Self-Theft Of Europe. Part 2: The Stolen Flower

In 1858, the Russian writer Sergei Aksakov published the second part of his memoirs, The Childhood Years of Bagrov the Grandson. He dedicated his memoirs to his granddaughter Olga, and they included the fairy tale ‘The Scarlet Flower’ (initially, the writer even wanted to call it ‘Olcha's Flower’ - in Russian, these words are consonant and differ by only two letters). Its plot reproduced to the smallest detail the French fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast’, known since the eighteenth century and translated into Russian several times by that time. However, Aksakov claimed that he had never heard of the original, and that he had allegedly learned about the adventures of the nameless merchant's daughter as a child, from the ‘keymaid Pelageya’.

This was not the first - and not the last - borrowing in the history of Russian literature. And it was not the only case in which a ‘hacker’ tried to shift the responsibility for the theft onto a defenceless maid. But Aksakov seems to have seen nothing wrong with appropriating someone else's property, if the plot is really exciting. And archetypal for Russia, I might add. After all, the belief that ‘not everything is clear’ and that even a real monster can-and should-fall in love with the belief that the rapist and robber actually has a ‘pure heart’ is still shared by an incredible number of Bagrov's grandson's compatriots.

Photo: Russians in Paris. Early 19th century caricature. Source: Wikipedia.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russia was still considered a monster in Europe - at best, it could be used for its own interests, according to Goethe's formula ‘do evil constantly and constantly do good’. The good for the legitimate monarchies was to suppress revolutions and maintain order on the continent, for which they were willing to put up with even occupation. To justify the tsarist rule over Europe, conservative publicists readily attributed to Russia the virtues and values that they believed were being eroded and lost in their own countries. In short, they were looking for the same ‘pure heart’ in the monster. Until it turned out that their ‘beloved’ had no ‘heart’... and that behind the facade of a supposedly majestic empire, there was only emptiness.

Photo: Astolphe de Custine. Source: Wikipedia.

Astolphe de Custine, who visited the state of Nicholas I in the late 30s of the nineteenth century, was stunned by this discovery. And his book Russia in 1839 became a real sensation. Unpleasant, of course, for St Petersburg. They were frantically looking for a way to respond. To refute, or at least divert the public's attention from the ‘slander’. Among those willing to ‘shut up’ Custine was the retired Russian diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev. ‘The ‘Tyutchev Memorandum’ has not yet been properly assessed. But it was he who actually laid the foundations of Russia's ‘cultural’ policy for the next century (or maybe even centuries in the plural).

Photo: Fyodor Tyutchev. Source: Wikipedia.

Tyutchev proposed not only to attract ‘voluntary helpers’ from European publicists, but also to demonstrate that Russia was not only the bayonets of the tsarist army, but also a culture equal to that of Europe and even the whole of the West. However, this culture still had to be... created. After all, from the time of Peter I and Catherine II, the elites of their empire were quite content with borrowings from the West, except when translated into a language they understood (or not translated at all - the educated public spoke French). Even the ‘patriotic’ legends that were urgently concocted on the occasion of the war with Napoleon in 1812 were in fact rehashes of ancient stories with the shoehorning of ‘scaevolas’ and ‘cocleses’ into the feet of Russian peasants - they had no more to do with reality than the performances of serf theatres.

Photo: ‘Russian Scevola’. A drawing from the time of the war with Napoleon. Source: Wikipedia.

The irony was that the very idea of ‘own culture’ was borrowed from the West, where a wave of nationalism (or nationalisms) was rising at that time. However, in the imperial version, ‘cultural rooting’ was not so much about finding untainted sources in the purely Russian ‘folklore’ (there were, in fact, problems with this) as it was about appropriating, appropriating what was not ours.

Photo: Russian peasants. A drawing from the early nineteenth century. Source: Wikipedia.

They tried to give the imaginary ‘Russian soul’, for example, by borrowing or even stealing ‘flowers’ from the West, following the familiar Aksakov recipe. Or they passed off as their cultural achievements even artists from the lands conquered by the Romanovs - this is how not only Nikolai Gogol (who consciously ‘chose the empire’), but also Vasyl Kapnist, Dmytro Bortnyansky, Volodymyr Borovykovsky, and hundreds of others ‘became Russians’. And in Europe, through the efforts of undoubtedly talented popularisers like Ivan Turgenev, the imperial construct was promoted as a ‘unique Russian culture’.

Photo: Ivan Turgenev. Source: Wikipedia.

In the end, even the borders of the empire quickly became too tight for the ‘culture traffickers’. Russia began to claim the heritage of all the peoples it could declare related to its own subjects, especially the Slavic ones. Pan-Slavism was not a Russian invention either (the empire was more likely to speak of Slavophilism), but while Slovaks and Czechs hoped for ‘brotherly’ support in defending their own identity, St Petersburg saw only one recipe - ‘the merging of Slavic streams in the Russian sea,’ as Alexander Pushkin, a favourite of Nicholas I, quite frankly put it. In fact, Tyutchev spoke directly about expanding the empire at least to the Elbe.

However, Nicholas I was wary of nationalism, as he was mainly confronted with revolutionary nationalism (in fact, even in the infamous ideological ‘triad’, autocracy and Orthodoxy were complemented not by a nation, as was the case with Joseph de Mestre, from whom this formula was actually borrowed, but by a safer ‘peoplehood’). The ‘turn’ of Alexander II was all the more pronounced as he began to present his own empire as a nation-state (which clearly hinted at the assimilation of ‘non-Russian’ peoples) and openly supported the national aspirations of the Slavic subjects of the Austrian emperor and sultan outside the empire. For St. Petersburg, this was, of course, a political weapon, but among the representatives of the ‘ward’ peoples, the myth of ‘Russia the Protector’ was carefully nurtured, and it is still alive today, especially in those countries that have avoided the experience of Russian troops on their land.

Photo: Monument to the ‘Liberator Tsar’ in the capital of Bulgaria. Source: Wikipedia.

Pan-Slavism sometimes acquired openly racist features - the same Nikolai Danilevsky opposed Russia to Europe (by ‘advance’ counting all Slavs and even non-Slavs who were Orthodox as ‘his’) as incompatible races. Interestingly, however, this opposition found a response... among German intellectuals. At least among those who shared the ideas of Sonderweg, the ‘special path’ of their homeland, as opposed to the ‘soulless West’, by which they meant Britain and France.

Photo: Mykola Danylevskyi. Source: Wikipedia.

Berlin was an ally of St Petersburg for almost the entire nineteenth century. Alexander II was even convinced that he had recruited Otto Bismarck when he was Prussian ambassador to Russia. And the tsar's friendly attitude actually allowed the ‘Iron Chancellor’ to unite Germany according to his own scenario. So it is not surprising that in the 80s and 90s, at a time of spiritual turmoil, the fascination with Russian culture and literature in particular became fashionable among Bismarck's compatriots. Like the conservative publicists of the early part of the century, they persistently searched for the virtues in Russia that they lacked in their homeland, and of course they ‘found’ them.

Photo: Wilhelm Henkel. Source: Wikipedia.

However, it cannot be ruled out that this fashion was also inspired to a certain extent - suffice it to recall that the success of Fyodor Dostoevsky's translations was due to Wilhelm Henkel, an immigrant from Russia who had complicated relations with the government there. Before him, the author's novels were simply not bought. The political background of the then-current fascination with Russian culture in France was even more obvious. After the crushing defeat in the war with Germany, Paris was not without reason afraid that Berlin might attack again. And so they were interested in an alliance with St Petersburg, which could deter their neighbours from attacking. But France was a republic and politicians needed to somehow explain an agreement with a czar whom voters still considered a despotic monster.

Photo: Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu. Source: Wikipedia.

French intellectuals found a way out quickly enough. They ‘separated’ - in words - the Russian autocracy from its subjects, Russian culture and the country as a whole. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu did this most systematically in his book with the characteristic title The Empire of the Czars and the Russians. But others have also joined in - in Jules Verne's novels, for example, Russians are only positive characters. And how could it be otherwise, if the publisher coordinated his manuscripts with Ivan Turgenev, the very propagandist of the empire's culture.

Photo: Cover of Jules Verne's novel Mikhail Strohov. Source: Wikipedia.

At that time, however, it was not yet called great, just Russian (despite the fact that a significant part of it was simply appropriated). But we were moving towards glorification by leaps and bounds. Thanks to such authors as, for example, Eugène-Melchior de Voguet. The member of parliament and former secretary of the embassy in St. Petersburg introduced his compatriots to Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky... And not just introduced them. He consciously tried to move the public, and there are probably more reflections on the ‘special soul’ of Russians in Voguet's book than in the novels he wrote about.

Photo: Eugène-Melior de Voguet. Source: Wikipedia.

In fact, it was about creating another mirage that made even principled opponents of the tsarist regime fall in love with Russia. Brought up on European examples, they also searched for glimpses of the ‘spirit of the people’ in Russian literature and art, which was oppressed by despotism. And they certainly found them. The holier the cause of those who fought against tsarist rule within the empire, from the Narodovoltsy to the Bolsheviks, seemed. The more actively the Western ‘friends of Russian freedom’ supported these fighters - organisationally, informationally, and financially.

Photo: Maxim Gorky and Mark Twain at the American Writers' Club. Source: Wikipedia.

However, history played a cruel joke on the sympathisers of the ‘other Russia’. The Bolsheviks, having gained power in 1917, made themselves quite comfortable in the former tsarist residence in the Kremlin. And they quickly returned to many of the practices of their predecessors, sometimes surpassing them in cruelty and relentlessness. But at the same time, they continued to play the ‘hope of progressive humanity’, and Soviet Russia was proclaimed the ‘homeland of the world proletariat’, whose support is almost the duty of every socialist on the planet.

Photo: Willi Münzenberg. Source: Wikipedia.

The creator of the ‘red propaganda machine’, Willi Münzenberg, first of all, improved and scaled up the technologies invented before him. After all, Peter the Great and Ivan IV had already been blinding their neighbours, Catherine the Great had already created a network of ‘useful idiots’ in Europe, and Alexander II had proclaimed himself the defender and liberator of the small peoples of Eastern Europe. Only now, even the boundaries of the old empire seemed too small, and everything was done for the sake and ‘on behalf’ of global progress and was being stampeded out on a truly industrial scale.

Photo: George Bernard Shaw. Source: Wikipedia.

When the USSR needed public advocates, it recruited stars of the magnitude of Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw and Pablo Picasso. If the Comintern decided to undermine the colonial empires of its rivals (not the Soviet one, of course) from within, it created the World Anti-Imperialist League, and mobilised Hollywood to fight Moscow's totalitarian rivals. The maximum task was to ensure that every Western (and not only Western) supporter of any bright and progressive idea quickly found himself in the company of like-minded people who, by a strange coincidence, were also in love with the ‘Soviet project’. Or in Russia, if it was easier or more understandable for the sympathiser.

Photo: Otto Katz, emissary of Willi Münzenberg, architect of the Anti-Nazi League of Hollywood. Source: Wikipedia.

The technology worked. And it still does. Otherwise, there would not have been so many Russian sympathisers in the Third World - in Asia, Africa, Latin America... This is precisely Soviet inertia, because the Russian Empire did not recognise the independence of the former Spanish colonies, proclaimed against the will of the metropolis, until the last.

Photo: Nikita Khrushchev receiving Fidel Castro in Moscow. Source: Wikipedia.

After the death of Joseph Stalin, the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, and the suppression of the revolutions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the ‘bright image’ of the USSR, however, was ‘spotted’. Even the most sincere ‘sovietophiles’ could no longer pretend that nothing had happened. But here an invention of the nineteenth century came in handy. The communist regime began to be separated from the Russian people. And, of course, from the ‘great Russian culture’, which was hastily declared greater and more majestic than the purely Soviet one.

Photo: Albert Camus. Source: Wikipedia.

Albert Camus, for example, demonstratively supported Boris Pasternak, who was persecuted by the authorities, declaring him a representative of this very culture, ‘rooted’ in pre-revolutionary Russia. In these circumstances, it seemed uncomfortable to delve into the question of what Russia and its culture really were. As well as to be interested in the political views of Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the time when he was being expelled from the Soviet Union.

Photo: The burial of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Moscow. Source: Wikipedia.

Who knew then that the USSR would soon collapse, and Solzhenitsyn would become one of the inspirations for the construction of neo-imperial Russia? After all, even when this happened, the West was still wondering who Mr Putin was and trying to look into the eyes of another monster. Hoping, apparently, to see a ‘pure heart’ still waiting for true love behind the old complaints about the ‘insidious’ abduction of Eastern Europe, a scarlet  flower from the imperial garden.

Read the first part of the article here.