The world could ignore this recurrent Russ an ch< ice as long as Russia was just an obscure province procrastinating on the margins of civilization. It can no longer afford to do so in the nuclear age, now that intercontinental ballistic missiles have made this choice central to the survival of civilization. Such is the logical conclusion of the Weimar Russia metaphor.
Comparing Metaphors
The problem presented by The Russian New Right was that it did not comply with either of the contending metaphors, but instead proposed its own. Thus it landed beyond the limits of the main current of America's Soviet debate, for, from the standpoint of the metaphor it offered nothing at all dramatic was going on m the world of the late seventies. It gave no grounds for apocalyptic prognoses nor did it promise any 'window of vulnerability' in the mid-eighties. The Soviet expansion of that time merely marked the agony of a regime of political stagnation. For the actions which the West was expecting of Brezhnev's Russia, an altogether different kind of political regime was necessary. This was something which just did not exist in the Moscow of the late seventies. Therefore, the deployment of SS-20s was not a portent of Europe's 'Finlandization'; Soviet operations in Africa did not promise to cut NATO's vital communications; and the Soviet army in Afghanistan was destined to be bogged down in that country for a long time to come. Neither 1914 nor 1938 were on their way back at the end of the 1970s. Munich and Neville Chamberlain had nothing remotely to do with the situation, nor did the calculations of the Austro-Hunganan Empire on the eve of World War I In spite of Solzhenitsvn's jeremiads, Communism was not 'on the march — in Western Europe and in America', nor did US television viewers face the prospect of having to verify this prophecy only after they had
'already been swallowed
Now, in the mid-1980s, you may judge for yourself which of the metaphors offered at the end of the last decade has withstood the test of history. Who recalls the example of 1914 today? Who any longer speaks of 1938? What has become of the 'window of vulnerability', that was supposed to be opening? Where is the prophecy about Europe's Finlandization? Do we still hear so much about Soviet plans to take over the oil-fields of the Persian Gulf?12 The hysteria s over, the drama gone. They have given way to what is almost a euphoria American politicians have been speakmg a completely different language by the m d-1980s.
'The Soviets', said Secretary of State Shultz, 'face profound structural economic difficulties, a continuing succession problem and restless allies, its diplomacy and its clients are on the defensive in many parts of the world. We can be sure that the 'correlation of forces is shifting back in our favor.'13 Richard Allen, former presidential
National Security Advisor, fully agreed w h this analysis If anything, the picture of Russia s decline he was drawing was even more sombre: 'The Soviet leadership is in the throes of a profound systemic crisis, one aggravated by political mstab !ity, . . . Combined with deeply rooted, some would say ineradicable, economic problems and widespread unease among the many nationalities of the Soviet Union, not to mention the mounting anti-Soviet'sm in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union desperately needs breatt 'ng space.'14
What exactly are they talking about? The all-out confrontation which both the American metaphors were predicting at the end of the 1970s? The general state of decline envisaged by the metaphor of Weimar Russia? Which of these approaches toward explaining Russia's behaviour in world politics has come off better — the one based on coincidental and superficial analogies with the behaviour of some other power in another set of circumstances, or the one which appealed to the long-term patterns of Russian political change?15
An Alternative Approach
We have examined here only one case in which both of the major approaches in America's Soviet debate (the ideological one, which seeks to explain the 1980s in terms of 1938, and the geopolitical one, which does the same in terms of 1914) have proved incapable of understanding the present behaviour of Russia or predicting its future course. (We will encounter other similar cases later.) The Russian political system has always turned out to be more complex than such explanations allow It has been developing cyclically; it has been pulsating, time and again it has entered into zones of decline, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but has never even come close to disintegrating Instead, it has emerged from each agony renewed, ever a greater threat, more powerful and menacing. In fact, it has been like this throughout history (see Fig. 1. in the Appendix).
The Muscovite tsardom was quietly flickering out -n the late seventeenth century on the periphery of Europe. Yet, in another quarter-century it had swiftly moved out of the zone of decline and, so far from remaining a provincial backwater kingdom, emerged before the world as the mighty Petersburg empire which for the first time tried to assert Russian control over Eastern and Central Europe he establishment of Petersburg Russia, with its officers arrayed in uniforms with shining epaulettes and speakmg French better than they did Russian, w as just as unrecognizably different from the bearded boyars of earlier Muscovite Rus" as the elites of Soviet Russia are from their tsarist forbears Peter's revolution changed the country no less than Lenin's, and it promised Russia a night to the pmnacle of world power As early as the second half of the eighteenth century Catherine's chancellor Bezborodko boasted that, 'not a single cannon in Europe would dare fire a shot without our permission'. By the middle of the next century. Petersburg Russia had reached its apex, having become a superpower and the gendarme of Europe, the chief anti-commurist force in the world, which Karl Marx (just like President Reagan later) saw as an 'evil empire', and 'the bastion of world reactior I his was the time when the Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin exclaimed, 'I ask can anvone compete with us, and whom do we not compel to obedience? Doesn't the political destiny of the world rest in our hands, if only we should care to decide it . . . ? The Russian sovereign is closer than Charles V and Napoleon were to their dream of universal empire!'16
What happened then? Only a few decades later we sec Petersburg Russia in the same desperate straits it had once led Muscovy out of, having lost the proud status of superpower, once more provincial and agonizing. Vladimir U'ych Lenin was destined to do for Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century what Peter had accomplished at the start of the eighteenth — dismantle her political system's outdated format in order to rescue its medieval, quasi-Byzantine mperial essence Once more — this time with its communism, its International, and its single party system — it differed so much from its predecessor as to seem another country. Again it rose to the heights of military might and became a superpower. By mid-century it had achieved what Peter could not, and had swallowed Eastern and part of Central Europe, with a population of И 1 million, without so much as missing a stride And then what? A few decades later we find Soviet Russia in the same situation of historical eclipse it had once led the Petersburg Empire out of, again agonizing with the long litany of seemingly incurable diseases recited by Shultz and Allen. Truly, one has to ignore completely Russia's past if one is to believe that this is the final chapter in the history I have just been trying to sketch In fact, the farther Russia progresses on the path of historical decline, and the closcr she comes to the moment of national ensis, when once again — for the third time m as many centuries — it will be decided which path she will take to halt her current decline, the more perilous the world situation becomes. Euphoria is no more appropriate now than panic was of the late 1970s If ever in the last half-millenium the West had vital need of a precise, well thought-out, and potent strategy capable of influencing Russia's historical choice, then t is right now, in the nuclear age in the face of a nat onal crisis unfolding n Russia before our very eyes.