“I do not reproach the Russians for being what they are,” wrote the Marquis Astolphe de Custine in one of his “Letters from Russia” in 1839. “What I blame in them is the temptation to appear as we are.”
Between the autocracy of the tsarist era, the dictatorship of the proletariat under Soviet communism, and the “vertical of power” advocated by Vladimir Putin, have things truly changed since the stay of the French aristocrat? Indeed, the Kremlin is organizing, on Sunday, December 2, according to seemingly Western criteria, general legislative elections intended to form a parliamentary assembly with the power to make laws, even to oppose the “Ukases” of the President of the Russian Federation. The comparison stops there. Unfortunately, nothing in Russian political life recalls the spirit and functioning of modern democracies. But was Russia ever one, or did it even wish to be one? It’s hard to be dissuaded when 60% of the 109 million Russian voters announce their intention to support a former KGB agent as the unrivaled leader of the Kremlin. In 1839, the Tsar already justified to Custine the necessary authoritarian and personalized structure of power: “Fortunately, the administrative machine is very simple because with distances that make everything difficult, if the form of government were complicated, one man’s head would not suffice.”
Reading—or re-reading, as they like to say at the Sorbonne—the “Letters” of Custine, one can only be struck by their astonishing modernity. With a few nuances, they describe, with pitiless accuracy, the dangerous tendencies we observe today in Russia. Here is a brief selection for the reader’s distraction.
“This empire, immense as it is, is nothing but a prison whose emperor holds the key.” No clearer observation could be made: the good old authoritarian, not to say dictatorial tradition, founded on the notion, always endorsed by successive regimes, of “zderzhava” (great power), has completely monopolized the political field in Moscow, to the point of becoming an authentic security obsession for Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Custine reminds us, in Russia “secrecy presides over everything.” How else to understand the Kremlin’s violent repression of parties and their representatives, barely ensured to surpass the mandatory 7% threshold to enter the Duma?
“I am struck,” continues the French aristocrat, “by the excessive concern of Russians about the judgment that a foreigner might pass on them… the impression their country must create on the mind of a traveler constantly preoccupies them.” The persecution complex often accompanies paranoid drifts. The Kremlin’s harsh remarks about foreign interference—specifically questioning the work of humanitarian associations or those dedicated to human rights established on Russian territory and funded, according to Moscow, “by foreign embassies”—are reminiscent of the Soviet rhetorical years about the “internal enemy.” Recently reinstated in full by the supporters of “United Russia,” the pro-Putin party. Fascination intermingled, taking it as a reference model, and hatred when failing to match it, the comparison with this “foreigner” dominates, according to Custine, the thought of these hosts: “the more I see Russia, the more I approve of the Emperor when he forbids Russians to travel and makes access to his country difficult for foreigners. The political regime of Russia would not withstand twenty years of free communication with Western Europe.” The degree of Russia’s openness can indeed be measured by the control measures and various censorships exercised by the power over the media. The Marquis simply saw correctly some one hundred and eight years before a certain G.F. Kennan, drafter and signer of a famous telegram—not only for its unusual length—sent from the American embassy in Moscow. If failing to invite European leaders to delve into the “Letters from Russia,” perhaps it would be appropriate to usefully suggest they “re-read” the reflections of one of the fathers of the American doctrine of “containment”.
