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Andrey Zubov, doctor of historical sciences WHAT KIND OF MODERNIZATION DOES RUSSIA NEED?
How should we correlate ourselves with the world, how should we shape our foreign and defense policy, in what direction should we carry on, if t all, the modernization of the way of life of modern Russia? As a historian I'll try to answer these questions from a historical point of view.
I shall begin by saying that in terms of civilization and culture Russia is not some peculiar Eurasian or Russian civilization, as certain people here are wont to say, but a periphery, an outlying province of the western world. This thesis can easily be proved. The pattern of our state and cultural life originates from the pre-state and non-literal condition at the end of the 10th century A.D. It was formed by the Eastern Roman Empire. Suffice it to look at the circle of reading, the style of architectural structures and fine art, and legal institutions.
Christianity and the way of life, which came to our country from Constantinople, were adopted by a barbarous people which had for a long time been in a state of complete cultural degradation. Academician Boris Rybakov, despite his sincere desire and painstaking efforts, could find very few monuments of the pre-Christian period in the vast expanses of the East European plain. Rus was neither Greece, nor
Egypt, nor the Roman Empire with their rich and millennia-old pre-Christian cultural past. Russia is a very young culture largely induced by ancient Mediterranean civilization in its Christian form. This is precisely why Russia, measured by time and space, is a distant periphery of western civilization.
The Beginning of History - Detachment
from the Cultural Center
Civilization differences between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean regions in the epoch of Christianization of Rus were not too great, and people living there at the time took them just as our contemporaries regard present cultural differences between, say, Germany and Italy. Another periphery zone of western civilization is the North-West of Europe - Scandinavia. To assess the development way of Russia it would be necessary to have a reference group in history. And the North-West of Europe, which is very similar to Russia in its historical development, can be such group.
In the very distant past, the fourth millennium B.C., two cultural centers of the prehistoric continent emerged in the area now occupied by Russia and North-West Europe. Between the Vistula and Ural rivers the Indo-European cultural center came into being, in the view of most scholars, and at the end of the third millennium the Indo-European people began to move in all directions, except the northern one, and gradually reached Xinjiang in the east, Punjab in the south-east, the Atlantic Ocean in the west, and the Mediterranean in the south-west. We should keep in mind that Greece, the Roman Empire and Armenia were Indo-European communities. The future Slav and Baltic peoples remained where they lived from time immemorial - in the East European plain. The North-West of Europe (southern Scandinavia,
British Isles, Brittany) was the megalithic civilization which spread up to Egypt and Syria in the 3rd - 2nd millennia B.C.
Beginning from the 2nd millennium B.C. both ancient centers were running wild, but the center of culture emerged in the Mediterranean region - in Egypt, then Crete, Greece, and Etruscan Italy. It is important to remember this in order not to feel the inferiority complex. In other words, we are the children of good parents without whom the present cultural world would have been unthinkable, but due to various reasons, we ran wild and remained in the state of cultural degradation outside the boundaries of civilization for about two millennia. During this time the Mediterranean world had traversed a great path of cultural development, whereas the Germans of Scandinavia, while the Slav and Baltic people of the East European plain had deteriorated even compared to their ancient state at the time of the Indo-Arian community. But the second acculturation within the same civilization is always easier than the implantation of alien civilization. The latter process is, as a rule, ineffective.
Both Russia and North-West Europe were again included quite simultaneously in the uniform cultural field of the West only at the end of the 1st millennium A.D. along with Christianization. The introduction of Christianity to Scandinavia and Rus took place at the end of the 10th century: Prince Vladimir baptized Rus in 988 and his close relative Konung Olaf Tryggvason, after visiting Vladimir as guest, baptized Norway in 993-995.
Scandinavia accepted the western form of Orthodox Christianity, uniform at the time, trough Rome, and Rus - the eastern form through Constantinople. But the form of Christianity, contrary to the idea of Pyotr Chaadayev, did not mean anything in actual fact for the civilization development of these two regions. And the church remained actually uniform, as practically all historians admit, not until
1054, but until 1204, that is, the destruction of Constantinople by the crusaders. Orthodox Christian Byzantium actively interacted with Europe, and was even in the lead both technologically and intellectually right up to the 13 th century. Just remember scholastic debates around Areopagitica in the 9th - 10th century, and Isihast arguments in the 11th - 14th century, which gave rise to Gothic in the west and Palama theology in the east of Europe, -- they were common to the entire Christian world. The Byzantium or Roman versions of Orthodox Christianity were of little importance for the cultural matrix. They meant something to certain individual aspects, but not to the level of modernization. Constantinople and Thessaloniki in the 14th century were no less "modern" than Rome or Paris and understood each other quite well at all levels - from theology to military art, because all of them were the centers of uniform Mediterranean civilization.
The main thing for a periphery is not a difference in cultural details, but the intensity of intercommunication with the cultural center. This is a very important aspect. It is not the type of culture that is crucial, but the intensity of intercommunication. The intensive intercommunication of Scandinavia with the western cultural center, that is, the Mediterranean, and even broader - with the entire area of the Ancient Roman Empire never stopped after its inclusion in a civilized area. The Christianization of Scandinavia was taking place along with the entire Catholic world. Later Scandinavia switched over to the Lutheran Church, just as the entire Northern Europe. University education, Gothic art and theology and municipal self-government began to take root in Scandinavia some 40 to 80 years later than in western cultural centers in the south. After the Reformation in the 16th century this lag disappeared altogether. Peasants retained personal freedom and their own land to a greater degree in Norway and Sweden. In Norway, for example, landlordism was negligible, and in Sweden,
where this type of ownership of cultivated land had increased from 22 to 60 percent from the mid-16th to the mid-17th century, the "reduction" of ownership under the 1655 law gave back to peasants and townsfolk part of their plots of land taken away from them, and by 1700 landowners possessed no more than one-third of all land. Civic freedoms of the Swedish "fourth estate" had never been alienated., and its liabilities to the state and landowners were strictly determined by the royal legislation and could not be increased.
The situation in Russia was quite different. The Mongolian and Tartar invasion of 1237-1240 was not an irreparable blow and did not cut Russia from the outer world as did the Turkish invasion to Byzantium in 1453. The point is that, first, Rus remained a vassal, but not a completely conquered state. Secondly, North-West Rus (Pskov, Novgorod), which was the most westernized, and the Polotsk and Turovo-Pinsk princedoms, also oriented to the West, were not occupied. They had to pay tribute to the invaders, and that was all. The 14th century was the time of Russia's active connections with western cultural centers, and the western part of Russia was regained from Tatars by the Russian-Lithuanian forces in the latter half of the century (Olgerd's victory over the Horde troops at Siniye Vody in 1363). Thus Russia's connections with the western cultural center through Poland and Hungary were fully restored. Right Reverend Sergius of Radonezh carried on intellectual dialogues with the Bulgarian Metropolitan Cyprian and the Greek Patriarch Philotheus Kokkinos on equal terms and they, in turn, had talks with Italian theologians. Works by Grigory Palama were almost immediately translated into the Slavonic language, and Russian learned scholars could boast of profound knowledge of Greek. The uniform cultural field was preserved at the time, but, as before, within the "center - periphery" system. The Greek icon-painter Theophanes taught the Russian genius Andrey Rublev his art, and as a
result Russian masterpieces came into being only 50 to 80 years later, as against those originated from the main cultural centers of Europe.
In actual fact, the dramatic separation of Moscovy Rus took place in 1448, when the Russian Church refused to accept Metropolitans from Constantinople (self-proclaimed autocephaly), and especially in 1459 when the Moscow bishops, on orders from Metropolitan Jonas, swore to preserve the independence of the "Sacred Moscow Church" as the supreme treasure. From then on all contacts of Rus with the rest of the world were stopped for 120-150 years. The Greeks would regard the Moscow Church as schismatic and self-proclaimed. As to the Catholic world, it did not recognize it at all. The conquest of Novgorod by Ivan III and the destruction of Novgorod and Pskov by his grandson Ivan the Terrible completely closed the gates to Europe and virtually eradicated Europeanized North-Russian culture.
The dramatic 150 years (from the mid-15th to the late 16th century) were the period of maximal stagnation for Rus, whereas the West made a great cultural leap forward during that time. It was a period of Renaissance and scientific revolution, of William Ockham and Meister Eckhart, Erasmus and Luther, Michaelangelo and Leonardo, Copernicus and Kepler, Galileo and Francis Bacon. The West made a great progress in mathematics, mechanics, medicine and philosophy, while Russia remained outside it, and cut from the European cultural centers by its secular and ecclesiastical rulers. The natural result of intellectual progress in Paris, Rome or Oxford was viewed in Moscow as a miracle, a gimmick, something like nanotechnological wonders at present.
As a result, when the problem of the freedom of will was discussed in Europe in the 16th century (discussions between Luther and Erasmus), Russian clerics were thinking of how they should carry the Gospel around the altar stand - sunward or against the sun.
By that time Scandinavia had become an integral part of the western world. Rene Descartes felt completely at home in France, in Holland and in Sweden in the 17th century, despite a host of differences in those countries. However, German and other foreign visitors to Moscow felt quite differently. The unfortunate graduate of Padua University, Orthodox Christian Mikhail Trivolis (known in Russia as Maxim the Greek) was forced to live in underground cells of monasteries near Moscow during many years for his attempts to raise the intellectual level of Moscow.
This was why modernization in the 17th century took place either through Ukraine, the only part of Rus open to the West, inasmuch as it was included in Poland, or directly through Lefortovo neighborhood in Moscow, which was inhabited mainly by Germans. But this modernization bore a simulation character, because Russian modernization was not a result of the conscious development of people as in old Europe, but a result of the simple borrowing of certain technical, military and political innovations. Tsar Peter the Great ordered his boyars to shave off their beards and put on European clothes. Naturally, they looked like dolls, but did not (and could not) become Europeans. Russia needed people from Germany, and so many Germans were invited to the country or were included in it along with the Baltic provinces. Our modernizers could not do with mummer Russian boyars. Simulation modernization is definitely a negative phenomenon. It creates an illusion of culture, but not culture itself.
We shall not dwell on the alternative to Tsar Peter's modernization, which emerged at the end of the 17th century. It was a plan of reforms mapped out by Princess Sophia and Prince Vasily Golitsyn; they were slow-going reforms aimed at essential modernization. But Sophia was thrown into prison and Vasily Golitsyn was exiled by Peter the Great. The essence of Peter's reforms was not
to open a window to Europe. It was just a crack in the thick wall through which the noble elite could go to the West and back within the system of simulation modernization. And ninety-five percent of Russian people were completely isolated from modernization processes. The road to education, especially to European education and civic freedoms, was closed for the overwhelming majority of Russians. Actually, they continued to live in the 16th century and were prohibited to change for the better. Peter's decrees of 1711 and 1719 virtually turned the greater part of the Russian population into slaves, without any hope for any acculturation. This is a remarkable and significant fact: the modernization of the elite took place largely by the naturalization and plundering of the basic mass of the people. As some of our scholars say, two subcultures emerged: a westernized and modernized elite whose representatives even forgot how to speak Russian (not more than 2-3 percent of Russian people) and mass subculture of people growing wild in comparison with the European common people.
West European absolutism in the 18th century proclaimed "To rule without the people, but for the people." By the end of the 1700th almost all population of Prussia, France, Austria, England and Sweden was literate. Local self-government bodies functioned everywhere, serfdom was abolished or existed in symbolic forms (week's labor-rent for the lord). Peasants in Russia were not considered citizens from the time of the reign of Elizaveta Petrovna, Tsar Peter's daughter, they had no property, no right to marry or to apply to court with complaints against their masters, and they were not taught to read and write. In fact, they were virtual slaves of their noble masters. Of course, there could be no word or thought about their modernization. Russian absolutism was the rule without the people and not for the people, but for the thin layer of the elite at the expense of the people.
It was only after the liberation of the serfs, the great reforms of the 1860s, and the opening of entire Russia for the West, but not only of a thin layer of the elite, that new modernization began in the country. Everybody knew how swift and powerful it was. During the 50 to 60 years of this modernization, especially in the last two decades of tsarist Russia's existence, an unprecedented economic and cultural leap forward took place. A new modernized layer of society emerged, which included both Slavophiles and Westernizers, Pirogov and Mendeleev, Tchaikovsky and Leo Tolstoi, Klyuchevsky and Sikorsky. But due to the fact that this modernization had bad, rotten roots, it ended not in the emergence of modern Europeanized Russia, which Pyotr Stolypin was dreaming of, but in a Bolshevik nightmare. The modernized section of the Russian people reached 10-15 percent of the country's population by the time of World War I. But the savage majority of the furious people instigated by the Bolsheviks and imatiated by the terrible war swept over and washed away new Russia in the five-year-long Civil war, which was actually a war of two subcultures.
Impasses of Simulation Modernization -
Is There a Chance?
After a short period of openness brought about by the New Economic policy (NEP) Russia became completely closed again from 1929. Within the next ten years of the "red terror" the thin layer of the modernized Russian society was utterly destroyed. Its representatives were either killed or driven out of Russia. From one to one-and-a-half million of Russian citizens who left Russia before World War II were the most modernized, cultured and knowledgeable part of Russian society.
And so we were again doomed to ever greater lagging behind advanced countries. Stalin's modernization was largely simulation and
took place mainly in the technical and military spheres. The view that Soviet Russia was a new great civilization and power was largely erroneous, in my view. It was erroneous because there were still old, pre-revolutionary specialists and their pupils (they lived and worked up to the end of World War II and the emergence of the reactionary trends propagated by Zhdanov and Lysenko), and research work continued with certain success. But in the fields where there were no in-process stocks of pre-revolutionary time, for instance, genetics and cybernetics, we lagged behind from the very beginning. As a result, the Soviet Union had to resort to scientific and industrial thefts in the crudest way during the 1950s - 1970s. Could we create our nuclear and missile might without Peenemunde or Bruno Pontecorvo? Having failed to carry out essential modernization, we returned to simulation modernization. Sweden and Norway of the 1980s and the U.S.S.R. of the epoch of late stagnation - such was the result of the one-thousand-year-old modernization race of two periphery European regions. The victor of the race is quite evident.
Finally, the opening of Russia to the outside world in 1990 and the lifting of totalitarian pressure have caused chaos and, as a result, a certain degradation of society even compared with Soviet times. This is quite understandable. But this period is passing. We all see now that society is being stabilized and changing its attitude to social values. It is open to the West. The Internet, travel to foreign countries and life there are having their effect. Young people, those who till rule the roost in the country tomorrow are changing especially rapidly, Russia is beginning to regard itself part of great civilization. In this situation all talk about the creation of an autarchic political model and orientation to the East, but not to the West, say, to Far Eastern countries or the Moslem world as the main source of cultural contacts, is irresponsible, irrational, and even dangerous. Today any attempt to fence off Russia,
build a new wall between it and the West as in the epoch of Emperor Paul I or Czar Ivan III will mean a new, fourth, stagnation, which the country will not survive. The present, exceptionally rapid development of world science and technology makes self-isolation especially pernicious, and the purchase of modern knowledge for oil, that is, a new spiral of simulation modernization, will help our society no more than an injection of morphine to a person dying from cancer.
Essential modernization is a difficult and long process requiring profound political experience. It does not mean that we shall soon become a great power again, all the more so, superpower. But this modernization will give us a chance to return to the company of civilized societies, close to us in spirit, and jointly with other nations similar to us culturally, to deal with common challenges and tackle common problems.
I think that after what we have gone through we have a chance to become a western country with a developed and responsible civil society. Or, on the contrary, fencing off from the West try, for the umpteenth time, to go along the road of simulation modernization and create a powerful state with people growing wild and suppressed by the immoral elite, a colossus on the legs of clay doomed to crumbling, sooner or later. In my view, there is only one way out of this alternative -to open ourselves to the West and reconcile ourselves with the fact that we are unable to be in the lead now (for too many people who were among the best representatives of our society, lost their life during the 20th century) and, playing the role we deserve, to enter the community of western powers. There is no other way for Russia worthy of our long-suffering people.
"Trudy po rossieyavedeniyu", M., 2010, p. 171-184.
