Lenin repeatedly described the tsarist empire as the “weakest link in the chain of imperialism”. The events of 1917 seemed to confirm this thesis. In February 1917, the tsarist monarchy was the first government in Europe, as it existed then, to collapse under the challenges of the First planet War. 8 months later, the “first” Russian democracy built on the ruins of the tsarist monarchy suffered a akin fate. In turn, the first totalitarian government of modern times was built in its place. In August 1991, the Bolshevik annihilators of the “first” Russian democracy were disempowered themselves. Nevertheless, the Russian state that emerged after the dissolution of the russian government one more time developed into the “weakest link” of the global order. The country returned to being a place to experimentation with utopian ideals of all kinds. In this respect, 1 cannot avoid the impression that Russian past has, in certain respects, a cyclical character.
The erosion of the tsarist regime
In the second half of the 19th century, Russia was 1 of the European countries where social and political conflicts were intensifying at a fast rate. This occurred despite the revolutionary reforms of Tsar Alexander II (1855-1881), which led, among another things, to the abolition of serfdom and the creation of independent courts. The polarization of society that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had predicted for the West occurred in Russia at the end of the 19th century. That is where the revolutionary centre of the continent shifted as a result. At that time, 3 conflicts that had already been mostly resolved in the West came to a head in the tsarist empire. These were constitutional, labour and agrarian issues that deprived the tsarist autocracy of its social roots. The frightening emptiness that surrounded the government became apparent during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.
Instead of arousing national enthusiasm, the Russo-Japanese War caused a general uprising of the people against the existing system. The majority of the population was mostly indifferent to the devastating defeats suffered by the Russian army. The revolutionary groups even noted these defeats with a certain satisfaction. Lenin declared in 1905 that it was not the Russian people but their top enemy – the tsarist government – that had been defeated in this war. With this highly defeatist attitude, the leader of the Bolsheviks (a “party of a fresh type”) was by no means alone at the time.
Being completely isolated, the tsarist autocracy could not be maintained in its erstwhile form. It had to ask society for cooperation. Thus, at the proposition of the then Prime Minister Sergei Witte, the tsar’s manifesto of October 17th 1905 was issued. In this document, the tsar promised his subjects basic rights and the convening of a parliament. This marked the end of unrestricted Russian autocracy. In April 1906, Russia received a constitution (“Basic Laws of the State”) – the first in its history.
The Russian historian Viktor Leontovich says that the constitution of 1905/06 was forced through by forces that were not curious in the constitution. Instead, their real aim was to consolidate the revolution. Regardless of this, following the liberal Russian politician Vasily Maklakov, the constitution gradually began to have an educational effect on both the government and the public.
However, all these developments primarily affected the Russian educated classes. The others barely participated in them. They were scarcely curious in the political objectives of of the political elites. Thus, the Russian peasantry – the overwhelming majority of the population, even after the adoption of the constitution – was not curious in the establishment of the regulation of law in Russia. This group was more afraid with the unresolved agrarian question. They dreamed of a complete expropriation from landowners, of a alleged “black redistribution”, and so did not want to admit the rule of the inviolability of private property that the constitution guaranteed in Article 77.
The gulf between the Russian educated classes and those below them became peculiarly apparent after the outbreak of the First planet War. Only loyalty to the tsar could motivate the Russian peasants to show exceptional endurance in the protracted conflict. However, this loyalty had been wavering since the turn of the century. The Russian lower classes – until then the most crucial pillar of the Russian autocracy – became its most dangerous opponent. More and more they began to transfer their hopes for the establishment of a socially just order from the tsar to revolutionary parties.
Just a fewer months after the start of the war (in December 1914), the Russian General Kuropatkin said that all of Russia had only 1 want – peace.
The “National Renaissance” within the Russian educated classes
Kuropatkin’s statement, however, primarily referred to the Russian lower classes, who bore the brunt of the war. The Russian educated classes, or at least many of their representatives, were in an entirely different temper at the time. After the outbreak of the war, but for the Bolsheviks and a fewer another extremist left-wing groups, they were gripped by a nationalist euphoria that did not disagree besides much from the temper that accompanied the outbreak of the conflict in countries specified as Germany, France or large Britain. Considering the indifference with which the Russian public had accepted the devastating defeats of the tsarist army in the Russo-Japanese War just a decade earlier, the change of temper that had taken place in the country within a very short space of time is surprising. However, this national renaissance contributed small to the popularity of the Romanov dynasty among Russia’s political class, as nationalist circles in Russia at the time suspected the tsarist household of not identifying sufficiently with the war. The fact that the tsarina’s favourite, Grigory Rasputin, who was assassinated in December 1916, played specified a prominent function in governing the country contributed peculiarly powerfully to discrediting the tsarist family. At the end of 1916, the opposition’s conflict with the government reached its climax. The leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party, Pavel Milyukov, describing the incompetence of the government at the time, asked: “What is this? Stupidity or treason?”
Not only the liberals and socialists but besides any conservative groups turned their backs on the government. Even any court circles were planning a palace revolution at the time. The erosion of trust in the tsar deprived the monarchy of its legitimizing foundations. At the time, Russia could indeed be described as the “weakest link” in the chain of belligerent powers.
Lenin’s defeatism
The fact that the Paris Commune followed the collapse of the French army, and the Russian Revolution of 1905 followed the downfall of the Tsarist army, led Lenin to the conviction that a revolutionary organization during an “imperialist” war should above all work towards bringing about the defeat of its own government. Thus, unlike Rosa Luxemburg and many another representatives of the left-wing Socialist International, for example, he did not see the outbreak of the First planet War as a origin for despair or as an unprecedented tragedy. On the contrary, he saw this war as a tremendous chance to accelerate revolutionary processes, calling it the “greatest manager of planet history”.
Lenin had nothing but contempt for the pacifists who wanted to end this war as rapidly as possible. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, he wrote to his organization friend Shlyapnikov, stating that “The era of the bayonet has begun. This means that 1 has to fight with this weapon.”
When Lenin formulated this idea, he had no bayonets of his own. He so had to cooperate with the forces that had them and were pursuing the same goal as him. This was namely the demolition of the tsarist army, with Russia’s opponents in the war aiming for this above all. Lenin by no means saw this action as a betrayal of Russia. In his article on the national pride of the Russians, published in December 1914, he wrote: “The Russian Social-Democrats loved their fatherland like another Russians. But for this very reason they wished the tsarist government a devastating defeat in all war. Helping to destruct the tsarist monarchy was the best service that any Russian patriot could render to his fatherland.”
Lenin saw the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1917 besides as a consequence of the different destabilization of the tsarist monarchy by the war. This was of course seen as a confirmation of his tactics. In March 1917, he wrote:
“The revolutionary crisis was accelerated by a series of defeats inflicted on Russia and her allies… Those… who shouted and raved against “defeatism” are now faced with the fact that the defeat… of tsarism is historically connected with the beginning of the revolution.”
Lenin and the “Revolutionary Defence of the Fatherland”
After the fall of the tsar in February 1917, Lenin said in his “April Theses” that Russia was now “of all the belligerent countries, the freest country in the world”. Nevertheless, he continued his defeatist course unabatedly, this time against the “freest country in the world”. His cooperation with the German Reich reached its highest at this time. Lenin poured peculiar scorn on those political groups in Russia who believed that after the overthrow of the unpopular tsar, the Russian Revolution now had to be defended from external enemies. Lenin contemptuously referred to these groups as “revolutionary defenders of the fatherland” and said that they were the “(worst enemies) of the further improvement and success of the Russian Revolution”. To the war-weary Russian soldiers, who had been freed from the shackles of military discipline as a consequence of the revolution, Lenin made this very effective appeal: “End the imperialist war immediately.” The tsarist army, which numbered around 9 million soldiers at the beginning of the February Revolution, was almost completely disbanded in the following months. However, Lenin’s peace propaganda had nothing to do with pacifism. For Lenin’s aim was by no means to end the planet war, but to transform it into a worldwide revolutionary civilian war that would destruct the most crucial origin of all wars – the alleged “world capitalist system”. In Russia – the “weakest link in the imperialist chain” – with its weak bourgeoisie, the proletarian revolution conceived by Lenin was to triumph first. The spark of revolution was then to spread to the highly developed industrialized countries of the West. That was the plan. In Lenin’s view, the most crucial prerequisite for the triumph of the proletarian revolution in Russia was the demolition of the bourgeois state and all its institutions, not least the army. In his polemic with Karl Kautsky in 1918 (already after the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution), Lenin wrote the following: “No large revolution has always succeeded without the “disorganization” of the army… For the army is the most ossified tool with which the old government sustains itself, the firmest bulwark of bourgeois discipline.”
The erosion of the “second” Russian democracy
In August 1991, the Bolsheviks, having ruled Russia autocratically since the October Revolution, was disempowered. The Russian democrats, who had been relegated to the “dustbin of history” by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, returned to the political stage. Nothing seemed to stand in the way of Russia’s return to Europe, something that the Russian democrats had dreamed of for years. Nevertheless, this triumph of the “second” Russian democracy did not last very long. The euphoric temper of August 1991 waned very quickly. shortly after came the shock of December 1991, with the dissolution of the russian Union viewed by many imperial-minded circles in Russia as a kind of apocalypse. This was followed by the trauma of January 1992, as economical shock therapy almost halved the population’s standard of living. Not least due to all this, the word “democracy” was mostly discredited in the eyes of many Russians. The writer Leonid Radsikhovsky wrote in mid-1992 that “Democratic values were now experiencing an erosion akin to that of communist values in the past.” The word “democracy” was gradually becoming a dirty word. As a result, post-Soviet Russia, like the Weimar Republic at the time, was transformed into an “aggrieved large power” striving to reconstruct its lost hegemonic position. akin to the tsarist empire at the beginning of the 20th century, Russia one more time became the “weakest link” in the European order.
The 1994 census showed that 46 per cent of the Russian population described the collapse of the USSR as a “catastrophe” or a “calamity”. At the time, many democratically minded Russian politicians besides believed that the borders of the Russian Federation, created in 1991, were not final and that the full post-Soviet area was a “vital sphere of interest” for the country.
For the most militant representatives of imperial revenge, however, the aforementioned quest to reconstruct Russia’s erstwhile greatness was far besides modest a project. They regarded the West’s triumph in the Cold War as an unprecedented disgrace, which they wanted to undo with all the means at their disposal. Their aim was not to reconstruct a balance in East–West relations but to completely defeat the western “globalists”. Like the right in the Weimar Republic, they demonized the values associated with the West. First and foremost, liberalism was attacked and described as a deadly enemy of the full planet outside the West. Liberalism was defined no differently by 1 of the most crucial representatives of the German Conservative Revolution, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, in 1923.
The magazine “Elementy” was founded in 1992 by the right-wing Russian publicist Alexander Dugin and served as the mouthpiece of these ideas. The magazine considered a compromise between the liberal advocates of the “mondialist” ideas and their opponents to be unthinkable. In the editorial of the seventh issue of the magazine (1996), 1 could read the following:
“Between them there is only enmity, hatred, the most brutal fight according to rules and without rules, the fight for destruction, to the last drop of blood… Who will have the last word? yet it will be war, the “father of all things” that will decide.”
In another passage, Dugin referred to this conflict as the “final battle” and utilized this word in the first German (“Endkampf”). Dugin’s tirades of hatred towards the Western “globalists” are surely reminiscent of Lenin’s invective against planet financial capital. In Lenin’s view, the conquest of “world capital” should enable a fresh just planet order without wars and exploitation. For Dugin, the conquest of the West, or alleged “mondialism”, was the indispensable prerequisite for the creation of a patriarchal idyll on this planet. Neither Lenin nor Dugin considered the conflict for power in Russia to be an end in and of itself. Russia was simply to become a launch pad for the realization of ideas that went far beyond concepts that were specifically Russian.
Dugin and Putin
One of the most crucial concerns of Dugin, who, unlike Lenin, did not have a “new kind of party”, was to convey his “ideology of the final struggle” to representatives of the political establishment in Russia. Especially after the establishment of Putin’s “controlled democracy”, Dugin’s extremist ideas began to influence interior Russian discourse more and more. It was then that Russia was transformed from the “weakest link” of the European order, as it was established at the end of the 20th century, into its extremist adversary. Putin’s demonization of the West, which became more and more evident, peculiarly after his speech at the Munich safety Conference in February 2007, was very much in line with Dugin’s intentions. The same could besides be said of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014. Putin’s adventurism ignored the full global order. Dugin, however, was incensed that Putin took only Crimea at the time and did not annex the full south-east of Ukraine. Anyway, shortly before the “turning point” on February 24th 2022, Dugin and Putin were already in the same boat. Immediately after the NATO debacle in Afghanistan in August 2021, Dugin published a pamphlet that can be seen as a kind of anticipation of the war against Ukraine. In the document, he talks of the looming “final conflict of humanity against liberalism”. Lenin had announced a akin “final battle”, albeit against the “world capitalist system”, shortly after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Lenin’s plans for planet revolution were to endure a full failure, as is well known. Dugin’s vendetta against the alleged “collective West” will most likely be no different. But what will be the price to be paid? We do not know, just like we do not know what impact Donald Trump’s triumph in the US presidential election in November 2024 will have on Russia’s future position in the global order. It seems that the cards have been reshuffled. The US could now, at least for the next 4 years, cease to be a origin in the global political order. This could give the emerging alliance of autocrats from Moscow to Beijing a unique chance to form the global order according to their own ideas. But 1 thing must be borne in mind. The autocratic alliance is anything but stable, and this applies above all to Russian-Chinese relations. The fact that Putin has turned his country, which had supposedly “risen from its knees”, into a junior partner of Beijing irritates any imperial-minded circles in Russia. These irritations are likely to deepen if conventional rifts and tensions, which have accompanied Russian-Chinese relations for generations, resurface. The late deceased Henry Kissinger predicted as much in 1 of his last interviews. He could be right here, as in any of his another prognoses. In that case, the Putin government would one more time gotta trust primarily on its own resources in its conflict with the West, and these are surely limited. In this context, I would like to callback the words of the Moscow historian Alexei Kiva, who said the following in 2018: “Russia’s share of global GDP is 1.5-2 per cent, while that of the USA and the EU is 20 per cent each. Taking into consideration this imbalance of power, Russia cannot afford a prolonged confrontation with the West.” Kiva’s words are reminiscent of those of the German Russia expert Boris Meissner, who described the balance of power between East and West in the mid-1980s as follows: “The russian Union’s existing economical base is far besides narrow to full realize its claim to planet power.”
Shortly afterwards, Perestroika began in the USSR. Will past repeat itself again this time?
This article is an extended version of a column that appeared in the online debate magazine “Die Kolumnisten” on November 11th 2024.
Translated by Eva Schulz-Jander
Leonid Luks is prof. of past at the Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany
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