After the pain and humiliation of losing Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, after the pain and humiliation of losing all the Soviet republics, it would seem that the hideous course had been run, that there was no more loss that could occur, no further humiliation that could be inflicted.
But in fact the greatest dangers lay ahead. Russia itself was at risk. The cracks that started in the Eastern Bloc and broke the USSR into fifteen separate countries were now threatening the new Russian Federation itself. The centrifugal demon wasn’t done yet.
The epicenter of schism was Chechnya. It was hardly a new problem. The fierce mountaineers of the Caucasus—Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis—had been resisting the Russians since the eighteenth century. That resistance flared into war in the mid-nineteenth century when a great leader arose. The Imam Shamil, a Dagestani, was able to unite the various tribes and nations of the Caucasus, becoming both their spiritual and military leader. Handsome in a fierce, severe way (to this day his picture, along with that of Jean-Claude Van Damme or Rambo, adorns the bedroom walls of many teenage boys in the Caucasus), he was a cunning and valiant leader, able to resist the tsar’s armies for nearly thirty years until he was taken prisoner in 1859. The Russians treated him with honor and he died a white-bearded patriarch in the holy city of Medina in 1871.
But his fighting spirit lives on, especially among the Chechens, the Comanches of Islam. And Shamil’s hometown of Gimry is kept under strict government control so that it does not become a sacred place and rallying point—all residents have a five-digit number that they must recite to police at checkpoints when entering or leaving town.
The outbreak of war in 1994 between Chechnya and Russia sent existential shock waves to the north. This wasn’t just another tiny republic seeking vainglorious independence; this could be the beginning of Russia’s unraveling, the secret sweet dream of the United States and NATO. That same year NATO launched airstrikes against the Bosnian Serbs. Strobe Talbott describes the reaction of the Russian hawks: “NATO’s war against Belgrade over Kosovo was a warm-up for the one it would someday unleash against Moscow over Chechnya.”[187]
NATO bombing or invasion aside, the parallels with Yugoslavia were ominous. Putin was obsessed by what he called “the Yugoslavization of Russia,”[188] the breaking apart into ever smaller fragments. Chechnya, said Putin, “is a continuation of the collapse of the USSR.”[189] And it wasn’t just Chechnya. “The entire Caucasus would have followed … and then up along the Volga River … reaching deep into the country.”[190] Putin was very clear about his “mission”: “If we don’t put an immediate end to this Russia will cease to exist.”[191]
America from time to time is troubled by the prospect of decline. But for all-or-nothing Russia decline is not an issue. Its very existence is always at stake. It is the default position of the Russian mind. A former legislator, Vladimir Ryzhkov, says: “Under Putin’s police state we are headed for another Time of Troubles in the best case scenario, if not a total collapse of the Russian state.”[192] A museum director says that unless Russia creates a harmonious society within five generations “Russia will perish. Only the Duchy of Moscow will be left.”[193] A columnist wonders—Will Russia survive until 2024?
Very prevalent today, the idea of Russia ceasing to exist is nothing new. In 1836 Peter Chaadayev published the first of his Philosophical Letters. Like a good Russian aristocrat, he wrote them in French, and later on they had to be translated into Russian. In those Philosophical Letters Chaadayev despaired of Russia, which he said belongs to neither Europe nor Asia. It neither partakes of the dynamic of those great civilizations nor possesses a dynamic of its own. “We belong to that number of nations which do not seem to make up an integral part of the human race, but which exist only to teach the world some great lesson. The lesson which we are destined to give will, naturally, not be lost; but who knows when we shall find ourselves once again in the midst of humanity, and what affliction we shall experience before we accomplish our destiny?”[194]
In a move that predated Soviet abuse of psychiatry by a century, Chaadayev was declared insane and forcibly placed under medical care, his papers seized.
A paradigm emerged from Chaadayev’s ideas. Cut off from the West by the Mongol conqueror and by obscurantist tsars, Russia had missed all the developmental stages of civilizational progress—Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment. The lack of any developmental dynamic meant that progress came from above, from the omnipotent ruler, the tsar. It was a country held together by power, religion, and fear—in Chaadayev’s excellent phrase “a realm of brute fact and ceremony.”[195]
Russia’s inherent shakiness was sensed not only by Russian philosophers, but by travelers to those parts in the nineteenth century. “Russia may well fall to pieces as many expect,” noted the dashing British intelligence officer Arthur Conolly, who often traveled through Central Asia in native guise, using the name Khan Ali, a pun on his own.[196] Not only is he credited with creating the term “great game,” he played it to the hilt until he was beheaded in Bukhara in 1842 at the age of thirty-four.
For the anti-regime intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the destruction of Russia was something they not only sensed but actively desired. One of the major poets of that period, Alexander Blok, claimed he could actually hear the empire collapsing. Blok, who hailed the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 as proof that Nature was still mightier than man and his arrogant works, longed for an elemental revolution that would sweep away all the cant and rot, making a place for a new and better civilization to arise. Deeply disillusioned by the actual revolution that took place, he died in 1921, no longer able to hear history in the making because, as he said, “all sounds have stopped.”[197]
In Russia the sense of shaky enterprise, the tendency to build structures that collapse, is balanced by a genius for survival. A Russian hacker with the handle “Lightwatch” put it like this: “The Russians have a very amusing feature—they are able to get up from their knees, under any conditions, or under any circumstances.”[198]
Russia withstood and outlasted the invasions of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler. Russia survived its own tyrants from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin. It survived the implosion of its state structure during the Time of Troubles in the early 1600s, again in 1917, and yet again in 1991.
Those events have inspired great works of art—the opera Boris Godunov about the Time of Troubles, War and Peace about the invasion of Napoleon, Life and Fate about World War II. And those works of art have in turn inspired further acts of heroic survival by Russians, and have spread the fame of Russian fortitude throughout the world. It seems to have always been there. In the mid-900s the Arab traveler Ibn Miskawayh called them “a mighty nation … with great courage. They know not defeat, not does any of them turn his back until he slays or be slain.”[199]
192
Vladimir Ryzhkov, “Guriev Is Latest Victim of Putin’s Police State,”
193
Interview with Vladimir Grechukhin, “Pravda dlya nas vazhnee zakonov,”
194
Peter Chaadayev,
196
Arthur Conolly,
197
Quoted in Avril Pyman,
198
The hacker called “Lightwatch” quoted in Clifford Levy, “What’s Russian for Hacker?”
199
Ibn Miskawayh quoted in Richard Lourie,