Burdens of History. Russia, and not getting it.

Russia has been in the news a lot recently.

That's obviously an understatement, and a cynic might state that "when isn't it?", but Russia hasn't always loomed large in our minds here in the US, like it has in the minds of other nations, principally its neighbors.  This is the case for a variety of reasons that have to do with its history, and also with ours.

Russians don't form, by and large, a demographic we think of much in terms of our immigrant past. This is not to say that there have not been Russian immigrants to the US, there have been, but not in the numbers that other European nations have, if we define Europe to be that land East of the Urals.  Yes, Russians have immigrated to the US, but even that immigration tells us something about Russia that we generally fail to grasp.

The Russians are not a European people, and the sooner we figure that out, the better.  Oh, I know that some student of geography will point out that Russia less Siberia is in continental Europe, which is perfectly true, and I know others would be shocked by that statement as the Russians look European, but they aren't.

How is this true.

Well, we have to look at what is Europe, and we can make a pretty good case that if it isn't Roman, it isn't Europe.

Most of what we think of as European today is European because the Romans were there.  The remainder is that area which Rome influenced, or at least the Latin Rite of the Church did in antiquity.  That's not only pretty significant, its enormously determinant of our cultural outlook.

The Roman Empire occupied all of Europe south of the Rhine River.  A pretty big patch of it.  It also came to occupy the Greek world, which at that time included Greece, the Balkans, Turkey and North Africa. Some will point out that not all of these regions were really "Greek", but it can be noted that they were more Greek than perhaps we suppose, as the Greeks had exhibited a strong influence in the regions where they had gone, even if they were a tiny minority there.  True, we wouldn't expect a majority population of Greeks anywhere in Libya  or Palestine, but that doesn't mean that the Greeks weren't part of that world. They were. And the Romans certainly came to be, although that's outside of our story.

South of the Rhine and south of Hadrian's Wall in Britain the world was Roman.  North of it, it wasn't Roman dominated, but the Romans exhibited influence.  When Rome fell in the 5th Century, it left much of its culture and it certainly left, by that time, the Church.

When Rome fell, and the Germans flooded south, and the Scots landed in Britain, a pagan non Romanized people were introduced to new lands. But that introduction flowed both ways.  It wasn't really long before these new people adopted some things that the Romans had left and they very quickly became members of the Latin Rite of the Church. The spreading of the Church took some time, to be sure.  Scandinavia, for example, was brought into the Christian fold late, and even Poland was pagan for much longer than we would generally suppose, but it did occur.

That's hugely significant in terms of culture. Rome had the view that nationality mattered less than central achievement.  The Roman Empire was founded on crime and was always corrupt, but amazingly it developed high concepts of human unity and it tended to disregard a person's ethnicity in favor of their abilities.  The concept that Celts, Arabs, Greeks, Italians and others could all belong to the same political entity was an amazingly broad one in that or any other era.  The Greeks had regarded non Greeks as barbarians.  The Romans regarded barbarians as being those who did not have the benefit of Roman rule, a distinctively different concept.  When Rome fell, and the Church remained, it left a situation in which the foundation of learning and knowledge was not tribal or national at all, but universal, vested in the institutions of the Universal Church.

So what does that have to do with Russia? Well, Everything.

Russia was a Slavic land on the crossroads of invasion from the East and West. From the East came Asian peoples who had a clear path of invasion, uninhibited by geography. From the west this was also true.  Russia's people fell to these invaders time and time again.  Even the name "Russia" comes from one, the Rus, a Scandinavian people who left their legacy in the form of a name, some cities, and in the strong strain of blue eyes and blond hair that Russians exhibit, unusual for Slavic peoples.

Russia was Christianized from Constantinople.  It wasn't the only country which received its Christianizing missionaries from the seat at Constantinople by any means, and the Church in East was part of the Universal Church at the time. But that still would have a different influence in some ways than being part of the Latin Church tended to be.  Vast expanses of territory proved so difficult in the end that, prior to the Great Schism, Constantinople granted Moscow its own seat, making the Eastern Church in Russia self governing.  When the Great Schism came, Russia went with Constantinople, although not to the degree now commonly imagined.  A major part of the Russian Church made an effort to recognize the Bishop of Rome as the head of the Church, but ultimately that effort mostly failed in Russia proper.

All of this means that Russia is a nation that is simply not European the way that other nations West of the Urals on the European Continent are.  It's been subject to repeated invasion to the extent that it is xenophobic.  It's culture owes little to the same influences that other European nations do.  In terms of its primary historic institutions, its leadership, its army, its Church, it does not look towards the same greater influences that other nations do. Even the introduction of European influences, sometimes occasionally wildly in vogue in Russia, have come as quasi-exotic, or have been forced upon the Russians by leaders who saw their advantages.

Okay, so if that's true, so what?

Well, we're having to live with, or put up with, a pretty active Russia right now. And we just don't get it.  It's clear that our last two presidents really don't get it, with this one not getting it to such an extent he probably ought to go sit in the corner and read up on Russia.

Russia is historically an imperial nation in which the Great Russians conceive of themselves as the protectors of the Slavic, and more particularly Orthodox, world in a way that we can't imagine as we haven't seen a power like this since for a very long time, outside of Russia itself.  They feel this way about things in the same way that the Japanese felt about Asia prior to 1945, or perhaps the way that Germans felt that way about all things German up until 1945., although both of these are imperfect analogies.  We would have supposed that the historically brief and failed experiment with Communism from 1917 (or really, for most of Russia, some point in the 1920s) until 1990 would have changed that, but you cannot really change a culture by force in 70 years.  Particularly not a culture that is as strong as the Russian culture is.  Their culture was, to be sure, extremely badly damaged, and the introduction of the virus of Communism lives on as a strain of infection in the culture in a way that we also don't grasp, but Russia re emerged, after the fall of Communism, ultimately as a Russian nation, after a brief experiment at being a European one.

So what does that mean?

Well, it means that the Russian people, outside of two species of dissident, are conservative in a traditional sense, and are not democratic by habit.  They're also Russian Orthodox in outlook, if not all in practice by any means.  They also will unite behind their ethnicity in a way that Europeans cannot even imagine being today.

Even their dissidents are largely Russian in character.   A few are heavily Europeanized, but that has always been the case. We look towards them, justifiably, as the ones who have the most in common with us.  But they're overwhelmingly located in urban centers, and frankly mostly located just in Moscow.  Others are really species of Bolshevik revolutionaries, fire breathers who would tear down everything in society as the extreme leftist of 1917 would have done, but we don't recognize them as such.  When Americans and Europeans cry for members of an all female band as if they're Jeffersonian democrats, we're foolish in the extreme. We're better off looking at them as the latter day kindred spirits of those who went Red deep in 1917 through 1930.

So, in looking toward Russia, we better get over the idea that it's going to become a true liberal democracy any time soon.  It isn't.  And we better get used to the idea that any place it once had imperial rule over, it would like to again.  Ultimately, only the fear that it will go to far in recapturing the Czars lands will keep it from reclaiming what it lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Most problematic over all of that is that anywhere there's a large Russian population, and there is in most of the former Soviet lands, it's going to view itself as having a right to rule, or at least intervene on behalf of Russians.  Simply yapping at the Russians is not going to change that. And the idea that economic sanctions will is stupid.

But that doesn't mean that the  Russians are a new Soviet Empire in the making. They are not.  Looking back to the Czars empire is a better analogy, and Europe was always able to do that.  That will require Europe to resume having a sense of itself, however, which right now it doesn't seem to. And in a way, Russia can do the Europeans a bit of a favor in those regards.