Russian Imperialism: Popular, Emblematic, Ambiguous

Abstract

T hese three richly suggestive essays give strong and hopeful promise that future studies of Russian imperialism will be informed as much by culture as by diplomatic and military history. By their substance and eloquence they challenge the traditional reliance on geopolitics as the dominant explanatory model of Russian foreign policy. At the very least they contribute to the modest body of scholarly literature that proposes geoculture as an alternative way of analyzing the dramatic expansion and the no less dramatic contraction of the Russian state over the past five centuries. In addition, they explore and contrast two dimensions of imperialism, the universalistor European-and the particularist-or Russian. Finally, they remind us of the importance of making analytical distinctions between the self-perception of the imperialists and the critical perception of the scholar. The overall effect, subtle but compelling, is to question once again the hoary dualism of Westernizer and Slavophile as a useful intellectual framework in which to compose cultural history. In every modern state imperialism shares a commonality of motives: the search for markets and raw materials, the assumption of greator world-power status, the consolidation of real or imagined security interests and the fulfillment of a national mission. But in each case the definition of the national mission must differ, reflecting the peculiarities of the dominant culture of the metropolitan center. Manifest destiny, the white man's burden, la mission civilisatrice, the contest between Kultur and Zivilization-yes, and even the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere-were so many forms of shorthand, slogans, to legitimize continental and overseas expansion, simplified like all shorthand, but capturing essentials of the real phenomenon. Russia lacked a popular and catchy phrase to capture the essence of its imperialism. Pushkin's narodnost' might have worked if the term had not been expropriated and vulgarized by Uvarov and Nicholas I. But this absence of a defining term should not blind us, as these essays demonstrate, to the complex cultural traits that informed Russian expansion. Modern Russian imperialism was no more or less particularist than that of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany or Japan. It was cast in a different cultural mold; the problem is to explain the difference.