ទេវកថានៃអឺរ៉ាស៊ី

 Why Russia Can’t Shed Its Imperial Delusions

The frontlines of the war in Ukraine run not just through floodplains and shattered towns but also through a more nebulous kind of terrain: the realm of civilization. From the outset, Russian President Vladimir Putin has cast his invasion as part of a cultural struggle, a view shared by some of his adversaries on the Western side. In October 2022, as he grappled with the disappointing course of the war he had begun just months earlier, he used a speech at the Valdai International Discussion Club to advocate “civilizational diversity.” “The smoothing out and erasure of all and any differences is essentially what the modern West is all about,” Putin said. The United States wanted to spread its “neocolonial” hegemony all over the world, including by suppressing the aspirations of Russians. Western support for Ukraine was part and parcel of the wider motivation to “restrain and block the free development of other civilizations.” At stake in this fight, Putin insisted, was the right of “any civilization to follow its own path and organize its own sociopolitical system.”

This was familiar territory for Putin and, indeed, for many Russian thinkers over the years. Recent developments have made new an old idea that emerged among nineteenth-century intellectuals in tsarist Russia who rebelled against the elite fixation with the West. They argued that mimicry of Europe would only enfeeble their country. Instead, they believed that Russia was a civilization in its own right with a unique inheritance that it could not wish away. Russia’s identity was anchored in both Europe and Asia, they insisted, a complexity best represented by the Eurasian steppe, the vast grassland thoroughfare stretching from China to eastern Europe around which so many great empires came into being. Known as Eurasianism, this conviction in the fundamental difference between Russia and the West at least partly underpins the Kremlin’s ruling ideology today. It helps Putin eschew liberal values at home and style Russia as “a unique country-civilization,” as the Kremlin described it in 2023, intent on defying an expansionist West. And it offers Russia’s critics and its defenders an explanation for why the country behaves as it does.

In The Steppe and Its Empires, the historian Michael Khodarkovsky accepts that historical and cultural differences separate Russia from western Europe. “The Kremlin’s spin masters’ claim of Eurasianism,” he writes, “is perfectly valid.” In his view, Russia has much in common with certain Asian traditions. Khodarkovsky compares the Russia of the early modern era with other large, land-based empires that formed around the steppe: the Ottomans centered in what is now Turkey, the Safavids in Iran, and the Qing in China. Despite their differences, he finds core similarities in their conceptions of sovereignty and territory, their militarized bureaucracies, their legal systems, and their diverse and multireligious populations. These empires, he writes, “were fundamentally different from the West in social, economic, ideological, legal, and cultural ways, just as their successors, the states of Russia, Turkey, Iran, and China, remain today quite distant from Europe’s liberal democracies.” That shared history, he argues, decidedly informs the present, in which many in Washington see the descendants of these empires as resolute enemies of the United States.

The mere fact of that common history, however, is insufficient to explain Russian behavior today. Russia, after all, shares a great deal with its European neighbors, too. It is misguided to believe that Putin acts as he does because he follows in the footsteps of Eurasian emperors and warlords. That notion flattens a complex record and turns history into a morality play of angels and demons. And in reaching so far back, it makes the mistake of taking Putin and modern Russia out of their own time.

POLITICAL FICTIONS

For centuries, Russians have yoked themselves to Europe as well as tried to push Europe away. In the eighteenth century, the Russian tsar Peter the Great sought to remake his domain in the image of the West, adopting European fashions, military practices, architectural styles, and much else. That led to cycles of reform and renovation, as well as backlash, chiefly from cultural conservatives, who saw the adoption of western European habits and attitudes as abominable and even heretical.

At the same time, many Europeans viewed Russia, along with Ottoman Turkey, as a kind of foil, an “other” against which western Europe’s varied states and peoples could establish a sense of shared identity. As the intellectual historian Georgios Varouxakis has written, the very notion of “the West” emerged in the nineteenth century at least in part to exclude Russia and Turkey. Because both states were geographically a part of Europe, a new label was needed for a civilizational grouping that would not have them as members.

Two things can be true at once. On the one hand, associating Russia with the Eurasian steppe is a political move. Europeans cast Russia in this light to separate themselves from Russian actions and to preserve the idea of Europe as at the forefront of modernity, distinct from the perceived pathologies or backwardness of “the East.” If Russia behaved badly, that was the fault of its primitive and cruel Asian side, a notion that conveniently created the fiction that Western countries are not capable of similar cruelty. When Russians embrace the Eurasian narrative, they are also engaged in the political project of rejecting Europe and the West, which Putin and his allies deride as decadent, declining, and immoral.

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On the other hand, Russia is different, and there is no need to pretend it isn’t. Khodarkovsky is right to explore how Russia’s history places it in the company of states and traditions that are less familiar to many in Europe and North America. These empires all emerged in the aftermath of the great Mongol conquests that spread over the Eurasian steppe in the thirteenth century and convulsed politics far and wide. If nothing else, The Steppe and Its Empires is illuminating as a catalog of comparable practices across these empires.

The Russians, the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Qing shared many practices, including in their political organization and their approaches to diplomacy and law. One example Khodarkovsky discusses has to do with making treaties. Starting in the sixteenth century, Moscow began casting its treaties with the local rulers of indigenous groups as oaths of allegiance, while those rulers assumed they were entering a mutually beneficial alliance. At the same time, Moscow continued to handle its relationship with these peoples via the Office of Foreign Affairs well into the nineteenth century. The Ottomans also made use of a kind of oath of allegiance, known as ahdname, which early on took the form of a privilege granted by the sultan to the other side. But while they used these ahdname with tribute-paying subjects such as the Kurdish tribes, in practice the Ottomans recognized the practical independence of those groups. In both cases, it was not entirely clear what fell inside and outside the domain of the empire.

According to Khodarkovsky, both the Russians and the Ottomans were “reluctant to differentiate between external and internal matters, denying the reality on the ground.” Such an attitude was a natural consequence of the tension created by another shared trait: the pretense to universal monarchy in conditions where it cannot be obtained. The notion of universal monarchy holds that the state is preeminent and has rightful supremacy over all others. The empires of the steppe likely inherited this styling in part from the Mongols. A universal empire, by definition, cannot make clear distinctions between inside and outside as it claims to rule over “all.” In the Mongol model, universal empire was matched with the extreme personalization of political authority, with the Great Khan functioning as the primary lawgiver not accountable to anyone else. Khodarkovsky’s examples demonstrate the influence of this particular understanding of sovereignty on the steppe empires, especially Russia. As Khodarkovsky puts it, the Russian executive was also the judiciary, a feature that lasted well into the nineteenth century.

STATES OF EXCEPTION

It can be difficult to keep a comparative historical project free of modern biases. Such pitfalls are especially hard to avoid when Russia is the focal point. Very early on in the book, Khodarkovsky writes, “It is noteworthy that during the early Renaissance, when Europeans were rediscovering and reimagining their Greco-Roman roots, the triumphant armies of Chinggis Khan were laying the foundation for future Eurasian empires.” Such a sentence sketches a profound contrast between Europe as the cradle of refined culture—the Renaissance, high art, and philosophy—and Asia as the site of empires and violence. Khodarkovsky suggests in the introduction that Eurasia tended to be organized by war, while Europe was organized by law. The lines connecting Chinggis Khan to Putin seem almost too telegraphed.

But the contrast is quite misleading. Asia saw tremendous artistic, scientific, cultural, and economic production in these centuries, not just in the urban centers of China, India, and Iran but also in the astronomy, poetry, and architecture of the Central Asian polymaths at the heart of what is called the Timurid Renaissance, roughly from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Europe’s empires, meanwhile, visited much violence on the rest of the world after the fifteenth century, just as Eurasian empires had done during and after the reign of Chinggis Khan. The legacy of the steppe is not simply one of bloodshed and the muscular assertion of power, just as the legacy of European history is not just one of laws and the orderly restraint of power. Russia’s imperialistic behavior can’t wholly be explained by either its European heritage or its Eurasian one. And it is clear that Western observers would not view Russia’s history of expansionism, including the swallowing up of vast territories once in the hands of Central Asian khanates and Siberian indigenous peoples, as an inherently “non-Western” trait if Russia had exhibited this tendency only outside Europe.

Khodarkovsky’s Asian comparisons also fail to explain the particular degree of excess in the Russian political system. Consider, for instance, the institution of oprichnina that Tsar Ivan IV established in 1565, through various cunning moves. Oprichnina was a special legal realm in which only his authority would apply—what leaders today might call a “state of exception.” Once he secured these unlimited powers, he ruthlessly eliminated anyone who had previously challenged him and sacked the cities of Tver and Novgorod, subjecting the latter to torture, looting, and massacres for weeks. The first oprichnina lasted until 1572. A second one was engineered soon after. Both periods were marked by purges and executions; at the end, few opponents were left to resist him. “I think that even the Turk is not obeyed as the Muscovite is, because he is a great tyrant,” wrote a Venetian envoy at the time.

In this telling, Ivan appears as a precursor to Stalin and other ruinous Russian despots. But what’s striking about the episode is that it finds few comparable incidents in any of the other Eurasian empires Khodarkovsky discusses; Ivan’s butchery is not the default of Eurasian political culture. Perhaps one could draw parallels between the sacking of Tver and Novgorod and particularly grisly incidents of Mongol brutality, such as the Mongols’ destruction of Merv in 1221 and their infamous devastation of Baghdad in 1258. But the Mongols and the other empires Khodarkovsky discusses treated enemies this way: once they had achieved their conquests, they were generally far more laissez-faire than the Grand Duchy of Moscow ever was. The Mongols, Ottomans, and Safavids, for instance, largely did not interfere in the daily religious practices of their subjects. By contrast, when the Russians conquered Polatsk, in modern Belarus, in 1563, Ivan reportedly ordered the drowning of all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Other Eurasian emperors of the time also did not persecute occult practitioners as Ivan did in the lead-up to the second oprichnina, actions more in line with attitudes in early modern Christian Europe than those common among rulers of Asia. In this way, the task of classifying Russia can become a fool’s errand; Ivan’s behavior carried echoes of Europe as well as those of the steppe, but it also reflected the will of an idiosyncratic political innovator.

It is difficult to determine where exactly Khodarkovsky falls in this debate of whether the culture of the steppes is responsible for Russia’s ills, but one suspects he implicitly absolves the Western side of the equation. For example, he doesn’t dwell much on the Ming dynasty in China, which ruled from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, an odd choice because recent scholarship has shown how that dynasty, especially in its early years, was shaped by the Mongol legacy as much as the other empires under consideration were. Including more about the early Ming in this study would have helped advance a sharper argument about how much the steppes shaped Russia. The Ming eventually shed much of its early expansionism by turning inward as a neo-Confucian ethos became more pronounced. It offered a different example of how Eurasian empires could evolve. Historical legacy is not destiny, and Russia’s excesses cannot be blamed solely on its ties to the political culture of the steppes.

NATION-STATE OR EMPIRE?

These criticisms should not be taken to mean that the Eurasian comparative framework for Russia is misplaced. It is obviously true that Russia is not a “European” country in the sociopolitical sense of the word, and the steppe influences are partly the reason why it is something different. Khodarkovsky’s book, along with other recent scholarship, makes a good case for that. But the Eurasianness of Russia is only one of many reasons why it is not a European country. Its enormous size and vast material resources make it much less like the relatively small nation-states of Europe. It is much more ethnically heterogeneous than most European countries; ethnic Russians make up slightly more than 70 percent of the population, while in most other European countries, the titular ethnic groups tend to make up close to 90 percent. Russia is an empire that has twisted itself into the form of a modern nation-state, with much of its territory acquired via “internal” conquest and colonization, including through settler colonization similar to what was practiced in North America, Australia, and elsewhere. European countries, by contrast, lost most of their imperial territories a long time ago. Finally, Russia is the heir to one of the two great powers of the twentieth century, and much of Russia’s self-narrative (including Russians’ understanding of their own history and politics) is still shaped by that reality, for better or worse. That love-hate relationship with Europe is also another key part of Russia’s perception of itself in the world. Putting all those aspects together, the country most comparable to Russia, both historically and in the contemporary moment, is not Turkey or Iran but the United States.

The desire to see Russia as singularly the product of its steppe heritage ends up distorting and simplifying this history. Recalling Russia’s Eurasian heritage is helpful to the extent that it underlines the fundamental complexity of Russia today. But the past should not be disaggregated to serve a modern agenda; Russia was embedded in both Europe and Asia and was crucially shaped by its twentieth-century Cold War rivalry with the United States. Putin’s attack on Ukraine, his professed imperial ambitions, and his ruthless suppression of dissent don’t make him a latter-day tsar, khan, shah, or sultan. His bad behavior is his alone.

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