The failure of two empires - By Dmitry Shlapentokh

<blockquote>"The geopolitical structure of the global order created by Stalin and his American adversaries in the aftermath of World War II is collapsing, not just on the Russian side but also on the American side. This implies that the future - at least the immediate future - is not so much for Pax Russika or Pax America, but most likely a push for increasing global anarchy."</blockquote>


The failure of two empires

By Dmitry Shlapentokh
Sep 5, 2008
Source

At first impression, it seems that the greatest among all Georgians - Joseph Stalin - is back. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, his most implacable enemy, the author of the major anti-Stalin work, Gulag Archipelago, is dead.

Moreover, while the world hailed Solzhenitsyn as one of the major forces in the 20th century that helped destroy Stalinization as the political ideological system in Russia, he soon fell out of the public mind. Few ordinary Russians came to his funeral. For the majority, his Gulag was as irrelevant as The Secret History of Procopius of Caesarea or the Annals of Tacitus of Rome.

Indeed, for quite a few people, Stalin is once again popular as the man who created the great Soviet - read Russian - empire; and it is not accidental that Alexandr Prokhanov, editor of one of the most influential Russian dailies, Zavtra, proclaimed that in the recent war with Georgia, the Georgian "battalion Solzhenitsyn" was destroyed by the advancing Russian army.

One could assume that these Russian forces advancing toward Gori, Stalin's birthplace in Georgia, were hailed by a huge effigy of Stalin, possibly the only one that remains in the world. Here, as if still alive, and looking dignified, he hails Russian soldiers as he did in 1945 when they marched in Red Square in Moscow during the victory parade that followed the end of World War II.

This seems to explain why the comparison between the recent Russian invasion of Georgia and the Soviets' imperial buildup launched by Stalin is so popular in the Western media.

But this is not the case: the war has irrevocably broken the relationship between the Russians and the other peoples of the former Soviet Union, that is, the war has in fact finally destroyed the legacy of Stalinism.

It is true that Stalin has been associated with the legacy of Russian nationalism. His empire looked like the Russian empire of the tsars; he praised Russian nationalism and deported millions of those minorities whom he suspected of disloyalty into the heartland of the empire. Still, his empire was not just a Russian empire; it was not an empire for Russians and by Russians. The empire transcended the narrow confinements of Russianness, not just because Stalin himself was not Russian, but because of the nature of the empire.

Imperial expansion did not benefit Russians. Russian gas and oil, machinery and education - all were spread to the outskirts of the imperial domain; and, with all the nastiness and discrimination of his rule - the case of Russian Jews and Germans in the late Stalin era is a good example - Stalin's elite and, later, the post-Stalin elite, was multi-ethnic.

Moreover, it is the Russified minorities - so similar to Stalin himself, who were the greatest patriots of the empire. These trans-ethnic elements of the empire (it's not a Russian but actually an Eurasian empire) permeated all of Soviet rule. And through a web of marriages, datings and friendships, a new people emerged: the Soviet/Eurasian people.

This was not just a Soviet propaganda statement. Still, all of this began a process of continuous destruction from the beginning of the post-Soviet era in the early 1990s. The price of gas and oil was increasingly raised to everyone. Even Russian friends - such as Belarus - were slowly compelled to pay the same prices as the distant lands which had never been a part of the empire. Ethnic violence against the people from the Caucasus and Central Asia became common.

The recent Russo-Georgian war was the last straw: from now on, Moscow, the Third Rome, the capital of the Eurasian empire to which all the numerous people of the empire have had a feeling of awe, a feeling that Moscow is also their capital, became a city of a foreign state. This feeling of Russia's foreignness is shared not just by the people of the Caucuses and Central Asia, but also by friendly Belarus, which offended Moscow by not supporting the Georgian war.

Now, Russia is more alone, more alienated and hated among the republics of the former Soviet Union than at any other time in Soviet and post-Soviet history.

And while Russia was able to inflict a great blow against Georgia, Russia has not been able to withstand a protracted war in the North Caucuses. Chechnya has in effect been abandoned to President Ramzan Kadyrov, who exists if not de jure but as an independent ruler, receiving tributes in the form of subsidies from Moscow.

While Russia cannot be either a new edition of the Stalinist Soviet Union or a reinvention of itself in the form of say a German Third Reich, the United States is seen by a considerable segment of the Russian elite as the country's major geopolitical rival, as a grand empire.

Still, the US's inability to defend its proxy Georgia, which it implicitly encouraged to attack South Ossetia, setting off the war, is a reflection of the broad geopolitical burden of Iraq and Afghanistan on the US's shoulders. These geopolitical debacles are related to America's increasing economic problems, for which no viable solution can be found in the context of present social-economic arrangements. The collapse of the American global imperial presence is structurally similar to that of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Neither Russia nor the US can be true imperial powers.

The geopolitical structure of the global order created by Stalin and his American adversaries in the aftermath of World War II is collapsing, not just on the Russian side but also on the American side. This implies that the future - at least the immediate future - is not so much for Pax Russika or Pax America, but most likely a push for increasing global anarchy.


Dmitry Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of history, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend. He is author of East Against West: The First Encounter - The Life of Themistocles, 2005.

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