As a newly minted U.S. diplomat in 1990, I was assigned to do consular work in Istanbul. The USSR had largely opened up by then, Soviet cruise ships were regularly stopping in Istanbul, and Russian was increasingly heard in the Grand Bazaar. The odd Soviet tourist, still acting on anachronistic Cold War reflexes, would show up from time to time at the U.S. Consulate to inquire about political asylum, and as the only Russian-speaker in the Consular Section, I was generally tasked to deal with these cases. This was not the 1950s and the United States was certainly not offering asylum to tourists, so my job was to ask a few general questions and provide contact information for the international resettlement agencies with offices in Istanbul.
On one occasion, my bland, routine question about “Why are you seeking asylum?” elicited a simple yet striking response from one forty-ish Russian man: “I want to live a normal life in a normal country.”
I’ve often reflected on this vignette in the subsequent 25 years. My interlocutor’s yearning for normalcy, alas, was expressed on the advent of exceptional upheaval for Russians. Indeed, it is only with the ascent of Vladimir Putin to power that Russians have begun to experience a sense of stability, and even of the country resuming its customary role of great power. As Russians savor the sensation that their country has finally risen from its knees, it is worth pausing to consider the various aspects of Russian greatness—and perhaps paradoxically, its connection to a hunger for normalcy.
The glory of Russia lies first and foremost in the country’s enormous human capital, the most striking manifestation of which is the extraordinary talent to be found in the arts. Russia did not originate iambic pentameter or the novel, ballet or the symphony, the cinema or oil painting, yet Russians have taken all these foreign art forms to the highest level. The Islamic world delights the Western aesthete by the sheer exoticism of its unfamiliar music, poetry and decorative arts. Russians, on the other hand, astonish Westerners not so much by contriving esoteric arts understood only by themselves, but precisely by their ability to excel at every facet of art, music, or literature developed by the West itself.
What is most conspicuous in the arts is true in almost every other field of human endeavor. Russia has made an outsized contribution in mathematics and virtually every scientific discipline, and the country consistently produces a disproportionate number of Olympic champions. Freed from the strictures of Marxism, Russia has even managed belatedly to produce world-class economists and entrepreneurs—even if the latter still manifest their excellence chiefly as expatriates.
The country’s seemingly boundless talent is all the more astonishing in light of the demographic catastrophes of the past century. Tens of millions of Russians perished from war, revolution, and famine; millions more emigrated, including a lopsided proportion of the educated and professional classes. Yet even after all these horrific losses, the gene pool of exceptional talent betrays no sign of running dry.
On the long list of fields in which Russians have traditionally excelled, conspicuous by its absence is the area of good governance. The country has raised a number of mighty conquerors—Ivan IV (whose Russian epithet, грозный, translates more accurately as “the Fearsome” rather than “the Terrible”), Peter I, Catherine II, and Stalin. However, since the rise of Muscovy, the country has yet to produce any ruler revered, either by historians or in popular memory, as governing for the good of the people. Russia has been ruled by several leaders who earned the sobriquet “the Great,” but not by a single one who has ever merited the title “the Just.” From the perspective of their subjects, Russian rulers have been characterized by magnificence rather than munificence. Ironically, the one Russian ruler celebrated for a great act of compassion toward the people—Alexander II, the Czar-Liberator who freed the serfs—stands unique in history as the only Russian ruler assassinated by a popular conspiracy.
The problem of poor governance hardly ended with the autocrat. The bureaucracies of both Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union were proverbial for being bloated, corrupt, incompetent, and largely indifferent to the needs or aspirations of ordinary citizens. Moreover, nearly constant territorial expansion has required resources, both human and financial, for the pacification of often obstreperous borderlands, comprising an additional load for the Russian population to carry. Thus, in the oft-quoted assessment of Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, “the state grew fat while the people grew thin.”
That such an amazingly gifted and capable people should be cursed with such atrocious governance has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Historians can no doubt trace the influence of the Mongol Yoke down to the present day, while environmental determinists point to the influence of a cold climate and endless expanses, and the behaviorists analyze the long-term effects of swaddling infants. We might look to geneticists of the Trofim Lysenko school for an explanation, and the phrenologists could no doubt advance theories of their own. Is it impossible to rule the vast territory of Russia with a light touch, in a decentralized fashion, without a stifling bureaucracy and with the basic welfare of the country’s population as the foremost consideration? I do not pretend to know why the tandem of autocracy and bureaucracy has reigned supreme in Russia, or to venture an opinion whether it had to be this way; I only know that it has been so. Perhaps a country as large and diverse as Russia could not be governed any other way. I know only that no other way has ever seriously been tried, at least not for very long.
In this regard, the first decade of the 21st century looked to be a bit of a break from Russia’s historical norm. High energy prices and competent macroeconomic management produced a boom that generated unprecedented prosperity and created a sizeable middle class. The state grew fat, to be sure, but the people also managed to put on a kilo or two.
However, even in the years when there was plenty to go around, the curse of poor governance was already making itself felt. Others have analyzed “Putinism” more thoroughly and eloquently than I could in this brief essay. Suffice it to say that the Putin model, as it has taken shape, entails “managed democracy,” a kleptocratic blurring of government and business, systemic corruption, weak institutions, and little by way of separation of powers or rule of law. None of these characteristics represents an innovation on Putin’s part. Rather, his role as a restorer, alas, has encompassed not just national pride, but more baleful elements as well from the darker recesses of Russia’s past. These elements include oligarchic practices spawned during the universally maligned 1990s—a period of anarchic, freewheeling corruption that Putin, rather unjustly, typically receives credit for reversing.
Another blast from the Russian past has been the whetting of an expansionist appetite, with concepts like Eurasianism and the Russian World providing new ideological underpinnings for the regime’s crypto-imperialism. The Eurasianists—Putin’s ardent supporters, if not exactly his inner circle—have gone so far as to proclaim that Russia is simply destined to be an empire, and that any attempt to turn the country into an ordinary European nation-state would end in Russia’s destruction.
Of course, the policy of cobbling together a Russo-centric Eurasia doesn’t come cheap. The $4-6 billion per year required to subsidize Belarus, together with a few billion more per annum to prop up dependent separatist regimes and client states such as Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, constituted chump change in the days of $100/barrel oil. However, the burden of empire has now become exponentially heavier with the long-term need to maintain an isolated Crimea and a devastated Donbas, especially at a time of diminished Russian financial resources. The cost will multiply again if Moscow succumbs to the temptation to push even deeper into Ukraine, or to turn northern Kazakhstan into a latter-day Sudetenland.
Occasionally I wonder what has become of the Russian gentleman I met so fleetingly so many years ago in Istanbul. Did he rejoice in the fall of Communism, only to be crushingly disillusioned by the excesses of the Wild Nineties? Did he find the breakup of his country and the loss of empire even more intolerable than the travails and indignities of Soviet life? Has he joined the jubilant throngs exclaiming “Crimea is ours!” and cursing the deceitful, decadent West? Perhaps he is living as a minority in one of the other post-Soviet states, either adapting to the new realities or quietly longing for the extension of the Russian World to his new, involuntary homeland. Or maybe he has taken his chances with emigration. Did he ever attain any reasonable facsimile of “a normal life in a normal country?” If he has remained in Russia or most any other part of the former Soviet Union, unfortunately, the answer is probably “no.”
The Russians have never ceased being a great people, and their accomplishments will still be cherished and celebrated around the world millennia from now. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not diminish Russia’s true greatness by one iota, nor has the rule of Vladimir Putin, whatever its merits, been required to restore it. Indeed, with its exceptionally talented population, Russia should be well placed to thrive in the post-modern economy, where human capital counts for increasingly more than natural resources or industrial capacity. Yet stagnation was already evident even before Russia was rocked by the Ukraine War, sanctions, and collapsing energy prices. The reflexive inclination to double down and tighten the screws is arguably less likely to lead the country triumphantly through the crisis than to turn stagnation into sclerosis.
One must wonder whether Russia’s great-power chauvinists are correct to insist (and based on what evidence?) that Russia must either be an empire or disappear altogether. Does Russian greatness really demand the gathering of non-Russians, by whatever combination of attraction and compulsion it takes, into some imperial amalgamation, with the consequent autocracy and bureaucracy required to hold such a state together? Must Russian exceptionalism play out through the subjugation of uncooperative neighbors, with a permanent, crushing burden of empire laid on the shoulders of the long-suffering Russian people? Need the pursuit of Russian national greatness entail the squandering of $2 trillion in hydrocarbon revenues, and the gradual—or not-so-gradual—re-pauperization of the population? Is the desire to live “a normal life in a normal country” an aspiration unworthy of a great nation? Or is it just possible that Russia might one day achieve true greatness in the realm of governance—not by being exceptional, but precisely by being profoundly ordinary?