Some other Russian isms

In the comments section of my last post, I was asked what other Russian ideologies might be, and how they contrast with conservatism. So here’s a brief stab at an answer:

1. Westernism/liberalism.

From the time that the Slavophiles split with the ‘Westernizers’ in the 1840s, there has been a sharp divide between those who think that Russia is distinct from the West and should follow its own separate path of development, and those who believe that Russia should integrate itself more fully with the West so as ultimately to merge with it. It is worth noting, however, that the term ‘West’ is rather ill-defined. There isn’t, and never has been, a single model of economic, social, and political development which one call definitively ‘Western’. Russian ‘Westernizers’ haven’t so much wanted Russia to copy ‘the West’ as wanted Russia to copy one particular version of the West, namely whatever version has been considered the most ‘progressive’ at the time. In the mid-nineteenth century, this meant liberalism; later, it meant socialism; nowadays, it means liberalism again, or perhaps even neo-liberalism. In geopolitical terms, this today means accepting US hegemony. In domestic political terms, it means supporting liberal democracy (though just what that means is not often well explained). In philosophical/moral terms, it means advocating the most ‘progressive’ interpretations of human rights. And in economic terms it means free trade, free market economics, and deepening the process of globalization by furthering Russia’s integration into the global economy.

2. Statism/Realism.

Statists believe that a strong state is a prerequisite for a stable, powerful, and prosperous Russia. Statism is not incompatible with Westernism/liberalism, and many (though far from all) Statists would in principle agree with Western liberal ideas such as democracy, free markets, and the like. But whereas the Westernizers/liberals give their ideological commitments top priority, the Statists put the interests of the state first and are therefore willing to sacrifice so-called ‘Western values’ if state interests demand it. Statists thus reject the Westernizers’ universalism, and are pragmatists rather than ideologues. In terms of foreign policy this makes them Realists – i.e. they determine policy according to material interests not abstract values. On the whole, Statists/Realists consider Russia to be a European country, historically, culturally, and politically. They dismiss the idea that Russia is a distinct civilization. Instead, they recognize that Russia’s primary interests lie in having good ties with Europe. But that does not mean that they believe that Russia should subordinate itself to other European states. Rather, the Statists’/Realists’ objective is for Russia to be recognized as an equal in a European concert of powers, thereby enabling it to live in peace with its neighbours while enjoying international respect and an ability to promote and protect its interests. In the late Soviet era, this idea took the form of Mikhail Gorbachev’s proposal for a Europe stretching ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok’. While many Statists/ Realists are coming round to the belief that such a Europe is not in practice possible, it remains the ideal which I think most of them would like to see.

3. Cosmism.

In the struggle for the title ‘most eccentric Russian philosopher’, there is no shortage of competition, but in my view the certain winner is the founder of Cosmism, Nikolai Fyodorov, an impoverished late-Imperial librarian who gave away all his money, lived off tea and bread, and slept on a wooden chest. Fyodorov proposed that the ‘common task’ of mankind was to physically resurrect the dead – all of them, every last man or woman who had ever lived – a task which would require the development of advanced technology to colonize the stars while searching for the cosmic dust into which our ancestors had dissolved. Despite his extreme eccentricity, Fyodorov had a surprising influence on great Russian thinkers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Vladimir Vernadskii, and has enjoyed something of a revival in post-Soviet Russia. Modern cosmists don’t believe in scouring space for the cosmic dust of our ancestors (though some are into ideas such transhumanism), but they share the belief that mankind has a ‘common task’. Cosmism thus lends itself to a certain form of cosmopolitanism. Technology is assigned an important role as the tool which will enable mankind to turn swords into ploughshares and to unite in a peaceful, common future. Cosmism fits well with Soviet concepts of internationalism as well as with memories of the ‘great leaps forward’ in Soviet technology, and thus with views that Russia must once again become the centre of technological progress and through that lead humanity forward to a radiant future.

Of all these –isms, Statism/Realism is the one which, in my opinion, most accurately describes that pursued by Russia’s rulers, both in the past and today. Conservatism, Westernism/liberalism, and Cosmism all influence public and elite opinion to some degree (Cosmism least of all), but ultimately, I think, the Russian state bases its policies primarily on determinations of interests rather than ideology. In some respects, such as their recognition of Russia as a European state, the Statists/Realists are closer to the Westernizers/liberals than to the conservatives, but in other respects – namely, their pragmatic rejection of universal values, and consequent insistence that Russia has a right to independent development – they are closer to the conservatives. The policies adopted by the Russian state may therefore be seen as essentially centrist in terms of the Russian political spectrum. Analysts who insist of portraying the ‘Putin regime’ as in some way ‘extremist’ are, therefore, very much wide of the mark.

UPDATE: As if on cue, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared today, ‘Russia, of course, can never allow itself the luxury of turning its face to Europe and its back to Asia, or vice versa. Culturally speaking, of course, Russia is part of European civilization.’ This confirms, I think, what I said about the Statists above.

The Russian soul and the toxic West

I’ve spent the last week ploughing through the 1,400 pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary. (Boy, that guy knew how to churn out the words!!) The experience has left me pretty well acquainted with the writer’s views on the Russian People (with a capital ‘P’), Europe, the Eastern Question, and Russia’s universal mission. I’ve also just finished writing an academic article which discusses, among other things, references to Dostoevsky in Vladimir Putin’s speeches. And now by some quirk of fate, the international press has produced not one, but two, articles saying that Dostoevsky provides the key to understanding Putin’s politics.

A year or so ago, the press was all over Ivan Ilyin, saying that he was the man you had to read to understand Putin. Before that they said it was Aleksandr Dugin. No doubt a year from now it will be somebody else. But there is a bit of truth in the Dostoevsky meme since Putin has quoted and mentioned Dostoevsky in his speeches on numerous occasions.

So what is being said of the Putin-Dostoevsky connection?

Russia, shield of Europe?

In a post last week, I commented that some modern-day Slavophiles ‘claim that it is precisely by refusing to fully endorse “Western values” that they can save Western civilization from itself’. This sparked one comment which read, ‘I wouldn’t claim that exactly none have this sort of a messianic vision, but it must be very few. They sympathize with the western conservatives of course, they lament their decline, they see them as natural allies – yes, but I don’t think they regard themselves as saviors of their civilization.’ With this in mind, I was intrigued by an article I read this week by Dalarna University’s Maria Engström. This was published in 2014 in the journal Contemporary Security Policy, and is available free online here.

Entitled ‘Contemporary Russian Messianism and New Russian Foreign Policy’, the article introduces readers to the concept of ‘Russia as Katechon, as the world’s shield against the apocalyptic forces of chaos’. Katechon is a Greek word meaning ‘that which withholds’. The idea dates back to St Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians. According to Engström:

St John Chrysostom interprets Paul’s words as a reference to the Emperor and his power that withholds and protects the world from the advent of the Antichrist. In this teaching, the Roman Empire is an antithesis of Anomia [lawlessness] and will exist until the Second Advent, restraining the chaos. … Already during Ivan the Terrible’s reign it was specified that the two enemies of Moscow as the Katechon are the external Antichrist, that is, all lands beyond Muscovy, and the internal Antichrist, which is no less dangerous than the external one. Internal resistance to the State under certain circumstances and especially during unstable periods is now interpreted as an indulgence to the powers of Anomia and chaos. This eschatological view becomes a constant of Russian history and the Russian understanding of the State as the Restrainer.

Engström explains that in Imperial Russia the idea of Katechon eventually came to imply that Russia was the shield which protected Europe from chaos. Thus Pushkin wrote of Russia’s ‘special destiny’, which included saving European civilization from the Mongols. Similarly, Alexander Blok wrote in The Scythians that, ‘We’ve held the shield between two hostile powers – Old Europe and the barbarous Mongol horde.’ Later in time, Russia was the Katechon which saved Europe from Napoleon and Hitler.

According to Engström, while the general concept is an old one, the use of the actual word Katechon in Russia is very new. The word entered Russian political philosophy following the translation into Russian in the 1990s of the work of controversial German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). In the process, it has undergone an evolution. In addition to the idea of defending Europe militarily, it has now acquired a spiritual sense – that of Russia being Europe’s ideological shield, defending against the influence of liberal Western values. The West, says Engström, is:

described in terms of Anomia (relegation of Christian values, forcing the majority to adopt the opinions of the minority, destabilization, and chaos). The rhetoric of spiritual mobilization, of Russia’s responsibility for the fate of the world, and of the ‘burden of the Russian people’ is becoming dominant once again as it was many times before during tragic periods in Russian history. … The new conservative doctrine is very anti-Western, but it is not a denial of Russia’s European identity; rather it is an argument for Russia’s true European Christian identity that got lost in the bureaucratic body of the European Union.

Some Russians go on to conclude that their country can only fulfil its messianic role as Katechon by propagating an alternative ideology to that of the decadent liberal West. The Russian constitution’s prohibition against an official ideology is thus mistaken and should be repealed.

This is all fascinating stuff. But I part ways somewhat with Engström when she says that this type of thinking has an important influence on government policy. This is especially true of the theory that Russia should be an ideological Katechon, protecting Europe against moral chaos. As I noted in a previous post, Vladimir Putin has recently repeated his own opposition to the idea of any sort of state ideology beyond ‘patriotism’. This hardly suggests that he sees himself as engaged in a deep ideological struggle with Western liberalism, let alone as leading a mystical charge to shield the West from the consequences of its own decadence.  More broadly, as I explained in yet another recent post, Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine and Syria supports the conclusion that Russian foreign policy is mostly Realist in orientation and focused on defending national interests not on promoting any ideology or set of values.

Imperial Russia

Much has been written in the last couple of years about Russia’s ‘conservative turn’. On the whole, I haven’t been impressed, but I did quite like an article I stumbled across today by Moscow-based American academic Christopher Stroop which was published last month in The Public Eye magazine (which describes its mission as being to ‘challenge the right-wing’ and its ‘threats to human and civil rights’). Entitled ‘A Right-Wing International’, the article describes the leading role which the Russian Orthodox Church has played in the World Congress of Families (WCF), an organization ‘dedicated to what [its members] call “the natural family”.’

Stroop depicts the WCF as the product of a complex mix of Russian and American influences. It emerged out of discussions between Russian sociologists Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov and conservative American activist Alan Carlson, who was strongly influenced by Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian émigré sociologist who taught at Harvard. According to Stroop, Sorokin taught that, ‘absent absolute values grounded in unchanging religious truth, human morality will decay and society will descend into chaos’. Sorokin drew on the writings of earlier Russian thinkers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Berdyaev, Ivan Ilyin, and Sergei Bulgakov, who all maintained that in the absence of belief in God, people would come to idolize the state. The result would be tyranny. Berdyaev, says Stroop, ‘believed in a particular Providential calling for Russia … in which a spiritually renewed Russia would have an important role to play in reviving the Christian roots of European civilization’. It is this idea, Stroop claims, which now inspires the Russian Orthodox Church and some Russian political leaders.

Stroop warns that the ‘idea of a special role for Russia in the world’s moral progress … [can] all too easily play into a sense of Russian exceptionalism: a sense that Russia represents a morally superior civilization.’ Berdyaev, Bulgakov, and others sought hard to avoid this, but ‘With or without claiming inherent moral superiority, there is a clear claim here that Russia has a spiritual mission to enlighten other nations. Historically, this claim is rooted in Slavophilism.’ Stroop adds:

The Russian discourse of moral mission and the superiority of Christian values to those of the ‘decadent’ West has played a key role in the resurgence of social conservatism in post-Soviet Russia. It should be noted that this discourse is essentially imperial; Russian concerns about morality have never been only about Russia, but have always been bound up with considerations of the role that Russia should play in the wider world.

I agree to some extent. As I have pointed out before, Slavophilism drew on German Romantic claims that nations could only contribute to humanity by following their own path and drawing on what was best in their own culture. Paradoxically, Slavophiles wished to distance themselves from the West, not in order to live in splendid isolation but precisely in order to be able to contribute something to the West. In the same way, some of their modern successors claim that it is precisely by refusing to fully endorse ‘Western values’ that they can save Western civilization from itself.

Yet to call this ‘imperial’ is going a bit too far. ‘Imperial’ implies the imposition of a set of ideas or a form of government by an alien central authority. I do not see any indication that modern Russian conservatives have any such thing in mind. Their idea is not to create a ‘right-wing international’ like the old Communist International. At the heart of the philosophical tradition Stroop describes is a recognition of the value of diversity. The basic claim is that Russia is different, and should be allowed to do things differently. That in turn means that others are different too and should also be allowed to do things differently.  It is no surprise that many of those who are now called ‘conservative’ in Russia are resolutely opposed to what they believe are the modern manifestations of imperialism, such as globalization. Theirs is in many ways an anti-imperial philosophy.

Given the declared mission of The Public Eye magazine, it would seem that Stroop’s use of the word ‘imperial’ is meant to sound some sort of alarm about the threat Russia poses to human rights in the West. I think that this is unnecessary. At the end of the day, most Russians are far more interested in being left alone by the West to do things their own way than they are in converting the West to their own point of view.

Book Review: Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine

My recent post on Sergei Lavrov’s article provoked a discussion about whether it matters whom politicians cite. French philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff has written a small book entitled Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine [Inside Vladimir Putin’s Head] based on the principle that it does.

Given how many people have written articles claiming to know what Putin wants or what he is thinking, it is surprising how few of them have bothered to go through all Putin’s speeches to find out what it is that he has actually said. Eltchaninoff has trawled 15 years of Putin’s pronouncements to discover which philosophers the Russian president has cited and to locate ideological statements. He has also interviewed a number of Russians who have taken part in the country’s ideological debates, such as philosopher/political activist Alexander Dugin, outspoken priest Vsevolod Chaplin, writer Alexander Prokhanov, and political philosopher Boris Mezhuev. He proposes that Putin is of more philosophical bent than commonly imagined.

By examining Putin’s speeches in depth, and using them to make a serious analysis of Putin’s ideological preferences, Eltchaninoff’s book breaks new ground. It contains much interesting material, and I certainly learnt a lot from it. In that respect, its contents are a valuable addition to our knowledge of Russia’s leader.

That said, I have some strong doubts about Eltchaninoff’s analysis of Putin’s philosophical sources. Eltchaninoff’s conclusion is that Putin is above all an ‘imperialist’ and an ‘arch-conservative’. But to reach this conclusion he has to treat some sources differently from others. Eltchaninoff dismisses as unimportant or irrelevant quotations from philosophers whom Putin has cited whose work doesn’t support his conclusion. Meanwhile, he puts a lot of emphasis on things other philosophers wrote which could support the conclusion, even when the things in question are not what Putin was quoting. The result is misleading.

Eltchaninoff mentions six main thinkers whom Putin has cited: Immanuel Kant, Konstantin Aksakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Konstantin Leontiev, Ivan Ilyin, and Lev Gumilev. He deals with the first three very differently from the last three.

Eltchaninoff discusses Putin’s references to Kant, and in particular Kant’s essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’, in the context of his liberal, pro-European discourse in the early 2000s. But he doesn’t allow himself to conclude that Putin is, or indeed ever was, liberally-inclined or pro-European. Eltchaninoff notes that when speaking in Kaliningrad or Berlin, Putin said that Russia was part of Europe, but when speaking in Asian cities he said that Russia was Eurasian. The citation of Kant was, therefore, just a diplomatic ploy, an example of Putin’s ‘pseudo-liberalism’.

As for Aksakov, Eltchaninoff considers Putin’s mention of him to be irrelevant. Aksakov, he notes, was a ‘first generation Slavophile’, but these Slavophiles were not imperialists; Putin is an imperialist; therefore, we cannot draw any conclusions from Putin citing Aksakov! Instead, Eltchaninoff says that Putin is closer to ‘second generation Slavophiles’ such as Nikolai Danilevskii, and proceeds to provide a long explanation of Danilevskii’s beliefs. But as far as I know (and Eltchaninoff doesn’t produce any evidence to the contrary), Putin has never cited Danilevskii.

Putin’s mentions of Berdyaev are similarly regarded as meaningless. Eltchaninoff remarks that the concept of freedom was at the core of Berdyaev’s philosophy. Putin is, as we all know, against freedom. Thus, it follows, according to Eltchaninoff, that Putin simply doesn’t understand Berdyaev. If he did, Eltchaninoff says, he wouldn’t have cited him.

Leontiev, Ilyin, and Gumilev receive very different treatment, with Eltchaninoff taking care to emphasize the anti-Western and illiberal parts of their philosophies. He segues neatly from Leontiev to the so-called ‘crown jurist of the Third Reich’ Carl Schmitt (to whom Putin has never in fact referred), thus creating the impression that Putin has fascist tendencies, while ignoring the fact that Schmitt is quite popular nowadays with a whole array of entirely non-fascist Western thinkers.

Eltchaninoff describes Putin’s references to Ilyin as ‘a manner of avoiding fascism while coming very close’. Like many other commentators, he draws attention to the positive statements Ilyin once made about fascism and to his repeated calls for ‘dictatorship’, while ignoring those things Ilyin said about the need to limit state power and the importance of personal freedom. And yet, it is precisely those latter points that Putin has cited, not the former.

As for Gumilev, Eltchaninoff provides some interesting information about Putin’s knowledge of his works, but fails to provide context for all the citations. When speaking at Kant University in Kaliningrad, Putin cites Kant; and when speaking at Lev Gumilev University in Astana, he cites Gumilev. Eltchaninoff believes that the latter cancels out the former, but not for some reason vice-versa. If Putin quoting Kant is merely ‘pseudo-liberalism’, could not Putin quoting Gumilev be ‘pseudo-Eurasianism’?

Having finished his survey of Putin’s speeches, Eltchaninoff comes to the conclusion that, ‘The philosophical sources of Putinism, however diverse they may be, all rest on two pillars: the idea of empire and an apology for war. This is the common core of Sovietism, Ilyin’s ‘White’ imperialism, Leontiev’s conservatism, Danilevskii’s panslavism, and Eurasianism.’

There are two major problems with this conclusion. First, the thesis that Putin is pursuing an empire by means of war is highly debatable as a matter of fact. Second, the interpretation of Putin’s philosophical sources as being united by empire and war is also highly debatable. Sustaining this interpretation requires one to ignore several of the most important sources and to be highly selective in one’s use of those sources which remain. After all, Putin’s citation of Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’ hardly fits Eltchaninoff’s conclusion.

Overall, this book is, as we academics like to say, ‘an original contribution to the literature’ on Russia’s president. But I am unconvinced that it really tells us what is going on ‘inside Vladimir Putin’s head’.

Patriotism is enough

As regular readers will have divined, I have a particular interest in the ideological underpinnings of the modern Russian state and its leaders, including President Vladimir Putin. Western analysts often mistakenly describe the people now governing Russia as nostalgic for the Soviet Union, an idea which Putin’s recent statements about Lenin should surely discredit. But if it’s easy enough to say what Putin is not, ideologically speaking, it is much harder to say what he is. Judging by a comment he made on Wednesday, the man himself might tell me that I am wasting my time trying to work it out.  At a meeting of the Leaders’ Club business association, Putin responded to a remark that Russia needs some unifying ‘national idea’ in the following way:

We do not have and cannot have any unifying idea other than patriotism. … You said that public servants and business and all citizens in general work to make the country stronger. Because if that is the case, then each of us, each citizen will live better, and have higher incomes and be more comfortable, and so on. And that is the national idea. It isn’t ideological, it isn’t connected with any party or any stratum of society. It is connected to a general, unifying principle. If we want to live better, then the country must become more attractive for all citizens, more effective, and the public service and state apparatus and business must all become more effective. As you said, we work for the country, not understanding it in an amorphous way, like in Soviet times … when the country came first and then there was who knows what. The country is people, that’s what working ‘for the country’ means.

I consider it interesting that Putin picked on ‘patriotism’ as his key word, and not something like liberty or equality or some concept of national greatness. But his definition of patriotism is a surprisingly tame and individualistic one, and also fairly materialistic. Despite all the talk of Putin’s promotion of traditional conservative values, here his objectives are limited to people living better, having ‘higher incomes’, and being ‘more comfortable’. Although it may be wrong to draw too much from one remark, this does not accord with much recent commentary about Putin installing a scary new nationalistic ideology in Russia.

That doesn’t mean that Putin lacks personal beliefs. It’s just that he appears to draw a distinction between what he believes and what he thinks should be the ideology of the state. Take Lenin, for instance. Putin doesn’t like him. But he’s made it clear that that is his personal opinion. If other people happen to like Lenin and want to have a statue of him in their city, or name their town square after him, then Putin isn’t going to stop them .

In fact, Putin’s position corresponds with Article 13 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation which states that, ‘Ideological plurality shall be recognized in the Russian Federation’, and that, ‘No ideology may be instituted as a state-sponsored or mandatory ideology.’ Putin’s statement represents adherence to the limits of his constitutional powers. Given that he is often described as an all-powerful dictator, that recognition is worthy of note.

Putin on communism

On Monday, Vladimir Putin followed up last week’s denunciation of Lenin with a long exposition on what he thought of communism. Given that Putin’s political ideology is a matter of considerable, often ill-informed, speculation, his answer to a question about Lenin at the regional forum of the All-Russian Popular Front in Stavropol is a really important ideological statement. So below is my (somewhat quick and rough) translation of the key segment.

My own interpretation of this statement is that Putin:

• approves of socialist ideas (equality etc) in the abstract, but feels that communism failed to put them into practice.
• disapproves of Soviet methods of government, particularly political and religious repression, and definitely doesn’t like Lenin.
• sees some advantages in state intervention in the economy, but not on the scale practised by communism. He comes across as favouring a European-style mixed economic system.
• is willing to countenance limited regional autonomy, but nothing more, and is strongly opposed to confederal ideas of a state made up of equal members. He strongly opposes regional secession.
• regards Ukraine as an artificial construct.
• puts a great emphasis on the state and the harm that communism did to it in Russia. Again and again, Putin returns to the state and the idea of statehood (gosudarstvennost’). A strong state emerges as a primary value.

Anyway, this is what Putin had to say:

[When I worked in the KGB] I wasn’t one of those who became a party member because I had to, but I can’t say either that I was an ideological party member, my attitude towards it was one of caution. Unlike many public servants I wasn’t a public servant with a party point of view. But unlike many of them I didn’t throw away my party card, I didn’t burn it. … It’s still lying around somewhere.

I liked a lot, and still like, communist and socialist ideas. If you look at the Code for the building of communism, which was widely distributed in the Soviet Union, it strongly resembles the Bible. This is not a joke, it’s like an excerpt from the Bible. The ideas are good: equality, brotherhood, happiness, but the practical embodiment of these remarkable ideas were far from those laid out by socialist utopians like [Henri de] Saint Simon and [Robert] Owen. Our country did not resemble the City of the Sun.

Everyone accused the Tsarist regime of repressions. But what did the establishment of Soviet power begin with? Mass repressions. I won’t talk about the scale, but simply of the most appalling example: the destruction and shooting of the Imperial family together with their children. Perhaps there was some idea that it was necessary to eradicate, as it were, any possible heirs. But why kill Doctor Botkin? Why kill the servants, people generally of proletarian origin? For what purpose? In order to cover up the crime.

Remember, we didn’t use to think about this much. Very well, they fought against people who resisted Soviet power with arms in their hands, but why kill the priests? In 1918 alone, they shot 3,000 priests, and in ten years 10,000 of them. In the Don region, they threw hundreds under the ice. When you start to think about it, and you get new information, you evaluate many things differently.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in one of his letters to Molotov, I think, wrote – I can’t quote him exactly – that the more reactionary representatives of the bourgeoisie and the priesthood we shoot, the better. You know, this approach doesn’t tally with some of our former ideas about the essence of power.

And the role of the communist, Bolshevik party in the collapse of the front in the First World War is well known. What was the result? We lost to a country which lost, since several months later Germany surrendered, and we ended up losing to losers, a unique occurrence in history. And for what purpose? For the sake of seizing power. How should we, knowing this today, evaluate this situation which brought enormous, simply colossal, losses to the country.

And then there’s the economy. Why did they move to the New Economic Policy (NEP)? Because the existing requisitioning of farm produce wasn’t working, it couldn’t. It couldn’t supply the large towns with food. So they moved to a market economy, then quickly got rid of it.

You know, what I am saying now are my personal deductions, my own analysis. A planned economy has definite advantages, it allows general state resources to be concentrated to fulfil very important tasks. In this way, health care questions were resolved – an undoubted service of the communist party of that time. So also were questions of education solved – an undoubted service of the communist party of that time. So were decided questions of defence industrialization. I think that without this concentration of general state resources, the Soviet Union could not have prepared for war with Nazi Germany. And there was a great probability of defeat with catastrophic consequences for our statehood, for the Russian people and for the peoples of the Soviet Union. So these are all definite pluses. But in the final analysis, insensitivity to changes, insensitivity to technological revolutions, to new technological structures led to economic collapse.

And finally, the most important thing, which is why I said that we must look in a different way at the ideas which the then leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, formulated. What were we talking about? What was I talking about? About how a mine was placed under the building of our statehood. What did I mean? This: I had in mind the discussion between Stalin and Lenin about how to build the new state, the Soviet Union.

If you are a historian, you should know that Stalin formulated the idea of a future Soviet Union based on autonomy. In accordance with this idea, all the subjects of the future state should join the USSR on the basis of autonomy with broad powers. Lenin criticized Stalin’s position and said that it was inopportune and incorrect. Moreover, he promoted the idea of the entry of all the future subjects of this state – and there were then four: Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and southern Russia, the Caucasian Federation as it was called, you know better than me.

So he, Lenin, said that the state, the Soviet Union, should be formed on the principle, as he said (I may be mistaken, but the idea is clear), of complete equality with the right of secession from the Soviet Union. And this was a slow-acting mine under the building of our statehood. Moreover, the ethnicities of a multinational but in essence unitary state were given boundaries and territories, and these boundaries were drawn completely arbitrarily, and in general without any foundation. Take Ukraine. Why was it given Donbass? To increase the percentage of proletarians in Ukraine, in order to have social support there. It’s such gibberish, you understand? And it’s not the only example, there are many more.

Cultural autonomy is one thing, autonomy with broad state powers is another, and the right to secede is a third. In the final analysis, this combined with ineffective economic and social policies led to the state’s collapse. And this is a slow-acting mine. And what is it if it is not a slow-acting mine? That’s exactly what it is. And bearing in mind the possibilities of today, we must simply attentively analyze everything which happened in the past. But one can’t smear everything which happened in the past with black paint or look at everything which happens today in bright colours. One must attentively and objectively analyze it in order not to repeat the mistakes of the past, and to build our state, economy, and society in such a way that the state only gets stronger.