Dark Star

To try to explain the enigma Russia has presented to three centuries of Western eyes is by turns an equally impossible and attractive task. With a lifetime’s academic career in Russian history behind him, Martin Malia has sifted through vast amounts of international diplomatic, social, military and intellectual material to account for shifting Western attitudes. The four basic stances he discerns, all of them substantially influenced by the West’s varying self-perception, will be immensely useful to anyone trying to understand his or her own attitude to Russia. But perhaps the particular benefit will fall to those on the political left, whether they were dismayed or rebellious at the apparent death of socialism when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

The first attitude Malia identifies is one of broad acceptance verging on admiration. Acceptance comes with the sense of a shared civilization, well illustrated by the friendship between Voltaire and Catherine the Great. The French Encyclopedists of the mid-18th century nurtured the idea of a cosmopolitan civilization based on the universality of reason, politically anchored by enlightened despotism. Without ever going to Russia himself, Voltaire was so impressed by “Cateau’s” record that her example led him to criticize the more benighted French regime of the time. Over the last 200 years there have been repeated periods in which the West has similarly admired Russia, not least when the new world of communism seemed truly viable.

With the Cold War not so long over, however, many of us will remember Russia perceived absolutely negatively, as Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire,” and this is the second kind of view Malia targets, Russia as Oriental despotism. “Oriental” was Montesquieu’s term for the least reasonable, least developed societies under enlightened Western eyes. And viewed in conjunction with the scattered accounts of travelers to Russia since the 16th century, it has helped to figure Russia as an enduringly secretive, coercive place. The country’s reputation in the modern world has been underscored specifically as a threat to liberty. In the early 19th century, the West judged Russia to be an alien place from the moment Alexander I lost his way in domestic reaction. As Malia says, with Metternich leaning heavily upon him, “Alexander . . . became ever more preoccupied with preserving ‘legitimacy’ and the established order throughout Europe. . . . This transformation brought Russia into her first conflict with European liberalism.” The vision of darkness, forever bound up with the name of Alexander’s successor Nicholas I and his Third Deportment secret police, lasted until Russia, at least in name, abolished serfdom in 1862. To move backward and forward in history, as this book impressively does, the dark vision of Russia returned in the Soviet era as fear spread that the repressive Soviets, heirs to the Stalin of the gulags and persecutors of intellectual dissidents, would win the space race and rule the world.

For a while in the late 19th century, a look eastward inspired more positive political sentiment. Encouraged by Russia’s economic and scientific progress and greater openness and calmed by the tsar’s military impotence, the West, in the guise of England and France, was happy to entertain a sense of convergence. According to this, Malia’s third view, Russia clearly lagged behind in terms of the general progress of civilization, anything from 50 to 100 years, but everything would be all right in the end. Optimists of course believe this now too. They talk about the West-East cultural gradient, by which the countries of east central Europe and Eastern Europe are gradually rising to the level of their Atlantic European brethren. This book doesn’t persuade me either way. Meanwhile it’s curious to notice that the paranoid Cold War version of the convergence was the CIA’s insistence in the 1970s that the Soviet economy was growing at 60% of American GNP.

Finally then to Malia’s fourth attitude, of Russia as a “barbaric yet vital soul.” Westerners delight in the exceptional, nonrational Russia. Suddenly the country is found to be sublime entertainment for the beleaguered modern spirit. This is the Russia that many will forever associate with Dostoevsky and which was doubly transmitted to the West through the enthusiasms of Rilke and Thomas Mann. One remembers it was the turn-of-the-century exiles who brought the Ballets Russes before the eyes of astonished Western audiences. But the art that stayed at home was equally exciting and probably helped to attract future political enthusiasts for the Great Soviet Experiment.

Which brings us to the politics of socialism and Marxism, which forest so many acres of this dense and forceful volume. Perhaps the most interesting path that Malia’s four-point compass opens up is how Marxism alternately welcomed Russia into the European fold and rejected it. Given that we are dealing with a nonrational subject, it is useful to understand, via Malia’s excursions into Kant and Hegel and a catalogue raisonee of the many faces of German Romanticism, what Marx’s “German Ideology” of 1845 essentially was: a Romantic fantasy shot through with Christian eschatology promising that the meek should inherit the Earth. Neither Marx nor the Russophobe Engels thought of backward, pre-industrial Russia, which lacked an urban working class, as the place where the proletarian revolution would occur. As Westerners, their view of Russia seems to have been of the darkest hue, and Marxian theory had eventually to be revised to meet the great enthusiasm that the Russian Populists and social revolutionaries mustered for the foreign ideology. The orthodox doctrine remained problematic for Lenin, and that problem passed into Western Marxist-cum-socialist history as the question that still endures in some circles: Was Soviet socialism the real thing or a betrayal of Marx? To see Russia as a traitor in this respect, suggests Malia intriguingly, is once again to cast it as an inferior civilization out of the Western fold. Perhaps that explains why many on the left, up to 1991, even knowing of Russia’s domestic disgraces and public lies, failed to condemn it. (Either that or they jumped ship earlier, like Sartre, and saw true Marxism in China.)

Another near-current left-leaning view on which Malia’s analysis sheds light is the argument enshrined in cultural theory that the Great Soviet Experiment was in fact the culmination of the so-called Enlightenment project, negatively perceived. This view identifies Soviet Russia as the ultimate creation of scientific rationalism pushed too far, given the nonrational, theory-resistant human condition. It represents a position Malia doesn’t number, one that stands the reasons for admiring Russia’s enlightened despotism on their heads. Roughly speaking, the outcome of the blind application of reason to life was the surrealism that characterized later Soviet life in both dissident and critical Western eyes. The equivalent failure on the Western side was the rational social science model, which brought to Western Kremlinology the inadequate theory of totalitarianism. Malia’s book, though first sketched in 1962, thus begins to explain the rout that the communist collapse inflicted on Western expertise.

It is hard to know in the end what Malia’s own view of Russia is, but one wants to know. A rhetorically ungainly dedication suggests the specter of Russia has been transformed into a kitten, which can’t be right, can it? One suspects his subdued protest lies with Russia being willfully misjudged or unjustly feared.

There are other problems: For example, the application of Alice-through-the-looking-glass and other tired literary tropes, such as Gogol’s whither-Russia troika. Why not write fiction if that’s where Russia’s endless equivocations drive the mind? The card-index approach to intellectual history also makes for difficult reading. More seriously, Malia seems reluctant to trust experience. I wonder if a man who travels to Russia, as did the Marquis de Custine in 1839, and finds it a dirty and brutal police state is not doing more than expressing an ideology. Malia seems to hate Custine for telling us what he found but doesn’t furnish any evidence that it was not true. Western newspaper correspondents, when I was in Moscow in 1978, found Russia hadn’t changed much since the Marquis’ days.

Finally, it is unsatisfying to leave readers to make up their own minds about Russia’s moral worth, after centuries of morally skewed West-East discourse. Of course there has been ignorance, misjudgment and paranoia on the Western side, but one salient difference stands out to distinguish between Western and Russian civilization, and that is, beyond the extent of political liberalism and shading into the Christian heritage, the importance attached to the dignity and sanctity of the individual. Malia doesn’t seem to realize that that was what the free world was celebrating with “Gorbymania” in the late ‘80s, not just the Soviet system ceasing to be Soviet.