Empires
Apart: America and Russia from the Viking to
Iraq
by Brian Landers
ENDORSEMENTS FOR EMPIRES APART
LOBSTER 57
Moscow on the Hudson?
John McFall
Is America an empire? Tsarist Russia and its
Soviet successor were certainly seen as such
through western eyes. That America is not shows
the heavily ideologised world through which
we frame history. In a bold sweep of historical
comparison of the two world titans, Mr Landers
attempts, in his first major work, to correct
such ideological distortions in an agnostic,
sardonic and wonderfully written treatment of
his subject. Juxtaposing Russia’s avowedly
imperialist history with anti-imperialist America
he demonstrates the ‘continuity of empire’
in each nation’s seemingly incongruous
histories in a convincing, skilful presentation
of their similarities yet fundamental differences.
This is a great book. Topical, thoroughly enjoyable,
and packed with information and interpretative
controversy. Like most historical studies it
combines description, analysis, and narrative.
In this case the analysis is largely sewn into
and revealed through the narrative. The two
nations are deemed by many as not comparable,
even ‘poles apart’. This book challenges
such conventional historical wisdom by taking
the existing historical record and rewriting
it. No new bombshell discoveries are presented.
Instead, the book aims at freeing history from
the ‘distorting prism that refracts the
present’. The real strength of this book
lies in its quality as an extremely subtle,
critical and bold interpretative thesis, not
as a conventional textbook that covers dates
and events. Full of startling historical content
as it is, it’s the ideology critique that
appeals most.
Much of the older literature on empire is favourable,
eulogistic. Great empires have brought with
them grand accomplishments: culture, civilisation,
peace to previously squabbling tribes and so
on. This book effectively and comprehensively
rubbishes any such notions. Witty and provocative
throughout, connections and parallels between
‘democratic’ America and ‘autocratic’
Russia are made by continually shuttling back
and forth through their forgotten and remembered
histories and their consequent ideological self-understandings.
It strips each nation’s ideological pretensions
bare.
Beginning with a controversial common point
of European origin in the Vikings’ freebooting
journeys west to the New World and east to Europe
and the near Asia, we trace the genesis of each
empire’s respective path. Like the first
Americans, the Viking Rus of Kiev had to fight
their way towards the Pacific in pursuit of
territorial gain and security. Americans distortedly
see their origins in the pious ‘Pilgrim
Fathers’ fleeing from religious persecution
on The Mayflower in the 1620s. The earlier European
colonists and the 375 plus languages that the
native Americans spoke for centuries before
are airbrushed out of the story. Honest toil
and God’s providence for his ‘chosen
people’ gave the early fundamentalist
colonists the sense of ‘manifest destiny’
that led eventually to the conquering and subjugation
of the whole continent. A destiny built on the
horrors of ethnic massacres, exploitation and
the ‘sweet sacrifice’ of ‘frying
natives’ is not the preferred foundation
myth of today’s America.
So, too, the Russians. Although their ultimate
origin is unknown, the eastern Slavic strand
of their roots is the privileged source in official
Russian history. Defying the Mongol hordes of
the east and the barbarians from the west, it’s
an affront to the Slavophile soul that the glories
of Russia could also stem from a rapine western
non-Slavophile source and an autocratic Mongol
legacy. Their sense of having a unique non-western
European and non-Asian identity forecloses this.
Confronting these foundation myths, the national
imperial ideologies that derive from them, and
the rewriting of popular history necessary to
confront them, is the historian’s task.
The author’s narrative relentlessly unfolds
to this end throughout.
Parallels and contrasts
Despite huge differences in geography, history,
ideology, culture, politics, religion, law and
attitude, the striking contrast between the
two are the attitudes and policies of each towards
their own societies: one democratic, the other
autocratic. ‘American history is Russian
history writ small’ it is contended (except
in the preponderance of overall US military
interventions overseas, and in particular post-WWII
as the US model came to triumph). The following
are used to develop this theme. The American
west was Siberia on a smaller scale; the treatment
of American native tribes was dwarfed by Stalin’s
deportation and massacres; the scale of wholesale
ethnic cleansing; the scale of the respective
Afghanistan invasions and number of deaths;
the lynchings of blacks compared to the pogroms
of Jews. (Is there really, however, a comparison
with the sheer horrors and scale of the industrial
gulag state of Stalin, the full disclosure of
which is yet to emerge?)
Among the interesting parallels and contrasts
of note are Tsar and President; serfs and slaves;
national heroes; the civil wars; the ‘spoils
system’ of American politics versus the
‘kormenlie’ equivalent of Tsarist
bureaucracy; oligarchs versus plutocrats; Romanovs’
trying to turn the clock back and America speeding
it forward (or, feudalism versus capitalism);
corporations having rights as individuals, an
individual having absolute right; the KGB, the
CIA; rule by elites, one by decree, the other
in a popular vote; ever expanding territorial
land grab towards their Pacific and Arctic meeting
points; destinies pursued With God On Our Side
and many more.
Briefly, some things which the book does not
contain. Although covert operations and democracy
(in America) are acknowledged as uneasy bedfellows
there is no ‘deep politics’ in the
analysis in regard to the many political assassinations,
engineered wars, foreign coups and the wider
Machiavellian activities of the rogue and secret
state. The official 9-11 narrative also goes
unchallenged and the link between corporate
interests and CIA activity, for example, is
not explored in substantial depth.
Academics will find lacunae in the lack of conventional
social science explanatory concepts, particularly
those familiar with ideology critique. The ever
present theme of rapine imperialism, its ideology
and the manipulated mass who are subject to
it, is recognised but not developed in any psycho-social
depth. (As an exercise in human self-understanding
the book compels us to consider the deeper aspects
of human nature). Professional historians may
take exception to the challenge to their role
and field of expertise. Critics of neo-liberal
capitalism and the Corporatocracy in general
may find the skeleton model of American corporatism
described unsatisfactory and underdeveloped.
Marxists may protest the lack of demonstrated
understanding of authentic Marxist ideas in
the treatment of soviet Russia and the lack
of distancing thereof from the world historical
fraud of Socialism In One Country. The early
philosophical works of Marx, for example, stem
from the radical Enlightenment and remained
unpublished ‘til the 1930s. The categories
of marxian political economy can be used to
much greater explanatory effect than the ideologised
concepts of lost orthodox economists prevalent
in the severely demoralised Wall Street Journal.
Much of what people imagine as ‘Marxism’
even today is polluted by the pseudo-scientific
dogma of the Stalinist textbooks, not to mention
today’s refracted political prejudices.
(An idea, after all, is not responsible for
the people who hold it!) But that is not to
criticise the work. I learned much from it.
Mr Landers expressly addresses his concerns
to the political prejudices of historians (I
am not one). He has accomplished a lot.
Readers of Empires Apart might appreciate this
little piece of paradoxical wit. At the height
of the Soviet economic collapse, an MP in the
Russian Supreme Soviet protested famously in
1989 on the new market reforms: ‘We have
ruined socialism, now we are going to ruin capitalism’!
Post the (ongoing) financial crisis, isn’t
the creaking American corporatist finance capital-led
economic model that suited the operations of
the empire now destroying America’s domestic
economy, undermining it’s own ideology
of democracy, and maybe in the longer term ruining
capitalism itself? Meanwhile, the Wall Street
ad hocracy at the heart of the new political
administration presides over the largest nationalisation
programme for private interest in history as
America’s corrupt financial sector morphs
into one giant oligarchical Bankprom. Post-Bush
the fallout from this will continue to raise
(and from both ‘left’ and ‘right’)
some soul-searching questions as to the nature,
character and future direction of American democracy.
As to its imperialism, time will tell.
Finally, Mr Landers refers to the ‘soul’
of both nations and notes their change over
the centuries. The election of Obama and the
ideological trend during the present Russian
interregnum towards a more liberal, post-soviet,
less autocratic and statist Russia (despite
the Putin years) certainly shows this. Yet,
he correctly adduces, ‘even for Obama
overcoming racism may prove to be easier than
abandoning imperialism’. Russia too, as
Georgia demonstrated last summer (despite US
covert provocation). As America ups the ante
in Afghanistan, that graveyard of empires, viewed
from the perspective of empire, despite their
sharply contrasting forms, the two titans’
histories have come to resemble each other far
more than we are given to understand –
that and the reality of the role empire plays
in history is something Empires Apart demonstrates
so well.
|
|
