Ideology | St. Stalin
What to do with your bad uncle?
We must demand, firmly but politely, that Russians come to terms with their past.
We must do this every few years — especially when we are squabbling with the Russians over the Ukraine, Syria, or other distant, antique lands that do not concern us.
Minatory columnists must suggest that the Russians should reconsider statues, public tributes, and history books that show their nation’s face in anything other than a thoroughly apologetic mien.
Self-flagellation is terrific fun, the Germans have known this for a few decades at least.
We must all be terribly, terribly sorry.
Come on, Russians! Once you start, you’ll soon see that self-abasement isn’t so bad at all. There’s a spiritual throb in feeling bad and dirty.
What’s even better is the power. When we ask for forgiveness we get power back over the very people we injured in the first place.
“You’re sorry? Oh, okay. Good. That’s alright. Okay. That’s enough. Stop apologising, please. Stop saying you’re sorry, please! It’s making me feel bad!”
God preserve us from having to forgive people.
And if you do not want to be sorry – if you do not want to engage in political pseudo-psychotherapy and ‘come to terms’ with the Gulag or the Holocaust – then, well, we are liberal democrats, and we have certain measures to reform your society so that you can be truly sorry, as we are.
Our methods have been at work these past fourteen years in Iraq.
We have expectations that the Iraqis will be able to come to terms with Saddam Hussein, as soon as they can walk the streets without fear that they and their children will be shredded to offal by an Islamic State suicide bomb.
And since we have helped Iraq, we in the West would like to help the Syrian people come to terms with Assad…
There’s a quote out there on the Internet — I’ve seen a video or two where Alan Watts uses it — that runs, “Why do you hate me? I haven’t tried to help you yet.”
Watts claims it’s a Hindu saying, but I’ve also seen it attributed to a Chinese sage — and if I wasn’t so lazy I’d probably read far enough to discover it was written by an alcoholic advertising executive in New Jersey, circa 1952.
Provenance aside, the quote captures a certain truth.
We resent those who try to help us because they have power over us.
And we also resent those who ask our forgiveness because they have a power over us. We do not enjoy seeing another human abase themselves before us.
We would prefer a strong, arrogant, and unrepentant opponent to one who is broken with a desire for our forgiveness.
What Western liberals wish for Russia is the impossible: a casting off of the Soviet experience.
To cut a people from their history in this way is a move towards destroying a people, an inducement to suicide.
At least three generations lived, served, and died under the red banner.
The Soviet regime perfected crime, perversity, and moral stagnation on an industrial scale.
This troika existed most acutely during the Stalin period.
But no nation can commit a psychic surgery so great that what their parents, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers struggled for can be easily damned.
The challenge for the Russians is how to digest the Soviet experience, and to digest an experience is not to vomit it up in the hope that a purge means purity — a moral error that was, of course, best exemplified by Stalin’s regime.
Digestion is not the same as sending out an urgent correction to the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia to paste over the entry on an Old Bolshevik who was once a dashing, heroic cavalry captain but is now — we knew it all along — a counter-revolutionary traitor.
When the Russian and Soviet peoples set out to build factories, canals, and cities from nothing they did so for many reasons.
There was coercion for sure, but there was also genuine pride, idealism and hope.
And though many of these projects crumbled to nothing, one cannot deny the sacrifice and pride that went into the attempt. It is not sufficient for Russians to turn to their parents and grandparents and say, “All you did was for nothing. It was a waste, and a morally corrupted waste as well.”
This is what Western liberals who want Russians to be sorry would wish for Russia, and in this sense they are closer to the Bolsheviks than Putin for it is they who want a radical break with the past and human nature.
This is because the liberal position — in so far as it has a morality — sees shame and sorrow as virtue. Shame and sorrow may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for virtue.
We look at the foolish mountain climber. Why does he do this to his family? Does he not know how dangerous his enterprise? He risks his climbing partner in this audacious route, the scoundrel?
And yet, we recognise that the expedition is admirable. The balls it took to attempt a summit, even if it ends in dashed bones under a mountain’s shadow, represents flawed human nobility.
It is in this sense that Russians can look back on their history, as all humans can look back on their history. The nature of a particular regime cannot detract from the brave efforts that went into the Soviet space program, Magnitogorsk, or checking the German army’s advance at Stalingrad.
Mundane achievements, too. The schooling, the families raised, and the Soviet institutions that made these possible — that made contemporary Russian life possible — were also worthwhile enterprises, although the system itself was blighted from root to flower.
Stalin’s position will always be ambiguous because he was a wicked leader during a war that was existential.
The expectation was that the Slav people would be divided into two categories should the Germans prevail: the dead and the slaves.
This does not exculpate Stalin from flirtation and collaboration with the Nazis — particularly over Poland. History will parse his abilities and flaws in this regard, but it cannot change Stalin’s leadership position during the war itself: a war to save the nation.
His intellectual, military, and diplomatic abilities may prove to be as wanting as his moral qualities, but this cannot change his leadership position during the war itself.
He must take a measure of credit for leading the nation, even if all else is ugliness.
He may at last come to be regarded by Russians as a bastard, but he is our bastard — if Georgians count in this regard, only a Russian can say.
We must let the Russians make their accommodations with history, as we must make ours. If only everything was pure, but it is not. We make do with flies in our honey.
