Empire of the Periphery

Boris Kagarlitsky

Description

Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history. Encompassing all key periods in Russia's dramatic development, the book covers everything from early settlers, through medieval decline, Ivan the Terrible - the 'English Tsar', Peter the Great, the Crimean War and the rise of capitalism, the revolution, the Soviet period, finally ending with the return of capitalism after 1991.



Setting Russia within the context of the 'World System', as outlined by Wallerstein, this is a major work of historical Marxist theory that is set to become a future classic.
Introduction: Topic and Method

1. A Land of Cities

2. The Thirteenth-Century Decline

3. Moscow and Novgorod

4. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

5. The 'English Tsar'

6. Empire of the Periphery

7. Peter the Great

8. The Eighteenth-Century Expansion

9. The Granary of Europe

10. The Crimean War and the World System

11. The Age of Reforms

12. The Flourishing of Russian Capitalism

13. The Revolutionary Explosion

14. The Soviet World

15. After 1991: The Peripheral Capitalism of the Restoration Epoch

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Russie
• Asia
• History
• General
• History of Asia
• Russia
• Political economy
• General officer
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849643122
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Empire of the Periphery Russia and the World System

Boris Kagarlitsky

Translated by Renfrey Clarke

P Pluto Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

First published 2008 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Boris Kagarlitsky 2008 This translation © Renfrey Clarke 2008

The right of Boris Kagarlitsky to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN13 ISBN10

978 0 7453 2682 5 0 7453 2682 X

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

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Contents

Introduction: Topic and Method

 1. A Land of Cities  2. The ThirteenthCentury Decline  3. Moscow and Novgorod  4. The ‘English Tsar’  5. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century  6. Empire of the Periphery  7. Peter the Great  8. The EighteenthCentury Expansion  9. The Granary of Europe 10. The Crimean War and the World System 11. The Age of Reforms 12. The Flourishing of Russian Capitalism: From Witte to Stolypin 13. The Revolutionary Explosion 14. The Soviet World 15. After 1991: The Peripheral Capitalism of the Restoration Era

Conclusion

Notes Index

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26 45 60 78 99 115 138 152 170 192 200 223 255 283 304

323

326 356

Introduction: Topic and Method

For us, experience of the times does not exist. For us, generations and centuries have passed fruitlessly. To look at us, you might say that the universal law of humanity has been reduced to nothingness. Alone in the world, we have given the world nothing, and have taken nothing from it. To the mass of human ideas, we have added not a single thought. We have not contributed to the advance of human reason in any way, and everything of this advance that we have come by, we have mutilated.

This was the bitter observation of the outstanding nineteenthcentury Russian 1 thinker Pyotr Chaadaev. His pessimism did not prevent Chaadaev from later declaring:

I consider our generation fortunate, if we can only recognise this. I think our great advantage is that we can survey the whole world from the heights of thought, free from the unrestrained passions and wretched selfinterest which in other places obscure people’s vision and distort their judgment. Moreover, I am profoundly convinced that we are fated to resolve many of the problems of the social order, to perfect many of the ideas that have arisen in older societies, and to answer the most important questions that preoccupy humanity. I have often said and emphatically repeat that we are, so to speak, destined in the very nature of things to act as the true moral court judging the many suits that are brought before the 2 great tribunal of the human spirit and human society.

HISTORY AS POLITICS

In the early 1990s Russia once again astonished the world with a deluge of rapid and unexpected changes. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the instantaneous transformation of distinguished Communist Party gures into fervent liberals, the stunningly quick and easy switch of slogans by the ruling elites, who recast their whole set of political ideas from the rebirth of socialism and the law governed state to a strong executive authority and Russian national revival  all within a single decade! In quiet periods people start to feel that the past has no bearing on them. It is something to be studied from textbooks and monographs. A sharpening of political struggle forces everyone, at times against their will, to live within history, and to create history. In such times we unexpectedly discover that our hopes and illusions, our errors and successes, are also part of history; that we are accountable to the past as well as to the future. We are compelled to understand the meaning that accumulated experience has for the present day, for the simple reason that if we do not, we risk understanding nothing about our own actions. An important element in being a Marxist is to be aware of the continuity of history. When the anticommunist forces gained the upper hand in Moscow in August and September 1991, they immediately set about

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EMPIRE OF THE PERIPHERY

demolishing monuments and renaming streets, trying to banish the spectres of the communist past from the Russian capital and to repopulate the city with new spectres, this time precommunist ones. But to no avail; ghosts are not to be exorcised so readily. The renaming of streets and cities was selfdefeating, revealing the extent to which the ideas, words and concepts that had been instilled in popular consciousness during the decades of communist rule had become an inalienable part of national culture. Everything that happened in our country might have seemed like a bizarre and tasteless fantasy, had it not involved our own lives and fates. In Russia, political errors always exact an unbelievable price. Not from the politicians, of course, but from the country. When we look into the past, we usually nd ourselves in the position of judges, if not of prosecutors. Nevertheless, searching through history to nd someone to blame does nothing to elevate us above events. Quite the reverse. In history there are not and should not be categorical verdicts and nal sentences with no right of appeal. Therefore, we should not judge, but seek to understand. To understand does not mean to forgive. To understand the past is to be capable of transcending it. Ultimately, what is involved is knowing how to change the present. This, properly speaking, is the purpose of history. Unfortunately, history has always been closely bound up with politics. From ancient times, the events of the past have been used to justify the ambitions of rulers. It is enough to read the ancient chronicles, or the works of Titus Livius, to appreciate how much the description of events depends on the religious and political views of the writer. In Europe in later years various national myths, resting on historical fact, served as the basis for state ideologies. From the late eighteenth century the criticising of historical myths itself became a powerful weapon of revolutionaries. In the Marxist tradition, historicism and the critical approach to society are inseparably linked. Nowhere in Europe do people argue so ercely about gures from the remote past as in Russia. The views expressed on Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great or Alexander II are inseparable from the political positions of the writer. These historical gures and symbols are still present among us. People talk about them as though they had just gone out the door. The whole country is like an immense haunted house in which ghosts move invisibly (and sometimes visibly) among the participants in modernday events. The past is linked directly to the future, and at times seems to these participants to be more important than the present. Meanwhile, history is exceedingly ideologised and politicised. Of course, there is nothing exclusively Russian about this. To hold power over the past is to exercise a form of political control. A peculiarity of Russia, however, is the fact that the lack of developed forms of popular representation has made history crucially important for the legitimi sation of the authorities. Unable to conrm their legality with an honestly obtained popular mandate, successive regimes and governments have been forced to appeal to the past, to the wellsprings. Russian historians have produced numerous volumes in the genre of the search for the guilty party. From the times of Karamzin, some have laid blame on the TatarMongol invasion of the thirteenth century, seeing this as

INTRODUCTION

3

having held back the countrys development. For others, the villain is the 1917 revolution or the Bolsheviks, who forced Russia off the correct path. Slavophiles see the source of Russias problems in Peter the Great, who sacriced Russias distinctive character to Western inuences. It is possible to seek an explanation for the countrys miseries in the decision by Vladimir Krasnoe Solnyshko (Vladimir the Sun Prince) to accept Christianity from Byzantium rather than Rome. The medieval chroniclers, it is true, mention that Prince Vladimir had other options  for example, to embrace Judaism, a thought which has Jewish conspiracy theorists horried. Russia is not to be understood with the mind, Nor with a common arshin will you measure it, wrote the poet Tyutchev. Indeed, the usual European schemas have generally been discredited by attempts to apply them to Russia. The trouble is that attempts to analyse Russian history from the position of national uniqueness and distinctiveness have failed just as completely. Throughout the nineteenth century, the liberal and Slavophile schools waged a struggle over Russian history. After the collapse of the Soviet Union these schools reappeared in their original forms, as if neither the experience of the twentieth century, nor the discoveries of archaeologists, nor Western revisionist historiography had ever existed. Standing counterposed to one another, the Westernisers and Slavophiles are united in understanding Russian history as isolated and special, not subject to the logic that is common to other countries. The Westernisers see the countrys history as a strange anomaly, the result of a number of chance circumstances; overcoming this abnormal situation is the job of an enlightened ruling authority that is ready to break with the past, and if necessary to carry out a ritual outrage against the people and its culture. By contrast, the Slavophiles believe in Russias special path, and exult in the countrys uniqueness. They cherish and foster everything that might serve as proof of the existence of a special Orthodox or Eurasian civilisation, everything that differentiates Russia from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, there is simply no way that Russias history can be divorced from that of Europe or of the world in general, and not only in the chronological and geographical senses. Russias distinctiveness, even uniqueness, is merely a specic manifestation of processes general throughout the world. Often, this has been an extreme manifestation, but for precisely this reason a grasp of Russian history is indispensable for understanding what is going on in the world at large. The reverse is also true; without an understanding of world history, the Russian past becomes a series of absurd puzzles which, as the poet says, can be neither understood with the mind nor measured in terms of a common arshin. To talk of a common arshin is itself a contradiction, since this measure of length has never existed except in Russia. This poetical slip of the tongue, however, reects the complete pointlessness of the cultural and historical discussions of Russias fate. Any number of facts can be cited to prove Russias uniqueness; this is a country where, as Peter the Great put it, the unheardof is commonplace. The uniqueness of Russia is due not to the mysterious Slavic soul, and not to a lag behind the advanced West, but to the specic position which our country has occupied in the world economic system. There is nothing incorrect or

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mysterious in Russian history. But the history of Russia, like that of any other country, can be understood only within the context provided by the development of the world as a whole.

THE POKROVSKY SCHOOL

Fortunately, the ideas of the Slavophiles and Westernisers are far from being the only ones spawned by the Russian historical tradition. The revolution of 1917 placed in question the myths of ofcial Russian historiography. The very concept of the Russian cultural tradition was destined for a fundamental re evaluation. In the early years of the twentieth century, when the coming shocks were still sensed only dimly, liberal commentators wrote that a people who made a revolution were doomed to be born anew. The selfawareness of the English and French, their concept of themselves, changed radically as a result of their experience of revolution. In the rst quarter of the twentieth century, the Russian past was destined to become the object of rethinking, of Marxist historical criticism. The leading gure in this criticism, and in essence the rst revisionist historian in the modern sense of the term, was Mikhail Pokrovsky. A pupil of the outstanding liberal historian Klyuchevsky, Pokrovsky concluded that the Russian past needed a radical rethinking, and that Marxist analysis provided the key to a new understanding of events. Nevertheless, the fate of the historical revisionism represented in Soviet Russia by the Pokrovsky school was unenviable. During the years of revolutionary upsurge its ideas were in demand, but once the bureaucracy headed by Stalin had gained the upper hand over the revolutionary currents, the approach to history changed as well. The rout of the Pokrovsky school began in the fateful year 1937 (Pokrovsky himself had died ve years earlier), and took on the character of a serious ideological campaign. The Old Bolsheviks who were in the dock during the Moscow Trials were sentenced to be shot, and Pokrovskys theories were condemned to disappear not only from history courses, but also from the collective memory. Surviving pupils of the distinguished historian suffered repression. Their late teacher was accused of having come up with a conception devoid of a feeling for the homeland, while his works were said to exhibit 3 disregard for the LeninistStalinist guidelines on questions of history. Just what these guidelines stipulated (especially on the part of the longdead Lenin) no one, predictably, troubled to explain. The propaganda campaign, in the style of the Moscow Trials, consisted of spreading absurd accusations with no more relation to reality than the charges  of espionage on behalf of all the imperialist powers simultaneously  that had been brought against the Old Bolsheviks. Stalins court publicist Yemelyan Yaroslavsky summarised the results of the offensive, writing inPravdathat the views of the nowsuppressed school 4 amounted to antiMarxist distortions and vulgarisation. The reality was that once the Pokrovsky school had been smashed, ofcial history in the Soviet Union returned to the prerevolutionary tradition. The Soviet Thermidor needed its own myths. Lists of rulers, augmented with

INTRODUCTION

5

descriptions of the victories of the Russian state, alternated with periodic complaints of economic and cultural backwardness. The Soviet era appeared as a triumphant culmination, for it signied that the victories were continuing while the backwardness was being overcome. The Communist Party represented the summation of a thousandodd years of Russian development. History had carried out its task, and had become unnecessary. The country now proceeded from congress to congress; at each of them, the joyful populace reported its successes to the party. After the suppression of the Pokrovsky school in the 1930s, Soviet history returned in the main to the concepts that had been traditional for nineteenthcentury scholars, merely embellishing them with quotations from Marx, Lenin and Stalin. After the downfall of the Soviet system, all these quotations could be removed without difculty from the textbooks and academic monographs, changing nothing of substance. Naturally, the ofcial historical line underwent a process of ideological correction. But only with regard to the Soviet period  from an age of great victories, this period was transformed into a succession of dark pages of the past. In other words, despite the changes of political course, the approach to preSoviet history (and to the cultural tradition) remained unaltered. Soviet historians continued to put the line they had inherited from nineteenthcentury liberal authors, while anticommunist writers, condemning everything Soviet, proclaimed a return to the liberal tradition, dispensing with the nowunnecessary quotations. The ideas that had been dominant in the late nineteenth century remained unshakeably ofcial in the early twentyrst century as well. For the most part, social and economic history was outside the eld of view of educated society. It was not that new books on these topics were failing to appear  new studies were being published, some of them brilliant  but they had very little impact on the general conception of the past that held sway in popular consciousness and even among the intelligentsia. Pokrovsky, by contrast, had from the very rst formulated his ideas in sharp opposition to the thinking then dominant in historical writing. With a high regard for the comparatively neutral Solovyev, he counterposed his views clearly to the liberal conception of Russias past, promising to reinterpret Russian history from a materialist standpoint. Above all, Pokrovsky addressed the 5 reader whose brain had not been put out of joint by school history textbooks. The ofcial historiography paid Pokrovsky back in the same coin, effectively striking his name out of the generally accepted list of Russian historians. After the abolition of the Soviet censorship, when the works of numerous prerevolutionary historians (including second and thirdrate ones) began to be republished in large editions, Pokrovskys writings remained unknown to the general public. In the ofcial school text of readings on Russian history, Pokrovsky is the only major historian to whose writings not even a line is allotted, and whose name is not even mentioned. But what, when all is said and done, is the main difference between these historians? The Russian historical tradition is characterised by exaggeration of the role of external political factors, by undervaluation of external economic factors, and by an extremely weak understanding of the links between these two categories.

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EMPIRE OF THE PERIPHERY

Attempts to understand the history of any country without taking into account the links with the history of humanity as a whole are doomed to failure. The attempt to analyse Russian history as an independent and isolated narrative could lead only to the rise of the competing myths of Westernisers (ascribing all of Russias ills to insufcient Western inuence) and Slavophiles (convinced that these misfortunes all ow from an excess of this inuence). The question of how Russias relations with the outside world have in fact been constructed, what the nature of these relations has been, and the reasons for their anguished quality, remains a mystical puzzle for both currents, and one which they have a superstitious reluctance even to touch. Orthodox Marxism, as interpreted by the Russian legal Marxists in the early twentieth century, did little to improve this situation. The history of each country was viewed in isolation from worldwide processes, while development was perceived as something like a race in which the runners were moving at the same time and in the same direction, but in parallel lanes. These ideas, which contradicted not only the dialectical thinking of Marx but also the experience of the Russian revolution, lay at the basis of the ofcial Soviet Marxism of the Stalin era. Hence also the classic images of Stalinist rhetoric  catch up with and overtake America, forward on the road to communism, and so forth. Pyotr Struve and other liberal ideologues of legal Marxism would scarcely have supposed that they were laying the methodological bases for a whole school of communist propagandists and ofcial historians, but the Marxist vaccination which they administered to the liberalhistorical tradition was extraordinarily effective. Instead of applying the critical method to the achievements of nineteenthcentury historical thought, Soviet ofcial history turned its Marxism to repeating ideas which, in Marxs view, needed to be viewed with scepticism.

THE CIVILISATION SCHOOL

Restoring the traditions of the Pokrovsky school is necessary at least in the interests of intellectual honesty and historical justice. Nevertheless, a simple return to the ideas of Pokrovsky is no longer sufcient. If the dominant concepts in Russian historiography have changed little in the last hundred years, archaeology and archival studies have made notable progress. At the same time, the school of worldsystem analysis in Englishlanguage sociological and historical literature has given us important ideas for understanding social development. Paradoxically, a rereading of Pokrovsky from this angle can easily lead one to conclude that the dominant concepts of Russian history need an even more radical rethinking than that which the Marxist scholar of the early twentieth century carried out. Meanwhile, the actual development of social thought in postcommunist Russia has followed a quite different course. The discrediting of Soviet ideology could not fail to give rise to a serious crisis in the social sciences as well. Since Marxism was ruled out of account, and endlessly repeating hundredyear old theses was now impossible, the theory of civilisations came into fashion.

INTRODUCTION

7

6 Samuel F. HuntingtonsThe Clash of Civilizationsimmediately became popular, even before anyone had read it. Adherents of diametrically different political viewpoints could refer to it, in some cases while promising the return of Russia to the bosom of European civilisation (from which the country had fallen either in the eighth century or in 1917, depending on ones viewpoint), and, in others, while calling for the defence of the fundamentals of Russian or Eurasian civilisation. The accepted founder of the civilisational approach to history was Oswald Spengler. But even before Spengler wrote his famous workThe Decline of Europe, similar ideas about history had been formulated by the conservative Russian thinker Nikolay Danilevsky. The latters book,Russia and Europe, published in 1871 at a time when Russian society was gradually recovering from the shock dealt by defeat in the Crimean War, is suffused with hostility toward the ungrateful West, still refusing to give Russian generosity its due. Danilevsky stressed in particular that it was not the governments of Western countries who were Russias enemy, but these countries societies and peoples. Danilevsky was convinced that during the Crimean War European public opinion was 7 far more hostile to Russia than were governmental and diplomatic circles. The problem lay in the profound enmity which Western civilisation, founded on the principles of utility and practical benet, felt for Russian civilisation, which embodied harmony between practice and high spirituality. In the West, 8 Danilevsky argued, there was no place for the law of love and selfsacrice. By contrast, the Russian empire did everything in the most moral fashion; even its policy of conquest was aimed exclusively at beneting the subjugated peoples. Never has the taking by a people of the historical realm predestined for them cost less blood and fewer tears. Everyone abused and oppressed the Russian people, but the latter did offence to no one.

The edifice of state erected by the Russian people does not have its foundations on the bones of downtrodden nationalities. The Russian people either took possession of deserted lands, or joined to themselves through nonviolent historical assimilation such tribes as the Chudi, Vesi and Meri, or the presentday Zyryane, Cheremisy and Mordvy, who have no rudiments of historical life and no desire for it; or, finally, the Russian people took under their shelter and protection tribes and peoples such as the Armenians and Georgians who, surrounded by enemies, had already lost their national independence or who could no longer preserve it. In all this, conquest played only a negligible role, as can easily be seen if we examine how Russia acquired its southern border regions, a process reputed in Europe to have consisted 9 of conquest by an insatiably greedy Russia.

At the time when Danilevsky wrote his book, half a century of war was nearing its end in the Caucasus. This conict had been accompanied by the mass killing and ethnic cleansing of Circassians, Chechens and other nationalities who did not understand the blessing represented by Orthodox civilisation. In the same way, the partitioning of Poland, to the extent that Russia took part in it, was a completely legal and just affair, the fullment of a sacred debt to Russias own sons, in which Russia should not have been disturbed by outbursts of senti