Russia: a more complex country than even Churchill realised
R★ ussians who complain that the West misunderstands their country sometimes blame a book by the Marquis de Custine, a snobbish French aristocrat who visited in 1839.
In the best tradition of posh travel writers, Custine only bothered meeting other aristocrats – and even then was supremely patronising. Russians, he mourned, were just civilised enough to have lost their appeal as noble “savages”, but were still far less cultured than their pomaded European counterparts. As he tactfully put it, they were like “trained bears who made you long for the wild ones”. Despite such twaddle, Custine’s La Russie en 1839 saw him hailed as a de Tocqueville for Russia – partly for his other feisty comments on how repressive Tsarist Russia was. To some, he was an early prophet of the dangerous authoritarianism of the Russian state – to others just a blatant Russophobe.
In his new book Russia: Myths and Realities, Rodric Braithwaite points out that Custine was compulsory reading in the US embassy in Moscow until the 1960s, and still “reflects the attitudes of many foreign observers today”. He then picks over 1,000 years of history to set the record straight, explaining why a nation that produced some of the world’s greatest writers often seems “devious, brutal and ruthless”.
It is an ambitious task, covering the birth of ancient Rus, the Tsars, the USSR, and Vladimir Putin’s rise in just 250 pages. But it is a worthwhile one, given how Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has given free rein to Russia’s critics. The Russian leader is now seen simply as an evil, cold-blooded dictator, a throwback not merely to the Cold War but to worst days of imperialism. In Ukraine, Russian troops are likened to “Orcs”, the goblins from Tolkien novels who serve an evil power. So what exactly has gone wrong?
One theory is to blame the “Mongol Yoke”, the 250-year period in the Middle Ages when Genghis Khan’s fighters swept across Russia, trapping its people in a Dark Age while Europe began the Renaissance. This, says Braithwaite, is often used to explain “the brutal nature of Russia’s domestic politics, its ruthless behaviour abroad, its authoritarian style of government”. Russians themselves sometimes use the term Aziatchina (“Asiatic stuff ”) to excuse “lack of culture, cultural backwardness, and crudeness”.
This, Braithwaite says, is implausible. The Mongols, he says, were landlords, not occupiers, demanding only taxes and imposing little of their own culture, unlike the Moors in Spain. While the post-Mongol Russian state was indeed authoritarian, so too were most European states of the time. “None needed the Mongols to show them the way,” he argues.
Nor did Russia lag behind for long. Under Peter the Great, Russia gained a decent army and empire. Under Catherine the Great, it began the cultural flowering that gave the world Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. By the turn of the 20th century, Russia had more women doctors, lawyers and teachers than almost any country in Europe.
Where an unfortunate mindset does seem to have taken hold is in the conviction that a country the size of Russia required a very firm hand – not just for vital reforms, but for basic rule. “Russian autocracy was more absolute, and lasted longer, than similar regimes further west,” says Braithwaite. “Explanations vary, but the key may lie not with the Mongols but with geography, poverty and the ruthless ambitions of the dynasty that ruled Moscow.” As he points out, even communists like Stalin still celebrated tyrants like Ivan the Terrible as men who got things done. Had he not, he might never have pushed Russia into sacrificing 27 million lives to defeat Hitler. Indeed, reading this account, the rise of Tsar Putin seems less an aberration, more a return to normal.
As Britain’s ambassador to Moscow between 1988-92, Braithwaite witnessed first-hand the Russian fall from greatness that Putin is now trying to resurrect. He is an engaging guide, though, to the entire past Russian millennium – and writes with the same flair demonstrated in his previous bestseller Afghantsy, about the disastrous Soviet Afghan campaign.
Having said that, he also admits that he too completely failed to forecast Putin’s Ukraine invasion, which proved that Russia “has not yet lost its imperial itch”. Churchill famously described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. The truth, it seems, is even more complicated even than that.