In the first half of the 19th century, when most Russians lived in serfdom, the intellectual elite in Saint Petersburg and Moscow was split into rival camps of Slavophiles and Westernisers. The Slavophiles saw Russia with its Orthodox Church, autocratic governance and its imperial status as a bastion of purity against corrupt western decadence. The Westernisers, as their name suggests, favoured a Russia aligned to western culture and religion with democratic governance to the fore.
Almost two centuries later these differing views have their echoes in the Russian Federation. On the one hand Vladimir Putin’s world view largely follows that of the Slavophiles, although their belief in freedom of expression has evaded him. In his latest work, My Russia: War or Peace?, Mikhail Shishkin emerges as the ultimate Westerniser.
Paradoxically, in their differing interpretations of Dead Souls, both Westernisers and Slavophiles claimed Nikolai Gogol as an adherent. This too is echoed today in Russians’ admiration for their Gogol and the Ukrainians rebranding him as their Mykola Hohol.
For Shishkin the Russian Federation remains an intellectual, psychological and political ulus or province of the old Mongol Empire. Its political leader models himself not on the Russian tsar but on the Mongol khan. Shishkin uses the word ulus 75 times and khan 49 times while making this argument.
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But the book begins on a different note. There are, he tells us, good Russians who abhor what is being done in their name. I agree and I know many of them. He puts it powerfully: “Monstrous crimes have been committed in the name of my people, my country, in my name. But there is another Russia. That other Russia is suffering pain and anguish. In the name of my Russia, in the name of my people, I want to ask the Ukrainians for forgiveness – but I know that what has been happening in Ukraine is unforgivable.”
That statement, however, heralds the end of the “good Russians” in Shishkin’s book. From there on it is a case of the ulus and a succession of khans. Stalin is identified as the most perniciously evil of all the khans but his non-Russian nationality is not mentioned in the 57 references to his regime and there is also a frequent conflation of Russia with the Soviet Union.
Next up for shaving is Nikita Khrushchev, an ethnic Russian raised in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk and responsible for packing the Kremlin with apparatchiks from the Ukrainian Communist Party. One of them, Leonid Brezhnev, first secretary of the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regional committees, went on to lead the USSR into a morass of corruption and economic stagnation. He was followed by Yuri Andropov, of shadowy ethnic origins and head of the KGB, whose ill health put a quick end to his khanship. Then there was Konstantin Chernenko, who emerged from an ethnic Ukrainian settlement in Siberia and died in office as quickly as Andropov.
The last head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, son of a Russian father and Ukrainian mother, introduced significant reforms but receives little credit from Shishkin who posits that the reforms, though significant, were designed merely to keep the Communist Party in power.
The demise of Gorbachev not only saw the end of the Soviet Union but the arrival to power of Boris Yeltsin, the first full-blooded, born-and-raised Russian to take control of the Kremlin since the October Revolution of 1917. There was unbounded hope but it didn’t last long. Shishkin eloquently portrays events that I witnessed in the 1990s when I lived in Russia as this newspaper’s correspondent.
The hardline but laughably disorganised putsch of August 1991 was easily overthrown. So too, was Gorbachev. In walked Yeltsin with the hopes of Russia on his broad shoulders. The hopes were quickly dashed. Shishkin, correctly, puts it as follows: “It is in great part thanks to him that democratic ideas became discredited in Russia. This ‘democratic’ president’s actions boiled down to keeping his corrupt gang – the so-called ‘family’, in which his daughter was the key figure – in power.”
The West’s continued indulgence of Yeltsin also played its part in discrediting democracy and in the end it was Yeltsin who gave us Putin.
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It is in his naive views of the West, however, where many westerners, including myself, will not find common ground with Shishkin. We have, he suggests, a great strength in that our countries are “nourished by the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Elon Musk, and if a state behaves badly, they can move their immense riches somewhere else. This is why modern states don’t see any point in territorial expansion”.
Shishkin’s view that the Russian Federation should be broken up and its 21 internal republics be given independence seems impractical. Few of them, such as Tatarstan with its Muslim culture and oil reserves, might survive economically. Others are so small and so thoroughly Russified that they would probably reject independent status.
First published in Germany in 2019, the English translation adheres strictly to the original. This means that some points made in the book have been overtaken by events. These include references to TV Dozhd and Radio Ekho Moskvy as media opposed to the Kremlin. Both have since been closed down by the authorities.
