All nations have founding myths that provide citizens with a framework for understanding their place in the world and history. For many Russians, the nation's founding myth defines Russia as chosen by God or History to bring enlightenment to a drowning world. But their passionate sense of Russia's greatness is paradoxically undermined by a corrosive pessimism.
Written by: Rodric Braithwaite
Russia is a country with an unpredictable past. - Russian folk saying
Everyone has a national narrative, built from fact, remembered fact and myth. People tell themselves stories about their past to make sense of the confusion of the present. They rewrite their stories generation after generation to adapt them to new realities. Ignore, forget, or completely re-enact episodes that are unpleasant or embarrassing.
These stories have deep roots. They feed our patriotism. They help us understand who we are, where we come from, who we belong to. Those who govern us trust them no less than we do. They hold us together in a 'Nation' and inspire us to sacrifice our lives, in its name.
The British have their "History of the Island", of the unbiased progress from the Magna Carta to power, freedom and democracy, marked by brilliant victories over the French: Winston Churchill wrote this in his magnificent work "The History of the English-Speaking Peoples". The English won, exploited and then lost three empires in 600 years. The descendants of their imperial subjects think of them as greedy, brutal, cunning and hypocritical. They don't think that way about themselves at all.
But 'Nation' is a slippery thing. Nations are like amoebas. They emerge from the depths of history. They spin and spin. They separate through binary fissions, recombine in different configurations, absorb their neighbors or be absorbed by them, and then disappear. War, politics, dynastic marriages, popular referendums move provinces from one side of a border to the other. Ordinary people can be born in one country, grow up in another and die in a third, without ever leaving their town.
Ask a Frenchman who was born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1869. Ask an Austrian Jew who was born on the border of Slovakia and Hungary in 1917. Ask a Pole who was born before World War II in what is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv, which since its foundation as Levhorod in the thirteenth century, has been known for its Polish, Austrian, German, and Russian like Lwów, Lemberg and Lvov.
Few of today's European states existed before the First World War. When Columbus discovered America, Germany, Italy, Russia, and even France and Britain were still fragmented, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was on its way to becoming the largest state in Europe.
The idea of 'Europe' is itself an artificial construct, an attempt to bring under one roof a collection of countries at the western edge of the Eurasian landmass, each very different from the others, ranging from Iceland to Romania, from Norway to Greece, from Spain to Estonia, bound together by a tradition of Christianity and a murderous history of internal persecution, bloody rebellion and violent domestic religious conflict, endless war for power and plunder, genocide, slavery and imperial brutality abroad.
By these depressing standards, Russians have as much right to claim to be European as anyone else. Partly because of its vast eastward reach into Asia, Russians and foreigners alike still question whether Russia is part of Europe. Many of their immediate neighbors consider them Asiatic barbarians and point indignantly at the suffering the Russians have inflicted on them over the centuries. Napoleon was right, they think, when he is supposed to have said: "Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar."
More than a thousand years ago, a people arose on the territory of present-day Russia, the origin of which is disputed. They adopted the Orthodox version of Christianity from Byzantium, thus irrevocably distinguishing themselves from others in Europe who chose Roman Catholicism. They developed their Slavic language. They created 'Kievan Rus', which for a time was the largest and one of the most sophisticated states. Today's Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians trace their origins from here.
But Kievan Rus was conquered and destroyed in the thirteenth century by the Mongols. Its dismembered fragments were reunited in the following centuries under the name of Muscovy taken from the then insignificant northern city of Moscow. The new state was hit by internal strife, economic disaster and the Polish occupation. Afterwards, it recovered and Peter the Great and his successors transformed it into an imperial Great Power, a dominant force in European politics. In the nineteenth century Russia helped define the nature of modern European culture.
Russia's existence was again seriously challenged by Napoleon, by the Germans, and as a result of Russian self-inflicted wounds in the twentieth century. Stalin put Russia back on the map, transformed the economy and won the war against Germany, all at a terrible human cost. Then in 1991 the empire fell apart. Russia sank back into poverty, incoherence, and its international importance declined. For many Russians, it was Vladimir Putin, who was elected president in 2000, who rescued them from unbearable humiliation and restored Russia to its rightful place in the world.
Edward Gibbon said that "History is little more than the record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Russians, like the rest of us, prefer to believe that their history has progressed in a straight and positive line. They explain disturbing events – such as the brutal reigns of Ivan the Terrible or Stalin – as necessary stages on the road to greatness.
Russians are charming, ingenious, creative, sentimental, soft-hearted, generous, stubborn, brave, endlessly tough, often cunning, brutal and ruthless. Ordinary Russians firmly believe that they are warmer than others, more loyal to their friends, more willing to sacrifice for the common good, more devoted to the basic truths of life. They give credit to the Russian spirit, as vast and all-encompassing as the Russian land itself. Their passionate sense of Russia's greatness is paradoxically undermined by an underlying and corrosive pessimism. And it is tempered by the resentment that their country is not understood and respected enough by foreigners.
Russian reality is colored by the disturbing and deep-rooted phenomenon of "vranyo". It is similar to the Irish "spirit" but lacks the tinge of charm of the 99ers. Individuals, officials, governments tell lies if they believe it serves their interests, or that of their bosses, their organization or the state. They did this in the sixteenth century, when English merchants advised their colleagues to make bargains with the Russians only in writing, "because they are cunning people, and do not always speak the truth, and think that other people are like them". They are doing it today.
It is too late for them if their interlocutor is aware that they are lying, although this does not stop the Russian government from punishing those who challenge their truth. Ordinary Russians may find it easier to believe what the government tells them. But there are limits. Aversion to lying drives many of the characters in Dostoevsky's novels to extravagant confessions. The systematic lying of Soviet officials and ideologues was a constant theme of dissident writers such as Alexander Solzhenistyn.
As revulsion grew even among ordinary people, it helped bring down the Soviet regime.
Churchill used to say that Russia is an enigma wrapped in a mystery within a riddle. This has become an excuse for intellectual laziness. But understanding Russia is a challenge, and you have to start by trying to separate the facts from the myths created by both Russians themselves and those who dislike them.
The Encyclopædia Britannica described Russia in 1782 as a "very large and powerful kingdom of Europe, governed by a total despotism, and inhabited by a wild and drunken people." The Marquis de Custine, a French reactionary deeply at odds with his society, visited Russia for a short time in 1839. The book he wrote, La Russie en 1839, was highly intelligent, perceptive, witty, one-sided and deeply superficial.
He saw little of Russian society apart from the aristocracy, which, in his opinion, had enough of the splendor of European civilization to be 'treated as savages', but not enough to be cultivated. They were like 'trained bears that make you want to go wild'. Custine's book was required reading at the American embassy in Moscow in the 1960s. It reflects the attitudes of many foreign observers today. Not the best starting point for any attempt to understand Russia.
Some argue that there has never been a more coherent thing than the Russian nation-state. However, most Russians seem to have their doubts. Whatever is meant by a 'nation', they believe that theirs is exceptional, chosen by God or History to bring enlightenment to a sunken world. This messianic feeling arose out of Orthodoxy in medieval Muscovy and has survived ever since.
It was promoted by Dostoevsky and a host of other writers in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the Bolsheviks shared the sense of mission, although for them God was replaced by History working through the instrument of communism. But their New World began to look like the old Russian empire, but with a different name.
Russians, and those who wish them well, can be forgiven for despairing at the misfortunes they regularly inflict on others and themselves. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they returned to the idea that modern Russia had an exclusive claim to the legacy of the Orthodox state of Kievan Rus. Vladimir Putin was consumed by the idea that “our great common misfortune and tragedy” was the 1991 partition of Russia and Ukraine, into parts of what he called “essentially the same historical and spiritual space.” The obsession fueled the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
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A fascination with Russia and its people has possessed me for most of my life. I was there when the Soviet Union collapsed. This event colors some of the judgments that follow in this short and, I hope, mature story.
Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it looked as if Ukraine's desire for independence could cause the Soviet Union to break up. In the early 1990s, either a war between Russia and Ukraine, or the possibility of the Russian democratic experiment failing as catastrophically as Germany's Weimar Republic, seemed beyond imagination.
Some of my other judgments were sadly wrong. Russia has not yet lost its imperial desire. Putin's brutal invasion of Ukraine has pushed back by decades the prospect of Russia becoming the modern democratic state at peace with its neighbors that so many brave Russians had fought to create.
But no people should be seen as hopeless. I cling to the golden image of the Firebird, which flies through the dark forests of Russian folklore to symbolize the hope that Russia will see better days. / Excerpt from the book "Myths of Russia" – In Albanian from bota.al
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