Russia: The Eternal Enemy

I spent some time this summer reading two novels by Lev Tolstoy, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina.” Apparently, I was not the only one who had this idea because I received comments from people who had been doing the same (*). But why dust out these old novels from the time of an Ancient Empire that doesn’t exist anymore? And yet, we cannot ignore Russia, our existential enemy.

Western European nations had been fighting each other for centuries in various combinations of alliances. However, during the 19th century, a trend appeared: Russia was attacked by large coalitions that included practically all the European states and several non-European ones. Napoleon’s ill-fated raid in the Eastern Plains (1812) was the first of these invasions, perhaps the first military campaign in history that caused the death of more than one million people, including civilians. The Crimean War (1853-1856) was the first truly global war, and we could legitimately call it “World War 0,” even though the “world” was all on one side. Apart from Greece for a brief time, all the world's nations were either neutral or fighting Russia.

In both world wars, during the 20th century, Russia was invaded by a coalition of Western armies that put the very existence of the Russian state at risk. Not everyone remembers the US sent an expeditionary army to Russia in 1918 during the Bolshevik Revolution. Why did they do that? It was not an invasion; they couldn’t think of invading Russia with 8,000 men when Napoleon couldn’t do that with 600,000. In any case, it was the first time that Russian and American troops fought against each other. A bad omen for what was to come.

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, it was another step upward in terms of violence and hate. Earlier on, Napoleon had shown no intention of exterminating the Russians; he was writing letters to Czar Alexander I, calling him “brother.” But in the 1940s, the Germans went in with a full extermination plan ready; the “Generalplan Ost” (plan for the East). The Herrenvolk, the “master race,” would occupy the fertile Eastern Plains after having exterminated most of the Slavs living in the region. The survivors would work as slaves for their master after having been thoroughly “de-culturalized” with the elimination of the Cyrillic alphabet, of the very term “Russia” and, probably, also of the Russian language, to be reduced to a dialect for the impoverished Mujiki peasants.

The Soviets managed to thwart the German plan at the cost of more than 20 million casualties. However, the border between Western and Eastern Europe remained a “cold” conflict zone for more than 70 years after the end of WW2. Fortunately, it didn’t erupt into an all-out war until 2022. But we are again in a hot phase of the conflict, and nobody can say if or how it will escalate.

It is impressive to think that there is nothing comparable in modern times to the East-West fracture that cuts Europe in two and has been an active source of conflicts for over two centuries. You can regard it as even more ancient than that, going back to the Teutonic invasions of Russia at the time of Alexander Nevsky in the 13th century.

Tolstoy would have correctly asked the reasons for this situation. In “War and Peace” he wrote:

On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. What produced this extraordinary occurrence?

One of the reasons why I took up Tolstoy’s novels was to search for the mysterious element that produced “this extraordinary occurrence.” With the best of goodwill, I didn’t find it. I gathered from reading these novels how “European” were the Russian elites during the 19th century. Writing in the 1860s and 1870s, Tolstoy was a learned person who could describe how his characters discussed at length all matters of Western culture: science, philosophy, and politics. At the time of the Napoleonic invasions, the Russian elite members spoke French with each other. Many of them couldn’t even speak Russian, considered an inferior dialect for the Mugiki. At the time of Anna Karenina, they had stopped addressing each other in French, but they used it when they didn’t want to be understood by their servants. They were sophisticated, multilingual people who could easily move all over Europe.

Tolstoy’s Russians of the 19th century were a landed aristocracy whose wealth came from agriculture. Very few of them were involved in industry or commerce. At that time, Russia was still transitioning from an agricultural society to an industrial one, somewhat behind other European countries but moving along the same path. The Russian Revolution wiped out the Russian elites of the 19th century, but modern Russians maintain many of the characteristics of their ancestors.

Today, your Russian friends may vehemently deny being “Europeans.” Yet, there are scant traces of non-European cultures in modern Russia. Russians have always been Christian. The Russian Federation (and the earlier state forms) borders and includes Buddhist and Islamic regions in the East and in the South, but their cultural influence on Russia has been limited. Some people point out that the East-West fracture line corresponds more or less to the divide between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity. That may have some relevance, but it is hard to think that we are risking a nuclear holocaust today because the Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204.

Soviet Russia had adopted a Western ideology, Communism, but Russians are no longer Communists. Russian science used to be one of the best in the world, and despite all Russia's troubles, it is still a top-level academic system whose researchers publish in English in Western Journals. The current Russian elites don’t speak French as their ancestors did, but they normally speak fluent English. Compare this with the Western world, where speaking Russian is uncommon and even considered subversive. If you go to Russia, you feel you are in a Western country. It is a different sensation from the one you have in places such as China and Japan, where the “Western” aspect looks like a veneer that covers a deep cultural difference.

So, what has made Russians the Bugaboo of the West for such a long time? I can’t do anything better than propose Tolstoy’s interpretation in “War and Peace.” I think it doesn’t need comments (**).

To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolénsk and Moscow and were killed by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence—apart from the cooperation of all the other coincident causes—to occasion the event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third, and a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have been so many less men in Napoleon’s army and the war could not have occurred.

<..> Without each of these causes nothing could have happened. So all these causes—myriads of causes—coincided to bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west, slaying their fellows.

<..> it was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power—the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns—should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.

<..> When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

<..> And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to happen”

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(*) Gilbert Doctorow, too, went to re-read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” a few days after this post was published.

(**) A quote often attributed to Tolstoy is “A King is a slave of history.” I couldn’t find it in “War and Peace,” but it nicely summarized Tolstoy’s ideas.