Now you see it, now you don’t
I am puzzled and bewildered by Jeff Nyquist’s views on Russia and the soviet union. To start with, he says that in recent years “Russia has moved backwards, ever closer to the USSR”. That presupposes by inference, that it has moved forward in the past – away from the ussr. My confusion stems from my previous understanding of Nyquist’s position; namely, that the events of the 1989-1991 were a gigantic deception; that the “collapse of communism”, “end of the cold war” and “disintegration of the soviet union”, were all staged and, therefore, did not happen. If we agree that all this never happened, how can we now maintain that Russia is moving closer to something that it has never in the last 82 years ceased to be? I believe that it still is, and always has been, the same old soviet union, which conveniently changed its name and this view seems to me the only logical consequence of my position that the collapse of communism was part of a long term strategic deception plan. From my viewpoint, once we agree on this, any talk of “Russia” is absurd and the idea of her “moving closer or further away from soviet union” immaterial.At the end of his article Common usage in strategy and tactics Nyquist says: “The Russians no longer fly the Soviet flag over their capital. (They have retained it for their armed forces, however.)” I am staggered by this. So let’s try and think this one through. Supposing they did still fly the hammer and sickle (or whatever else was their hateful symbol) would that have changed everything and Nyquist would no longer call them “Russians”? Should our perception of a power – which I thought we both agreed had embarked on a long term deception strategy – be dictated by the colour of their flag?!? Frankly, I do not care one jot whether they fly Disneyland’s flag over Kremlin and paint Mickey Mouse on their tanks – Putin would still be the same old soviet. Imagine Goebbels taking over from Hitler and replacing Swastika with the German flag – would that make him less of a Nazi? Now you see it, now you don’t.
Soviets have actually retained a multitude of the old symbols, from the soviet anthem – ah, but they changed the lyrics so now it’s quite all right, I guess – to the names of towns (e.g. Kaliningrad), even the venerable Maryinsky Ballet reverts to its soviet name “Kirov Ballet” when touring in the West. Dropping all these soviet names and symbols would still not change one bit in the soviet substance of what Jeff Nyquist calls “Russia”. But they could just as well do it and why not? They can obliterate every single symbol of the soviet past just for the show because they can create any fiction they wish. In a perverse sort of way, the real tragedy is that they don’t have to do that because the masquerade has been accepted even though they still use the soviet anthem and call their towns Leninsk, Ulianovsk, Sovetsk or Octyabrskiy, they still honour Stalin as a “great war leader” and so on.
Unless I again hopelessly misunderstand something, Nyquist seems to be saying that, although we have witnessed a giant staging of events orchestrated from Moscow, we should still take it at face value. Or alternatively, it was all for the show and we do not believe one bit of it but let’s go along with it anyway because the thoughtless multitude with their common usage dictates it. Or perhaps: they told us that soviet union is no more, we don’t believe them but let’s call it Russia anyway, shall we? And then this alleged Russia has allegedly moved away from what soviet union was – was it still deception or was it “real”? – only to subsequently move “backwards, ever closer to the ussr”. Now you see it, now you don’t?
Yes, the reader is right if he thinks this looks suspiciously like some sort of an insane game. This game is known as a long term deception strategy and I counted JR Nyquist among those very few who bravely unmasked it, who did not succumb to it. So what happened?
I think I know what happened. We have to go back to the origins of communism to understand it. The roots of communism lie in the West – in the ideas of Enlightenment, in the French revolution, in Marx’s ideas about the nature of industrial revolution in Britain – but after the bolshevik coup, for reasons of political expediency, it suited various powers to identify it with the “mysterious East”. For the Catholic Church bolshevism was a manifestation of all that was wrong with the Orthodox Church. For Polish nationalists it was just another expression of Russian imperialism. For Western politicians congregated at the Genoa Conference it was convenient to see the murderers as “representatives of Russia”:
“When the Bolshevists, whom the Germans used to detach Russia from the Allied cause; who afterwards murdered the Tsar and the Russian Imperial family in circumstances of revolting barbarity; who killed, tortured, or caused to be assassinated tens of thousands of their fellow-countrymen; who plundered the public treasury, and private purses, banks and churches with fine impartiality; who wrecked and ruined Russia beyond hope of reconstruction and brought upon her an unexampled famine culminating in widespread cannibalism–when representatives of these men were invited to Genoa to assist in the reconstruction of Europe it seemed that paradox could no further go. But yesterday it went further.
Applying to the conveners of the Conference the principle sic vos non vobis the Bolshevists installed themselves from the outset as arbiters of this pan-European gathering and went from strength to strength. They launched insolent propaganda throughout the world. They accepted the Cannes Resolution ‘in principle’, while reserving the right to amend and extend its conditions – and were not expelled from the Conference convened solely on the basis of those conditions. Invited to negotiate privately at the British Prime Minister’s villa and to luncheon with him, they signed during those private negotiations a separate treaty with the Germans.” [1]
For Wickham Steed, who was observing it at close quarters, “the sight of M. Tchitcherin, top-hatted, in faultless morning coat, yellow gloves, and a red flag in his button hole, boarding an Italian battleship, conversing amiably with King Victor Emmanuel, drinking champagne, clinking glasses, and exchanging signed menus with the worthy Archbishop of Genoa, to whom he descanted upon the idyllic freedom enjoyed by the churches in Russia, was a spectacle incomparable and indescribable in prose.” But Wickham Steed was an exception; he did not care much for the common usage.
Whole volumes were written to prove that the red plague was not an international danger but the same old Russia. Polish politician and historian, Jan Kucharzewski, wrote a monumental work in seven volumes, From White Tsardom to Red, which encapsulates in its title the basic premise of continuity between the Russian Empire and the soviet union. Naturally, quotes of acerbic de Custine were pulled out of the cupboard and aired. The whole of Russian history was called upon to prove the continuity. Wasn’t dreaded cheka exactly like Okhrana? Weren’t Dzierżyński’s czekists and their torture chambers just like Ivan’s Oprichniki? Wasn’t Stalin’s murderous disregard of human life modelled on that of Peter the Great? Well, they were surely superficially similar. But to say that it was a mysterious manifestation of the “dark Russian soul” is to surrender to lazy thinking. There were thousands of murderous princes in Europe and Ivan the Terrible was not any worse a tyrant than Henry VIII. No Russian dynasty has ever sunk as low as the princely thugs of the House of Anjou. Okhrana as a model for soviet secret police? I guess that would be true: a model of how NOT to run secret police; after all, Dzierżyński and Stalin were arrested many times and always managed to wriggle out. What a pity Okhrana wasn’t a bit more efficient.
And what about de Custine? Surely, in this modern age we should give some credit to the account of a disgraced, openly homosexual aristocrat who mercilessly mocked the country he did not understand – sounds perfectly like a modern day tourist. But even if we assume that his report was accurate, what can it tell us about today’s Russia, 170 years later? Or about Russian culture as such? Does Jane Austen tell us much about the culture of today’s Britain? Or maybe we should look for a more insightful foreigner’s account: how about Dostoyevsky’s description of the hell on earth he encountered in London in 1862? Would that tell us much about today’s London? Strangely enough it probably does, thanks to Dostoyevsky’s genius, to which the debauched Marquis did not even pretend. The real uselessness of de Custine today, however, lies in the small matter of October 1917 coup, when bolsheviks slayed Russia as it was.
Russia, with all her imperial pretences, died in the infernal fire of the bolshevik revolution and in her place the centre of international communism was born. Bolsheviks pretended to be Russians when it suited them to promote that image; apart from that, they spat on Russia. Is it really such a wonder that the directions of expansion of the new creature built on the ruins of Russia, were identical to those of the Russian Empire? What else could they be? But Imperial Russia had no interest in Cuba or South Africa, in Angola or Venezuela. Imperial Russia, like most empires in history of mankind, tried to “russify” conquered countries. Soviets never do that. They use Cubans in Cuba and Poles in Poland, Vietnamese in Vietnam and Americans in America. Most empires exploited the vanquished for the benefit of their own populations but the quality of life in Warsaw under the commies has always been better than in Moscow.
Apart from the bloodiest days of the revolution, when all that was Russian was destroyed, soviet union never disparaged Russian nationalism, as Nyquist maintains, it merely used it, as any other weapon in the armoury. Only once we understand that nationalism of every hue is no more than a tool in their hands, that we can appreciate the importance of the dialectic of Russian vs. soviet. In fact, the 22nd congress of the soviet communist party quietly dropped the doctrine of dictatorship of the proletariat and replaced it with a new concept of state of the whole nation. This was the same congress, on which the abrupt departure of Zhu En-lai precipitated the sino-soviet split. The new “nationalist face” of communism was agreed at the outset of the long term deception strategy.
The mistake of placing the origins of communism in the “mysterious East” is equally tiresome. Kipling and Churchill are usually called upon to put the stamp of approval on this abdication of spirit of enquiry. The East is supposed to be so strange and so enigmatic, that the rational mind of a Western man cannot possibly comprehend it. One of the most laughable aspects of this particular misunderstanding is the imaginary inability of the West to come to terms with the idea of a “long term plan”. The reality is much more prosaic and does not contain any mysteries. Long term planning is impossible in democratic societies because any plan beyond the next general election is doomed and even if it were possible democratic politicians would be incapable of hatching such a plan. But this does not make long term planning a peculiarly “Eastern” idea. Churches in their political, temporal capacities, always plan for the long term – is Vatican somehow “Eastern”? Every powerful dynasty in history planned for centuries ahead – were the Bourbons Chinese or the Hohenzollerns Russian? Every dictator always plans for the longer term than his democratic counterpart – commies only took it further, developed the idea and put it into practice. There’s nothing incomprehensible about it. Having said that, it is quite true that the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus with his attention span of a hamster, sharpened on the intellectual diet of “reality tv” or whatever it is called – cannot possibly comprehend anything as complex as a long term strategy. But what does this matter?
It has always been the case that most people are unable to confront reality – unless it is served as a surreally sick pulp on their screens – or formulate their own opinions. Leftists realised that a long time ago and came up with an idea of opinion forming elites, whose role it is to create common usage language and common usage opinions for others to repeat parrot-fashion. But we are not on the Left. We ought not to bring down the ancient and noble notion of an intellectual elite and soil it in the mud of “opinion forming”, however nice and intelligent the opinion-makers might be. And this nicely brings me to my last subject: why we ought not to allow the common usage to dictate the terms of our discourse.
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- Wickham Steed, Genoa, The Times, 24 April 1922