Alexander Obolonsky writes: In recent years, it has become fashionable in official and semi-official Russian circles to label oneself a ‘statist’ (gosudarstvennik) on nearly any occasion – or even without one. Implicit in this label is the idea that ‘statists’ are in opposition to supposed ‘anti-statists’. This stigma is frequently applied to liberals, who are also branded as a ‘fifth column’ or ‘national traitors’.
Yet being a ‘statist’ is not the antithesis of being a liberal. After all, who, if not the state, should be the guarantor of the basic economic, civil, intellectual, and spiritual rights and freedoms of individuals? If ordinary people lack real mechanisms for realising their values and ideals, then even the most eloquent liberal rhetoric becomes just little more than the hypocrisy of the privileged. This is especially relevant in the context of underdeveloped civil society – where a culture of voluntary associations around shared interests is weak, and where ordinary people cannot even defend themselves by means of appeal to the law or to the very institutions that are supposed to provide it.
Indeed, state-centred thinking has deep roots in Russian history – particularly in the practice of the state itself. Compared to the West, the Russian state has always been ‘larger’ than society. Its influence on public life has been far more active and multidimensional. The state has historically played a more universal role than in most European countries, let alone the United States. It has acted as a primary force, often preceding and overpowering the development of society.
However, a strong state sometimes serves the cause of progress. For instance, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the liberal-minded wing of the Russian bureaucracy played a quite positive role in advancing reforms – though Russian bureaucrats have always served as convenient scapegoats under every regime. Yet the imbalance between strong state and weak society blocked the development of independent civil forces. Moreover, if the state dominated society, it had even less concern for the individual within it. It is no exaggeration to say that the subject of the Russian state historically owed everything to it, while the state owed nothing in return.
The renowned French traveller Astolphe de Custine (1790-1857), walking along Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg in the middle of the day in 1836, noted: ‘The streets were swarming with officials, and in each man’s manner of walking one could see the will of the one who sent him.’ Those unwilling to live as conformist servants of the state often removed themselves from ‘normal’ life – moving to the North, to religious retreats, into the steppe, later into emigration, or becoming ‘nihilists’. One way or another, Russia’s most potentially active human capital has historically been estranged from the state.
Psychologically, this produced a deeply ingrained suspicion, all the way up to rejection, of any state-led initiatives, even when they were beneficial. Ironically, initiatives that promised some tangible gains were often met with even stronger resistance. The repeated negative experiences subjects had with the state fostered a durable stereotype: ‘Old evils are more familiar and therefore more reliable than unfamiliar goods’, or more bluntly: ‘Nothing good ever comes from government plans.’ This quote, only slightly paraphrased, reflects the Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky’s (1841-1911) damning verdict on the fate of Catherine the Great’s early attempts at participatory governance. A classic example was the public’s negative reaction to her Commission on the Law Code in 1766.
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The Soviet period was the dramatic culmination of the state’s dominance over the individual. Repressions – at times reaching apocalyptic proportions – never ceased, not even during the regime’s comparatively moderate phases. They solidified the stereotype of the omnipotent state and the powerless individual, reduced to a mere cog in the machine, expendable in the pursuit of supra-individual national or ideological goals.
Unfortunately, both the dominance of the state over the individual and the underlying causes of that dominance have also persisted in the post-Soviet era – albeit in modernised forms. The transformation of conservative ‘statism’ into the leading official ideological trend has led to the devaluation – and even discrediting – of liberty as a fundamental value. What has emerged instead is a reactionary and utopian nostalgia for ‘order’. Riding that wave, a frothy surge of political reaction has swept across society. One of the mechanisms that camouflaged this state of affairs was the appropriation of the concept of patriotism by the state itself.
Our present-day ultra-statists, alas, draw from a powerful cultural-historical tradition. The stronger the state became, the worse life grew for those living under it. Consequently, the state came to be perceived as a hostile force toward the individual – and in reality, it almost always was. As Klyuchevsky put it: ‘The state swelled, the people withered.’ In rethinking Russian traditions, it is, however, essential to consider the nature, meaning, and consequences of this historical phenomenon: expansive, intrusive state: weak, passive society. Neither Russia nor other nations with a heavy burden of authoritarian or totalitarian traditions are doomed to run endlessly, like a squirrel in a wheel, reproducing the patterns of state power and social subjugation.
Russia, too, has something positive to present – both to itself and to the world. Alongside the dominant culture of subjugation, an alternative counter-culture of resistance has always existed and survived, even in the darkest times. Despite my respect for Vladimir Nabokov as a writer, I cannot accept his devastating description of Russia as: ‘a nation of moral monsters, smiling slaves, and dim-witted thug s… a place where vulgarity and despotism are camouflaged by counterfeit culture’. No, Russia was never a nation of slaves. Rather, it has been a nation enslaved by irresponsible and predatory authorities.
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The very concept of the rule of law – as a mutual limitation on both the rights and powers of rulers and citizens – was absent in Russia. Any unsanctioned civic initiative was, at best, viewed by authorities as suspicious. Political protest in particular was crushed ruthlessly. In response, what Klyuchevsky called the ‘Moscow people’ developed a peculiar form of political resistance: instead of rising up, those who could not accept the existing order simply exited it. They ‘wandered off in all directions’ – they fled the state. Klyuchevsky interpreted this form of reaction as a kind of ‘servant syndrome’ or ‘tenant syndrome’, in which a subject, rather than confronting a tyrannical landlord, simply leaves: ‘When subjects, linked to their government by a shared notion of the public good,’ he wrote, ‘become dissatisfied with a ruling power that no longer protects that good, they rise against it. But when servants or tenants, whose ties to the landlord are based only on conditional benefits, no longer receive those benefits, they just leave the house.’
And so they did. Peasants fled into the wilds, to the free frontier, or joined the Cossacks. Nobles chose exile abroad or the solitude of their estates. In Soviet times, the equivalent was ‘internal emigration’. In all these cases, the most potentially active segments of the population – those capable of contributing to general development – were drained out of mainstream life. Meanwhile, most of those who entered into service of the state were not the most talented, and certainly not the most principled, but rather the most obedient. These were the conformist subjects, those willing to execute any command without hesitation or reflection.
From this, some have drawn fatalistic conclusions about Russians’ ‘inherent unfitness’ for freedom, a kind of national deficiency. I strongly disagree with this. I could cite numerous examples of behaviour among my fellow citizens that clearly reflect a deep-seated aspiration toward freedom and dignity. But I will instead share a perspective I find compelling – that articulated by the contemporary Russian scholar GP Aksenov. Arguing that Russians were never devoid of a ‘sense of freedom’, the tragedy, he said, was that this instinct was never realised within the political body of the state, but rather always outside it – via expansive colonisation. The state constantly had to ‘catch up’ with its runaway subjects and re-enslave them. ‘Russia was betrayed by geography. There was always somewhere to flee.’