Yves here. Satyajit Das reviews three books that claim to offer new insights into the Russia now by looking at Russia past. But all of the works, as Das points out, are colored by Anglo-American predispositions.
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011), (2022). His latest book is on ecotourism and man’s relationship with wild animals – Wild Quests (2024). Jointly published with the New Indian Express Online
Pieces on Russia frequently cite Winston Churchill’s well know epigram: ‘… a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. The lazy formulation reflects the former British politician’s Kiplingesque view that civilisation was white and English-speaking. Even superficial understanding of countries, especially one as big as Russia with its different languages, idioms, cultures and societies, requires patient effort. It is best studied through their rather than oureyes, to avoid conscious or unconscious biases.
Analysis of Russia must incorporate its vast size (spanning more time zones that any other country), resource richness, ethnic mix and complicated history, especially the transformation from monarchy and feudalism to a socialist state. There is an underlying inferiority complex which comes from its late emergence as a world power. There are grievances about the lack of external appreciation about its contribution to the world. There are problems of identity with Europeans regarding it as Asian while the latter regard it as Western. Its institutions, traditions and approaches often seem alien to outsiders.
During the Cold War years, Kremlin-watching was a large industry. It did not diminish after the demise of the USSR although the focus changed. In recent years, a revanchist Russia, has generated a vast literature. The following fine recent books are well worth reading for the knowledge they offer the interested:
To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko, Cambridge University Press, 2024
Memory Makers The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia by Jade McGlynn Bloomsbury, 2023
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans, Princeton University Press, 2024
Each deals with different subject matter and offers diverse perspectives of Russia’s past and present.
Sergey Radchenko, a respected scholar, provides a deeply researched work which benefits from access to recently declassified Cold-War documents. To Run the World seeks to understand Russia’s central interests in the post World War 2 era. He uses studies of Soviet leadership from Stalin through Gorbachev to Putin to explore this question. Robert Conquest writing in The Great Terror thought that the Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev sequence illustrated the evolution of homids, read backwards. There are solid portraits of the main Russian players and their American and Chinese counterparts. The book of necessity covers the Korean War, the Berlin confrontation, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the six-day war in the Middle East etc, all of which have been extensively analysed elsewhere.
Unsurprisingly, Radchenko finds that the principal driving factors wasn’t ideology or economics. Political philosophy was constantly mangled to justify expedient actions and maintain the Communist Party’s grip on power. Western fears of Soviet economic prowess seem laughable with hindsight. Black humour provided a clear assessment of the USSR’s economics. One joke stated that workers pretended to work just as the state pretended to pay them. The central planned economy mainly entailed cheating at work or swindling the boss.
The ineptitude extended into the post-Soviet era. Advisor Igor Gaidar was scathing about President Boris Yeltsin’s knowledge or more accurately lack of knowledge about economics and democracy. Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin summed it up succinctly: ‘We wanted the best, but it turned out as always’.
To Run the World comes down on the side of Russia being motivated by a desire for legitimacy, recognition and power. While true in part, the argument is not entirely convincing. The text does not fully support the thesis. For example, Stalin was hesitant in trying to turn the world red, a significant difference from Lenin’s plans to export socialism.
Radchenko perhaps underestimates Russia’s innately chaotic nature and developmental struggles. In the 1920s, Lenin was acutely conscious of the state’s ‘deformities’, which reflected Tsarist structures and institutions covered by a thin coating of Soviet paint. That deficiency has carried over into the present. Karen Dawisha in Putin’s Kleptocracy quotes Russian political analyst Yevginy Gontmkaher: ‘there is no state in Russia…there is a certain structure in which millions of people who call themselves bureaucrats work…but they do not perform the function of a state…instead of a state as an institution implementing the course of a developing country, there is a huge uncontrolled private structure which is successfully diverting profits for its own use’.
An added consideration is the sheer difficulty in holding together a vast state, which was highlighted by the breakup after 1991. It might explain the tendency towards tyrannical authoritarianism. It created a particular leadership style which persists. Stalin preferred people to support him from fear rather than conviction because convictions could change. Fyodor Dostoevsky writing in The House of the Dead caught its essence: ‘tyranny is a habit; it grows upon us, and in the long run turns into a disease…’
Radchenko ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union. He sees it as economics catching up with the country’s superpower ambition. While certainly a central factor, other observers, especially the Chinese Communist Party have a more nuanced view – Gorbachev gravely miscalculated in prioritising political over economic reforms.
To Run the World suggests that the collapse of the USSR did not end Russian ambitions. President Putin, Radchenko argues, believes in his country’s prominence in the international order. But as the author himself admits, Putin’s election and support derived from the population’s desire for order, stability and improvements in living conditions. While Putin has been clever in using history to buttress his positions, it is worth noting his views on the past: ‘Anyone who does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart, but anyone who wants it restored has no head’.
If there is a weakness in To Run the World, it is that the author does not attempt to contrast Russia’s ambitions and motivations from that of other great powers. How is Russian exceptionalism different from that of America or China? Ultimately all nation states play the hand they are dealt as best they can to survive and further their interests.
Radchenko or perhaps more likely the publisher bombastically pronounces that the book is a radical new interpretation of Russian history. While impressive and readable, that may be an overstatement similar to the proposition that Russia sought to run the world.
In the complementary Memory Makers, historian Jade McGlynn presents an analysis of Russian propaganda and its use in reshaping national identity. The focus is on how Russia under President Putin has used the media, education and cultural events to shape the public’s view of the country’s history.
Memory Makers opens with a military parade in Red Square, to commemorate the 1941 Battle of Moscow. Complete with carnival paraphernalia, military displays and political theatre, the spectacle is epic memory making around the Great Patriotic War. McGlynn uses similar episodes, such as the contrasting coverage of Ukraine’s maidan uprising by Western and Russian media, to make the case for how Russian propaganda misrepresents the past. She cites the use of Nazi-era footage of Stepan Bandera and the Ukrainian Waffen SS Division as evidence of how events were manipulated.
While Russia undeniably uses these events in a specific way to define itself, the problem is that in both cases the portrayals are factual if exaggerated. Russia’s prominent if frequently poorly acknowledged role in the defeat of Germany is undeniable. Similarly, the history of collaboration of Ukrainians with the Nazis is correct. McGlynn’s assertion that the invasion of Ukraine was the result of Russia’s preoccupation with policing the past is weak.
The official narratives are also consistent with how the majority of Russians view their position in the world and especially their nation’s perceived treatment by Europe and America. In effect, the constructed history is intended for a receptive Russian audience Pure falsehoods, such as the blatant lies about living standards and economic performance during the Soviet era, were generally ignored and debunked. Ben Lewis’s Hammer and Tickleprovides multiple examples of this gallows humour.
There is nothing new in any of this. Francis Fukuyama thought that in his mythical post-ideological world the fight for the future would be replaced by a battle to define the past. As an old Soviet era joke states: ‘It is difficult to know what happened yesterday’.
Moreover, interpretations evolve. As Kathleen Smith’s Mythmaking in the New Russia and Thomas Sherlock in Historical Narratives in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia pointed out, President Boris Yeltsin sought to denigrate and discredit the Soviet past, changing the flag, introducing a new Russian anthem and repurposing Soviet holidays. McGlynn accepts the shift under Putin was not coercive but an inclusive and participatory project meeting a genuine public appetite for a more patriotic history after the chaos of the immediate post-collapse period.
McGlynn is correct in her argument that these shifts reflect particular pressures – economic weakness, political challenges and concerns about corruption or fraud. But politicians everywhere reimagine history and strategy when circumstances dictate. That may be perhaps the most troubling aspect of the book. There is little comparison of the Russian approach to its history with that of other countries. America, France, Germany, Britain, Israel, Japan, China and India have all, at various times, sought to rewrite their own past. In Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky showed how American mass communication was a powerful propaganda tool which was highly effective in shaping public opinion. McGlyn makes an oblique gesture to this problem when she admits that the phenomenon is not uniquely Russian but without elaboration.
Memory Makers’ concluded that manipulation of a nation’s history can have real world spill overs such as kinetic wars. Given that all nations have propagandised their past to manipulate and motivate their population through the centuries, that proposition is not particularly insightful. Truth has always been a casualty of politics and nationalism.
Benjamin Nathans’ monumental To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause mines a very different aspect of Russia’s past – the history of dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as many unknown others.
Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and recently available KGB records, Nathans creates a sympathetic portrait of the human-rights dissidence movement in the USSR. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause meticulously documents the fight against the government via unauthorized public gatherings, petitioning in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulating banned samizdat texts.
After Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev promised a new Russia which was interpreted by intellectuals as a shift away from the terror and tyranny under the Georgian dictator. Writers, scientists, intellectuals and students sought to publish plays, novels, essays and articles critical of the government and system.
The dissidents devised a novel strategy – to try to force the Kremlin to obey its own laws.
Gathering annually on 5 December (Soviet Constitution Day) at the monument to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, they demanded that the regime obey the 1936 Constitution’s guarantee of basic rights and the Code of Criminal Procedure. When Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were tried for publishing anti-Soviet literary works abroad, dissidents demanded the proceedings be open to the public, as the law required.
They were aware that their actions, no matter how clandestine, would attract the attention of the authorities and collide with the apparatus of Soviet power. In the Stalinist period, such activity would have ended in mass purges, show trials, forced confessions, the gulags or death sentences. But knowing that the state was unlikely to respond in this way due to external pressure, this strategy was, as one of them put it: ‘simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people’.
They pursued this strategy resigned to the risk of prosecution where the verdict and sentence were pre-determined by the government. Nevertheless, the dissidents bravely sought to use the system to draw attention to their views and captured the world’s imagination. Perhaps they were driven by what Fyodor Dostoevsky called ‘the most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people… the need for suffering, ever-present and unquenchable’.
Dissidents were arrested, subjected to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced to labour camps or psychiatric hospitals or sent into exile. The government’s actions transformed them into martyred heroes, some of whom like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn became well known in the West. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and hastened its collapse.
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause takes its title from the toast routinely made at dissident gatherings. Benjamin Nathans has written a remarkable history of protest in Russia but whose implications are wider, especially on how to can use the law of a state to contain its power.
The books have appeared at an interesting time. The world’s relationship with Russia for the last century and a half has been one of large shifts. The nation once played an important part alongside the West in winning the two twentieth century world wars. But since 2007, when Putin gave an important but ignored speech to the Munich Security Forum articulating Russia’s place in the global order, the relationship with the West has steadily deteriorated. Today, a new cold war is under way.
Where used, Churchill’s quote is usually truncated. In its complete form, it ends with an important qualification: ‘…but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interests’. All three books provide important insights into those shifting and complex concerns.
Ultimately, better mutual understanding rather than agreement on all things is the key to coexistence. As Dostoevsky well knew ‘we are people from the same madness’.
