‘The negation of everything worth living for’

Portrait of Alexander III
by Ivan Kramskoi, 1886

In 2010, when the Putin Project was still just a monocracy and one could converse freely over the phone with friends in Russia, I remarked to one that Russia seemed to have ‘reached about 1892’, i.e. a point during the reign of Alexander III. Press censorship was well under way (my friend had just lost his job as an investigative journalist on a newspaper taken over by Putin), democracy was being ‘managed’ at every level, Orthodoxy had fused with official nationalism, male life expectancy was heading for what it had been in the 1890s, the economy was dominated by a kind of State capitalism, and unprecedented numbers of Russians were leaving to live abroad.

Little did I know that Alexander III is Putin’s hero! This was explained to me recently by an admirer of the Putin Project, who added that Putin does not in fact hanker after the Soviet Union, because he regards the Communists as bunglers, compared with Alexander III who had the true interests of Greater Russia at heart. The fact that Alexander III’s sobriquet is Mirotvorets (‘The Peacemaker’), because no major wars were fought in his reign, is irrelevant, as Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Finland were already under his thumb. Instead, Alexander III made war on Russian Jews, of whom his ideologist Pobedonostsev said a third would die, a third emigrate, and a third be completely assimilated.

Joseph Conrad was speaking primarily of the Russia created by Alexander III when, taking issue with Bismarck’s motto La Russie, c’est le néant (nothingness), he wrote in ‘Autocracy and War’ (1905) that Russia is ‘not a Néant: she is and has been simply the negation of everything worth living for’. He knew what he was talking about: his whole family had been exiled to Russia for his father’s part in the fight for Polish independence, his mother died of TB there, and his experience of Russia deeply traumatised him.

Conrad extended his definition to the whole of Russia’s past: ‘From the very inception of Russia’s being, the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been the imperative of her existence.’ The prime cause, as he saw it, was the form of government called ‘autocracy’: ‘From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence as a state Russia found nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning and end of her organisation. […] there has never been any legality in Russia; she is a negation of that as of everything else that has its root in reason or conscience.’ I think I could show that there has been legality in Russia, but I certainly agree with him that the Russian people’s preference for autocracy is the cause of Russia’s awfulness.

The surreal contempt for truth — a mendacity verging on insanity — the elemental hatred, the barbarism, destruction and nihilism of the war on Ukraine are enough to convince people that official Russia, Russia as a state, Russia the Putin autocracy, has again become ‘the negation of everything worth living for’. I believe this and it’s certainly depressing.

How did it come about? After the collapse of communism, Russians at last had the opportunity to create a democracy and rule of law, but they were easily distracted and somehow ended up regarding democracy as an expectation ‘imposed’ upon them by the West. Russia must have a different, ‘exclusive’ future. In the early 2000s Russian intellectuals began openly debating what ideology was needed to ‘fill the vacuum’ (the phrase often used) left by Soviet ideology. I was frankly aghast: so they were not interested, after all, in values, for instance freedom, truthfulness, legality, incorruptibility, tolerance, the mainsprings of a way of doing things without killing people, they were interested in an ideology. And Putin gave them one: his own crackpot version of Russia’s past, its religion, its greatness, its exclusive autocratic ‘identity’ that qualifies it to do what it likes.  (‘He lives in a world of his own’, remarked Angela Merkel, after a visit in which she was purposely terrorised by Putin’s large dog.) Let us remind ourselves that in Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Andrei Amal’rik said that ‘the mass ideology of this country has always been the cult of its own power and size’.

There has also always been a strong streak of irrationalism, satanry and apocalyptic self-destruction in Russian culture and politics. In the post-perestroika period of so-called anarchy, during which Russia rejected democracy and espoused nationalism, these demons escaped from their boxes, and Putin mistakenly thinks he can ‘manage’ them.

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.