Putin's Eurasian Fantasy and Russia's Bizarre Love-Hate for the West

To understand the dynamics of what is happening in Russia under Vladimir Putin, a self-styled tsar in all but formal title, one needs to understand the bizarre love-hate relationship Russia and the Russian people have had towards the west and western ideas for literally a thousand years.   Much like American Christofascists who can only feel good about themselves when looking down on others, Russia and far too many Russians have long clung to a mindset that Russia and its Orthodox religion were superior to the west and western Europe in particular even when any rational objective standard would conclude the exact opposite.  Prior to Peter the Great's forced westernization of the aristocracy - e.g., mandatory shaving of beards, adoption of western style clothes and learning of western ways and languages - any visitor to Russia was typically shocked by the backwardness of Russia which liked to view itself as "the third Rome" and protector of true Christianity.  In many ways, even under the Soviets, this mindset remained unchanged and was in some ways intensified by the Soviet anti-west obsession.  A piece in Bloomberg looks at this mindset now being packaged under the term  "Eurasianism." Here are some excerpts:

Vladimir Putin’s aggressive foray into Eurasia, and the possibility of a new cold war with the West, has actually enhanced rather than lessened his popularity in Russia. The Economist despairs that “the chances of Russia’s becoming a modern, civilised country, open to the world and respectful of its citizens, are diminishing with every outburst of war hysteria on Russian television.” Last week in Germany, amid much discussion of Russia’s aims in Ukraine, an acquaintance of mine from Leipzig seemed equally pessimistic: “The Russians need another century,” she said, “before they are ready to join European civilization.”

[A] century doesn’t seem long enough. For Russia’s own journey to the West has not reached its destination since Peter the Great started it in the 18th century. 

The collapse of communism in 1989 seemed at first an opportunity to reset Russia’s direction. But any such move was pre-empted by the disasters of Boris Yeltsin’s rule and the consequent rise of Putin. Today, Russia’s political elites seem far from willing to undertake a makeover in the image of the West. Indeed, they appear to be engaged in a menacingly different geopolitical and cultural attempt at self-definition as they seek close alliances with China and other Asian countries. 

As Japan has shown, a superficial westernization, indicated by integration into the global economy, can easily conceal atavistic fantasies of national redemption and glory. Early in the 20th century, Japanese philosophers such as Kitaro Nishida and Tetsuro Watsuji sought to establish Japan’s radical spiritual and cultural difference from the West -- a project that eventually lent itself to Japan’s militarist Pan-Asianism in the 1930s and 1940s.

The advocates of a Greater Russia can claim to have an even longer intellectual and political pedigree, and a broader range of supporters: from Dostoevsky, who denounced the West almost as fervidly as the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb, to Alexander Herzen, the radical critic of Russian autocracy who claimed that Istanbul was the true capital of the Russian Empire.

An intriguing variation on this Russia-centric outlook was Eurasianism -- the notion that Russia belonged to neither East nor West but was a state with Mongol roots, its society a synthesis of various ethnic communities supervised by Great Russian Nationalism. Its ideological and intellectual basis was established by anti-communist Russian emigres in the 1920s and '30s, who, though critical of the Bolsheviks, hailed the strong Russian state that the latter’s despotism had helped create.

The Eurasians foresaw “post-Bolshevik” Russia as retaining a monolithic economy and one-party rule. They also wrote incessantly about the necessity of a religious revival across Russia. In their vision, the cunning of history was to reveal Russians as Eurasians rather than westernized communists or liberals.

Eurasianism is presently articulated by the political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, the son of a KGB officer, who reportedly has many attentive listeners in the Kremlin and the Orthodox Church. Dugin and his acolytes acknowledge that centuries after Tamerlane’s conquests, which redrew the map of the world, Eurasia remains, as U.S. policy maker Zbigniew Brzezinski put it in 1997, “the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.” Accordingly, Dugin has advocated a new anti-Western alliance between Russia and Asian countries.

This sense of injury and humiliation helps confirm the theory of one of the more eloquent and influential Eurasianists, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, a respected linguist, who argued in his essay “Europe and Man” that the very project of Europeanization was an ideological trick, designed to achieve permanent Western dominance over the non-West. . . . . the feelings of wounded pride, anger, frustration and inferiority he articulated remain crucial to understanding the ostensibly blithe anti-westernism in Russia today.

Putin himself rose to high office on a wave of support from the Russian masses, which had been exposed to some terrible suffering caused by Russia’s westernization through economic “shock therapy.” Bending Crimea to his will, or calling for a religious revival, Putin seems to be realizing the old Eurasian fantasy of a strong ideological state dedicated to restoring Russia’s distinctive national and civilizational “otherness.” 

Few commentators were more shocked on Sept. 11 than those who assumed that history had ended in 1989, and the universal dissemination of Western-style capitalism and democracy was the main geopolitical reality. They now confront the eruption of a long-repressed ideology -- an expansionist Neo-Eurasianism, which, incarnated by a nuclear-armed country, makes even Islamic fundamentalism seem toothless.

 Without understanding Russia's very different - and all too often tragic - history that has been beset by autocrats and rulers who have manipulated the Russian populace against its best interests, it is hard to understand what is happening currently in Russia and its goal in the Crimea.