Until the end, Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) lived under the delusion that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could have been preserved. If the fifteen Soviet republics had not been driven apart by nationalism, but had started working together in a confederacy on the basis of equality, the citizens of this new Union of Sovereign States would have been spared a lot of misery, ex-party chief Gorbachev thought after his political end. He had lost long and broad by then against Boris Yeltsin, who had been elected first president in June 1991 with a plea for a ‘Russian renaissance’.
Yeltsin’s appeal to a renewed Russian nationalism did not come out of the blue. Though supreme in the Soviet Union, Russia felt deprived. Russia had given everything to the colonized remnant: industrial industry, military might, geopolitical prestige, high culture and lofty language. But it had gotten stench back for thanks. The sentiment that Russia was being peeped had been alive for some time, but took off when Gorbachev’s perestroika led not to a social market economy, but to empty shops. “While we labor-loving people work hard and still have to queue for tomatoes and sausage, in Georgia they enjoy shashlik, fresh fruit and wine in the sun,” I heard regularly when I came to Moscow in the summer of 1990 live. This mood echoed the 19th-century theory of history that Russia had not so much subjugated other peoples as had colonized itself and was thus not a perpetrator but a victim.
The Russian Renaissance had to rectify this. That happened. Russia is now richer than the rest. Yet this reparation appears to have been insufficient, more strongly, it has turned into aggressive nationalism and even war. Why? Because since the demise of the Soviet Union, Russian society has never wanted to delve into its own imperial past. The notion, since the 1950s, that the Russian Empire had also been overtaken by history – just like the British and French Empires – is out of the question in Russia. The 19th-century ideology that expansionism is the inevitable destiny of the Russian state has remained dominant.
It is no coincidence that on the 350th birthday of Peter the Great, Putin claimed that Russia never conquered territory, but only took back what was already Russian.
Nor is it a coincidence that Russian imperialism in the Baltic, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Bessarabia, Caucasus and Central Asia has never become a serious subject of critical reflection in recent decades. On the contrary. While Kiev and other new capitals are working on their own national historiography (with all the perverse exaggerations associated with such an anti-colonial historiography), Moscow closed its windows. The ban of the historical society Memorial is the most poignant example of this.
It didn’t stop there. Under Putin, the missionary state expansionism of the 19th century has mixed with 20th-century ethnic nationalism.
That mixture turns out to be intoxicating. The war of annihilation against Ukraine is sometimes hailed not only as historic justice, but also as a way to cleanse Russian blood of the strange taints that have seeped in over the past decades. In the past six months, this Russofascism has not only been practiced by Ivan Romanovich somewhere on 15th Park Street in Izmailovo, but also by a respected international thinker such as Dmitri Trenin, director of the now defunct think tank Carnegie Moscow.
Whether Gorbachev’s union would have prevented this, we will never know. But that the Russian renaissance would culminate in Blut and Boden is an intensely tragic memory at his death.
Hubert Smeets is a journalist and historian. He writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 8, 2022