favorov

The Russian President is a nationalist, not a
communist, says Paul Robinson, and has
much in common with the men who fought the
Bolsheviks in the civil war

The victory of Vladimir Putin’s supporters in last month’s
Russian elections was gr eeted with horror in some liberal
quarters. There were fears that President Putin had been
confirmed as the leader of a corrupt, repressive corporate
state that would restore Soviet-style totalitarianism. But
these fears were misplaced, and indeed be t ray a profound
misunderstanding of Russian history.

While Putin is indeed an autocrat, he is no Red Tsar. He is
a typical Soviet radish — red on the outside but white at
the core. He is the heir not of Lenin and Trotsky, but of
the White officers w ho fought to save Russia from
communism in the civil war of 1917 to 1921. Depending
on one’s view of the Whites, that may or may not be a
good thing. But, to most, White is undoubtedly better
than Red, and Putin’s authoritarian rule gives Russia
c omp aratively little to fear.

After the collapse of tsarism in 1917, there were not two
but three possible paths for Russia to follow: liberal
democracy, Bolshevism or White military government.
When the Bolsheviks overthrew the liberal demo cratic
prov isional government of Alexander Kerensky and
introduced communist rule, a small group of military
officers formed a volunteer army to overthrow Lenin.
Soon christened the ‘Whites’, to contrast them with the
communist ‘Reds’, they fought a bloody civil war against
the Bolsheviks. Like Kerensky they lost, but now, 80
years later, it appears that their ideology has finally
triumphed over the other two.

It is an ironic accident of history that a former communist
secret policeman, a mem ber of an org anisation specifically
set up to exterminate Whites and people like them, has
ended up in effect putting their ideology into practice.
The intrinsic difficulties associated with governing Russia
in all centuries have led to similar ideas in similar
circumstances of state collapse and reconstruction.

What should we expect of a White government? Civil war
White leaders ranged from psychopathic loonies like the
self-proclaimed ruler of Mongolia, Ataman Roman
Ungern-Sternberg, who ima gined himself to be the
reincarnation of Genghis Khan, to liberal-minded folk like
the second commander of the volunteer army, General
Anton Denikin, whose father began life as a serf. An
unmistakable common thread ran through all of their
administra tions, however, and that was the belief in
strong central power.

The prime example, General Wrangel, who headed the
White movement in 1920, did not take attacks on his
authority lightly. He railed against critics who wanted him
to introduce some form of represen tative government:
‘They want to share power with me. Having passed
through rivers of blood, the provisional government, and
every sort of special assembly, and having finally put
power in the hands of one man, which is the requirement
for successful struggle, they want to repeat the mistakes
of the past.’ One can imagine Putin saying something
similar nowadays about the oligarchs who enriched
themselves at Russia’s expense in the 1990s, and now
insist that the country’s president share power wit h
them.

The Whites were not merely apolitical but anti-political.
They hoped to transcend the factionalism of party
politics in favour of national unity. Lenin, on the other
hand, practised division. He split his party more times
t han Joseph Chamberlain or David Owen. The civil war was
a deliberate act of policy. As the leader of a minority
party, Lenin knew that he could only hold on to power by
provoking counter-revolution and forcing people to take
sides, a concept echoed by the so-called
neoconservatives in America: ‘Either you’re with us or
you’re against us.’ The need to create new enemies at
every juncture was an essential aspect of Leninism.

It was precisely this phenomenon which repelled the
military officers wh o formed the Whi te armies. As
patriots, they valued unity above all else and hated party
politics, considering it inherently divisive. Putin appears
to be very similar. The group he has nurtured to support
him is titled United Russia, a name that con jures up
General Denikin’s slogan, ‘Russia, one and indivisible’. In
her article on the Russian elections in the Christmas
double issue of The Spectator, Rachel Polonsky seemed
to suggest that it was somehow fraudulent of United
Russia to stick up po sters carrying pi ctures of both Josef
Stalin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But therein lies the
essence of the party’s creed: national unity. In exactly
the same way, White reactionary monarchists marched
alongside White republicans of the Kornilov Sho ck
Regiment, whose regimental anthem contained the words
‘The Tsar is not our idol’.

If one had to use just two words to sum up the Whites’
beliefs, they would be the same ones that would most
usefully categorise those of Vladimir Putin — nationali sm
(natsionalizm) and statehood (gosudarstvennost’). The
former requires no explanation. Gosudarstvennost’, which
will be a term unfamiliar to many, is an idea at the heart
of both ‘Whiteness’ and Putinism. The Whites referred to
themselves as ‘state-minded people’
(gosudarstvenno-mysliashchie liudi), by which they meant
that they placed the highest priority on protecting the
interests of the state and enhancing its power and
authority. Likewise, if Putin stands for any credo, it is for
a streng thening of central state authority, for the sake of
Russia as a whole.

Probably the most fundamental tension in Russian politics
is that between the concepts of gosudarstvennost’ and
its rival obshchestvennost’. The nuances of the latter are
diffic ult to translate, but the term refers to civil society
and, roughly speaking, means ‘public opinion’. Liberal
commentators regard the state in Russia with suspicion.
At the start of the 20th century, they longed for the
state to surrender its power to ‘public opinion’. They still
do. But supporters of gosudarstvennost’ view supporters
of obshchestvennost’ with equal suspicion. They see
them as the self-interested representatives of the
chattering classes, who, if put into positions of power,
will immediately plung e Russia into a state of anarchy in
which their beloved liberties will be of no use to them or
anybody else. This, the Whites argued, was what the
liberals of the provisional government had done in 1917,
and this, many now claim, is what free-market d emocrats
such as Yegor Gaidar did to Russia in the early 1990s.

There is something of a misconception in the West that
the Russian state has traditionally been exceedingly
powerful. In fact, the opposite is the case. Compared wit h
Western countries, the rulers of pre-communist Russia
had a very small administrative apparatus and
comparatively limited financial resources to govern an
enormous geographic area. Russian leaders have regularly
found it extremely difficult to enforce their rule far f rom
Moscow or St Petersburg. Even in the modern era both
Yeltsin and Putin have found themselves frustrated by
regional governors who pursue policies directly counter to
those of the central government. In earlier times, it was a
lack of power, not a surfeit, that induced tyrants such as
Ivan the Terrible to resort to violent administrative
solutions.

A weak state can lead to despotism. It is only under the
shelter of a state strong enough to protect its subjects
from crime or external assault, to create and enforce laws
to regulate commerce and industry, and to encourage the
arts, education and other social benefits, that a society
can prosper, and that the conditions for individual liberty
can ever hope to exist.

This was certainly th e view of the two Russian
philosophers most closely associated with the White
Russian armies, Petr Struve and Ivan Il’in. Struve began
his intellectual career as a Marxist, but ended it as a
monarchist. Equally remarkably, Il’in was first expelled
from Soviet Russia to Germany for his anti-communist
agitation, and then forced to flee from Germany for his
refusal to support the Nazis.

Both men understood that the intelligentsia’s obsession
with liberating the people was unleashing forces which
would eventually destroy all liberty in Russia. Only an
authoritarian government, they decided, could protect
individual freedoms in the absence of a political culture
that accepted basic ideas such as property rights. A
society whose people understood legal rights and duties
could successfully govern itself. One that did not must be
ruled by a powerful individual, who would educate the
people in its legal consciousness until such time as it was
fit for self-rule.

This sou nds like a recipe for dictatorship, which indeed it
was. But Il’in made a clear distinction between dictatorial
rule and totalitarian rule. The latter was ‘godless’, and
while the state should be all-powerful in those matters
which fell under its comp etence, it should stay out of
other areas, such as a person’s religious beliefs or private
life, entirely.

What we see, therefore, in the ideology of the Whites is
a form of authoritarian liberalism, which insists on the
need for the rule of a single powerful individual, but does
so because such an individual is seen, in Russia’s peculiar
circumstances, as the personification of the state and
hence as the best protector of liberty. One can, I
maintain, view Putin in the same light. Simply put, Russia
has scant hope of developing into an economically
successful and politically free society without a state
that can collect sufficient taxes to maintain social
services, enforce its laws throughout the length of the
country, clamp down on crime and terrorism, and provide
the Russian people with some degree of peace and
stability.

For all its dictatorial tendencies, the contemporary
Russian state clearly exhibits some restraint. It does not
seek to intervene in every aspect of its citizen s’ lives,
and Russia is a country where people can and do criticise
the government without being molested. In many
respects the government of Vladimir Putin is probably the
most benign in Russian history. Like the Whites, Putin is
no liberal democrat, but his promotion of state interests
may well be the best hope for liberal democracy in Russia.

Paul Robinson is assistant director of the Centre for
Security Studies at the University of Hull.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&sec tion=current&issue=200 4-01-10&id=3922
tn