Very big, Russia
Philip Marsden RUSSIA: PEOPLE AND EMPIRE, 1552-1917 by Geoffrey Hosking HarperCollins, £20, pp. 548 Towards the end of the 15th century, Russians became increasingly aware that the world was about to end. Because it had begun with Adam in 5508 BC, and because It was due to last 7000 years (the time needed for sufficient angels to have lived and thereby replace those who had fallen from Heaven), all eyes became focused on the year 1492. No church calendars were made for after that date. No plans were made. The harbingers of doom began to appear everywhere — heretical rationalists, wanton reformers, covert agents of the Antichrist.
The world did not end. In fact, this small mediaeval kingdom — intensely devout, harried by Tatar khans — stood on the threshold of the greatest and most sustained period of territorial swelling in InstorY. Within a century of Ivan IV con- quering Kazan in 1552 — the starting date for Hosking's study — Cossacks had reached the Pacific, 4500 miles to the east. At its fullest extent, the Russian empire Was a continuous block accounting for a ninth of the earth's land surface. Professor Hosking's impressive book is a book with a thesis. It is history based less on old-fashioned chronology than on a series of grand ideas. At the heart of these ideas is one very simple one: Russia is too big. Solzhenitsyn said as much in his recent The Russian Question at the End of the 20th Century, but where he is shrill and prescrip- tive, Hosking is expansive; where Solzhen- itsyn plays the bearded Slavophile, Hosking is the judicious liberal, and to these ears at least he is much the more convincing.
In the effort to gain its empire and main- tain it, Hosking contends, Russia has for- saken the opportunity to develop either civic institutions or a proper idea of itself. Dependence on the military stunted the commercial possibilities of what is poten- tially the world's richest country. It also forced its citizens — whether aristocrats, peasants or bureaucrats — into continual service for the fighting machine. With the country on a constant war footing, the debate which may have provided the seeds of national consciousness was always squashed. By the mid-19th century, when the 'whither Russia?' question was burning the lips of every thinking citizen, it was already too late. Even brute nationalism proved useless as an ideology, given that by then the empire contained so many diverse subject peoples. It all began with the Tatars. Crippled by paying tribute, the Russians first defaulted, then marched on their southern strongholds. Finally they absorbed the khans who became landlords themselves beneath the rule of Moscow. This was the first act of empire. The problem then was knowing where to stop. Three thousand miles of indefensible steppe lay to the east; to the west was the equally vulnerable cor- ridor of contourless forest. It was this which proved, in the centuries to come, the most dangerous of all — conduit not only for the forces of Napoleon and Hitler but for the seepage of corrosive western ideas. In order to protect such nebulous frontiers, the Russians were forced to expand until they found themselves defending borders of dizzying dimensions. After a plethora of recent books on Lenin and Stalin and Gorbachev, and endless re-examinations of the last of the Romanovs (most of which have only served to expose the pathetic irrelevance of the family), it is refreshing to stand back and look at Hosking's broad canvas. Rather `It's supposed to be a tete-a-tete, but they're both talking through their derrieres.' than pandering to residual Cold War prejudices, or to parochial interests in any- thing royal, the good professor aims to put our understanding of Russia back where it should be: in the context of the country's own past. It is a measure of his success that there are more resonances for today's Rus- sia in these pages than in all the archive- spilling that has characterised so much post-Soviet publishing.
Most striking of all is that — with west- ern policy now focused myopically on reform as a given good — 'reform' has so often been synonymous with calamity for the empire's brow-beaten peoples. The pattern was set in the mid-17th century, when Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich tried to bring the church into line. In doing so he not only triggered a schism from which Russian Christianity never recovered but broke irrevocably whatever trust there was in authority. Dissenters, known as 'Old Believers', retreated to their churches and burnt themselves alive rather than compro- mise their faith to the state.
Subsequent reforms by Peter I, Cather- ine II and Alexander II suffered equally from being ham-fisted, half-baked, or too little too late. A similar pattern of flawed reform can be traced through Nicholas II to Kerensky, Gorbachev and now Yeltsin.
Hosking's explanation again is simple, and not new. Russia, imperial Russia, was always two nations, state and people (or rather, state and peoples). Its cumbersome empire required the state to evolve in its own way. In the 19th century, the imperium became tripartite — state, people and intelligentsia. While these divisions existed, a sense of common nationhood was impos- sible to establish. Any gesture by the state to resolve the situation — as, for instance, with Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs or Nicholas II's elected Duma was inevitably tainted by elements of mis- understanding, mutual suspicion and self- preservation.
In a few pages of Soviet and post-Soviet reflections at the end, Hosking offers a note of optimism. Russia, he claims, is currently closer to nationhood than ever before. Shorn of much of its empire, it has now an educated population and an oppor- tunity to build a framework of credible institutions. But with divisions between state and people as sharp as ever — and now exacerbated again by vast disparities of wealth — it is an optimism which for the time being is hard to share.
Geoffrey Hosking's History of the Soviet Union remains the standard text on the subject. With this more ambitious book, he can put in a claim to the previous 350 years as well. It is unlikely that a clearer, more stimulating account of the Russians' extraordinary period of imperial history will be written.
Philip Marsden's book on Russia, The Spirit-Wrestlers, will be published shortly by HarperCollins.
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