The International Politics of Eurasia: v. 9: The End of Empire? Comparative Perspectives on the Soviet Collapse

S. Frederick Starr, Karen Dawisha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315483634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First Published in 1997. This book is the ninth in a series often volumes produced by the Russian Littoral Project, The project shares the conviction that the transformation of the former Soviet republics into independent states demands systematic analysis of the determinants of the domestic and foreign policies of the new countries. The series of volumes is intended to provide a basis for comprehensive scholarly study of these issues. This volume was shaped by the author's view that future scholarship about the post Soviet world requires both specialized research and broad-gauge studies that carefully juxtapose the breakup of the Soviet empire with the transformation of other multinational empires.

II
Imperial Disintegration

3
The Fall of the Tsarist Empire and the USSR

The Russian Question and Imperial Overextension

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Roman Szporluk

Introduction

The Russian state collapsed twice in the twentieth century. In 1917, the Russian Empire disintegrated while it was fighting and losing a foreign war. The Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, in peacetime, several decades after it had won the greatest war in Russia’s long history of wars. The first state collapsed before the Communists took power; the second, when it was under Communist rule.

Many works have been written—and even more will be written—about causes of the breakup of both the Russian Empire and the USSR.¹ Our task here is much more modest—to focus on certain distinct “factors” (“circumstances,” “conditions”) which substantially contributed to these events, without claiming, however, that these are sufficient or necessary “causes” of what happened.

Unlike empires of modern times that fell while their former metropoles were gradually being transformed into “normal” nations and nation-states, the tsarist—and then the Soviet—empire fell apart before a modern Russian nation and a Russian nation-state had emerged. A major factor in the imperial collapse in 1917, and in the Soviet collapse in 1991, proved to be conflict between the imperial state and an emergent Russian nation or “society.” In both cases, “Russia” contributed to the fall of “Empire.” This leads us to the conclusion that both empires failed to solve the “Russian Question”—arguably their most important nationality question.

Another major factor in the fall of both the Russian and Soviet empires was their overextension. They established their hegemony over nations and territories that refused to recognize Russia and /or the USSR as a superior civilization, a higher form of economy and government—qualities which an empire must possess if its rule is not to be based on coercion alone. To maintain hegemony over them in the absence of such recognition required a disproportionate reliance on coercion, and this made Russian rule in “Europe” a heavy burden on the Russian people, which in turn further contributed to the alienation of the Russians from “their” state. These were additional obstacles to the formation of a modern Russian nation. Thus, the inclusion of non-Russian peoples under Imperial/Soviet rule negatively affected the conditions under which the Russians lived. Having been called—and coerced—by their rulers, both tsarist and Communist, to serve “the great cause” of the empire, the Russians found it very difficult to establish for themselves a political identity distinct from and independent of empire.

Because of this special focus, the historical account of this essay is highly selective in facts and problems mentioned. We are interested in those elements of the past experience which may be a useful guide for the identification of the future trends, from which one may draw some lessons. Hegel’s famous quip that “the only lesson history teaches is that men do not learn any lessons from history” is usually quoted out of context: Hegel did say not that nothing else was to be learned from history—the problem, he said, was that people did not know how to find the deeper meaning behind concrete events.²

What do we mean by empire? There are many definitions available and we do not propose to offer a new one here. Instead, we shall help ourselves to some descriptions of empire by others which appear to be helpful in our study. Thus, Ghita Ionescu sees “three basic elements” in an empire: (1) “a strong political center, animated by a historical mission of expansion,” (2) “religious or ideological coercion,” and (3) “a sense of final purpose” in its elite.³

For Dominic Lieven, “an empire has to be a great power,” but it must also “play a major role in shaping … the values and culture of an historical epoch. To be a great power has implications as regards resources, ideologies, expansionist temptations and cultural styles which, in historical terms, are implicit in the concept of empire.” ⁴

Finally, Istvan Hont sees an empire as “a kind of territorial state-system within which entire populations or nations (even if they might retain the appearance of being the inhabitants of a distinct and separate territory) are considered as either superiors or inferiors.” Hont agrees with Michael W. Doyle that “Empire … is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social, or cultural dependence.”⁵

Thus, following these authors, we conclude that to qualify as an empire a polity needs to be a great power and to be internationally recognized as such; to extend over a large territory and to include different peoples under different legal and administrative systems; to be endowed with a sense of ideological or religious mission that transcends considerations of power politics; and to act as a leader in the sphere of culture.

The Tsarist Empire

Russia began to call itself an empire only in 1721, but it had in fact become an empire long before Peter I renamed his country. Peter’s assumption of a Western title (at that time in Europe there was one other polity in the same class, the “Holy Roman Empire” ruled by the Habsburgs)—is rightly associated with his— and Russia’s—orientation toward and identification with “Europe.”

Empire in the East

But long before these changes in titles, Muscovy had already become an empire. A key event in this process took place in the reign of Ivan the Terrible—the so-called “Conquest of Kazan.” Andreas Kappeier rightly devotes a chapter titled “Gathering of the Lands of the Golden Horde from the 16th to the 18th Century” in his account of the rise of the Russian Empire.⁶

Subsequently, Muscovite Russians and Volga Tatars and other eastern, mainly Turkic and Islamic peoples, lived under one jurisdiction. The Muscovite elites worked out a modus vivendi with the elites of the eastern peoples, with whom their ancestors had been acquainted during the so-called Mongol rule over Muscovite Russia. Richard Pipes has noted that the Russians were successful in assimilating those (eastern) nations whose nobility did not enjoy the same privileges their Russian counterparts had, but the Russians were a “complete failure” in the Western provinces, where the local nobles had traditionally been better off than they.⁷ Under Moscow, the Russian and Tatar elites established a cooperative relationship and Moscow’s further expansion to the east was facilitated by this Muscovite-Tatar cohabitation.⁸ The Muscovites and the peoples of the Volga and farther east lived together in a polity to which concepts taken from the West European experience did not apply: Moscow’s “Eastern Empire” was formed before the age of modern nations and nationalism, and in areas where Western ideas, if known at all, were accessible only via Moscow.

Empire in the West

Things were quite different in Russia’s western domains. The Muscovite state also expanded to the West before Peter’s time, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gaining Novgorod and parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a vast polity that at one time extended over what we know today as Belarus, Ukraine, and western regions of Russia. Those western acquisitions brought areas previously exposed to Western influences into the Muscovite realm, but they were not strong enough to counterweigh the eastern character of the Russian state. The first “Westernization” of Moscow came in the seventeenth century when the tsar established his overlordship over the formerly Polish-ruled parts of Ukraine to the east of the Dnieper, and also over the city of Kiev. The result was the transformation of Russian culture under the impact of Ukrainian or “West Russian” (including Belorussian) infusions, which prompted some Russian scholars to connect the emergence of a modern Russia to this “Ukrainization” of Muscovy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁹

The next major step in the Europeanization of Russia came under Peter the Great. In addition to the many changes in cultural, administrative and military spheres, Peter gained new territories from Sweden, including the site where St. Petersburg itself, Russia’s new capital, was built, and also the Baltic provinces, the present-day Estonia and Latvia. In the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, Catherine II added most of Poland’s Ukraine (except Galicia) and all of today’s Belarus and Lithuania. Finally, in 1815, under Alexander I, Russia acquired even the central Polish lands, with Warsaw, Lublin, Kielce, and Kalisz, which came to be known as the “Congress Kingdom.” A little earlier, in 1809, Russia acquired Finland from Sweden, thus adding a Protestant nation to the mainly Protestant Estonians and Latvians and Baltic Germans who had been under Russia since Peter.

Thus, besides the Orthodox and Muslims (and Russia gained many of the latter in the Crimea and other formerly Ottoman possessions), this newly enlarged Russia included millions of Jews, Catholics (including Catholics of the Uniate rite), and Protestants. This kind of imperial expansion into “Europe” had no analogy in the European experience. The West European empires expanded overseas—while Russia, concurrently with eastern conquests, was establishing its rule over regions and peoples who were more “European” than Russia itself. In this respect the Habsburg expansion into the Balkans and parts of Poland (1772, 1795) was different because Vienna was more “Western” than any of its new acquisitions. To be sure, modern Western nations had been built by conquest. But those conquests happened long before the age of nationalism, and this factor in the end made it possible for the Bretons, the Burgundians, and the Provençals to recognize the primacy of Paris and eventually to become “French.” As the Russians were soon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Preface
• I. Theoretical Perspectives on the Forms and Development of Empires
• II. Imperial Disintegration
• III. Peripheral Successor States and the Legacies of Empire
• IV. Metropolitan Successor States and the Question of Imperial Reconstitution
• V. Changing Forms and Prospects of Empire
• Appendix: Project Participants
• Index