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Порталус

Russia as Part of the West

Дата публикации: 04 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) POLITICS →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1188906701


Is Russia part of the West?

Viewpoint: Yes. Despite the divergences of Russia's remote past, in modern times Russia has unequivocally become a Western state and a fully integrated part of Europe.

Viewpoint: No. What has been called Russia's Westernization was only a series of superficialities that have been unable to mask distinctly un-European patterns of culture, politics, tradition, and interests.

_______________________


British statesman Winston Churchill once famously referred to Russia as a "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." The consternation expressed in his statement at least partly derived from the question of Russia's identity as a nation. For many observers, Russia is undeniably part of the West. A Christian nation since the conversion of its people in 988, Russia has been intimately tied to Europe by culture, trade, and diplomacy, as well as by faith. The basis for its laws and social organization, from the tsars through the communists to its current leaders, has shared many commonalities with the West. The development of its art, science, and philosophy had pronounced Western influences and went a long way toward influencing the West itself.
Yet, at the same time, other students of Russian history deny the country's Western identity. Despite its Christian faith Russia stood apart from the West. In many respects its political culture derived from the steppe empires of Asia. Its monarchy remained far more powerful than its Western counterparts until it was overthrown, and the communist dictatorship that replaced it also bore impressive comparison to what some scholars have termed "Oriental despotism." Lacking Western concepts of individual rights, private property, and representative government, Russia has remained separate from the West. As post-Soviet Russia looks toward redefining its world role, its identity as part of or in distinction to the West is an important question.



Viewpoint: Yes. Despite the divergences of Russia's remote past, in modern times Russia has unequivocally become a Western state and a fully integrated part of Europe.

The West has traditionally been a term of self-identification created in opposition to a nebulous East. The Latin expression ex Oriente lux, ex Occidente lex--meaning from the East, light (religion and philosophy), from the West, law (Roman-inspired order with personal liberty and private property)--expressed well the common notion that the specifics of Western civilization contrasted with a less specified and less tangible East. In cultural and historical studies, the West has stood for the Greco-Roman world in antiquity, the Roman Catholic world in the Middle Ages, and subsequently modern Europe and the "New Europes" created by overseas colonization. As the West has come in modern times also to be identified with industrial capitalism and political democracy, so some observers have added Japan to this "West."

In brief, several features suggest that Russia is indeed an integral part of the West. Russia's ethnolinguisitic basis is Slavic, a western branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Russia's Byzantine inheritance in religion (Orthodox Christianity and Roman law) is essentially Greek and Roman. Russia's political structures have been variants of common European types, including medieval kingship, absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, socialism, dictatorship, and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and at least in form, parliamentary democracy. Capitalism and communism, Russia's two forms of economic organization since at least the 1880s, are Western developments built on theories of political economy that originated within Western philosophical thought. Adam Smith's capitalism was the product of the Scottish Enlightenment, just as Karl Marx's communism emerged from elements of the German philosophical tradition and from Smith's observations about economics. Russia's cultural modernization has been thoroughly Western since the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725) and had some roots that were even older.

The Slavs originated in what is now Poland, Belarus, and western Ukraine, and their closest Indo-European linguistic and cultural cousins are the Baltic and Germanic families. Such key Slavic words as the equivalents of iron, plow, bread, and prince come from ancient Germanic, and those few such as bog, meaning "god," which derive from Iranian roots, were picked up from Sarmatians living in the Roman zone. The greatest affinities of customary and early Slavic law were with neighboring Germanic peoples, whose system of laws inspired the common-law tradition still prevalent throughout the English-speaking world. Russia's Cyrillic alphabet originated as a phonic modification of the Greek alphabet.

The standard terminology of the Greek and, hence, Russian Churches as Eastern Orthodoxy has created the misconception that they alone represent Eastern Christianity. To the contrary, "real" Eastern Christianity is found in the breakaway Syrian, Armenian, and Coptic (Egyptian and Ethiopian) Churches, which adhere to the Nestorian and Monophysitic doctrines. These doctrines were condemned at the Third and Fourth Ecumenical Councils in the fifth century. Nestorianism denied the eternality of human nature of Christ and hence downgraded the significance of the Virgin Mother of God. Monophysitism denied Christ's human nature altogether. The differences between Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy, which also calls itself "Catholic," are trivial and mostly hierarchical. The split between these two branches of the Christian faith, which dates from 1054, had to do with the Byzantine (and Russian) Church's refusal to recognize the authority of the bishop of Rome, the Roman Catholic pope, as the supreme pontiff. Yet, the British Anglican Church broke away from Rome in the sixteenth century for largely the same reason. They also restored one of the key Orthodox practices, which Catholicism abandoned in the late Middle Ages--the married parish clergy.

Once one grasps how close Orthodoxy and Catholicism are in relation to the other Christian Churches, one has no trouble understanding why the fundamental outside cultural influences on Russia, besides the Greek and Balkan Orthodox Slavic, were from Catholic Europe. With the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium and the Balkans in the fifteenth century, they became almost totally European--even in church matters. In the eighteenth century, Russia moved from simply borrowing from Europe to contributing to it as an active member. Peter the Great, for example, inspired Frederick the Great of Prussia to take a personal interest in architecture.

In the political realm, early, pagan Russia (Rus) took its basic structures and ideas from Scandinavians. Riurik, the semilegendary founder of the Russian state, and his brothers and retainers were of the same Viking stock that emerged from the north and shaped lands as distant as Normandy, England, and Sicily. The Byzantine contribution included some Roman notions of law and concepts of monarchy and tyranny that derived from classical Greece. The Russian state of Novgorod, one of Muscovy's main rivals until the late fifteenth century, was associated with the German Hanseatic League and had a rudimentary city-state democracy. Muscovy's monarchical structure, despite Mongol influences, had a host of similarities with contemporary European lands. In the late seventeenth century Russian political thought came under the direct influence of Europe. Starting with Peter the Great, who embarked on a long, far-reaching tour of Europe in 1698, Russia started to borrow entire institutions from Europe, such as Sweden's collegiate system of government, a precursor to the modern use of ministries. Catherine the Great completed the Europeanization of Russia's nobility, which Peter had begun. Enforced Western standards of dress and taste complemented Peter's borrowing of court and aristocratic titles, such as Graf, the German equivalent of count. Alexander I copied France's ministries of state and military general staff, and Napoleon's civil code was a model for Russia's Law Code of 1833. This process intensified to the point that after a period of revolutionary disturbance in 1905-1906, Russia adopted a version of the Prussian 1850 constitution. German economic theory inspired Russian state industrialization policies in the 1880s and 1890s. German revolutionary theory, especially that developed by Karl Marx, provided the intellectual basis for much of Russia's socialist movement, including the most successful revolutionaries--Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks, who took power in 1917.

Before 1917 Russian nationalism and that of the minorities within its empire--also copied from Western movements--proved to be the most important rival revolutionary competition to the Marxists. Earlier, German Romantic nationalism had inspired Russia's Slavophiles and French utopian socialism. All of the communists' goals were those of Western visionaries, socialist and nonsocialist. Communist means were analogous to European fascism and Nazism, and they both inspired and were inspired by Western totalitarianism. The entire range of dissidence against the Soviet Russia regime, except for religious movements among Muslims, was Western in origin and content. Post-Soviet Russia has made major strides in developing Western-style capitalism and democracy, including legally protected private property and representative parliamentary government. In January 2003 it revived the thoroughly Western institution of trial by jury, which had also been in place between the tsarist government's judicial reform of 1864 and the Revolution of 1917. Although its government still has semi-authoritarian features at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is well on the path to further reform and liberalization. Russia has been and remains mostly Western.

-- David Goldfrank, Georgetown University


Viewpoint: No. What has been called Russia's Westernization was only a series of superficialities that have been unable to mask distinctly un-European patterns of culture, politics, tradition, and interests.

The East is a nebulous term in historical, geographical, and cultural studies. For the Ancient Greeks, the East was literally east of what was then Greece--hence the historic name Anatolia for present-day Turkey-in-Asia. Because of the Ottoman Turkish conquests, however, Europe's historic terms Near East and the Eastern Question applied to Greece, the Balkans, and Black Sea regions--hardly Asia from a modern point of view. Within the world of Christianity, the original core lands of the "Eastern (Orthodox) Church" included Greece, as well as Anatolia, Syria, Judaea, and Egypt. In political theory, "Eastern" or "Oriental" has often been coupled with the notion of "despotism." In modern times, communism has been considered an "Eastern" phenomenon, the Communist East being a common expression, often used to express the idea that the Soviet Union was a new version of "Oriental despotism." Russia's geography, stretching across Siberia to the Pacific and including historic steppe lands once dominated by the Mongol Empire, is nearly two-thirds Asian. Russia's national religion is Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Russia's historic tsarist system fit despotic patterns. As Russia modernized, it created twentieth-century communism, which also represented despotism, and at the turn of the twenty-first century, post-Soviet Russia retains despotic features.

At first glance, Russia's Orthodoxy, as a branch of Christianity, might appear Western, but this is not really the case. Orthodoxy's insistence upon the sanctity of ancient traditions and its blend of mysticism and rationalism render it more akin to Eastern religions than to Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. The Orthodox hierarchy's historic deference to state power and rulers is also in many ways a direct consequence of its origins in the Byzantine Empire. The hesychastic system of breath-control prayer, which medieval Russian monks acquired from their Greek counterparts, was itself an Orthodox borrowing from Indian practices. The characteristic Russian notions of self-identity, developed by the Slavophile thinkers in the 1830s and 1840s and emblematized by such terms as the Russian soul or Russian idea, have as their core an affirmation of Orthodox traditions in direct opposition to the Catholic and Protestant West. This school of thought and later philosophical developments posited Russia as a messianic entity poised to lead the spiritual regeneration of a world dominated by a "decadent" West. Much of this thinking, it should be noted, found its way into communist notions of the rebirth and reshaping of man and society. Moreover, the second religion of Russia has been Islam since the conquest and incorporation of Kazan in 1552.

In the Kievan, late-Imperial, and post-Soviet periods, the Russian state has appeared similar to Western counterparts, but such appearances may be deceptive, hiding deeper structural divergences. Early Russia (then Rus) arose as a tribute-collecting realm, replacing the earlier steppe-Turkic Khazar Khanate centered in the lower Volga. The notion that the mass of subject peoples were tributary--with goods, money, and labor--to the ruling classes and their state, was present from the start and barely gave way to notions of participatory citizenship in the late empire before communism reimposed labor obligations on most of the population. As state power, taxation, and labor conscription developed in the Mongol period and the Muscovite tsardom, so did the collective responsibility of villagers and townsmen for obligations. By the late 1500s, most Russians were tied down to their domiciles and service to the state. If the nobility and townsmen acquired some real liberties after 1762, the bulk of Russians who were peasants, even after emancipation from serfdom in the 1860s, remained bound to their villages down to 1907, when their obligations were abolished after revolutionary events. Peasants--the vast majority of the Russian population--remained subject to corporal punishment until 1904. The state dominated commerce and industry into the late eighteenth century and remained powerful in the latter down to 1917. Typically for a despotism, Russian commerce and industry did not develop so dynamically as those of the nondespotic West or Japan. The structure of this state being despotic, even without the conscription-manned waterworks of the classical Oriental despotisms of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, wielders of supreme state power, such as Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the Great, realized the potential for either unlimited, paranoiac, vindictive personal tyranny or the massive mobilization of people and resources for construction projects and warfare.

Theoreticians of despotism often neglect the social and economic value to villagers of their strong communal structures, the traditional prop of the system, but the Russian peasants showed such understanding both during the Revolution of 1917 and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1917 they appropriated all land for the communal ownership of villages. Since 1991 their descendants have refused to decollectivize agricultural land, and trade in it remains illegal at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Communism was, in the eyes of the "father" of Russian Marxism, Georgii Plekhanov, an "Asiatic restoration," and the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, himself recognized that the parasitic tsarist bureaucracy would survive the Revolution, just as the Soviet bureaucracy largely survived the fall of communism. Under the communist regime in the Soviet Union, the degree of state control over labor, property, and the economy surpassed that of any great historic "Oriental despotism," while Josef Stalin's personal tyranny dwarfed that of the most vicious of despots. The post-Soviet Russian transition has created a hybrid polity with similarities to non-Western real and quasi-dictatorial regimes, which use state power over economic interests and employ the press to control the people, and where the alternative to public authority is not a vigorous civil society but a multitude of little despotisms represented by criminal gangs, the monopolies they enforce, and the tribute (protection money) they collect through threats of violence. Concepts of individual rights, private property, and representative government, all the staple of Western government, society, and philosophy, were long absent from Russia and are only in their infancy there at the present time. Russia has been and remains mostly Eastern.

-- David Goldfrank, Georgetown University


HISTORICAL BACKWARDNESS

Below is an excerpt from one of Lev Trotsky's articles on the historical character of the Russian Revolution in which he indicates his belief that Russia is more of a Western entity than an Eastern one:

The development of Russia is characterized first of all by backwardness. Historical backwardness does not, however, signify a simple reproduction of the development of advanced countries, with merely a delay of one or two centuries. It engenders an entirely new "combined" social formation in which the latest conquests of capitalist technique and structure root themselves into relations of feudal and pre-feudal barbarism, transforming and subjecting them and creating a peculiar interrelationship of classes. The same thing applies in the sphere of ideas. Precisely because of her historical tardiness, Russia turned out to be the only European country where Marxism as a doctrine and the Social Democracy as a party attained powerful development even before the bourgeois revolution. It is only natural that the problem of the correlation between the struggle for democracy and the struggle for socialism was submitted to the most profound theoretical analysis precisely in Russia.

Idealist-democrats, chiefly the Narodniks, refused superstitiously to recognize the impending revolution as bourgeois. They labelled it "democratic" seeking by means of a neutral political formula to mask its social content--not only from others but also from themselves. But in the struggle against Narodnikism, Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, established as long ago as the early eighties of the last century that Russia had no reason whatever to expect a privileged path of development, that like other "profane" nations, she would have to pass through the purgatory of capitalism and that precisely along this path she would acquire political freedom indispensable for the further struggle of the proletariat for socialism. Plekhanov not only separated the bourgeois revolution as a task from the socialist revolution--which he postponed to the indefinite future--but he depicted for each of these entirely different combinations of forces. Political freedom was to be achieved by the proletariat in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie; after many decades and on a higher level of capitalist development, the proletariat would then carry out the socialist revolution in direct struggle against the bourgeoisie.

"To the Russian intellectual it always seems that to recognize our revolution as bourgeois is to discolor it, degrade it, debase it. . . . For the proletariat the struggle for political freedom and for the democratic republic in bourgeois society is simply a necessary stage in the struggle for the socialist revolution."

"Marxists are absolutely convinced," he wrote in 1905, "of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does this mean? This means that those democratic transformations which have become indispensable for Russia do not, in and of themselves, signify the undermining of capitalism, the undermining of bourgeois rule, but on the contrary they clear the soil, for the first time and in a real way, for a broad and swift, for a European and not an Asiatic development of capitalism. They will make possible for the first time the rule of the bourgeoisie as a class. . . .

"We cannot leap over the bourgeois democratic framework of the Russian revolution," he insisted, "but we can extend this framework to a colossal degree." That is to say, we can create within bourgeois society much more favorable conditions for the future struggle of the proletariat. Within these limits Lenin followed Plekhanov. The bourgeois character of the revolution served both factions of the Russian Social Democracy as their starting point.

It is quite natural that under these conditions, Koba (Stalin) did not go in his propaganda beyond those popular formulas which constitute the common property of Bolsheviks as well as Mensheviks.

"The Constituent Assembly," he wrote in January 1905, "elected on the basis of equal, direct and secret universal suffrage--this is what we must now fight for! Only this Assembly will give us the democratic republic, so urgently needed by us for our struggle for socialism." The bourgeois republic as an arena for a protracted class struggle for the socialist goal--such is the perspective.

In 1907, i.e., after innumerable discussions in the press both in Petersburg and abroad and after a serious testing of theoretical prognoses in the experiences of the first revolution, Stalin wrote: "That our revolution is bourgeois, that it must conclude by destroying the feudal and not the capitalist order, that it can be crowned only by the democratic republic--on this, it seems, all are agreed in our party." Stalin spoke not of what the revolution begins with, but of what it ends with, and he limited it in advance and quite categorically to "only the democratic republic." We would seek in vain in his writings for even a hint of any perspective of a socialist revolution in connection with a democratic overturn. This remained his position even at the beginning of the February revolution in 1917 up to Lenin's arrival in Petersburg.

Source: Lev Trotsky, "The Character of the Russian Revolution," 1940, Lev Trotsky Internet Archive http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/1940-russia.htm.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (New York: Schocken, 1974).

David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947).

Steven Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia's New Mafiya (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1994).

Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974).

Donald Treadgold, The West in Russia and China: Religious and Secular Thought in Modern Times, volume 1, Russia, 1472-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1995).

Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

Melvin C. Wren, The Western Impact upon Tsarist Russia (Huntington, N.Y.: Robert E. Krieger, 1971).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 04 сентября 2007 года

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