sort of pre-petrine, knee-jerk,
anti-Western xenophobia. That's even less true.
But what those indicators suggest, I think, is that Russian perception of the West
and Russia's relation to the West is changing once more.
Since Peter the Great, Russians had been accustomed
to seeing the West figuratively as a set of institutions and practices and values
that were synonymous with progress and modernity.
It was seen as a place that produced and consumed things
that Russians wanted: cigarettes, blue jeans, Coca-Cola.
Those old certainties now seem far less secure. Talk of a common European home
now sounds, in the 21st century, a sort of quaint--
and antiquated, perhaps—notion.
So what does all this mean?
It'll have to...be resolved, I suppose,
by a new generation of Chaadeyevs in the 21st century,
to bring these questions of identity that are still unresolved
and probably ultimately unresolvable to the attention of the nation once more.
Hopefully avoiding arrest, unlike Chaadeyev before.
So thank you, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you guys may have.
[applause]
(Woman offscreen) Thank you, Robert.
Let me just get this out.
All right, so as usual, we're gonna have, I think, a couple of microphones wandering around.
Is Susan here? Yeah, Susan and Jay will both have microphones,
and I'll just kind of keep my eyes open and try to point out people
who would like to ask questions.
So where do we have the first question?
Uh, right over here. Jay?
(Male audience member) Thank you. Uh, you talked a lot--
in Question of Identity, you talked a lot about Russia's relationship to Europe,
sort of hinted that there was maybe a relationship eastward,
but didn't say much about that. Could you say something about that?
(Robert) Well, I don't know much about that,
but I can say something about it, though.
I mean, there is-- [clears throat]
reasons of, I guess, sort of space, time, and my own...
interest and knowledge precluded me from getting into this,
but at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century,
you have a kind of backlash against that sharp division
that the westernizers and the slavophiles imagined,
that...Russia had to be either of the West or something sort of sui generis of its own.
And these so-called Eurasianists began to imagine and assert
that Russia was, in fact,
perhaps politically, somewhat culturally,
part of the kind of broader Eurasian tradition
that looked to the South and East, rather than looked to the West.
There's a fascination in the visual arts with all things Scythian, right,
this sort of embrace, semi-mythical embrace of, you know, ancient peoples
from Herodotus and other Greek historians.
And there's a fascination for this kind of nomadic step, style, and culture,
and a lot of Russian composers trying to incorporate those motifs into their work.
The Russian poet Alexander Blok wrote a poem called The Scythians,
imagining, you know, Russia and this sort of Eurasian identity.
But this is something that I don't think in the long term--
I guess the reason I, one of the reasons I was kind of admitting it is I think in the long term,
the victory of a Western-style political model with the Revolution of 1917, um,
kind of takes the wind out of the sails of that Eurasian movement just a bit.
Um, but it's certainly there. In fact, in the 1960s--
or the 1950s and 60s in this country-- a lot of, uh...
historians of Russia were arguing that Russian historians should learn,
not only Russian, but also Chinese.
Uh, which it's hard enough to do the one, but to do both is probably why it never caught on.
But that this would be the new sort of comparative lens,
that we would look at Russia in concert with--
in conjunction with-- this other great Communist superpower,
the People's Republic of China.
The sign of Soviet split and, I think, the linguistic difficulties
of that enterprise may have undercut the effectiveness of it.
But it's certainly there, this Asian influence.
I mean, Dostoevsky,
who was a great fan of Russian Empire and imperial expansion,
said that we can be Europeans in Asia.
In other words, that we could sort of lord it over the Central Asians
and the other sort of peoples of Siberia, just as the Europeans in the West
have their own sort of colonial imperial holdings overseas.
Um...
but maybe we could get a lecture in the future on China
and well talk more about these questions.
It's a good question, though.
(male audience member #2) I've got one a little a bit further to the West.
So, once the Soviet Union collapsed and you had countries
like the Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States,
it seemed like Russia was certainly concerned about Western influences
in that buffer area, if you will,
to the point where I think they were blackmailing some of these countries with natural gas,
economic, uh, blackmail.
Could you talk a little bit about, uh, you know, the relationship there
with Russia to these satellites to the West, if you could.
(Robert) Well...[clears throat]
The situation in the Baltic States is difficult
for Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians especially, I think,
because these territories had been part of the Russian empire,
but had been independent or had declared their independence
after the Revolution of 1917
and had held onto that independence until 1940.
And while the rest of the world was busy fighting Hitler
Stalin invaded and annexed those three independent countries.
And subjected them-- in the space of about a year and a half--
to all of the intense social transformations of collectivization of agriculture,
rapid industrialization, the crusade against ideological enemies
of the people, et cetera. All of these processes
that had been implemented in Soviet Russia over the space of about 25 years
were done in this incredibly foreshortened period of time in the Baltic States.
And they were exceedingly disruptive
and to say that they were resented is putting it mildly.
And the first real murmuring or stirrings of nationalist separatism
at the end of the Soviet period came, not surprisingly, from the Baltic States,
where you had a large ethnic Russian population, but you also had a very vocal population
that thought of themselves as Lithuanians, more so than as Soviet citizens.
I think part of the problem,
from the perspective of the Soviet system, thinking about the problem of national identity
under, uh...
how should I put it? Sort of undermining, I guess,
this greater Soviet identity, is that the Soviets foster both of these identities
at the same time. The Soviet Union from the 1920's forward
championed what it called "The Friendship of Peoples,"
that the Soviet Union was a fraternal brotherhood of 100 and some different ethnic groups.
And the Russians were sort of the big brothers of this unwieldy family,
but the other sort of member nations all shared and took part
in this kind of fraternal collective.
And so there was an attempt to encourage and sort of celebrate national culture.
Within limits, not to the point of articulating calls for political secession
or independence or anything like that, but encouraging Georgian literature
and encouraging and fostering Central Asians
to celebrate their own sort of Uzbek or Kazak identity,
along with this greater supranational Soviet identity.
The problem, I think--
and historians who write about the fall of the Soviet Union
express this better than I. My research is much earlier,
but historians who write about this period argue that once the Soviet identity
stopped meaning anything by the late 1980s,
as Gorbachev is pretty much selling the store, the idea of being soviet means very little anymore.
And those national identities that the system had encouraged for so long
now began to seem all the more meaningful and all the more powerful.
So I think that that sort of resurgence of national identity
on the western borderland of the Soviet Union, especially, I think can be seen in that context.
As far as Russia,
you know, kind of blackmailing those independent countries today,
certainly...
my understanding is that, uh, Ukraine is getting a lot
of its natural gases [inaudible] Russia and that if political events don't proceed
in Ukraine the way that the Kremlin would like them to,
there's this threat of cutting off that supply.
And cutting off, thereby, supply to much of central and Eastern Europe, as well.
It's getting it through those Ukrainian lines.
You know, I guess I suppose the easy answer
is that Moscow has never stopped thinking about those countries
as well within the Russian sphere of influence.
And Belarus is probably the most closely aligned of those countries today with Russia.
But I think that...
I think the Russian government today has never really completely abandoned its close ties--
and in fact, maybe imperial pretentions to influence in those regions.
I don't know what that'll mean in the future.
The Russian government monitored very closely elections in the Ukraine over the past decade
to make sure that regimes friendly to Moscow will be supported.
I mean, I guess we do the same thing all the time, but just in a different hemisphere.
(woman offscreen) Way in the back. Marty.
(male audience member) Thanks, Robert.
Um, I was wondering if you might be able to comment a bit more
on the role of Russian orthodoxy as a player in aspects of isolationism.
And it seems to me that would be a pretty considerable factor
with regard to this question of east versus west and Russian exceptionalism.
And perhaps if that could be connected to the differentiation of orthodoxy
versus the Western Christian influence that we see in other Slavic cultures and histories.
(Robert) That's a good question.
Chaadeyev argued that it was orthodoxy that was largely to blame
for Russia's cultural isolation.
Russia had chosen Christianity at the end of the 10th century,
but it messed up and chose the wrong one.
You know, the earliest Russian sources
say that Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev selected orthodoxy
out of all the religions on the table because this was the most beautiful,
the most aesthetically pleasing.
It was also, of course, the religion that would have allowed him to ally himself
more closely with the Byzantines at Constantinople.
So there's a certain pragmatic dimension to that, as well.
But when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453,
it left Russia as the only real sizable orthodox Christian kingdom left standing.
And it's been argued that had a profoundly isolating effect
on sort of Russian historical development.
The so-called theory of the Third Rome-- Moscow as the Third Rome--
was articulated by orthodoxy clergymen in the 16th century,
that the first two Romes have fallen, Rome and Constantinople.
And their prideful wickedness had no small role to play in this.
Moscow is the Third Rome and there shall be no fourth.
So went the dictum.
And sort of jumping ahead— a lot of scholars during the years of the Cold War
picked up on that line 400 years before and said "see right here in embryo
is the genesis of sort of Stalinist impulses to take over the world."
Well, not really, because implicit in this idea of Moscow as the Third Rome
is not a sort of mandate for untrammelled Imperial expansion,
but rather, a great sense of moral obligation.
When that formulation was put forward in 1510,
a clergyman, [inaudible], gave this sermon to the Grand Prince of Moscow--
one of the Vasilys; I can't remember which one-- as an admonitory warning.
If you don't maintain your kingdom in a pious, upright, Godly fashion, it will be taken from you.
And so, I think part of that kind of isolation that we see in the 17th century
that I mentioned before is born out of a real conviction
that orthodoxy and orthodox Christianity is not only the true Christian church--
I mean, all Christian churches claim that they are the one true Christian church;
orthodoxy's not alone in that-- but that there's a lot riding on the preservation
of proper ritual, of right worship.
The word orthodoxy itself, in English and in Russian,
means "right worship," worship that's done in the proper fashion.
So I think orthodoxy certainly played a role in fostering a sense of Russian distinctiveness,
Russian distinctive kind of national identity.
I think Chaadeyev went too far in claiming that it was to blame for...
everything that had gone wrong in the 1000 years preceding,
but...
during the 19th century, certainly, the orthodox church plays a great role
in sort of formulating this sense of Russian patriotism.
And all the way up into the revolution, really, of supporting...
edicts and military campaigns of a czar, blessing the efforts of the royal family,
a close association with the Romanov family and the orthodox church
to indicate, again, that, you know, this dynasty is anointed by God, God's agents on Earth.
So I think there's a strong connection, strong linkage
between orthodoxy and Russian national identity.
And for the slavophiles, this was...what makes us who we are.
The reason we are the way we are is because of our orthodox faith.
Otherwise, we'd just be Belgians or Dutchman, right?
Um, but we're not. What makes us distinctive--
and in fact, for the slavophiles this is what makes Russia so awesome--
is that we are orthodox.
And we are part of this larger-- and simultaneously smaller--
but larger sort of Russian collective.
We're not divided, like these mercenary or Protestants in the West,
according to slavophiles.
And we're not subjected to the whims of a single pope,
like the Catholics, right? We have a collective conciliar...
uh...style.
And this creates a more harmonious whole.
I mean, all of the positive that slavophiles found in Russian society
they trace back to the orthodox influence.
So I think it's an enormously important formative--
plays an enormously formative role in that sense of Russian distinctiveness.
(male audience member) On your last remark about orthodoxy
in the post-Soviet period: do you see orthodoxy
as becoming, again, very important to the Russian psyche or society?
(Robert) That's a good question. I think that...
[clears throat]
It was often said that in the 1990s,
on a major holiday like Easter, you couldn't get anywhere near
an orthodox church, because it was crowded with believers.
And there was a huge resurgence of interest
in Russian orthodoxy in Russia, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I think with the Soviet Union gone and the hammer and sickle and the red flag
and all of that, you know, tossed into the dustbin of history,
the only sort of resonant symbol of Russianness left
was the Russian Orthodox Church.
And particularly because for most of the 20th Century,
the Russian orthodox church had been in an oppositional relationship
with the Soviet state, I think once the soviet system was gone,
the orthodox church was really one of the few sort of salient symbols of Russianness
that was left to hold onto.
Statistics suggest that regular church attendance has gone down greatly
since that wave in the 1990s has interestingly gone back to levels
that are higher than much of the rest of Europe,
but far below levels of church attendance in the United States.
And yet interestingly, a vast majority of ethnic Russians
identify themselves as orthodox Christians,
even if they're not practicing as orthodox Christians.
Um, so I think that...
to call it a sort of performative orthodox identity
is to go too far, perhaps, but um...
but I think it's certainly...
I think it's certainly a part of defining what it means to be Russian
now in this post-Soviet period.
It's a good question.
(female audience member) Hello? Um, how did Russia
acquire the military prowess in the 17th century
to defeat the very well-practiced European powers?
(Robert) Uh, Peter the Great introduced, not surprisingly,
a coercive system to build an army of mass conscription.
Every 20 peasant households had to supply a strapping young lad
who would spend the rest of his life in the military.
That was later reduced to 25 years, which amounted, practically,
to the very same thing. Um, but it was really through, again,
these kind of top-down coercive state reforms that this was possible.
That, and the introduction...
so you had this sort of man-power, you know, plucked out of the village,
but also the techniques and technology borrowed,
adopted, stolen, whatever you want to say, from the West.
So when Peter...
beat the Swedes at Poltava in 1709,
he did so by using Western tactics.
And by using the tools of the West sort of against itself, I suppose.
Much in the same way as Peter's great admirer in the 1930s, Stalin,
used the kind of tools of the industrial mechanized West
and the capitalist system to industrialize the Soviet Union
and make the Soviet Union into a world power. As a superpower.
Does, does that answer the question?
(male audience member) Pushing you back a little bit...
toward the notion of identity.
It would seem that the situation now is that, uh, Russia
finds itself surrounded by basically the former members of the...
USSR.
All of whom might fairly be said to have kind of a pissy attitude about...
about Russian influence, and in addition to which, um,
China may be thought to be thinking that Siberia was gonna look pretty interesting
for a very populous country 25 years from now, when conditions would change.
To what extent
do you think that the Russians will feel a bit surrounded
and a bit defensive and so guide their political policies,
be guided in their political policies by their surroundings,
by their political surroundings?
(Robert) That's a good question, and I think that it--
I think that a lot, my sense, again, as an expert on the 19th century
looking at the 21st century, but my sense is that a lot
of what motivates...
foreign policy today coming out of the Kremlin is motivated
by those very fears that you mentioned. A fear of encirclement, a fear of...
traditional allies and in fact, traditional sort of colonial possessions
now turned against us. I think that's a strong--
that was a strong, um...motif
in the rhetoric surrounding the war in 2008 between Georgia and Russia.
A small mountain kingdom that had been part of the Russian Empire for years,
part of the Soviet Union, and now...
going to war against Russia, this was...
I think the result of that is a profound sense of anxiety
and a sort of defensive posture.
The, the Russian-- I mean there's editorials in the Russian paper
going back several years now, a periodic sort of theme
in these Russian tutorials is, you know,
in case no one noticed, the Cold War is over.
So why is-- the Warsaw Pact is long gone;
why is NATO trying to expand further to the East?
Why is NATO expanding; why is there talk of missile defense systems
on our very borders and these sorts of things?
On the few occasions when Russia is mentioned
in American political discourse,
it's mentioned sort of fearfully or identified explicitly as an enemy power,
as in the most recent political campaigns.
Or the sort of geography is completely muddled, and Russia is in the back yard of Alaska--
or however that was phrased, I can't remember.
But I think all of this combines
to put Russian politics, or at least many political actors,
in a kind of defensive posture.
If you think about the, um...
the ongoing question of Russian adoption that's going on,
and Russia saying we're not gonna have any more adopted babies
leaving our country to go off to America
because they're just gonna be sent back anyway,
um, just the other day,
Zhirinovsky, the head of the kind of...
national kind of crazy wing in the Russian Duma
basically said something to the effect that-- he was asked, wouldn't it be better
that these Russian kids go off to a place where they'll be taken care of?
If they stay here, many of them are just going to perish.
And Zhirinovsky said, yeah, they'll die, but at least they'll die in their own country.
They'll die here with their own people.
And he was serious, I think, when he said that.
But I think it does reflect this idea that...
the West has now become, um,
from the Russian perspective, aggressively expansionary
and this, I think, has altered the way that Russia has seen the West.
And again, not on a sort of individual or personal level,
but sort of thinking about, you know, politics,
or political policies that form in relation to these positions.
But I think that that defensive posture that you identified is very real
and very influential right now.
(male audience member) Well, I just have to add to that,
because I'm Russian. I'm from Russia,
so kind of an insider perspective on the identity issue, okay?
So in Moscow, currently-- that's like the latest statistics--
out of roughly 12 million people, the familial ethnic Russians living,
so we are a minority in the capital already.
And most people feel kind of depressed by their own government in a way, you know,
because nothing's been improving for 15 years, like health care, education system.
It's like—and people kind of catch up with the idea that nothing's gonna change, you know.
And, uh, most workers come from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
They're underpaid, they don't have rights, and, uh, the core population of the country
is basically...
pretty depressed, I'd say.
And I don't think the question of self-identity as like East versus West currently exists...
inside the country, you know.
(Robert) So it's more of an internal divide
between Russians and former Soviet subjects?
(male audience member) Well, back in--
Stalin's idea was to eliminate the identity.
Well, you said that it was kind of fostering local
little ethnical self awarenesses here and there.
But resettling people, you know, like Chechens were moved
and Tatars from Crimea were moved.
The idea was to make people lose their identity, so they become Soviet people.
(Robert) I think for these targeted populations,
ethnic Germans, Chechens, Tatars along the Volga--
those who were identified, mislabeled wrongly as enemy populations,
fifth columns by Stalin,
I think in those cases the attempt was to...
not only eliminate identity, but eliminate those who possess that identity.
And similarly in Ukraine, too. I mean, at the same time as--
in the 1920s, Ukrainians are encouraged to publish in the Ukrainian language,
recover a sense of Ukrainian folk identity and culture,
and then by the 1930s, those same authors and ethnographers and political figures
are then targeted in the Stalinist purges for having gone too far with their national identity.
So I think that the whole idea of the Friendship of Peoples,
of Druzhby Narodiv that exists in the Soviet Union
or existed in the Soviet Union was about...
celebrating acceptable forms of national identity or of ethnic identity,
but was also about defining from above what those acceptable identities were.
And the unacceptable identities, as you rightly point out, are...
well, there's no place for them in this sort of Soviet mentality.
As far as the sort of demographics of Moscow today, um,
and the sort of sense of malaise that you identify--
my sense, from the things I've read, is that,
and this ties in with political protests over the last couple of years,
is that a lot of this comes out of the post-2008 economic crisis,
and that when, for much of the 2000s, when the economy was doing quite well
and when Putin presided, essentially, over the creation of a Russian middle class,
a lot of people were willing to forgive his kind of autocratic tendencies.
You know, when you have money in the bank and you're able to buy flat screen TVs, you know,
you can overlook a little of, uh...
a little authoritarianism.
But when the economy turns sour, I think, and people began to lose what they had,
and to lose a sense of security, I think that sort of economic,
the economic origins of those political protests are significant.
Or, you know, need to be taken into account, at least.
(woman offscreen) I guess we can wrap it up.
Near 8:30, and we'll see you all next week.
(Robert) Thanks.
[applause]