Decolonization is always a painful process. According to the Dutch sociologist Van Doorn, “to colonize is to ‘imprison’ others, but it is also to imprison oneself.”[16] This is because to colonize is for the colonizing nation “an investment, not only in the economic sense, but also culturally and morally.”[17] Van Doorn spoke of the “broad, almost total deception” of the Dutch after the loss of Indonesia, which could explain why “the mourning process of the end of [Dutch] Indonesia has been so difficult.” He mentioned as “an additional fact… that Indonesia was almost our entire empire. All colonial powers have wrestled with decolonization after World War II, but while England and France in particular were driven step by step from their global positions, the Netherlands lost everything at once.”[18] This fact, to lose “everything at once,” played a role also in Russia. The decolonization was sudden, unexpected, and total. The Russian frontiers were completely redrawn, and after centuries of almost uninterrupted expansion, the map of the country resembled that of sixteenth-century Russia.
TWO REACTIONS TO THE LOSS OF EMPIRE: TO ACCEPT OR NOT TO ACCEPT
There are two reactions to the loss of empire: to accept or not to accept the loss. Unfortunately, in the Russian situation, after a short period of shock, the loss of empire did not result in a gradual acceptance, but in a swelling tidal wave of chauvinism and nationalism. It resulted in nostalgia for lost greatness mixed with revanchism and hatred of the “enemies” who had brought the Soviet Union down. Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s reform minister, told how this process took place. “In Russia,” he wrote, “the peak of the post-imperial syndrome mixed with radical nationalism did not come immediately after the collapse of the USSR, as I had expected, but later.”[19]
And he continued:
[W]e had assumed that overcoming the transitional recession and the beginning of economic growth and an increase in real income for the population would allow people to replace the impossible dreams of empire restoration with the prosaic cares of personal well-being. We were mistaken. Experience showed that in times of profound economic crisis, when it is not clear whether there will be enough money to feed the family until the next paycheck and whether there will be a next paycheck or whether you will be fired, most people do not worry about imperial grandeur. On the contrary, when economic security is growing and confidence that this year’s salary will be greater than last year’s, and that unemployment… will not affect you, and you see that life has changed but is returning to stability, you can come home and watch a Soviet film with your family in which our spies are better than theirs, where we always win, and the life depicted onscreen is cloudless, and then talk about how enemies have destroyed a great country and we’ll still show them who’s best.[20]
Gaidar shows very clearly that the Russian nationalist revival was not the consequence of some quasi-Marxist Verelendung of the population, but, on the contrary, developed parallel to a growing material well-being and security that enabled people to look further than the worries of their daily life. But the growing material security was not the only factor that explained the emergence of the new Russian nationalism. There were at least two additional factors that played a role. The first was the almost predictable counterrevolutionary drawback that takes place after every revolution and, second, the deliberate nationalist propaganda campaign that was conducted by the political leadership.
PITIRIM SOROKIN AND THE ETERNAL CYCLE OF IDEOLOGIES IN REVOLUTIONS
The counterrevolutionary drawback that takes place after every revolution has been described by Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), who, before World War I, was a young liberal opponent of the autocratic tsarist regime. Imprisoned several times under tsar Nicholas II, he became in 1917 the personal secretary to Kerensky, the leader of the democratic Provisional Government that was installed after the February Revolution. He was sentenced to death by the Bolsheviks, but ultimately exiled in 1922. He went to the United States, where he became one of the leading sociologists and founded the sociology department of Harvard University. His personal experiences led him to analyze the phenomenon of revolution and its implications for society. In his book Man and Society in Calamity (1946) he distinguished different phases in revolutions.
Theoretically, we can distinguish in any revolution two phases: first, destructive and “liberating,” second, constructive and “restraining.”[21] …[In the first phase] all ideologies that attack the oppressing institutions and values from which the revolutionary group suffers gain rapidly in popularity and acceptance.[22] …If the revolution is mainly political, the ideologies are primarily political; if the revolution is also economic the ideologies have an economic character; and if the revolution is religious, the ideologies assume a religious nature.[23] …However, since economic revolutions are much deeper than political ones, they hardly ever occur without having at the same time their political, religious, or nationalistic aspects. Ordinarily the greatest revolutions become economic.[24]
Sorokin mentioned the Paris Commune and the October Revolution of 1917 as examples of such economic revolutions. It is clear that the Russian Revolution of 1991, that put an end to communism with its planned economy and, after an absence of more than seventy years, reintroduced a market economy, was not a purely political revolution, but equally an economic revolution and consequently as deep and fundamental in impact and scope as the October Revolution of 1917 that it, finally, buried.
But revolutions are dialectical processes. They carry, as a rule, their negation—the counterrevolution—in their womb. After the first period of revolutionary fervor follows a second period in which the pendulum swings in the opposite direction. Sorokin described this process as follows:
Everyone knows the refrain “It was the fault of Rousseau and Voltaire,” sung in the second period of the French Revolution, when the ideologies of the first phase were giving way to those of Chateaubriand, J. de Maistre, de Bonald, and others. The story repeated itself in the Russian revolution [of October 1917]. In the first period bourgeois science, philosophy, Pushkin, Tschaikovsky and other representatives of the “degenerate aristocracy” and the “bourgeoisie” were assailed. Religion, the emperors and the great military generals of the past, the family, marriage, and sexual chastity were likewise attacked. In the second period, the Revolution banned the Marxian texts of history, restored the family, praised sexual chastity, and elevated Pushkin and Tschaikovsky to even higher positions than they had before. It idealized the great Russian Czars, the famous generals, and even the religious leaders of the past. It exalted patriotism, “Our Soviet Fatherland.”… Soviet Russia resumed exactly the same foreign policy as that of the Czarist regime.[25]
According to Sorokin, “ideologies of the second stage represent a revival of the living ideologies of the prerevolutionary society in new dress and colors. The revolution itself, when successful, inherently and necessarily consumes its earlier ideologies and resurrects the living prerevolutionary ideologies. This explains why in practically all great revolutions the ideologies of the first phase turned out to be unpopular in the second.”[26] This process may explain why in present-day Russia the capitalist liberalism of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys,” which guided the reforms of the early 1990s, has fallen into disgrace, together with the protagonists of the perestroika period. Not only of its leaders: Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but also of the liberal reform ministers, such as Yegor Gaidar and Andrey Kozyrev, who are now accused of being responsible for the economic breakdown and the loss of empire. Putin is clearly the representative of Russia’s “restoration” after the chaotic transformation years. It was Putin who called the loss of empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” Although he does not want to restore communism, he is the man who exalts in the second phase what had been destroyed in the first: a centralized, strong state, a positive assessment of Stalin’s “geopolitical genius,” a leading role for the secret services, and the eternal glory of the Russian empire.
21
Pitirim A. Sorokin,