The Mongol heritage and the peculiar character of the Russian intelligentsia hold the key to an understanding of the Russian revolution and whatever has happened in the Soviet Union since. There was no inevitability about this course of development, but it has been influenced decisively by Russian history. The omnipotence of the present Soviet state has descended directly from the omnipotence of the Khans and the Czars.
History as a discipline has suffered greatly as a result of the cold war. It inevitably took a back seat as international developments came to be discussed largely in ideological terms. As it happens, neither the Americans nor the Russians, who have dominated the political debate in the postwar period, are particularly history conscious. But the old discipline is staging a come-back and it has begun to be recognised that a country’s past has a decisive influence on its present actions. Mr. Tibor Szamuely’s The Russian Tradition* is part of this process.
Those who had read Mr. Szamuely’s articles do not need to be reminded that he was an extremely provocative and lucid writer (he died in 1972 when he was barely 47). He was firmly opposed to communism and made no bones about it. But, unlike many others of similar persuasion, he knew what he was talking about and he knew it first hand. His uncle and namesake was a celebrated figure in the Hungarian revolution in 1919. He himself was born in Moscow in 1925. His father disappeared in Stalin’s great purge in 1936. He served in the Soviet army, took a doctorate from Moscow university, was arrested in 1951 and later allowed to return to Hungary where he became vice-chancellor of Budapest university. In 1964, he came to Britain via Ghana.
The Russian Tradition covers a vast ground and no one who is seriously interested in the origin of the revolutionary concepts which have come into popular use all over the world can afford to miss it. But in this review I propose to confine myself to just two issues – the Mongol heritage and the character of the Russian intelligentsia – because I feel that these hold the key to the events of 1917 and since.
In our country where the tradition of geographical studies is extremely weak, it is necessary to point out that Russia has no natural frontiers and that this has led at once to the spread of the Russian people over one-sixth of the world’s land surface and armed struggle against invaders that “for length, intensity and ferocity has no parallel in the annals of any nation.”
The struggle was a losing one. The Kiev princes inflicted a number of defeats on the invaders. But the nomadic pressure from the steppes, which stretched to the heart of central Asia, continued to mount so much so the people began to move to the less exposed north-east and by the end of the 12th century Russia’s centre of gravity had shifted there. This was a forbidding land of forests and marshes where it was possible to eke out a bare living only with the greatest difficulty. Trade and cities could not flourish in these environments. Finally in 1237 the Mongols crossed the Volga and in the course of a lightning campaign crushed Russian resistance. Thus began the Tartar rule which was to last 250 years and affect the subsequent course of Russian history.
On the positive side, the Tartar victory ensured the unity of Russia. The descendants of the Rurik dynasty of Kiev had fallen apart by that time and the Grand Duke of Vladimir had no power outside his own apanage. On the negative side it laid the foundation of absolute autocracy, something quite alien to the spirit of Europe.
Under the Mongol concept of polity and society, the Khan had absolute power over the lives of all his subjects. But what is perhaps even more important, the Khan was the owner of all the land in his empire and everyone else could hold land on conditions of temporary tenure in lieu of services to the state. Russia – its society and its political and administrative system – was remoulded in the Mongol image in the 250 years of their rule.
The Tartar power was finally supplanted by the Muscovy principality which had earlier fully collaborated with it against other Russian princes and won favours from it. But Muscovy was a successor state of the Tartars; it hardly bore any resemblance to the free society of Kiev. The title of Czar itself came from the Mongols and with it came their concepts of universal service to the state and the unquestioning submission of the individual to larger collectives culminating in the state. Karl Marx summed up the heritage of Muscovy when he wrote:
“The bloody mire of Mongol slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy… Kalita’s (ruling prince) whole system may be expressed in a few words: the machiavellism of the usurping slave… It is in the terrible and abject school of Mongolian slavery that Muscovy was nursed and grew up. It gathered strength only by becoming a virtuoso in the craft of serfdom. Even when emancipated, Muscovy continued to perform its traditional part of the slave as master.”
The tragedy of Russia was that she had to continue to wage a relentless armed struggle even after the end of the Mongol rule. She had to fight on three fronts. Some idea of the magnitude of the effort and loss can be had from the fact that in the 200 years between the end of the Mongol rule and the accession of Peter the Great, Russia had fought six wars with Sweden and 12 with Poland-Lithuania lasting 85 years, almost all of them unsuccessful and two disastrous.
At the beginning of the 17th century Moscow itself was occupied and it once again appeared that Russia would disintegrate. And in the south, Tartar and Turkic tribes continued to attack and destroy Russian settlements carrying hundreds of slaves with them year after year. Moscow itself was sacked several times, the last being in 1571 when Ivan the Terrible was at the height of his power.
Mr. Szamuely does not exaggerate when he writes: “Perhaps no other historical experience has left as lasting an impression on the folk-memory of the Russian people as the horrors of this interminable struggle against the slavers and killers of the south.” And one cannot but agree with the famous Russian historian, Paul Miliukov: “Compelling national need resulted in the creation of an omnipotent state on the most meagre material foundation; this very meagreness constrained it to exert all the energies of its population – and in order to have full control over these energies it had to become omnipotent.”
It is perhaps necessary to add that, like the Khans, the Czars laid claim to all the land in the realm. Indeed, according to Mr. Szamuely, “Ivan carried the process of gathering the Russian lands to its logical conclusion by killing off the greater part of the boyars: the old apanage princes, the descendants, families and courts… it invariably flowed over into the frenzied massacre of thousands of innocuous house-servants, slaves, tenants or anybody else who had somehow been connected with the object of the Tsar’s insane suspicions.” As the system finally evolved in the 17th century, everybody who served the state held land and all those who held land served the state. Thus “the state became not only independent of society, but overwhelmingly powerful in relation to it.” In such a scheme of things, no rival power centre could possibly arise.
As for the intelligentsia, the word itself is of Russian origin. But the Russian concept and its content before the revolution had little in common with the current use of this term. The intelligentsia in Russia was not the equivalent of the intellectual community in other European countries. “A significant portion of the intelligentsia consisted people who were, at best, semi-educated… failed students, lapsed seminarians, auto-didacts etc. At the same time a larger part, probably the greater and most highly civilized part, of the educated class – higher civil servants, university professors, engineers, scientists, many professional people – were never regarded as belonging to the intelligentsia.” The intelligentsia was not so much a class as a state of mind, an attitude of total hostility to the political and social system. As the great Russian historian, Berdyaev put it: “The intelligentsia bore a strong resemblance to a monastic order or a religious sect, with its own extremely intolerant morality… even with its own peculiar physical appearance.”
The rise of this class was not surprising. It was, broadly speaking, the product of two factors -the elimination of clan, tribal and regional loyalties during the troubled times when millions of Russians fled north-eastward to escape the Tartars and the absence of a middle class similar to the European bourgeoisie of which the Western intellectual community formed a well-integrated part. “It was truly déclassé, a genuine intellectual proletariat, homeless and unprotected, isolated from the ruling class by its radicalism and from the peasantry by its education. Both chasms were unbridgeable… the only home it could claim as its own… was its mental vision of the ideal society of the future.” And, needless to add, it is this class which fathered the October revolution.
There was, of course, nothing inevitable about this course of development. Russian history could well have taken a different turn if the first world war had not led to the virtual disintegration of the Russian army and state. But how different? Just as it has decisively influenced the character and nature of the Soviet state, the country’s past heritage would have asserted itself even if the revolution had not taken place in October 1917. All in all, history remains a better guide to the understanding of major societies than ideology.
* THE RUSSIAN TRADITION: By Tibor Szamuely (Secker and Warburg, £5)
The Times of India, Sunday, 31 August 1975