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CIAO DATE: 01/04
International Affairs:
A Russian Journal
In Defense of Russian Sovereignty
A. Tsipko *
There is no reason to believe that today, in post-communist Russia ideology is less important than it was in the communist and Marxian Soviet Union. In fact, after August 1991 and disintegration of the Soviet state political struggle across the former U.S.S.R. became even bitterer. In the Soviet Union ideological struggle and the struggle against the so-called "worldwide imperialism" was mostly of a theatrical and decorative nature. Those who believed in communism's inevitable triumph and the advantages of the socialist mode of production were few and far between among Soviet intelligentsia and even among ideologists.
Ideological struggle unfolded in earnest on the eve of the Soviet Union's downfall: this was the struggle for the Soviet heritage between those who wanted to preserve the union by switching from the state's ideological to historical legitimacy and those who wanted to destroy it, to "dismantle the empire" as they put it. Today, the meaning of the ideological and therefore political struggle between the "Soviet patriots" and "democrats" on the eve of the union's collapse is growing clearer: they treated the "Russian heritage" and the Russian national awareness differently. The "Soviet patriots" of all hues, and even the "reds" sought to revive Russia, Russian Christian Orthodox civilization the Bolsheviks had destroyed in the Civil War and Stalin had partially and ambiguously restored. The democrats of all hues - the "people of the sixties" and human rights activists - saw purification of the nation's awareness from the remnants of Russian identity as their ultimate aim. The "red Soviet patriots" are revering Stalin precisely for his efforts to restore Russia's great power status and respect to the Russian military victories. Ironically it was Stalin who partially fulfilled Peter Struve's advice and did justice to Peter the Great's patriotism, Suvorov's heroism and self-sacrificial services of admirals Nakhimov and Kornilov.
Being convinced that Russian national awareness, Russian patriotism rooted in loyalty to the Russian Christian Orthodox Church, Russia's great power status, and its military triumphs could not in principle be democratic the democrats believed that if restored Russian national awareness would inevitably revive "Russian imperialism," Russian traditional despotism and Russian state anti-Semitism. They imagined that by dismembering the Soviet Union and contracting Russia's territory they were delivering the final blow at Russia's claims to greatness and uprooted the shoots of imperial despotism, xenophobia, and chauvinism.
Back in May 1991 when the Soviet Union was still alive political scientist Leonid Radzikhovskiy in the official newspaper of the Democratic Russia movement by way of polemics with my articles "Istoki stalinizma" (The Sources of Stalinism) that had appeared in the Nauka i zhizn' magazine late in 1988 and early in 1989 had the following to say about the struggle for the Russian heritage: either continuity and preservation of the czarist and Soviet "territory," "military force," and "order" or "real Russian sovereignty." He believed that "empire," "militarism," and "ideology" should have been sacrificed to democracy. 1
It was late in the 1980s when the Soviet Union's collapse was around the corner that former orthodox communists became Slavophiles wishing to restore traditional Russian statehood while the Social Democrats, "people of the sixties," became democratic Westerners ready to dismantle the Soviet empire. Anybody wishing to understand the current ideological situation in Russia and the meaning of the bitter ideological struggle should bear in mind that the democrats were fighting not so much against communism as the "empire" and the Russian great power traditions.
In this way the democratic revolution in Russia differed from the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe of the late 1980s: there communism and the Soviet system were fought against in the name of national states.
In Russia the democrats fought neither against Marxism, nor communism, nor the "heritage of October 1917." Nobody wanted to remove the vestiges of Marxist-Leninist ideology, nobody wanted to abandon class morals and embrace Christian morals common to mankind - everybody concentrated on removing the vestiges of Stalinism, of the so-called "Stalinist distortion of Marxism." In fact, nearly all leaders of the subject of our revolution - its ideology - were Marxists and have remained Marxists. Emotionally and philosophically they were loyal to the ideals of October, they revered Lenin and "the Lenin guard."
Here I have in mind Gavriil Popov, Elena Bonner, Iury Afanasiev, Leonid Batkin, and others. They were democrats and remained Marxists when it came to identifying the content and motives of their struggle. They looked at Russia and Russian autocracy through the eyes of Marx - therefore they were delivering blows at the Soviet Union seen as territorial heritage of the Russian Empire. It was their aim to leave behind the entire history of the Russian state, the heritage of the Bolshevik revolution together with the millennia-long imperial tradition.
Obviously this could not be done without dealing blows at the ideology, the holy ideas of statehood, Russian patriotic traditions, the traditions of great victories, the army's prestige, and the idea of serving the Fatherland. There was logic in this: Russia's claims to the great power status rested, at least in the minds of common people, on the pride in the great military victories planted in Soviet school in the same way as it was done in czarist school. This explains why on the eve of a collapse a campaign designed to discredit Russian patriotism was being unfolded on a great scale.
***
Strange as it may seem all efforts, including my own, to remind that before the revolution there had been a liberal patriotic tradition or liberal conservatism in Russia, that we should go back to Peter Struve and Nikolai Berdiaev were either ignored or denounced by the Union of Right Forces for the sake of putting an end to the great power status and its tradition. On the eve of the Soviet Union's collapse all denouncements of this tradition went hand in hand with denouncements of Russia's social traditions the main of them being the traditions of "peasant," or communal "we" allegedly mainly responsible for the communist totalitarian regime. Meanwhile, many of them were well aware that there was no tradition of Russian communality, that it was a product of the government's fiscal policy of the 18th century. Significantly, many prominent liberals of today did a lot in the late 1980s to rehabilitate Marxism so that to prove that the experience of our revolution per se speaks neither of true or false nature of materialism. 2
In the same way as the struggle against the "totalitarian empire" wittingly or unwittingly turned out to be a struggle against traditions, the pillars of the Russian statehood, and the territory the struggle against the "archaic" nature of Russian national awareness degenerated into Russophobia, denouncement of everything cherished by Russians, attempts to discredit the Russian Orthodox Church, belittle Russia's military victories, and Russians' labor morals. In fact the desire to destroy the millennia-long history of the great power and to uproot it from peoples' minds is as destructive as the Bolshevist efforts to defeat the "petty-bourgeois" nature of Russian peasants.
***
Today, we are witnessing two connected and mutually complementing stages of the emergence and development of the liberal, anti-state ideology in Russia. At the first stage the word "empire" was demonized as a synonym of "oppression," "chauvinism," expansion," etc.
Hence the new democrats' conviction that democracy and a healthier national awareness can be reached by discarding the "vastness of Russia" and trimming it down from a "great power" to a "compact national republic of the Russians." Late in the 1980s and early in the 1990s, the democrats discovered four enemies of freedom in Russia. The first of them is "the peasant we," the patriarchal consciousness that supports the state's omnipotence. The second is the empire, a result of territorial expansion. The third is the military-industrial complex, militarized economy, and a huge army. The fourth enemy is the claims to the great power status and a prominent role on the world political arena.
This is where the openly declared policy of the Soviet Union's territorial disintegration is rooted. This is where the policy of destruction of the military-industrial complex and demilitarization comes from. The already mentioned Demokraticheskaia Rossia newspaper presented, in the most concentrated way, this ideology of democratization of Russia through "dismantling the empire," trimming its vast territory and destroying its military-industrial complex. Egor Gaidar's Gosudarstvo i evolutsia (The State and Evolution) that appeared in 1995 offered more details of the same theory. He insisted that the "imperial ambitions" and "restoration of the military superpower" had nothing to do with "liberation of society" and democratic development; he said that restored military might and the borders pushed back to the natural limits would have become a trap: just like under the Bolsheviks democracy would shrink thus inviting another "all-Russia autocrat."
The policy of undermining the foundations of the traditional Russian great power status stems logically from the above. 3 To make this possible, the democrats invited society to overcome the so-called "statist approach," to abandon the military-industrial complex to its fate, and forget about the former territory. Indeed, the author asks, are we a nation "suffocated by want of lebensraum" or suffering of "deficit of armaments." 4
These bits and pieces clearly demonstrate that the democratic rejection of everything related to great power, read Russia, is irrational and has nothing to do either with common sense or logic. Indeed, why do democracy and modernization in the United States remain unscathed by its great power status while in Russia it is incompatible with democracy? Why does the military-industrial complex in all developed countries serve modernization while in Russia it causes economic degradation as soon it becomes stronger? Why did the Germans who were a divided nation have the right to reunification and extension of their territory while the Russians and Byelorussians lost this right forever?
It seems abundantly clear that demilitarized Russia of which our democrats are dreaming will be unable to protect its borders stretching for thousands of kilometers. The liberal ideology of ruining the state contradicts common morals. The ideologists of liberalism in Russia and the leaders of the Union of Right Forces are blinded by lack of confidence in Russia (or even by hatred of Russia) to the extent that they deny its peoples and the state everything that they allow to others.
One gets an impression that liberalism in Russia proceeds from the presumption of guilt of all peoples of Russia, the Russians in the first place, and the entire Russian state. The program documents of the Union of Right Forces, the party of the Russian liberals, is based on a conviction that democracy and human civilization as a whole will be much better off if Russia loses its "great power" status, that is, if it drops its claims to independence, and its role in world politics to become a "junior" partner patronized and controlled.
The striving for regaining the status of an influential world power is seen as the "loser complex." State sovereignty that contradicts the position of "liberal democracies" is described as a global catastrophe and dismissed as a "dramatic challenge not only to Russian liberalism but to entire mankind at the threshold of the 21st century." 5
***
In fact, Russian liberals are reproducing, at a new level and in new conditions, what the Vekhi authors dismissed as national, state, and religious "apostasy" 100 years ago, at the dawn of the 20th century. There is no need to remind here that the ideologists of new Russian liberalism look at Christian Orthodoxy as a "religion without future." Militant atheism reveals the Soviet and Marxist roots of Russian liberalism. The authors of the Russian Liberal Manifesto have in vain tried to tie together their ideology and Struve's ideas. The author of famous PATRIOTICA was alien to defeatism; he would have never accepted Westernism based on suspicions about his own country. He would have never embraced Westernism that rejected "national interests," that had nothing to do with the interests of "liberal democracy," the national and state sovereignty.
In the declaration adopted in June 2001 by its unifying congress the Union of Right Forces openly declared that the spirit of "statism" was its main foe; its chairmen and the political declaration recommended to shift the task of protecting national security and the national and state interests to the so-called "global contract," that is, to the selfsame "community of the developed states." The Union is imposing on the country the conception of limited sovereignty by insisting that any attempts to "interpret Russia's national interests arbitrarily" that is, independent of the West, cannot be accepted. The same position is present in the Manifesto that describes any attempts by the state to formulate its "national interests" or declare "non-interference in internal affairs" as a ruse and an attempt at "violating human rights and freedoms." 6
We all know that Struve called to the opposite - statism should be planted in human minds, especially in those that suffered of "national apostasy." He said: "The intelligentsia should imbibe the spirit of statism without which no powerful 'free state' can exist among the educated classes." 7 He wrote further that Russia could not be preserved and developed without recognition of "state power as a social value." 8
***
Today we are confronted with the theory of Russia's self-liquidation rather than with Westernism. The contemporary democratic movement stemmed from the desire to destroy the empire and remains dedicated to it.
Significantly, the ideologists of the Union of Right Forces are operating with the concept of a "totalitarian empire" that does not distinguish between the Russian czarist empire and the Soviet Union; it also downplays the changes that liberated the country from the Marxist-Leninist ideology and Marxist organization of labor. This confirms that the new Russian democrats and liberals do not so much want to liberate the country from communism as to destroy the Russian state, the product of several centuries that fought for its independence in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 and won.
There is no need to prove here that having lost its original Slavic core, the union of Great Russians, Ukrainians (Malorossy) and Byelorussians, its native territories and the natural historical borders along the Baltic and Black seas new Russia undermined its original national primacy. Obviously, linguistically, culturally, and religiously close Ukrainians and Byelorussians driven outside new Russia as a result of our struggle for democracy are much closer to Russians than the North Caucasian peoples. Obviously, Russians would have found it much easier to build up new Russia with them than with the Chechens, Ingushis, and Balkarians.
It should said that the ideologists of the Soviet Union's disintegration, the ideologists of new Russian liberalism, the leaders of the Democratic Russia movement and of The Union of Right Forces never tested their theory either with moral and humane values or with common sense.
It seems that the leaders of the Union of Right Forces have moved even farther away from common sense, the interests of the Russian state and its peoples than the former leaders of Democratic Russia. After August 1991, both Gavriil Popov and Anatoli Sobchak began supporting the Novo-Ogarevo process and refused to contribute to the Belovezhskaia Pushcha coup. Today, the leaders of the Union of Right Forces unequivocally denounce all regrets about the Soviet Union's collapse (which meant the collapse of real historical Russia) as a manifestation of the "loser complex" and "great power nostalgia."
We can all see that at the present, second stage ideological struggle the new liberals are waging against the Russian traditions of great power and statism has become even more embittered. Today, the globalization conception is used to make the ideology and practice of Russia's self-liquidation more convincing and to prove that the real sovereignty lost by Russia cannot be regained because the globalizing world leaves space neither for national sovereignty nor for the "national interests" per se. This fits "defeatism" into the global process and makes it look quazi-scientific; transfer of some of the prerogatives of nation-states to supranational organizations within the EU is described as the only and dominant trend while the ideology and practice of truncated limited sovereignty are presented as a norm and the rule to be embraced by all contemporary states.
***
Obviously, the ideology of self-liquidation, abandonment of territories, and Russia's geopolitical advantages, rejection of the national military-industrial complex and national sovereignty is akin to sickness. The liberals' struggle against "statism," the passionate desire to see one's own country a defeated weak "small brother" deprived of ambitions is a sign of a serious crisis of post-communist Russia as a whole. This is an ailment that affected a large part of the best educated, most active and energetic part of Russia's political elite. This is a paradox. They are intelligent and well educated - they seem to be deprived of their intellect as soon as they start thinking or talking about Russia. The dilemma formulated, in particular, by Egor Gaidar-either "welfare" or the military-industrial complex and "military might" - is obviously half-baked. Czarist Russia had left the dilemma in the past even before the revolution: Russia could not have survived without its military might; it had to fight off Polish, Turkish, Swedish, and French expansionists.
It is unreasonable and illogical to encroach on the military-industrial complex that we inherited from the U.S.S.R. where it was the center of scientific achievements, the source of high technologies, and an instrument of Russia's competitiveness in the contemporary world. It is thanks to it that we still can make fifth-generation weapons to ensure real sovereignty. The complex produces state-of-the-art weapons that bring billions of dollars to the state's coffers; it helps maintain the standard of living, it preserves numerous jobs and the education level, etc.
Time has come to say, and one can say with good reason, that the ideology of overcoming Russia's statism and the great power status (irrespective of hidden and stated motives) is damaging Russia's national security.
First, the idea or, rather, an opinion that the nation is suffering not because it has not enough territory but because its territory is too large is dangerous. It disarms the nation and the elite and cripples their ability to oppose the centrifugal trends that are still strong in Russia and that are an aftermath of sorts of the Soviet Union's disintegration. The very idea that Russia is suffering because it is too vast and that its vastness prevents it from creating efficient economy and rational production pushes the country, wittingly or unwittingly, to another Khasaviurt.
Significantly, before the October 2002 events in Moscow, experts and political scientists close to the Union of Right Forces encouraged President Putin to repeat the feat of President de Gaulle and withdraw from Chechnya in the same way as the French president had left Algeria. Every time the ideology of Russia's self-liquidation moves to the fore emotions substitute reason: France was a stable mono-ethnic historical and legitimate unit while Russia, being a product of the Soviet Union's disintegration, never existed. These people have not taken into account that Chechnya's independence will undermine the principle of new Russia's territorial integrity and legitimacy. If Russia "delivers" itself from Chechnya this will mean that any rebel territory can aspire of becoming a self-determined state. Obviously, Russia's retreat from Chechnya will increase the separatist sentiments in the Northern Caucasus (in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Ingushetia, and Balkaria in the first place). In fact, do we know where "excessive territories" end and "territories Russia needs" begin: if the Northern Caucasus is an "excessive territory" why should we look at the Muslim Volga area as the "territory we need"?
***
Here I have to say something normally not mentioned: the liberal struggle against "excessive territories" stems not from a "fatigue with the empire" but from the psychology of a potential emigrant, a person who treats Russia as an alien country for which he has no compassion.
Each nation looks at its territory as its home, the soil on which its ancestors worked and shed blood. Indeed, it is next to impossible to separate the "mother country" from the "colonies" on the former Soviet territory. For centuries the north of Kazakhstan was developed by Russians - it was part of the "mother country," wasn't it? The south of Ukraine that in the past was the North Black Sea coastal steppe and then was called Novorossia was undoubtedly part of the mother country. Can one acquire the right idea about Russia's past without the history of shipbuilding in Nikolaev, the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, etc.?
The liberals' struggle against excessive territories was and remains a struggle against Russia's national interests and the Russians' national awareness.
Second, it is only too obvious that the "liberal" struggle against the "imperial heritage" and "excessive territories" turns out to be a struggle against the urge toward integration and integration processes across the post-Soviet expanse. The so-called independent media that are in fact controlled by the liberals for five years now have been consistently opposing the idea of the Russian-Byelorussian union state; they are doing their best to sow doubts about the reintegration idea. What is more, the liberal media support the anti-Russian forces both in Byelorussia and Ukraine and those who reject the very possibility of cooperation and friendship between the former Soviet republics and the Russian Federation. They insist that Russia should avoid "acquiring Ukraine" because this integration will give a new lease of life to the "nearly dead union between Russia and Byelorussia" that will result "in an nearly unavoidable geopolitical temptation to set up a Slavic Entente" and move further on, to another empire.
This is the best and most glaring example of lack of logic or, to be more exact, of absurdity of liberalism a la Russe. Indeed, why were the divided Germans allowed to reunite while the Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians divided in 1991 are denied this right? Why does unification of spiritually, linguistically, culturally, and religiously close Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians lead to an empire while Russia that unites different peoples and even civilizations is regarded as a nation-state? In which way does Eastern and Southern Ukraine (the Ukrainian part of Novorossia) differ from the South of Russia, from the Stavropol and Krasnodar areas? The answer is: there is no difference. The lands are populated by the same Russian-Ukrainian people who speak the South Russian tongue. The liberals are convinced that this people should live in different states.
This is another example of lack of common sense, respect to the right of nations to reunification and historical creativity practiced by the Russian liberals. In fact, their ideology is spearheaded against Russia's national-state interests.
Third, one cannot ignore the fact that this ideology of Russia's self-liquidation is damaging Russia's spiritual security and the nation's spiritual health. Nobody can predict some remote effects of the current wide-scale campaign designed to expose the Russians' claim to the great power status. I can only add that deliberate erosion of the people's faith in the state, its power and its ability to revive as a great power is unnatural.
In fact, all over the world all nations and all governments are doing the opposite: they teach people to be proud of their state, its achievements, to respect the traditions and the ancestors. They know that the faith in the nation and the country (which is the essence of patriotism) is an important instrument of bringing together the leaders and the people and is a source of energy. Throughout human history none of the governments had done what Gaidar's cabinet did. The cabinet of reformers did its best to convince the nation that the state was weak, that nothing could be done to revive it, that "Russia was doomed to become an outskirt of European civilization" (Leonid Sedov) and that for its own good the nation should reconcile itself with this prospect the sooner the better.
Everybody knows that patriotism, pride for one's own country is irrational and is born by myths, legends, and ambitions. The new nations of Central and Eastern Europe that appeared in the last 100 to 150 years are products of myths yet nobody ever tried to deliberately expose them in an effort to reveal the void on which the faith in the nation and its predestination rested. Nobody has ever tried to prove that what other nations can do - strive to grandeur - was banned to one's own nation. It was absolutely clear at all times that the cornerstone of ethnic memory once removed kills national pride and national awareness, breeds apathy, deprives the nation of moral principles and destroys personality.
These efforts produced what could be expected: lack of optimism among the Russians who no longer see any meaning in their own past that became obvious for the first time in many centuries and that sociologists registered in recent years.
***
This shows that time has come to confront the ideology of Russia's self-liquidation with convincing and tangible arguments in defense of the state and national sovereignty. I do not have in mind a propaganda campaign or brainwashing. We should overcome the state's passiveness and apathy obvious in everything related to its own urgent and important interests. I regret to say that even under Putin the quality of ideological efforts remains low. We have to liberate the public from the liberal myths that suppress willpower, breed pessimism, kill off faith in ones own forces and in the state. We have to create national identity so that to provide each and every citizen of the Russian Federation with a firm soil of facts and objective reality.
The academic and expert community has risen in protest against the self-liquidation ideology; there are attempts to prove that Russia can raise from the ruins of the Soviet Union and its own reformed economy to claim its role of a subject of history and of world politics.
We have to gather all the arguments to defend sovereignty and Russia and provide a theoretical canvass of the potentials and reserves of state and national development. We have to collect all arguments and facts to overturn and expose the ideology of Russia's self-liquidation.
Significantly, many historians and academics have become aware of the need for the philosophy of optimism; they have already formulated their response to the national and state apostasy. Anatoly Utkin in his Vyzov Zapada i otvet Rossii (The Challenge of the West and Russia's Answer) and his contributions to the round tables by the Rossia newspaper collected arguments that refuted the liberals' assertion that Russia had no civilizational resources to meet the challenges of contemporary civilization. Another book, Mify o Rossii i dukh natsii (Myths about Russia and the Spirit of the Nation) by Aleksandr Gorianin offers a different approach to Russia's history that has no nihilism in it.
It was Andrei Kokoshin in his article "What is Russia: A Superpower, a Great Power or a Regional Power?" that appeared in International Affairs who was the first to point out to the numerous resources that still make Russia a great power. He avoided a direct confrontation with the ideology of self-liquidation yet outlined that main lines and key points of polemics with the liberals' ideas about world politics.
First, Kokoshin has created a system of arguments spearheaded against the theory of self-liquidation of nation-states as one of the globalization results. He has demonstrated that the growing number of supranational international organizations, the phenomenon of multinational and transnational corporations does not devalue the role and importance of sovereign states. He has pointed out that accelerated globalization of the 1990s failed to quench ethnic conflicts and the growing isolation of ethnic communities. He has written: "In the last ten years new (yet deep-rooted) conflicts were added to the old ones." 9
***
When talking about the future of sovereign nation-states our globalists fall into the same methodological trap as Karl Marx fell before them when assessing the future of nations. This trap is called economic determinism that underestimates the specifics of national awareness and ignores an impossibility to reduce life to economic relations alone. Marx believed that as capital and industrial production became universal and completely international nations and national specifics would die away. This did not happen; in fact history reacted in the opposite way: industrial capitalism created a wave of unprecedented nationalism, racism and numerous wars.
The globalists have added nothing new to what Marx wrote about internationalization of the world and industrial production. What is new is internationalization of everyday, mass culture and global information exchange. These processes cannot shake loose the pillars of national awareness and national identity. A Frenchman, a Pole, and a Russian may use similar toilets yet this does not deprive them of their ethnic identity. Globalization cannot undermine the personality core, the national tongue, the national memory, and national identity.
Early in the last century Peter Struve described in every detail the intimate connection between the state's sovereignty, the national tongue, and national awareness. He demonstrated that the nation-state served the foundation for, and was a condition of, preservation of national culture, national tongue, national awareness, and, consequently, national memory. 10
Our liberal globalists are too inflexible in their way of thinking to be able to imagine that changes in production and everyday culture may be opposed to so that to rebuff the leveling processes. In fact, things are developing in a non-lineal way: supranational organizations make it even more urgent to preserve the national core as a guarantee against supranational organizations' erroneous decisions that can be damaging to national interests.
In its conviction that the community of liberal democracies knows better what is good for Russia and that any of its attempts to protect its sovereignty will endanger human civilization our liberal elite is quite unique. No other elite places the national interests of its country below the interests of other countries. Those who believe that an opposite position - an ability to place the interests of one's own country above the interests of other states - has become a norm of civilized European patriotism are quite right.
This explains why the world and Europe are concerned with protecting the core of national sovereignty, the mechanism through which the state can take back the powers it transfers to supranational structures on its own free will. The supranational mechanisms and instruments are preserved as long as they promote national interests. It takes no wisdom to detect that there are primordial and insurmountable obstacles on the road toward the death of national sovereignty.
Strange as it may seem those who call themselves Westerners and who are trying to integrate Russia into the community of developed states in actual fact are waging a struggle against the fundamental values of contemporary European civilization. The democratic idea of individual sovereignty and the sovereignty of a nation as an absolute master of its country is intimately connected with the idea of state sovereignty. Many of the European countries have transferred part of their powers to the supranational structures of united Europe yet they (1) have preserved the right to recover these powers in case of need; (2) in contemporary Europe in the broad sense of the word (in the so-called Atlantic civilization) some states limit their sovereignty in favor of another state sovereignty, to be more exact in favor of the United States as the only superpower and its growing might.
Those of the Russian globalists who are insisting that in the context of internationalized markets and the free movement of capital the ideas about the state sovereignty as a dogma of the 19th and 20th-century political culture are dying out are wrong. The idea of U.S. sovereignty as the only great power remains unscathed: no power in the world can stand opposed to the will and wishes of those at the helm of this "increasingly sovereign" power.
It should be said that the globalist convictions of our liberals have a great deal of hypocrisy in them: they are fighting against the remnants of our state sovereignty, "the imperial ambitions" of the Russians for the sake of strengthening the U.S. ambitions as a genuine world power. Those who refuse to feed their own army will have to feed an occupation army; those who destroy the sovereignty and dignity of one's own state are wittingly or unwittingly strengthening the dignity and sovereignty of its rivals. There are no other options.
***
There is an opinion that the idea of globalism and of dying out of state sovereignty can be brought up to its logical end when the governing functions are transferred to the single world governance, a new international organization that will replace the UN. Those who support the idea argue that many tragedies caused by German fascism and the Holocaust could have been avoided but for the tenacious prejudices of state sovereignty. They say that back in 1935 it became abundantly clear what Hitler's regime had in store; it was at that time that the allied United States, France, and Britain could have unleashed a preventive military action to kill fascism in its cradle. World history could have developed differently.
This raises questions to which the "liberators of the world from all and any sovereignty" provide no answers. How can we avoid the pressure of the United States in the supranational structures? It is in its nature to put its own interests above humanity. Can the struggle against the so-called potential threat emanating from the so-called potential rogue countries result in imposing the U.S. interests on all other states? Are there guarantees that the new supranational organizations will protect the individual sovereignties and freedoms better and with more zeal than the sovereign states of the past? We have learned from the history of mankind that universality is fraught with a bias toward totalitarianism. Who will have the right to distinguish between the states "hostile" to the "interests of civilization" or "friendly" to them? How can we separate personal interests, national preferences, and other subjective feelings of bureaucrats of the future world governance from the genuine interests of democratic civilization? Who will guarantee that an abandonment of national sovereignty will not degenerate into more attacks against civilians and cities very much like the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia? Indeed, who will keep in check the totalitarian biases of world structures in an absence of sovereign states and their sacred borders?
The Russian proponents of withering sovereignties (Russia's sovereignty in the first place) cannot answer these questions. I am very much afraid that the propaganda of the allegedly unavoidable effects of globalism does nothing but promotes another form of totalitarianism for the sake of "world-wide democracy."
In his article quoted above Andrey Kokoshin has attempted to refute the liberal thesis about the pernicious nature of Russia's "boundless vastness." He has demonstrated that the idea about "geopolitical advantages" losing their relevance in the context of economic globalization holds no water. The very attempt to cast doubt on the importance of the territorial factor was born by the specific post-war conditions in which Germany and Japan restored their economic might: at the turn of the 21st century its importance as a component of national might was reassessed. Kokoshin has written: "A large territory contributes to military security and increases the country's agricultural potential. More than that: it offers wider possibilities of transit transportation corridors, sovereign environmental protection measures, and so on. There is another side to this: the world's population will grow...and will inevitably increase an anthropogenic pressure on the environment therefore a large territory with a good climate, plenty of fresh water and other vitally important resources adds to the state's might. In this context, Russia's vast territory is of great value." 11
The article has demonstrated that a strictly objective scholarly approach will reveal many factors and parameters of Russia's continued great power status. This is best discerned from the national point of view; it becomes clear that real influence and real might are not determined merely by per capita GDP but also by the human development index.
It turns out that Russia's traditional image of a world power and its unique status of Eurasian civilization and even its historical memory, its history and glorious military victories offer a huge development potential.
Common sense prompts us that even two unique advantages - the territory and the practically inexhaustible mineral resources (with preserved sovereignty and statehood) - give Russia a chance of survival. It should be added here that the unfolding rivalry over the development resources will force us "in the nearest future to prove at least to the main global rivals even if not our ability of using these resources than at least our ability of owning them." 12
Anatoly Utkin has also pointed out to these geopolitical advantages. He believes that we should accept a different approach to the map of Russia and start scanning it from Siberia moving westwards and not vice versa. This will reveal our true riches to us.
Today, the Siberian rivers and lakes, the treasure troves of pure water cause envy across the world; our former backwardness has developed into a national advantage. Today Russia possesses the largest territory free or nearly free from anthropogenic effects. Russian forests and marches help diminish the negative effects of climatic changes, cushion economic and social losses for our country and other regions.
The unique geopolitical advantages of the country that is the Eurasian heartland are a huge and still untapped national resource. Russia can become the main transportation corridor between two economically most dynamic regions: Western Europe and the APR; increased freight transit from the West to the East and from the North to the South and back will restore Russia's status as one of the transportation powers.
Our geopolitical advantages maintain Russia's influence as a great power and serve a source of its development. Russia keeps open the doors to all key regions: to America via Alaska; to China via the Amur; to Western Europe via the Baltics, the polar regions and the Black Sea; to the Muslim world via Kazakhstan, Central Asia and the Caspian; the Indian world via the Altai and Hindu Kush. Russia has ample resources to pursue an active international policy and to remain an influential power.
Stop listening to those who are saying that today Russia is weak as never before and that it should forget its ambitions. A scholarly and honest approach reveals everything that is needed to preserve Russia's might as a world power. We should look at our country as a nation interested in its own future.
To be able to preserve and develop the gift we have inherited from our ancestors - our territory stretching to the Pacific, - we should by all means learn to discern new things on Russia's map. We should recognize the Yenisey, Ob, and Lena as our rivers rather than exotic inventions of trailblazers; appreciate the climate and scenery of the upper reaches of the Lena, to the north of Lake Baikal that are especially attractive.
We should learn to look at the trans-Urals territory as the heart of Russia, as a territory where Russians are living rather than as a mineral-rich cold place. This is how Russia will preserve its amazing territory that has many geological wonders in store. Biotechnology will create frost-resistant fruits and vegetables and turn the Siberian expanses into a zone vibrant with life.
I have never attempted here to inspect all possible arguments in defense of Russia's sovereignty, all possible ideological, material, political and other potentials of Russia's statehood. I am convinced that time has come to look after our spiritual and ideological safety and to start working on an ideological foundation of Russian's national sovereignty. Adequate moral and political atmosphere has been created.
The defeatist ideology typical of all Russian revolutions and the ideology of national and state apostasy have fortunately outlived themselves or are very close to this. The very fact that the Union of Right Forces, the party of militant liberalism, gets merely 5 percent of the votes speaks volumes. Today, the defeatists are not those who are talking about "national sovereignty" and "greatness" of Russia but those who are imposing on us the role of an obliging "junior partner" deprived of its own opinion. It is for the expert community to supply the reviving awareness of eternal Russian sovereignty with an ideological foundation. Today, the willpower and purposefulness of the president are not enough-all those who call themselves supporters of the state should display their willpower and purposefulness.
Endnotes
Note *: Aleksandr Tsipko, Chief Researcher, Institute of International and Political Problems, RAS; D.Sc. (Philosophy). Back
Note 1: L. Radzikhovsky, "Smena vekh," Demokraticheskaia Rossia, No.7, 1990. Back
Note 2: For more details see my book Nasilie lzhi, ili kak zabludilsia prizrak, Moscow, 1990. Back
Note 3: E. Gaidar, Gosudarstvo i evolutsia, Moscow, 1995, pp. 195-196. Back
Note 5: Rossisky liberal'ny manifest (Program of the Union of Right Forces political party), p. 2. Back
Note 7: P.B. Struve, PATRIOTICA. Politika, kul'tura, religia, sotsialism, Moscow, 1997, p. 61. Back
Note 9: A. Kokoshin, "What is Russia: a Superpower, a Great Power or a Regional Power?" Mezhdunarodnaia zhizn, No. 9-10, 2002, p. 38. Back
Note 10: "No rational motives can explain why a Frenchman should remain French, a German-German, a Pole-Pole. This is the 'soil of thought" which...nobody discusses any longer." (P.B. Struve, op. cit, p. 66.) Back
Note 11: A. Kokoshin, op. cit., p. 42. Back
Note 12: Deliagin, Mir 2010-2020 godov: nekotorye bazovye tendentsii i trebovania k Rossii (manuscript). Back