Paul Valéry must have had Russians in mind when he wrote that “The only thing one can learn from history is a propensity for chauvinism.”
Well, fine, not all Russians – one shouldn’t generalise. But chauvinism is certainly the only lesson learned by many Russian descendants of White émigrés, most of them living in France.
One has to reach this melancholy conclusion on the basis of their open letter Solidarity with Russia in the Hour of the Ukrainian Tragedy.
Written by Count and Countess Shakhovskoy, the missive includes among its 100-odd signatories members of some of Russia’s oldest families.
A Bobrinsky, a Tolstoy, a Bariatinsky, a Sheremetiev, a Pushkin et al all signed this proof that they must have played truant when history was taught. Especially that part of history that went beyond chauvinism.
Their ancestors were the lucky ones. They managed to get away when Putin’s ancestors raped Russia.
The unlucky ones were culled en masse, for no crime other than belonging to an undesirable class. Actually, culled is perhaps a wrong word, suggesting as it does a quick death visited without much imagination.
Yet many murders were quite imaginative, as documented in Sergei Melgunov’s book The Red Terror, published in the west while Lenin was still alive.
Melgunov cites thousands of instances of such niceties as skinning people alive, rolling them around in nail-studded barrels, driving nails into people’s skulls, quartering, burning alive, flailing, crucifying, stuffing people alive into locomotive furnaces, pouring molten pitch or liquefied lead down their throats.
White Russians who ended up in Paris kept their lives, but they all lost something else. Those who had large families, lost some of their members. Those who had estates, lost them. Those who had money, lost it. Those who had libraries and musical instruments, lost them. Those who had jobs at universities, lost them.
Above all, they all lost their country, and many swore to regain it by ousting the blood-soaked degenerates who took over in 1917. Yet there was always a growing group, infiltrated or otherwise corrupted by the Bolsheviks, which began to claim that the Soviet Union was the same old Russia, albeit painted red.
For all their professed internationalism, they’d say, the Bolsheviks expressed the national Russian idea. Hence they must be supported.
They didn’t know much about what was going on in Russia, and what they did know they blanked out. Many went so far as to beg forgiveness and implore the Soviets to take them back.
The Soviets would oblige, typically welcoming the repatriates with executions and concentration camps.
But even many of those who knew better than to go back still took out Soviet passports as a symbolic gesture. They’d go to the Soviet embassy, drink to Stalin’s health and gorge themselves on free caviar few of them could afford at home.
Step by step, in their minds Soviet Russia ceased to exist as a real and quite awful country, now painted such a dark hue of red that it looked almost brown.
She was replaced by a legend, a sort of secular verbal icon depicting a pristine mother cradling baby émigrés in her arms. With each passing decade, chauvinism indeed became the only lesson they learned from history – and the only one they passed on to their descendants.
Not long ago, a young Frenchman whose Russian father was born in Paris explained to me that the very earth of Russia is sacred. “What makes it any more sacred than the earth of, say, England or France?” I asked – in French, for the youngster doesn’t know a single Russian word except ‘vodka’, wrongly stressed on the last syllable.
He looked at me as if I had questioned the heliocentric nature of our universe. For both him and even his father (who does speak some Russian, reasonably well for a Frenchman) the saintliness of Russia is axiomatic.
To them every Russian regime, be it Grand Prince Vladimir’s, Stalin’s, Gorbachev’s or Putin’s is part of the same blessed continuum, which they idealise in defiance of any widely documented facts.
Russia to them can do no wrong – even if it’s ruled, as it is now, by the spiritual and institutional heirs to the same chaps who flailed and quartered their ancestors, those who didn’t manage to get away to Paris.
This explains why, rather than being appalled by Putin’s frankly kleptofascist regime, they lash out against those who dare criticise it – and especially those who try, however meekly, to resist its aggression against the Ukraine.
Hence the letter, written by Their Highnesses from the height of their fire-eating jingoism. One paragraph will suffice to get across the essence of this message ad urbi et orbi:
“In the face of increasing tensions, both in Donbass and in international relations, one conclusion is inescapable: the aggressive hostility currently unfolding against Russia is devoid of any rationality. The politics of double standards goes beyond the scale. Russia is being accused of all crimes and found a priori guilty without any evidence, while other countries are offered amazing latitude, specifically in the area of observing human rights.”
One would be tempted to say that every word in the paragraph, as in the whole letter, betokens either ignorance or stupidity. But that’s not the case, at least not the primary case: the letter is animated by unadulterated chauvinism. Those cursed with it are indeed bound to sound ignorant and stupid, but this is a side effect only.
Facts can never make inroads on Russian chauvinism, especially its strongest, vicarious variety afflicting those Russians who have wisely refrained from living in the mythical land of their morbid imagination. The rest of us, however, should be reminded of the facts.
Such as, I am not aware of any country serially violating civil rights that is given ‘amazing latitude’ in the West. Neither apparently are the authors who fail to cite any such place.
One can guess that they refer to Israel’s attempts to protect her citizens against terrorist attacks, but this is only conjecture based on this group’s long history of, putting it mildly, ambivalent feelings towards the Jews.
In that case all I can suggest to the authors is that they read The Guardian or, closer to home, Le Monde. They’ll find plenty of evidence that Israel is never short of Western detractors. No ‘double standard beyond the scale’ is there to be seen.
What they mean by ‘irrational hostility towards Russia’ is neither irrational nor hostile. It’s simply the West’s attempt to use sanctions to mitigate Russia’s rabid aggressiveness towards her neighbours, this time towards the Ukraine.
Russia happens to be the only European country currently attempting a conquest of another European country. This is indeed a crime of which Russia is accused, but she is ‘found guilty’ neither ‘a priori’ nor ‘without evidence’.
Do the authors think that it’s Martians who have occupied parts of the Ukraine? If so, they should by all means continue to hold that view, at least until they have received some competent psychiatric treatment.
The rest of us know that the culprit is Russia or, to be more specific, her ruling regime or, to be even more specific, Putin. This knowledge is strictly a posteriori, with enough evidence to convince the jury and convict the culprit.
But the authors don’t sit in judgement of Russia. For these vicarious chauvinists Russia is God, and God is only to be worshipped, not judged.
Perhaps they ought to read Paul Valéry’s essays – in the original language, which they know a whole lot better than Russian.