In 1916 my father fled Warsaw, when Poland was still part of the Russian Empire, for fear of being forcibly recruited into the Tsar’s Army. Roundups of young men of fighting age were then the usual method of raising armies. One of my older uncles was mobilized in this way by the Cossacks in 1904. He set out to fight the Japanese in Western Siberia, on foot, like Napoleon’s troops a century before. When he reached his destination near Vladivostok, the conflict was over and the Japanese had won. In our family saga it is remembered that he returned by train, on the newly opened Trans-Siberian railway. The Russia of that time was a mixture of medieval customs and attempts at modernization, a random search for balance between anchorage in the West and a past of servitude under the yoke of the tsars and the Orthodox Church. This unlikely exercise between the so-called Westernists and the Slavophiles has never ceased and is still going on. The war against the Ukraine proves it; it is a manifesto of historical continuity.
If you go to Moscow, the capital is undoubtedly a Western city, even in its excesses of consumerism, enriched by oil revenues. I remember that when I met Vladimir Putin there, at the beginning of his first term, he used Westernist language. Surrounded by young technocrats, often educated in the United States, he spoke the language of high technology and start-ups. But, yesterday as today, it was enough to get away from Moscow, a hundred kilometers, for example, to plunge back into the Slavophile world, miserable, uneducated, soaked in vodka, in the hands of Orthodox popes, back after the fall of communism. Stalinism, moreover, was a Slavophile religion rather than a Marxist ideology. Will nothing ever change?
Today we know that almost all the Russian soldiers sent to Ukraine are, as before, young people trapped in the distant provinces of Central Asia or the Far North, ethnic minorities, cannon fodder sacrificed by Putin, which saves him from recruiting Russians by calling rows. The war is waged by Buryats or Chechens, just as, in colonial times, the Spanish sacrificed the Moroccans and the French sacrificed the Senegalese. Russia is a colonial empire. It is easy to imagine the lack of enthusiasm to fight of these enlisted mercenaries for a cause that no one understands. But Putin, just like in the time of Peter the Great, with whom he compares himself, only exists because of the war. The Europeans seem not to have realized that, in twenty years, Putin has never stopped waging war: in Chechnya, in Georgia, in Syria, in Crimea, in Ukraine and now in the African Sahel.
Another historical constant, taken from the Slavophile panoply, that we find in Putin, is the contempt for the truth. I listened to President Macron, the day after the invasion of Ukraine, when Putin had loudly assured him that he would not go to war: “So Putin always lies!” This naivety of the French president shows a certain ignorance of Russian history and the history of totalitarian regimes in general. Tyrants evidently always lie, although they pretend that they will respect his word and treaties; their temporary advantage derives from the fact that they do not respect our rules, while pretending that they will. Stalin promised Roosevelt and Churchill that he would not impose communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe; he did the opposite. In the same way that Hitler signed, in 1938, the Munich agreements by which he undertook not to annex Czechoslovakia, which he did immediately after. If Putin has signed an agreement authorizing the export of Ukrainian grain from the port of Odessa and the next day he bombs Odessa, why should we be surprised? The pact was only intended to distract the attention of Westerners.
To be fully consistent with the Slavophile tradition, Putin was missing an essential dimension: anti-Semitism. This oversight has just been repaired by his Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, who has pointed out that “Ukraine’s aggression against Russia” (sic) is a “Zionist plot”, that the president of Ukraine is not Jewish by chance and that since Hitler “was of Jewish origin” (sic), it is understandable why “Ukrainians are neo-Nazis” (sic). Quotations from Putin and those around him could also be multiplied, in particular from the patriarch of the Orthodox Church, who suggests that Russia embodies a civilization superior to any other, charged with saving the soul of the decadent West.
Who joins this Slavophile delirium? It is not measurable, but it is not too far-fetched to say that the Russian people, brutalized by alcohol, poverty, propaganda and lack of education, lean more towards Slavophiles than towards Westerners. Let us bear in mind this historical continuity in our support for Ukraine: the war will not be long, it will be eternal. And I thank my father for fleeing Russia in 1916.
Guy Sorman
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