Jerzy Niezbrzycki

The idea of Russia

[... ] Russia is a state in its own right. The sources of its material and spiritual power lie both in Europe and in Asia. But the most important source, the most important cornerstone of its strength arose and exists, as it were, in a fourth dimension, in the abstract. This source is its statehood, its polity, its system of government and power. It is beyond space and beyond time, it is eternal in its essential essence: in its separation from the nation, in its supremacy over the interests of that nation, in the immutability of its universal ambitions.

The territorial development of the Russian state proceeded in inverse proportion to the development of the internal freedom of the people. The external power and strength of the Russian state fed at the expense of the masses of the people. “The state was strengthening, the nation was languishing”, clarifies the excellent Klyuchevsky.

At a time when the people are winning for themselves perhaps relative political or social rights and freedoms, the state is in danger of catastrophe. The state is strongest when it is based on absolute political and social slavery of the people.

This is an antinomy so blatant in relation to those laws which guide the political development of European states and nations that this antinomy alone should arouse great caution in the assessment of Russian phenomena.

But with this antinomy is connected another, no less fundamental. It is the constant democratisation of the ruling stratum or caste. The state itself is constantly evolving, changing the top of the leadership, not allowing the elite or aristocracy to stabilise, appointing elements to this leadership, coming from the very pits, “without lineage – tribe”. If, at any period of the development of the Russian state, this evolution is stopped for a long time, if a general tendency towards stabilisation arises – then a veritable hurricane of revolution passes through Russia destroying the existing state of affairs and introducing a new one. Such were the reforms of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great. Such was the role of the Bolsheviks headed by Lenin.

Finally, the third antinomy is the separate mutual relationship of state and nation. The Russian state has never had fixed boundaries “at all times they have been haphazard, expanding according to the success of Moscow’s arms and the colonising advances of the Greater Russians” (Klyuchevsky).

Engels spoke of Russia as the possessor of vast, plundered, other people’s property, “which will be taken from it by force on the day of reckoning”. Over the past 500 years, the Russian state has been expanding at the rate of 150 sq. km per day. This territorial expansion has been achieved by Russia through a relentless policy of militarism, which, incidentally, has always been justified by the needs of “state defence”. Russia’s war policy, like its entire foreign policy, was in the closest connection with its domestic policy. Winning wars strengthened the existing order of things, losing wars caused discontent, riots, forced the government to reform. Hence the revolutionary elements in Russia always and invariably pursued a policy of capitulation during wars. The Russian people were not the subjects of this policy of state expansion. It was only its instrument. Hardly: its own social and spiritual development invariably proceeded behind, was a function of the development and evolution of the state. The state created and formed the nation. Consequently, while the Russian state at each actual moment in history was itself actual, the formation of the Russian nation was never complete. Only the Russian state has a history; the Russian nation is a mutable mass both ethnically and spiritually, constantly adapting to ever–changing borders and state forms.

Two elements are inextricably intertwined in the history of Russia: the despotism of all centralising power and constant rebellion, revolution and anarchy. These two elements, seemingly polar opposites, have often been closely fused together in this territory. The despotism element would be represented, theoretically speaking, by the central authority. The element of rebellion – by the nation, the people. But we know that the greatest revolutionary upheavals in the history of Russia were carried out precisely by the authorities. One Russia knows only a form of revolution no longer guided, no longer postulated, but actually imposed.

The Russian people invariably reveal tendencies both to rely, most passively, slavishly, on a central despotic power, and to incline to the wildest anarchy. The rebel tsar is the ideal ruler. The ideal tsars of Russia were the cruel revolutionaries Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great; the ideal Russian revolutionary, no less cruel, was the self-declared tsar: Pugachev.

Researchers of the Russian soul and character have repeatedly drawn attention to the feminist, passive nature of the Russian psyche. Popular in the West, the recently deceased Russian philosopher N. Berdyaev wrote many treatises on this feminism and the resulting ambivalence – the Russian duality. The Russian nation is indeed a highly polarised nation, containing within itself a huge number of contradictions and opposites, not found in any other nation to such an extent.

This passivity, this unmanliness of the Russian nation makes it incapable of forming its own idea, in addition to submitting to the authorities in an involuntary manner. The Russian nation is one big world nation that does not have its own philosophy. The fact that in the formation of the Russian nation there was no such decisive and weighty factor as religion in the life of all peoples – both in Europe and Asia – played a huge role. Orthodoxy was invariably an element of the state in Russia, earlier in the hands of the Mongols, later of the tsars or emperors. No nation has revealed such fervour in a spontaneous, unprompted, both collective and individual search for God as the Russians, having not found Him in the Russia’s official Church.

The Russian nation is a tragic nation in this respect too. Having within itself a great tendency to accept religion as the supreme dogma, having much potential religious fervour, it has no possibility of discharging these passions. The attitude to the state, to the ruler, to any idea that came from outside or was imposed from above, therefore takes on the characteristics of an almost religious attitude.

The inability to create its own idea means that Russia is in constant search of ideas from outside. The tragedy of Russia is that the lack of synchronisation of its history with that of Europe has meant that ideas from outside generally come to Russia when the sources of those ideas are already in decline.

When Russia adopted Christianity from Byzantium, Byzantium was in decline. This immediately shook confidence in the strength of the very idea of Orthodoxy. It was therefore subordinated to the state as a stronger and more powerful cause. The idea of religion was politicised, so to speak. The idea of the state itself was taken from the Mongols, but also at a time when the huge legacy of Genghis Khan and Tamerlan was breaking up into hordes and khanates. The Muscovite rulers understood that the cause of this collapse was the overgrowth of a kind of Mongol feudalism, a kind of liberalism, autonomy in territorial administration; and here the idea of the state is adopted with an amendment: centralisation must not be allowed. The axis of politics must be “collection”, amalgamation, administrative and territorial unification. The idea of enlightened absolutism was brought, brought literally in person, by Peter the Great from the West at a time when absolutism in Europe had already reached its zenith and was about to collapse into ruins. Hence the 18th and 19th centuries in Russian history saw not only the construction of the peculiar principles of Russian self-rule, but also the role of the “gendarme” of all other monarchies, oppressions, tyrannies, and universal absolutism.

In Pobedonoscev’s letters to Tsar Alexander III (while he was still heir to the throne) we read:

There will come a time, perhaps, when sycophants (...) will assure Your Imperial Highness that it is only necessary to give the Russian State a so-called constitution in the Western manner, and everything will go smoother and wiser, and power can be quite at ease. This is a lie, and God forbid that a Russian should live to see the day when this lie is realised.

Ideas are imprisoned in Russia like living people. Until a new idea supersedes an old one, the idea in Russia ossifies and withers, turns from the social into the increasingly political, the increasingly rigid and reactionary. Russia began to adopt the idea of revolution at the end of the 19th century, when such ideas were weakening in Europe itself. As Russia absorbed revolution as an overarching idea, Europe faced a prolonged period of decadence. Under these conditions, could there not have arisen in Russia the conviction that, behold, Russia was absorbing into itself, digesting in its juices of historical atavism this idea of freedom and liberty, transforming it into an idea of state totalism and human bondage, becoming once again the gendarme of its grim vision in relation to the whole world, unhappily its very period incapable of its own new creative impulses.

Under these conditions, could there not have been a conviction in Russia that Russia was merely the worthy heir and inheritor of all the greatest human thoughts. Was there not a basis for the conception of a “rotten West” to be born, especially since the pessimism and defeatism sweeping Europe more and more perfectly confirmed it in this conviction. Has not Russian ambition in this direction been, and is not, fuelled by the philosophy of European decadents such as Spengler, Kierkegaard and now Sartre, and a whole pleiad of minor pessimists.

In all this, one must admire the Russian “genius loci”, this extraordinary ability to assimilate foreign thought. No one has formulated this Russian characteristic as Fyodor Dostoevsky did in his speech (8 June 1880) at the formal meeting of the Society of Russian Literature, on the occasion of the unveiling of the Pushkin monument.

The Russian nation, said Dostoevsky, like Pushkin in world literature, has this superiority over others that it possesses an extraordinary capacity, a genius for responding to other people’s thoughts, which it accepts and feels as its own (...) The Russian soul, the genius of the Russian nation, is capable of absorbing into itself the idea of an all-human reconciliation, of brotherly love, of a sober, view, forgiving enmity, distinguishing and explaining differences, levelling contradictions.

The great artist, epileptic not only in life but also in his brilliant work, falls here into the exaggeration so characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia: the frailty of the Russian spirit, its inability to create independently, he tries to present as an advantage, an asset, a virtue almost. A typical inverted inferiority complex – regrettably characteristic not only of Dostoevsky, but also of the vast majority of the Russian intelligentsia.

The emergence of the Russian state under conditions separate from the rest of the world has been marked over the last two centuries by three basic elements: the authorities (and therefore the Tsar and the bureaucracy), the intelligentsia and the people. Each of these elements bore its own independent character and played its own independent role in the formation of this state, in the formation of the whole.

The central power had no ambitions other than state ambitions. The peoples, whether its own or subjugated, were to play no other role in its conception than that of a tool to strengthen the state. The ambitions of the rulers went primarily towards territorial conquests. No historian has yet logically explained the origins and reasons for this incessant partition fever.

The rationalisation was always false and abstract: from the mystical idea of a third Rome to the need to defend the Slavs, to defend order, to defend the faith, to defend one’s own borders finally.

The internal programme of the central power was determined above all by the needs of war. The ideal of the system was the greatest possible efficiency of the country in the hands of the administration, its mobilisation capacity, its obedience. “Slavery in Russia is patriotism”, Mochnacki stated. The present played no part in the Tsar’s conceptions of power: the Tsar was caught up in a vision of a future, boundless Russia, he felt himself to be a divine mission and, in his own way, considered himself a servant of Russia, of historical Russia.

Russian self-rule has no equivalent in the West. The European monarchy, both as an idea and as an institution, is quite different. Of all Russian institutions and manifestations of Russian life, Russian self-rule has the most Asian characteristics. “Nothing so surprised foreigners as the absolutism of the Russian ruler and the ease of the means he used to rule the country”. (Klyuchevsky)

“The Russians,” Herberstein wrote, “are convinced that the Grand Duke is the executor of the will of Heaven. They usually say: it pleases God and the ruler; it is known to God and the ruler”. Russian self-rule has the power of religious elements in it and that is why, despite the cruelty of its rule, it was and is so invariably attractive to the Russian people and had so many religious temptations for the Russian intelligentsia, to mention Dostoevsky or Tolstoy.

The Russian tsars, the evil and cruel ones above all, had an excellent grasp of the soul of their people and played on their passions. “I cannot disregard, not only the interests, but also the passions of my people”, said Nicholas I, and one must do him justice that he was more concerned with these passions than with interests.

The nation was without ideas, without faith, without religion. Set potentially for anarchy in moments of weakening power, it was in mass and individually a meek slave to the strong tsar. In Russia, there were no assassinations of Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great, no assassination of the impotent Paul and the “liberator” Tsar Alexander II. Nicholas I, also known as Pałkin [Pol. ‘pałka’ – a but, a button, a club], was more sure of life than the weak hysteric and mystic Nicholas II. Such a seasoned connoisseur of the technique of government as Napoleon was, he underestimated many things about Russia, but he understood this trait perfectly. He also understood the power that the fusion of a cruel tsar with the passive Russian people would represent: “if a brave, violent, capable tsar is found in Russia, Europe will belong to him”.

The disposition of the ruler is completely independent of the sympathy or popularity the ruler enjoys with the people

...in this country, everything that lives is always more or less dissatisfied with its government, which is not only accused secretly, but it is customary to speak ill of it, and loudly. In spite of this, no one stops either working in the office or pulling guard duty: in a word, everyone serves this government. A foreigner, ignorant of the nature and importance of this opposition, so eternal and widespread, and therefore not at all dangerous, seeing everywhere the enemies of the existing disorder of things, and nowhere its defenders, is ready to think that Russia is only waiting for an opportune moment, that it only awaits a call. (Mickiewicz)

Russia built itself “not by its will”, that is, not by the will of the people, but by the will of the rulers. Like its capital, St Petersburg, it was and is built on the skeletons of millions of its own and foreign citizens. “Where the people, there moan and cry” (Koltsov). The people were a tool in the hands of the ruler, realising his idea: a boundless state.

The most interesting, but also the most tragic element of Russia was the intelligentsia. Born by the state, it turned every now and then towards the nation. Its ideal was unity with the nation. But the Tsars did not want intermediaries. They understood their nation much better than the intelligentsia, who, either looking to the West, wanted to introduce the whole of European civilisation and culture into Russia at all costs, or, disgusted with the West, idealised their nation, elevating all its faults, such as passivity, humility, aversion to industrialisation, to the order of the greatest virtues. And as the nation sought God, so the intelligentsia sought the people. The whole of Russian literature, which in Russia replaces philosophy, is filled with these two themes. But the people, about whom westerners and Slavophiles, nationalists and Marxists wrote with equal passion, did not see themselves in the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky and others. None of these had descended “under the thatched roofs”. The people were waiting for a revelation, and this revelation could only come in the form of either the Messiah or the Antichrist. The people subconsciously believed in revolution; the intelligentsia both wanted it and feared it.

In this incessant ordeal, in this oscillation between tsar and people, between self-government and revolution, the Russian intelligentsia was able to rise to the highest levels of human culture. It was able to create great literature, prose and poetry, great music, fine and performing arts, it was able to make enormous achievements in the sciences and humanities.

It was able to instil in the whole civilised world the conviction that its ideas, all-human, humanitarian ideas, are the ideas of the whole Russian people. It was able to arouse great interest in Russia and its people all over the world, it was able to portray them in the best possible light, it was able to “weep for those who live” to make them sufferers, bogeymen, irresponsible for the deeds of tsars and rulers, martyrs of destiny, helpless executors of some mysterious missions, messages.

This was admitted by some, very few, representatives of this Russian intelligentsia, such as Chadayev, of whom we have spoken, such as Vladimir Solovyov.

Europe, Solovyov wrote, looks at us with hostility and fear, because in the face of the grim and puzzling elemental power of the Russian nation, in the face of the modesty and incompleteness of our spiritual and cultural forces, our ambitions are open, clear and enormous. The cries of our “nationalism”, which wants to destroy Turkey, to destroy Austria, to smash Germany, to possess the Tsarograd and, by the way, perhaps India, ring loudest throughout Europe. And when asked: what will we give to mankind in exchange for what has been taken and destroyed, what spiritual and cultural elements will we contribute to world history – we must either remain silent or mock with worthless platitudes.

But at the same time, this intelligentsia was neither able to fight a battle against the Tsar nor to get closer to the people. When the revolution broke out, it swept away the Russian intelligentsia in the first place as an unstable, hysterical factor. And so it happened that this part of the Russian people, which seemed to have been most prepared for the revolution, which always lived in denial of reality, did not play a serious role during the revolution, nor did it take part in the reconstruction of the state. The ideas of Russia that it formulated turned out to be pure abstractions.

The leadership of the nation was assumed by revolutionaries who came out of the nation itself. But in taking power, they followed the line that power in Russia had followed for centuries. The line of cutting itself off from the nation, of imposing on it an idea of its own, which, as before, is the idea of the state, not the idea of the masses.

“The idea of Russia” developed by generations of Russian intelligentsia turned out to be a sham, a humble altar erected by a handful of abstract “aristocrats of the spirit” who sought for themselves in this artificially constructed “idea” all the three: God, the ruler, and the people.

Having created nothing concrete for their own people, they poisoned the general culture with miasmas of defeatism, spiritual hermaphroditism and impotence. They have infected it with an easy focus on the abstract, paper man, taught contempt for indisputable truths, blurred the boundaries of good and evil.

With a semblance of sincerity, with the typical Russian “azefiada”, with incessant cajoling and spitting at their own people and their own sanctities, they created a gulf between Russia and the Western world that became the prototype of today’s “Iron Curtain”.

They created a false image of Russia, a “myth of the 20th century”, which today’s Russian rulers use as their most terrible weapon against the rest of the world.

The task of knowing Russia, knowing it dispassionately and objectively, is to debunk, to shatter this myth. Hating Russia is as dangerous as succumbing to its charms. Let us leave the feelings to the literati and artists. They have not and will not play a positive role in the field of knowledge of Russia. Our task is cold, calm analysis, surrendering to the logic of facts, not words or imaginary, nebulous notions, however dictated by the most brilliant fantasy.

Let us reject the legend of the “idea of Russia”. Let us deal with Russia itself, its past, its geography, its material possibilities. Let us not be dismayed that this phenomenon is highly complex and so difficult to study.

When we speak of the need to know Russia, we must not forget that reality is depriving our people at home – for the first time in our history – of the possibility of objective study in this field. The whole burden of this task falls on us.

We must also not forget that unlike us Westerners, who know less and less about what is happening beyond the Iron Curtain, Russia has practically unlimited opportunities for insight into our lives, on this side of the Curtain. And not just insight, but preventive action. The stronger the enemy, the better and deeper the knowledge of it must be.

A fragment from: Idea Rosji [The Idea of Russia], Instytut Wschodni Reduta. Kurs Spraw Wschodnich, Londyn 1949 (maszynopis powielony) [The Eastern Institute ‘Reduta’. Eastern Affairs Course, London 1949 (typescript reproduced)].