The Coast of Realism

I nominate that as the title for Tom Stoppard's sequel to The Coast of Utopia, updated for the 21st century era of Russian oligarchs and Group of 8 petro-supremacy.

Well, I mean to say, will you just read Sergei Roy's essay in The Liberal?

It is assumed, and sometimes stated outright in the circles in which Mr. Yavlisnky is popular, that here in Russia we are in a pre-February 1917 situation. Sergei Shelin has remarked that “…certain… nuances in today’s behavior of the upper and lower classes give rise to ‘February’, or, more accurately, ‘pre-February’ associations in many people”. Specifically, the Putin administration is said to be authoritarian and even autocratic and thus slated for an overthrow. The mere formulation of this position should make any true Russian liberal shudder – if he really holds the future of liberalism in Russia dear to his heart. It is my firm belief that no revolution in Russia, liberal, democratic, or any other, is either possible or desirable, either now or in the foreseeable future.

I'll admit, anyone who can describe Solzhenitsyn's prose as a massacre of the Slavonic idiom has immediately got my attention, however wary or antagonized it may be. Though the irony here would seem to operate at Roy's expense: He's both confirming Solzhenitsyn's revisionist disdain for the February Revolution, which brought down the tsar and might have led to a genuine constitutional democracy instead of "October" and its ensuing Bolshevik tyranny, but he's also dismissing that seismic event as little more than ripples of liberal miscalculations and failures. You can't have both: Either Nicholas II remained in power as the unmitigated "Master of the Russian land," or he did not. Once you decide that, the second tier of hypothetical options for possible modes of government presents itself.

I dare say I know which tier one outcome Sergei would have preferred because his shrugging regard for the status quo under Vladimir Putin is enough to make you check that you're reading this piece in a journal called The Liberal.

The army general Andrei Nikolayev, a Duma deputy whom I interviewed a few years ago, provided me with some memorable statistics. Apparently in Moscow alone, ‘close security protection services’ are 100,000 strong. That is ten divisions – fully armed, well-paid, and ready to defend their style of living and that of their masters. This is entirely apart from the state ‘repressive apparatus’ – which has also done pretty well for itself in recent years, and is not likely to welcome any revolutionists in the streets of Moscow or anywhere else.

One rubs the eyes. A member of the Russian intelligentsia endorses a ruling regime because of its every-ready and omnipresent security service, which is too large and well-financed and comfortable to brook any Father Gapons, let alone chessmaster revolutionaries, parading around the streets and upsetting the new White Paradise. I forget now: Is noticing that you're living in a police state and simply accepting the fact the Bakunin or Herzen interpretation of sociohistorical dynamics*? I also loved Roy's sentence: "[T]he Putin administration is said to be authoritarian and even autocratic…" which is said to be evasive and even pathetic. The Kremlin might offer Roy his old job back at the Moscow Times if he's willing to produce favorable press like this for nothing…

I am a Westernist in the sense that the culture of liberalism, historically speaking, is not endemic in Russia, and was transposed onto Russian soil from the West. Unfortunately, the term zapadnik (‘Westernist’) is now often applied – with sufficient reason – to individuals who advocate the subordination of Russia’s national interests to those of the West. I have absolutely nothing to do with this kind of Westernism; I am a Russian Westernist – and there are plenty of us over here. So far as I can judge, Mr. Putin is one; a European to the core – however hard it may be for the Western reader to accept this.

Putin as Peter the Great, comrades!

The title of this shabby essay is "From Autocracy to Anarchy." Always beware the deep thinker who warns of civil chaos as a consequence of political opposition. If he sounds as if he's got something to hide, it's usually because he's got something to preserve, too.

*It's  just occurred to me that the answer is Belinsky. The literary critic took his Hegelianism to eleven when he suggested that Nicholas I's reign of injustice and subjugation was harmonizing. Part of the paradox of the Russian tradition is its bequest of brilliant minds struggling to find radical solutions that don't succumb to their own forms of autocracy. Roy's problem is that he writes long after Isaiah Berlin made such a paradox a matter of conventional wisdom. Any intellectual who earnestly rationalizes statist tyranny today is almost too unselfconscious to be trusted on anything.