Churchill famously portrayed Russia as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” and Michael Khodarkovsky of Loyola University, Chicago – not the well-known anti-Kremlin billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky – sets out to show the situation is not quite as baffling as that.
It is a brave venture because even the Russians themselves have tried, unsuccessfully, to define their own status. Peter the Great set Russia firmly on a European path and Catherine the Great was adamant that Russia was a European country but she was German, born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst.
Then in the 19th century,” Westernisers” favoured enlightened European values, while “Slavophiles” opted for the Orthodox religion and Great Russian nationalism. In the 1990s, immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, reformers opted for the “Westerniser” role while Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as a committed “Slavophile”, was an early influence on the Putin presidency.
Shortly after the Russian Revolution, a small group of anti-Communist emigrés came up with the concept that Russia was influenced equally by Europe and Asia. This “Eurasianism” has now re-emerged as the basis for Vladimir Putin’s policies.
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Khodarkovsky also sees Russia as Eurasian, but from a different angle. Putin, he posits, has adopted the Eurasian line to lay down claims in both continents and “conceal Moscow’s imperial expansionism”.
The Steppe and its Empires supports the Eurasian view in a scholarly exercise that compares Russia with the other empires that have emerged from the steppe: the vast grassland plain that runs from China to Hungary.
By its very geography, the steppe favoured countless nomadic invasions and counterinvasions and led to a martially focused amalgam of culture and politics, and Khodarkovsky places Russia in the context of the other empires that have emerged from the steppe.
The Qing empire begat contemporary China, the Ottoman Empire’s descendants exist mainly in modern Turkey, central Asia and even in parts of Europe. The Qajar and Sarafid Empires gave us today’s Iran and the Mughal Empire’s influence remains on the Indian subcontinent. There are also places where these empires and their mindsets overlap with Turkic territories in Russia and Azerbaijanis who speak a Turkic language but practise the Shia Islam of Iran.
They have many unshared aspects and not everyone will agree with Khodarkovsky’s conclusions, but an undoubted common denominator is the absence of European-style democratic principles.
- Seamus Martin is a former Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times
