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Glasnost Before Gorbachev
| Article
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13314 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1987 |
5,780 Words |
| Author
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W. Bruce Lincoln
W. Bruce Lincoln is now at work on books entitled Red Against
White: The Russian Civil War, and Russia's Great Reforms. He
is a University Research Professor at Northern Illinois
University. He is the author of Nikolai Miliutin: An
Enlightened Russian Bureaucrat (1977); Nicholas I: Emperor and
Autocrat of All the Russias (1981); In the Vanguard of Reform:
Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861 (1982); In War's
Dark Shadow: Russians before the Great War (1983); and Passage
through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution (1986). |
For at least four hundred years, Westerns have been perplexed by the unique way in which the cultures and politics of Europe and Asia have come together in Russia. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans regarded Russia as a "rude and barbarous kingdom," more Asiatic that Western, where the chasm between opulence and poverty exceeded anything known in the West. For their descendants who lived a century later, Russia was an uncertain colossus, still Asiatic in terms of her rulers' willingness to expend human life for their aggrandizement but sufficiently European in terms of education and technology to threaten the security of the West with her unlimited manpower and vast resources. Europeans fearing Russia's designs for world conquest were relieved to discover, at the time of the Crimean War, that the Russian colossus had "feet of clay," and then came to fear anew the specter of millions of Russian infantrymen marching westward at the czar's command. On the eve of the First World War, Europeans spoke of the "Russian steamroller," fearful--or hopeful--that it would roll inexorably across the plains of Eastern Europe to destroy the might of newly united Germany. Yet, as it had a hundred years before, the West's vision of Russia's power once again proved to be inflated. From the war's first battles to the last, the czar's armies fell before those of Germany all along Europe's eastern front.
Despite Russia's catastrophic defeat by the Germans in World War I, her victory over Nazi Germany twenty-five years later rekindled Western apprehensions about her overwhelming numbers and inexhaustible resources. Today, Westerners continue to debate the meaning and nature of the Russian mind, the extent of Russian power, and the strength of Russian will. But, as in the times of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler, they disagree about what conclusions to draw from the information at hand. Kremlinology is an inexact science at best. Russia continues to be an uneasy colossus driven by uncertain forces, what Sir Winston Churchill once called "a riddle wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma." Plagued by a corrupt bureaucracy, a failing agricultural system, and a work force that remains less productive than any in the West, the Russia that cannot feed herself or produce a decent standard of living for her citizens remains a superpower capable of impressive military and scientific achievements.
Ever since Peter the Great launched Russia's first crash program of modernization some three centuries ago, the Russians have borrowed science, technology, and know-how from the West and have used Western yardsticks to measure their achievements. Yet the modernization of government and technology that enabled Peter the
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