RUSSIAN DESPOTISM AND RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM: INSEPARABLE TWIN BROTHERS?
In Russia internal despotism and external imperialism went hand in hand. They were, so to speak, inseparable twin brothers. We can distinguish five factors that played a role in establishing this link:
1. Territorial expansion gave extra legitimation to the rule of the despot.
2. Territorial expansion functioned as a surrogate satisfaction for the disenfranchised (serf) population.
3. Because despots tend to reign for longer periods than democratically elected leaders, they are in a better position to make long-term projects, especially those concerning imperialist territorial expansion.
4. Despotic rule as such fits better with imperial rule than with democratic rule. Despotic and imperial rule are congenial.
5. Despotic rule is not only more apt to generate imperialist policies than non-despotic rule, it also has a tendency—as in a dialectical process—to be strengthened, in its turn, by the empire, because its vast surface and the many different subjugated populations will hamper the establishment of a more democratic rule. In this sense despotic rule and imperialism are mutually reinforcing processes.
Despotic rule means suffering for the population, which is denied basic human freedoms and civil rights. A despotic tsar does not legitimize his absolutist rule by a reference to the popular will, but to divine right. This legitimacy, based upon a metaphysical droit divin, will be strengthened when the ruler can boast important imperial conquests. Imperial conquests provide, so to speak, an additional legitimacy for his rule. This same mechanism can be seen to play a role in Putin’s (partial) rehabilitation of Stalin. Stalin’s “geopolitical genius,” that is, his territorial expansionism, is used to (re-)legitimate his regime.
Since the Sobornoe Ulozhenie of 1649, which is the social charter of Russian absolutism, the enserfment of the Russian peasantry, which had already begun two centuries earlier, was definitively established. From that moment on Russian serfs were irreversibly bound to the soil of their master. Moreover, the towns were subjected to tight controls and sealed off from the rest of the country. The urban poor were considered as state serfs. Only taxpayers (that is, the aristocracy and the rich merchant class) could be legal residents. No inhabitant could leave without royal permission.[28] Rural migration was definitively stopped. Serfdom, however, was not in the interest of the private landowners alone. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian state owned land with twenty million serfs on it. This was 40 percent of the peasant population.[29] This population was literally the property of the state. A population that has practically no rights, not even the ability to move freely around the home country, cannot have the personal pride and individual satisfaction of free people. In such a case, the home country’s imperial conquests provide an ersatz satisfaction. Feelings of powerlessness and a lack of personal pride and individual accomplishment are compensated by a process of identification with the power and the glory of their country. The lack of personal respect that they receive as individuals is compensated by the respect—and fear—that their home country inspires. “If a man is proud of his Belief, his Fatherland, his People,” one can still read in an anonymous Russian publication of 2007 attacking democracy, “he finds internal pride in himself as a representative of this great people and great country.”[30] This mechanism can be observed in a population of serfs that has been enslaved, as well as in a population that gives up its original freedom and enslaves itself for the sake of national glory. John Stuart Mill already described this mechanism in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), where he wrote:
There are nations in whom the passion for governing others is so much stronger than the desire of personal independence, that for the mere shadow of the one they are found ready to sacrifice the whole of the other. Each one of their number is willing, like the private soldier in an army, to abdicate his personal freedom of action into the hands of his general, provided the army is triumphant and victorious, and he is able to flatter himself that he is one of a conquering host, though the notion that he has himself any share in the domination exercised over the conquered is an illusion. A government strictly limited in its powers and attributions, required to hold its hands from overmeddling, and to let most things go on without its assuming the part of guardian or director, is not to the taste of such a people.[31]
According to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk this tendency to compensate one’s lack of personal self-respect by indulging in the imperialist glory of one’s home country can be observed especially in the nation states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are for him “experiments in collective self-esteem and self-aggrandizement, directed by the mass media.” The foreign policy of these national states, “insofar as it included imaginary competition, was always dramatized by tensions of respect and disrespect.”[32] This element of surrogate satisfaction must not be underestimated. It clearly still plays an important role in present-day Russia, where citizens, whose political freedoms are more and more restricted, long for “national greatness” and a recovery of “Russia’s glorious past.”[33]
Despotic rulers are sometimes poisoned, sometimes deposed. However, as a rule, they tend to have longer reigns than those of their democratic counterparts, who, at regular intervals, have to expose themselves to elections. Their long reigns enable despots to initiate long-term projects, such as territorial conquests, and bring them to fruition. Russia’s kings and tsars were often blessed with long lives, which led to extraordinarily long reigns. This was the case for the first three rulers, who may be considered the founders of the Russian imperial project. Ivan III (the Great) reigned for forty-three years, his successor Vassily III, for twenty-eight years, and Ivan IV (the Terrible), who was the first to call himself tsar, for thirty-seven years. Between 1462 and 1584 these three rulers reigned for 108 years altogether, a period that was only interrupted for fourteen years when Ivan IV was a minor. It is, therefore, no surprise that under this long and stable rule the foundations for Russia’s continuous expansion were laid.
30
Anonymous authors,
31
John Stuart Mill,
32
Peter Sloterdijk,
33
Instead of seeking refuge in the ersatz self-esteem, provided by empire, a more authentic way to reappropriate the self-esteem that has been denied, is described by Axel Honneth in his book