Harvard's Richard Pipes speaks about Russia's past and future (05/26/96)

Harvard's Richard Pipes speaks about Russia's past and future

by Taras Myhal and Andrij Wynnyckyj

TORONTO - Richard Pipes, the Baird Professor of Russian History at Harvard University and the former director for East European and Soviet affairs of the National Security Council under U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1981-1982, delivered the second annual Barbara Frum Lecture at the University of Toronto Medical Sciences Auditorium on April 24-25.

The two-part lecture and seminar is sponsored by the Frum family, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (where Ms. Frum established herself as an icon of broadcast journalism while with the "As It Happens" program on CBC radio and "The Journal" on CBC-TV), Random House, Saturday Night magazine and the host university's department of history.

"Russia's Past and Russia's Future: The Burden of History" was an hourlong excursion down the bumpy road of Russian history, in which the Polish-born Dr. Pipes touched on a variety of elements that shaped it. He maintained that, to really understand this history, a strong appreciation of the eccentricities of Russian politics is necessary, rather than a familiarity with the mysteries of "Russian-ness" or a grasp of deterministic sociological imperatives.

Dr. Pipes, after all, should know. He was one of the few Western historians who forecast the USSR's demise because of its repressive policies towards the nationalities it controlled, while many of his colleagues were left stunned, surprised and bewildered when it happened.

Beginning his survey in the Medieval period, Dr. Pipes posited that the ascendancy of a brutish and backward Moscow over the politically more progressive and sophisticated Novgorod as the chief-city state colored much of Russia's subsequent development, and left it with a doleful, regressive polity.

With its persistent autocracy that stunted legal/political institutions and dwarfed civic culture, Muscovy, then the Russian empire, lagged behind the West even as it grew to control prodigious amounts of territory, Dr. Pipes said. He said that an absence of a concept of private property and of law "superior to both sovereign and subjects" has kept and still keeps Russia behind.

The half-hearted emancipation of serfs did not come until 1861, and whatever democratic institutions existed, such as the Duma formed after the revolution of 1905, were artificial and largely ineffective constructs, copied from the West.

Prof. Pipes commented on the polarizing tug of war between Europe and Asia for Russia's soul, saying that Russians have an unresolved concept of self and identity.

He outlined the tensions in Russian thinking, between Peter I's drive to catch up to the West (replicated in the early days following the 1917 revolution by the Bolsheviks), and the conviction held by the Orthodox clergy that Russia was unique and superior (reasserted by Stalin and his successors).

Prof. Pipes claimed that Russia's autocracy established an intimate link between Russia's status as a great power and its internal stability. "Nothing troubles present-day Russians so much, not even declining living standards or the prevalence of crime, as the recent precipitous loss of status... In Russia, the sense of ethnic identity was always indissolubly linked with that of empire; its loss has produced bewilderment and anguish," he said.

Prof. Pipes added "there is a universal pining for great-power status, be it among nationalists or democrats, Westernizers or Slavophiles," and the present appeal of the "red-brown" (Communist-neo-fascist) coalition is based on its promises to restore the glories of Soviet might.

Despite the dangers posed by Russia's chronic identity crisis, Dr. Pipes expressed doubts that calls to reconstitute the empire would amount to anything more than rhetoric. He said the "post-colonial elites" of the newly independent states would make it impossible without all-out war ("Too many clerks have become ministers, and too many sergeants have become generals for the clock to be turned back," quipped the historian), adding that the present conflict in Chechnya proves Russia is incapable of managing one successfully.

Speaking on the day that Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudaev was killed by the Russian military, Dr. Pipes did not give ground to his largely academic audience on his skepticism about the prospects of Russia's evolvution into a stable, market-oriented democracy.

He referred to a poll showing that 60 percent of Russia's citizenry believe Western aid is meant to destabilize rather than to assist their country's economy.

While dubious about Russia's progress towards a genuinely open society, Dr. Pipes was certain it would not revert to the extremes of Stalinist totalitarianism. The reasons he gave for his relative aplomb: on the economic front, privatization had advanced too far; while on the political front, nobody has the stomach for a terror campaign of the scale necessary.

Many of the formal lecture's themes were revisited in a seminar and question-and-answer session held at the U of T's Governing Council Chambers on the following afternoon.

Dr. Pipes was mischievous in forecasting the political weather in Russia. He opined that a Mussolini-type fascism could well be established, adding wryly to the audience's dismay: "Italian fascism wasn't all that bad," he said. "I lived there - there was lots of operetta and bad architecture, but it wasn't much worse than the Poland I'd left in 1940." He pointed out the howling irony that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (once reviled by the Soviet regime) is currently a popular figure in Russia.

Prof. Pipes admitted reverting to a more pessimistic view of Russia's possibilities in recent months. "My initial optimism rested on parallels I saw with Japan and Israel - two nations that underwent such a trauma that change was made possible."

Dr. Pipes explained that Japan, a formerly highly militaristic, conservative nation, moved toward a totally pacifistic, democratic culture that, while corrupt, was still a far cry from its antecedent. Israel, whose people had eschewed armed conflict for 2,000 years was galvanized by the Holocaust into forming one of the most effective armed forces of the century and its society was almost totally militarized.

Dr. Pipes said the events of late 1991 and early 1992 suggested to him that Russia was the brink of a dramatic transformation, but the democratic reform movement had failed abjectly in selling the Russian people on the ideas of representative democracy and the benefits of property and the rule of law.

Asked whether the continuing presence of Lenin's body in the Red Square mausoleum was a symbol of this ambivalence, he replied: "What we have seen is a half-hearted revolution." Compared to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when "virtually all traces of the tsarist regime disappeared in a matter of months," Dr. Pipes said, "hammers and sickles still abound" as do toponyms such as "Leningradskaya Oblast" and "Sverdlovsk."

"There was a chance in 1991 to get rid of these symbols, when the Communist Party was banned, but now it's probably too late," the Harvard historian added, "now that [Russian President Boris] Yeltsin is appealing to the nostalgia of provincial voters."

In response to a question, Prof. Pipes cautioned against complacency about the seeming collapse of Russian military might. "As a result of Germany's physical and psychological trauma following 1945, there was a conscious decision not to rearm," Dr. Pipes said, "but in Russia's case the example is rather more similar to Germany's situation following World War I."

As if to temper the frightening echoes of this scenario, Prof. Pipes added that "you can't rouse Russians like Hitler roused the Germans," and that while Communist Party leader Gennadiy Zyuganov is a canny politician, he is not a galvanizing tyrant like Hitler or Stalin.

Prompted from the audience, the former National Security Council advisor cautioned that an expansion of NATO at this point would be completely counterproductive and only feed Russian paranoia. He said he believes in Western political and economic engagement with Russia, coupled with insistent pressure to reveal and moderate any build-ups in military capability.

Dr. Pipes also said that there now is a chance to settle Russia's identity crisis. "In 1917, the population of what was known as Russia was 40-45 percent non-Russian," he asserted. "Now about 80 to 85 percent of the Russian Federation's population is either Russian or completely Russified," he claimed.

Prompted by a question from McMaster University historian Prof. Petro Potichnyj, Dr. Pipes said recent moves reintegrating Belarus with Russia "can't be duplicated" with Ukraine or any of the other newly independent states.

The lecture and discussions were broadcast in an abridged form on CBC Radio's "Ideas" program on May 7.

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