The Spectator (UK)
January 10, 2004
Putin's might is White

The Russian President is a nationalist, not a communist, says Paul
Robinson, and has much in common with the men who fought the Bolsheviks in
the civil war

Paul Robinson is assistant director of the Centre for Security Studies at
the University of Hull.

The victory of Vladimir Putin's supporters in last month's Russian
elections was greeted with horror in some liberal quarters. There were
fears that President Putin had been confirmed as the leader of a corrupt,
repressive corporate state that would restore Soviet-style totalitarianism.
But these fears were misplaced, and indeed betray a profound
misunderstanding of Russian history.

While Putin is indeed an autocrat, he is no Red Tsar. He is a typical
Soviet radish ­ red on the outside but white at the core. He is the heir
not of Lenin and Trotsky, but of the White officers who fought to save
Russia from communism in the civil war of 1917 to 1921. Depending on one's
view of the Whites, that may or may not be a good thing. But, to most,
White is undoubtedly better than Red, and Putin's authoritarian rule gives
Russia comparatively little to fear.

After the collapse of tsarism in 1917, there were not two but three
possible paths for Russia to follow: liberal democracy, Bolshevism or White
military government. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the liberal democratic
provisional government of Alexander Kerensky and introduced communist rule,
a small group of military officers formed a volunteer army to overthrow
Lenin. Soon christened the 'Whites', to contrast them with the communist
'Reds', they fought a bloody civil war against the Bolsheviks. Like
Kerensky they lost, but now, 80 years later, it appears that their ideology
has finally triumphed over the other two.

It is an ironic accident of history that a former communist secret
policeman, a member of an organisation specifically set up to exterminate
Whites and people like them, has ended up in effect putting their ideology
into practice. The intrinsic difficulties associated with governing Russia
in all centuries have led to similar ideas in similar circumstances of
state collapse and reconstruction.

What should we expect of a White government? Civil war White leaders ranged
from psychopathic loonies like the self-proclaimed ruler of Mongolia,
Ataman Roman Ungern-Sternberg, who imagined himself to be the reincarnation
of Genghis Khan, to liberal-minded folk like the second commander of the
volunteer army, General Anton Denikin, whose father began life as a serf.
An unmistakable common thread ran through all of their administrations,
however, and that was the belief in strong central power.

The prime example, General Wrangel, who headed the White movement in 1920,
did not take attacks on his authority lightly. He railed against critics
who wanted him to introduce some form of representative government: 'They
want to share power with me. Having passed through rivers of blood, the
provisional government, and every sort of special assembly, and having
finally put power in the hands of one man, which is the requirement for
successful struggle, they want to repeat the mistakes of the past.' One can
imagine Putin saying something similar nowadays about the oligarchs who
enriched themselves at Russia's expense in the 1990s, and now insist that
the country's president share power with them.

The Whites were not merely apolitical but anti-political. They hoped to
transcend the factionalism of party politics in favour of national unity.
Lenin, on the other hand, practised division. He split his party more times
than Joseph Chamberlain or David Owen. The civil war was a deliberate act
of policy. As the leader of a minority party, Lenin knew that he could only
hold on to power by provoking counter-revolution and forcing people to take
sides, a concept echoed by the so-called neoconservatives in America:
'Either you're with us or you're against us.' The need to create new
enemies at every juncture was an essential aspect of Leninism.

It was precisely this phenomenon which repelled the military officers who
formed the White armies. As patriots, they valued unity above all else and
hated party politics, considering it inherently divisive. Putin appears to
be very similar. The group he has nurtured to support him is titled United
Russia, a name that conjures up General Denikin's slogan, 'Russia, one and
indivisible'. In her article on the Russian elections in the Christmas
double issue of The Spectator, Rachel Polonsky seemed to suggest that it
was somehow fraudulent of United Russia to stick up posters carrying
pictures of both Josef Stalin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But therein lies
the essence of the party's creed: national unity. In exactly the same way,
White reactionary monarchists marched alongside White republicans of the
Kornilov Shock Regiment, whose regimental anthem contained the words 'The
Tsar is not our idol'.

If one had to use just two words to sum up the Whites' beliefs, they would
be the same ones that would most usefully categorise those of Vladimir
Putin ­ nationalism (natsionalizm) and statehood (gosudarstvennost'). The
former requires no explanation. Gosudarstvennost', which will be a term
unfamiliar to many, is an idea at the heart of both 'Whiteness' and
Putinism. The Whites referred to themselves as 'state-minded people'
(gosudarstvenno-mysliashchie liudi), by which they meant that they placed
the highest priority on protecting the interests of the state and enhancing
its power and authority. Likewise, if Putin stands for any credo, it is for
a strengthening of central state authority, for the sake of Russia as a
whole.

Probably the most fundamental tension in Russian politics is that between
the concepts of gosudarstvennost' and its rival obshchestvennost'. The
nuances of the latter are difficult to translate, but the term refers to
civil society and, roughly speaking, means 'public opinion'. Liberal
commentators regard the state in Russia with suspicion. At the start of the
20th century, they longed for the state to surrender its power to 'public
opinion'. They still do. But supporters of gosudarstvennost' view
supporters of obshchestvennost' with equal suspicion. They see them as the
self-interested representatives of the chattering classes, who, if put into
positions of power, will immediately plunge Russia into a state of anarchy
in which their beloved liberties will be of no use to them or anybody else.
This, the Whites argued, was what the liberals of the provisional
government had done in 1917, and this, many now claim, is what free-market
democrats such as Yegor Gaidar did to Russia in the early 1990s.

There is something of a misconception in the West that the Russian state
has traditionally been exceedingly powerful. In fact, the opposite is the
case. Compared with Western countries, the rulers of pre-communist Russia
had a very small administrative apparatus and comparatively limited
financial resources to govern an enormous geographic area. Russian leaders
have regularly found it extremely difficult to enforce their rule far from
Moscow or St Petersburg. Even in the modern era both Yeltsin and Putin have
found themselves frustrated by regional governors who pursue policies
directly counter to those of the central government. In earlier times, it
was a lack of power, not a surfeit, that induced tyrants such as Ivan the
Terrible to resort to violent administrative solutions.

A weak state can lead to despotism. It is only under the shelter of a state
strong enough to protect its subjects from crime or external assault, to
create and enforce laws to regulate commerce and industry, and to encourage
the arts, education and other social benefits, that a society can prosper,
and that the conditions for individual liberty can ever hope to exist.

This was certainly the view of the two Russian philosophers most closely
associated with the White Russian armies, Petr Struve and Ivan Il'in.
Struve began his intellectual career as a Marxist, but ended it as a
monarchist. Equally remarkably, Il'in was first expelled from Soviet Russia
to Germany for his anti-communist agitation, and then forced to flee from
Germany for his refusal to support the Nazis.

Both men understood that the intelligentsia's obsession with liberating the
people was unleashing forces which would eventually destroy all liberty in
Russia. Only an authoritarian government, they decided, could protect
individual freedoms in the absence of a political culture that accepted
basic ideas such as property rights. A society whose people understood
legal rights and duties could successfully govern itself. One that did not
must be ruled by a powerful individual, who would educate the people in its
legal consciousness until such time as it was fit for self-rule.

This sounds like a recipe for dictatorship, which indeed it was. But Il'in
made a clear distinction between dictatorial rule and totalitarian rule.
The latter was 'godless', and while the state should be all-powerful in
those matters which fell under its competence, it should stay out of other
areas, such as a person's religious beliefs or private life, entirely.

What we see, therefore, in the ideology of the Whites is a form of
authoritarian liberalism, which insists on the need for the rule of a
single powerful individual, but does so because such an individual is seen,
in Russia's peculiar circumstances, as the personification of the state and
hence as the best protector of liberty. One can, I maintain, view Putin in
the same light. Simply put, Russia has scant hope of developing into an
economically successful and politically free society without a state that
can collect sufficient taxes to maintain social services, enforce its laws
throughout the length of the country, clamp down on crime and terrorism,
and provide the Russian people with some degree of peace and stability.

For all its dictatorial tendencies, the contemporary Russian state clearly
exhibits some restraint. It does not seek to intervene in every aspect of
its citizens' lives, and Russia is a country where people can and do
criticise the government without being molested. In many respects the
government of Vladimir Putin is probably the most benign in Russian
history. Like the Whites, Putin is no liberal democrat, but his promotion
of state interests may well be the best hope for liberal democracy in
Russia.