Russia’s apocalyptic messianism

 

Having recently read Kropotkin’s memoirs (reviewed here), reminded me, in his description of intellectual history of Russian revolutionary movements, of Berdyaev’s book, “The origin and the meaning of Russian Communism”. Berdyaev wrote it in 1935-36; it was published in 1938. The only contemporary events referred to in the book are the Moscow trials (in one sentence), and a single mention of Hitler. The book presents an intellectual history of Russian revolutionary thought from the beginning of the 19^th century until the October Revolution, with an interpretation (relatively new at the time) of the Bolshevik policies.

 

Nassim Taleb has written that books that have been around for a  long time, are likely to remain with us for a long time.  If Plato is being read almost two-and-a-half millennia after he wrote, we can sure he  will be read in another two-and-a half millennia. The same is true for Berdyaev.  The book is, as I mentioned, ninety years old; I read it almost forty years ago. But it is still the book “d’actualité”. And has recently become more so.

 

The ideological background to the Russian thought is, according to Berdyaev, the belief in “apocalyptic messianism”. It is the subterranean ideology shared, Berdyaev writes, by Slavophiles, nihilists, anarchists and communists. Its main ingredient is a belief that, for some mysterious reason, Russian people (and that literally means “ordinary people”, peasants) has been selected to suffer and through its suffering to bring universal salvation to the world: “The mission of the Russian people is to realize social justice within human society, not just in Russia but in the entire world” (my translation). The salvation is accompanied by destruction.  The two elements, as in John’s apocalyptic writings, go together. There can be no salvation without the destruction of all that is false, rotten and built on lies. Apocalyptic thinking is, Berdyaev writes, the most important part of the Russian idea. It is characterized by asceticism, dogmatism, and acceptance (or perhaps, search?) of suffering.  

 

Berdyaev’s recounting of the 19^th century intellectual history has two objectives, I think. First, to situate Communist millenarism precisely within the doctrine of Russian messianism. The attractiveness of the Bolshevik revolution for the ordinary people in Russia was that it could be easily fitted into that age-old mold. The fact that the original belief was tightly linked with Christianity was not a problem. The same belief can be held with entirely different ideologies, even with an ideology like Marxism that is explicitly anti-religious. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek Berdyaev writes that Russia failed to become the Third Rome, but created the Third International. This leads Berdyaev to the discussion of the “russification” of Marxism, that “extreme Westernizing doctrine” when it appeared first in Russia.

 

The second objective is what may be of more interest today: the plasticity of apocalyptic messianism. We indeed hear of it almost daily, in a coarse form of threats of nuclear annihilation that are, it is averred, needed to preserve ‘conservative values” embodied by Russia. Berdyaev, himself a philosopher of Orthodox Christianity, does use class analyses throughout his discussion of 19^th century Russian ideological journey. Every messianism took place within given historical and social framework and appealed to different classes: Slavophiles found support among the clergy, high bureaucracy and the Court; anarchists were born in, and supported by, the parts of nobility and idealistic students; social-revolutionaries and the movement of “Black partition” (agrarian reform) relied on enfranchised peasantry; support for Bolsheviks was the strongest among impoverished intellectuals and national minorities.

 

Reading Berdyaev today thus necessarily raises the question, What classes are today the supporters of “apocalyptic messianism”, if there is indeed such a vision? We are not entirely sure that it really exists beyond somewhat crazed daily statements by the deputy head of the Security Council and a few TV commentators, but I do not think that its existence can be entirely discounted. Sergei Karaganov, in his recent writings, tries to give it some rationale by presenting Russia’s struggle (that is, its “messianism”) as built on two pillars: the creation of a polycentric world that much better fits the reality of political preferences today and is more egalitarian, and a struggle for “generally recognized” (conservative) values of family, religion, gender etc. Karaganov, being a political scientist and an international relation scholar, is much more at ease in bringing out the first element which indeed, I think, has much validity (the world cannot be ruled by a hegemon and be peaceful), although it is not clear how Russia by breaking international rules is contributing to them being observed by others. 

 

The second objective (“conservative values”) is dealt in only one sentence. “Objectify speaking”, there is nothing in that area that Russia can offer to the world, given that it exhibits some of the highest numbers for suicides, homicides, family violence, alcoholism and almost all other “generally recognized” social pathologies. Prudently, Karaganov avoids the topic.

But my question is, What social classes can support the version of “apocalyptic messianism” today? Russia’s social structure is entirely different from what it was in the 19^th century or in the period described by Berdyaev. Communist system has industrialized and urbanized the country. It has created a new ruling class, the red bourgeoisie, that has, when it conveniently decided to liquidate the system, become a true capitalist bourgeoise now, even an oligarchy. A large middle class of “technical” and “humanistic” intelligentsia has been created. The young and middle-aged market-dependent middle class has developed in many cities, even if its numbers are the highest in the two capitals. Aristocracy has been eliminated. Peasantry has shrunk. Thus, within the entire new social structure, it is not clear (at least not to me) who may be “the carriers” of the new apocalyptic messianism. It could be that what we hear are just the individual voices of anger or despair—not a reflection of a more deeply-seated ideology or class interests.  These are things which the contempories are not apt to judge well: history can prove that “apocalyptic messianism” has entirely lost its ideological hold on Russia, but, it is not impossible to believe that it is emerging right now under a different ideological form that we cannot fully grasp.

Cultural revolution in the land of Kafka and Borges

 

Famous anarchist theorist, revolutionary and a renowned explorer of Siberia, Peter Kropotkin’s memoirs were published in 1898, written in Russian but originally printed in English in The Atlantic Monthly. They were later slightly revised and expanded, and this final version is what we currently have and which I have just read.

 

It is a very clearly and, I think, objectively written book. Kropotkin begins with his privileged childhood.  He was born into the house of Prince Kropotkin, one of the most influential aristocrats, close to the emperor, living in a palace in Saint Petersburg. Kropotkin tends to underplay the privileged environment into which he was born, but he does not deny it. The book then moves chronologically: his years at the elite page academy of the Court, decision not to go into the expected military service but to move to Siberia which he explored and about which he wrote several seminal geological and geographical treatises; and then onto the political activity, prison in Russia, escape to western Europe, forty years of life in exile… Since the book ends much before the October Revolution and even before the split between social-democratic and communist wings, these issues are obviously not treated. But the schism between the Marx-dominated faction of the First International and Bakunin’s anarchist faction is discussed. And attacks on state socialism, propagated by Engels and Marx (this was written before the codification of Marxism, so the two famous names are written in an unusual order) are sustained and frequent.  

 

Kropotkin returned to Russia after the October revolution. The role of anarchists in the Revolution was not negligible but their later fate was not pleasant. Kropotkin however was too old, and died in Moscow in 1921, just days before the Kronstadt rebellion. He was buried in Moscow and it was the last time that anarchists’ black flags were freely unfurled in the Soviet Union. Today, one of Moscow’s metro stations bears Kropotkin’s name.

 

Politically, the most interesting period treated in The Memoirs is the one after the Crimean War and emancipation of serfs in 1861. He writes about the contradictory nature of Alexander II who oscillated between being the Tsar—liberator and the Tsar—reactionary, and whose very death at the hands of Russian revolutionaries exhibited the conflicting strivings of his soul. Alexander was killed when, after the initial assassination attempt failed, he, alone among all, jumped out of his car to help the injured guard; that provided an easy target for the second assassin, and he did not miss.

 

Kropotkin’s descriptions of the revolutionary life in the Russia of the 1860s are hyper-realistic. But to the reader today, the entire Russian existence seems to be that of a land of wonders. The relationship between political offenses and punishments meted out is not only a product of arbitrariness (for which a nice Russian word proizvol’ exists) but the outcome of an almost infinite randomness.

 

To visualize it, assume that your political sin (emancipation of labor, printing of non-authorized literature, attendance of anti-government rallies, violent attacks on police, assassination of the dignitaries) is written on a piece of paper which is then put into an enormous machine that produces the sentence. The machine is geared to produce harsh sentences; sentences that are often written before the crime is committed. Next, let this piece of paper with your crime move to a second, attached, machine which is managed by a capricious God. That second machine revises the sentence; the sentence of exile can become one of being hanged, or, differently, of immediate freedom; it can lead you to a decade in jail or to be released and feted by liberal intelligentsia today. The first machine was described by Kafka in his Penal Colony (inspired by Dostoyevsky); the second is from Borges’ short story in which every individual passes through all possible positions in life, from a ruler to a homeless, entirety at the will of capricious gambling chance. Thus, the Russia of the 1860s, and perhaps the one of today, appears as a blend of Kafka and Borges. 

 

For a rational mind, it is very difficult to see not only how such punishments help the government, but not to notice that the capriciousness, randomness, and indeed 

sloppiness  with which punishments are executed become entirely counterproductive from the point of view of the rulers’ own interests.

 

Take Kropotkin’s case. He was followed by the secret police for “going to the people”, i.e., organizing lectures on socialism and anarchism among workers in St. Petersburg and several other cities in Russia. He would move from his home (probably dressed in the fineries), change into mud-stained boots, short coat (that we learn distinguished the workers from the rich), rough shirt, and move through dark St Petersburg alleyways until he reached a badly-lit warehouse where twenty or thirty workers and a couple of young intellectuals (camouflaged like Kropotkin in people’s attire) would meet to discuss George Berkeley, David Hume, Chernyshevsky, Jesus Christ and human freedom in general. Kropotkin was eventually arrested—but even that arrest had several unusual moments, including being foretold to the potential prey which led Kropotkin to hide and destroy all incriminating evidence; and where the arrest, perhaps because of his family background, needed a clearance from the top powers. Kropotkin is thrown into the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress, in a tiny cell (whose sketch is provided in the memoirs) where he is held for a year in solitary confinement: able to make eight paces only and to see a tiny piece of St Petersburg translucent Nordic-blue or entirely dark sky. But in such a room, he is, after a while, allowed to have his family send him food daily and is visited by the Grand Duke (the brother of the Emperor) who, according to Kropotkin, tries, through apparent amicability, to extract confession from him.

 

Kropotkin is afterwards, because of his loss of weight and general weakness, sent to a prison hospital that is so poorly guarded that he is able to plot his daring escape with a dozen of revolutionaries, some of whom are also in jail and others free. The plans are made and remade almost daily as if the plotters had access to the modern internet and were totally free to write and then revise various escape scenarios. Finally, in a rocambolesque way, Kropotkin escapes, and while the Klondike-like police chases him, he and his accomplices decide to spend the evening in the plushest restaurant of St Petersburg where police does not do razzias.

 

What was the crime for which he and his comrades, among whom women played an extraordinary important and brave role (as Kropotkin repeatedly mentions), were accused of? Creating a cultural revolution in the Russian countryside by telling the liberated but indebted peasants that they are no different from the nobles, that they have the right to a free life, and that they should rebel, burn the aristocratic estates and disobey the Emperor. The young educated people of St Petersburg and Moscow who went “to the people” (similar to those sent by Mao into the peasant communes a century later) numbered, according to Kropotkin, only some 3,000 individuals. They gave up all comforts of their previous lives. Many moved to villages, working there as ordinary journeymen or toiling the land, with the goal of bringing Russian peasants out of their millennial turpitude and teaching them how to be free. They, and again particularly so the women, did it with an unbelievable self-abnegation, dedication, courage and seriousness.  

 

They did not shy of “direct action”. While Kropotkin does not explicitly endorse assassinations, he underlines the reasons that lead to them. The line between the tyrannicide and terrorism was always thin. Kropotkin approves of the assassination of his own relative who was governor of Kharkov and enacted some harsh measures against the revolutionaries.

 

The West European part of the memoirs is interesting even if less exciting. It takes place after the suppression of the Paris Commune, in an atmosphere of police persecution, hangings, semi-legal printing presses, contraband of revolutionary tracts from Switzerland into France.  Kropotkin is most of the time, living (like Lenin later) in Switzerland, working on political agitation with the famous Association des Horlogers Jurassiens. He criticizes state socialism of German social-democrats whom he accuses of  aiming only at political power while disregarding moral transformation, indeed the cultural revolution, needed to save humankind.

 

Kropotkin’s ideas regarding the societal organization that would be built in concentric circles from the lowest to the highest level, would abolish the state, and organize production among the publicly-owned cooperatives that would not compete with each other but labor in free association and self-help looks irremediably naïve. It is not surprising that Marxists, and later Leninists, thought it was a fairy tale.

 

But perhaps that humans, at times, need visionaries, the selfless individuals who produce fairy tales and reading Kropotkin may be a way to try, at least for a moment, to believe in them. A young friend to whom I mentioned reading Kropotkin’s memoirs, and not expecting she would know of him, immediately replied: “We are reading him now to fight climate change and to help self-organization of society.”

Freedom by North-West

 

(I will not provide any citation in this article because it is not academic writing. Furthermore, since the topic is immense and has, from many angles, been written about before, any citation will simply open the question why such authors were cited, and not others. Thus it is merely a personal view—and, as we know, individuals do not matter.) 

 

There are two problems with East European intellectual elites. They are: nationalism and parochialism.

 

To understand East European elite’s nationalisms (plural) one has to look at the recent history. By “recent” I mean the past two to three centuries. Eastern Europe was the terrain of imperial competition. The empires often successfully absorbed domestic elites, but with increasing literacy, urbanization and greater share of intellectuals in local populations, the elites turned to defining the “nation”. This was part of the pan-European Romantic movement. The intellectual elites began by studying local customs, poetry,  folk dancing, then turned toward codification and standardization of languages, and moved to the claims for national self-determination. Depending on the empire they were part of, the elite’s nationalism was anti-Russian, anti-Ottoman, anti-Austrian and anti-German.  In some cases (like Poland) it was simultaneously directed against all three. Nationalism underwrote all the 19^th century rebellions: Serbian, Greek, and later Bulgarian and Albanian against the Ottomans, Polish against the Russian Empire, Croatian against Hungarians, Hungarian against Austrians.

 

After the Versailles Peace Treaty, it seemed that the elites’ goals were fulfilled: four imperial powers disintegrated. But it was an illusionary success for nationalist elites whose objective always was to include 100% of its nationality (which itself might have been broadly defined) within its borders even if meant including other peoples who, in their turn, wanted to include 100% of its nationality within its own borders. Thus the end of empires was succeeded by inter-national conflicts in countries that were composed of several nationalities (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia) or contained significant minorities (Poland and Romania); or were left with the feeling of national deprivation precisely because they included within its borders much less than 100% of its nationality (Hungary).

 

Such elites were ideologically very close to fascism and it is not strange that the support that the Nazis enjoyed in Eastern Europe was significant, and the places where they did not enjoy support were the countries where the Nazis planned to destroy local elites. Hence, the elites had to turn against them.

 

In all cases, nationalist elites looked for Western support. At times, it was forthcoming as when the principal western powers (UK and France) had an interest in dismembering the empires (from 1916 onward with respect to Austria-Hungary), or when they tried to contain them for ideological reasons (as with the Soviet Union), or for purely military reasons (France with respect to Germany between the two world wars). In other cases, the support was not forthcoming and the countries were trafficked by the great powers in Versailles and Yalta. But that did not stop the elites in their self-understanding to believe they were the defenders of the “Western civilization”. Depending on conditions, they defended (or “defended”) it, against communism, Russia’s Asianism, Turkic Ottomans, or against whoever the nationalist intelligentsia thought was less culturally advanced than themselves and their own nation.

 

The communist rule that to many countries came with the Soviet Army, made nationalism go underground. Its expressions were no longer tolerated. But it continued to exist, and as communist grip loosened and its economic failure become more obvious, the underground “waters” of nationalism grew into a torrent. That torrent blew everything in front of itself in the revolutions of 1989-90. The revolutions were self-servingly interpreted by the participants and  Western elites as the revolution of liberalism. In reality, they were revolutions of nationalism and self-determination directed against an imperial power, the Soviet Union (identified with Russia). Since the 1989-90 revolutions suddenly commanded widespread popular support, it was easy to proclaim them as revolutions of democracy rather than of nationalism. That was particularly easy in countries without ethnic minorities or “others”. But where it was not the case, it led to violent conflict: in the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Its current, and bloodiest, chapter is now being written in the war between the two most important successor states of the USSR: the conflict that was feared already at the time of the Belovezha Accords, but was hoped to be somehow avoided.

 

East European nationalisms always define themselves as “emancipatory” and “liberal” when dealing with stronger powers, while, once themselves in power, in regard to those who are weaker or less numerous, they behave imperially, reproducing the very same traits of which they are critical in others.

 

Nationalism is, not surprisingly, accompanied by parochialism. When East European nationalism in its modern version was born, it was interested only in the European balance of power, because (western) Europe then dominated the world and wrote the rules. During the communist period, interest in, and obeisance to, extended from western Europe to the United States. The US was always more attractive to East European nationalists than the European powers because it was further away and did not historically have any particular interest nor claims on Eastern Europe. For Americans, Eastern Europe existed only as a provider of cheap immigrant labor.  Thus, for the reasons of American historical disinterest, its economic and political heft, and antagonistic role vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, the US became an ideal ally.

 

This went hand-in-hand with ignorance of the rest of the world. For East European intellectual elites, decolonization, the Vietnam war, Lumumba, Mossadegh, Allende, Mao and the ascent of China, Indian non-alignment, G77, Bandung never happened. The level of disinterest in about two-thirds of the world, and at times arrogance, was in the past thirty years, exacerbated by the membership in the European Union which gave to the elites, that always suffered from a complex of inferiority, the feeling of finally belonging to the West. As in the mock-up maps of the world that The New Yorker Magazine publishes, where the rest of the world, as viewed from Manhattan, shrinks into a microscopic dot, for East European intellectual elites the world exists only North-West of wherever they happen to live.

 

This particular pattern of elite thinking opens a possibly unsolvable problem for the Russian intellectual elite. It shares, thanks to its anti-communism, and despite its imperial background, many of the features of East European elites. But since the latter are anti-Russian, the two cannot coexist in harmony. The Russian pro-Western elite finds itself in no-man’s land. It cannot find any sympathy among East European elites, nor can it find any sympathy among the Western elites because the latter are supporting Eastern Europe. Since nationalism and the hatred of the other are the principal components of East European elites’ view of the world, the only way for the Russian liberal elite to be accepted as “western” lies in hating somebody more East than themselves, There is no such.

 

The Russian elite thus finds itself intellectually (and in terms of sympathy) isolated.  They can proffer banal points of liberalism but nobody believes them. Or they can, as many seem to be doing, turn back to imperialism and invent a fiction of Euro-Asianism that gives them a special place in the world in which they do not need the approval of Western and East European elites. In either case, the outcome is dire.