"Why the Bear Growls"
Peter Morley (Russia Profile Discussion Group)
http://www.russiaprofile.org/cdi/2006/3/1/3340.wbp
eugene...@comcast.net
Professor Pipes is such a patriarchal figure in the Russian/Soviet studies that everything he publishes is worth of reading, whether one agrees with him or not.
I happen to agree with Prof. Pipes’ characterization of Russians as remarkably “depoliticized.” I equally share Prof. Pipes’ view of the Russian political tradition as “solidly conservative.” It is hardly incidental that the ruling United Russia party – supposedly a vehicle to promote President Putin’s liberal reforms – defines its ideology as “social-conservative.”
What I find puzzling in Prof. Pipes’ most recent publications is the origin of public poll data he bases his conclusions upon. I closely follow Russian polls but have never come across the one showing that “nearly one-third of Russians … are not aware that the Soviet regime no longer exists.”
Or take, for example, the assertion that “the majority of Russians regard the West as an enemy.” According to just published Levada Center poll (“Socio-political situation in Russia in February 2006”), 52 percent of Russians view the United States positively and 36 percent negatively. For the European Union, the numbers are 61 and 20 percent, respectively. True, this is a decline since August 2004, when 67 percent of Russians expressed positive views of the US and 77 percent of the EU. Still, the current numbers don’t betray any animosity toward “the West.” In comparison, only 35 percent of the respondents expressed their positive attitude toward Georgia (55 percent were negative).
Victor
Russian history, and some of his early contributions like the
publiction on Karamzin's "Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia," and
"Formation of the Soviet Union : communism and nationalism 1917-1923"
(both coming from the 1950s) are essential for any student of Russian
history. What troubles me is that he seems to have stuck with the old
arguements. There is little more in his article than a reproduction of
his view on Russia formed half a century ago and crystallized in his
Russia under the Old Regime, 1974. According to him, Russian history
went wrong ever since the days of Rurik and Vladimir, but he ignores
the simple fact that until the coming of the modern age, Russian
state's supposedly "authoritarian" policy was necessarily limited to
the upper social strata. He judges the "abnormal" Russian history
against a telelogically constructed pattern of the "normal" Western
European history (a whiggish presuption long abandoned by his
colleagues who study Western European history), while his analysis,
couched in terms of 19th century sociology and performed against the
backgound of the mid 20th century modernization theory, takes Russia as
a self-contained unit and tends to ignore that Russian empire was part
of wider system of international interaction.
Therefore, Prof. Pipes's case is a good illustration of President
Putin's comment on sovietologists, since his sells one an the same
thing over and over again and his discourse on Russia is loosing any
connection with the realities beyond text. (In his memoires," Vixi: the
Memoirs of the non-belonger" Pipes spills much ink trying to distance
himself from the American sovietological community of the 1970s and
1980s, but, whatever the personal differences, he is very
"sovietological" in this sense). On the other hand, if one adopts a
constructivist approach, Pipes's utterances about Russia might have the
character of self-fulfilling prophecy as soon as they start to inform
the policy-makers. For Russian regime, whatever it initially might be,
has every reason to treat in an authoritarian manner a discourse
postulating the invariable authoritarianism of Russian political system
and it has no other option but to respond in kind to the policy
informed by such discourse and aiming to weaken or destroy Russian
state as such. The fallacy that professor Pipes commits is therefore
not so much epistemological, as it is practical. For some reason, he
simply chooses Russia to be persistingly authoritarian and contributes
to it being so by shaping a hostile public opinion both in Russia and
abroad towards whoever might be in power in Russia. Unfortunately,
Professor Pipes never explains to the reader the rationale behind this
option leaving one to make conjunctures.
Labeling Russia despotic is a convenient way of asserting one's own
liberal and democratic identity. In this case, Russia performes the
function of the constituting "other", very much in the manner of Orient
in the 19th century Western European discourse of Orientalism. It is
particularly noteworthy, that Professor Pipes and the discourse which
he perpetuates enjoys a special popularity in the countris of Central
and Eastern Europe. Partly, it can be explained by recent Soviet
dominance, but, I believe, there is more than that. In order to
understand this situation, it might be useful to compare russophobia
with antisemitism. Winston Churchill's reply to the question why there
is no anti-semitism in Britain was that the British simply do not have
any doubts of there own worth and do not consider the Jews to be
smarter than they. Professor Pipes and people like him (and there are
especially many of them in the countries of Eastern Europe where he is
widely popular among historians) are probabaly not so self-confident
and for them russophobia is a convenient psychological devise to
strengthen their European, democratic and liberal identity. Needless to
say, such an attitude hardly serves to heal the wounds of the past but
rather reproduces the dialogue of the deaf.
> ------=_Part_3638_15338775.1141316845922
> Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
> X-Google-AttachSize: 465
>
> Richard Pipes wheels out the same old arguments as to why Russia is why it is. Surely people must be getting bored of fallacious arguments based on a deterministic view of some kind of inherent "authoritarianism"? Or does Pipes have a point?
> <br><br><a href="http://www.russiaprofile.org/cdi/2006/3/1/3340.wbp" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.russiaprofile.org/cdi/2006/3/1/3340.wbp</a>
>
>
> ------=_Part_3638_15338775.1141316845922--
Babich Dmitry
From: Dmitry Babich
Dear Viktor, you made a very cunning analysis of the East Europeans' attitude to Russia. Having read the Polish media, I have to agree with your idea that Russia for the Polish politicians is "the other", helping them to reassert their European and generally Western image. Sometimes it is bad, but sometimes it even has a positive consequence. "Don't behave like a Russian" sounds more convincing than the usual "be civilized" or even "you ought not kill, you ought not steal." For example, in"The Debt" (Dlug), the most watched Polish movie of the 90s a bloody mafia killing is called "Russian style way of settling disputes," although the situation described in the movie is as common in Poland as it is in Russia.
Russia, ironically, only has Africa and sometimes Chechnya to perform the role of the "other." "U nas tut ne Afrika" (It's not Africa here) is the usual call to order during the stormy Duma sessions. I understand why Africans feel insulted and hate this kind of attitude. Hopefully, Poles will one day feel the same about "Don't behave like a Russian."
Yours, Dmitry Babich