Part III
The Fireglow of History
I’m now absorbing the living pages of history. The world never stagnates, it’s always stirring, new forms of life are always appearing. And I love to look back now at the path trodden by humanity, or run forward to the wonderful beautiful future which humanity will inhabit, spreading its wings and saying, ‘Happiness! Happiness for everyone!’
Alexandra Kollontai, 1952
History, too, depressed him terribly: you learn and read that at a certain date the people were overtaken by all sorts of calamities and were unhappy, then they summoned up their strength, worked, took infinite care, endured great hardships, laboured in preparation for better days. At last they came – one would think history might take a rest, but no, clouds gathered again, the edifice crashed down, and again the people had to toil and labour … The bright days do not remain, they fly, and life flows on, one crisis follows upon another.
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, 1859
I am tired of the twentieth century,
Of its blood-filled rivers.
Vladimir Sokolov, 19881
This is a history book about a contemporary crisis. As much as it hopes to throw light upon the present day, history is its subject. And so in Part I we reflected on the Russia Anxiety as an historic condition, but one that has come and gone, caused by events and personalities as much as by deeper cultural currents. It’s a condition, what’s more, that history might even be able to cure. In Part II, we saw that the big issues that fuel the Russia Anxiety – the country’s apparent predisposition to political violence, for example, or the assumption that aggressive expansionism is encoded into its DNA – are not predetermined by history at all. Instead, history offers alternatives and solutions, and it shows that Russia’s story is one of normality as well as exceptionalism.
Yet, as we’ll see in Part III, the Russia Anxiety is still made out of history, of ingredients like memory, chronology, narrative and time. After all, if Russians have forgotten how to remember Stalin, are they not doomed to relive him? And haven’t Russians throughout the past had a tendency to imagine the wrong kind of futures: of utopias, special paths and force? These two problems – the relationships between history and memory, and history and the future, which are the subject of the next two chapters – seem likely to worsen the Russia Anxiety. But in the following pages we’ll see something different. History isn’t Russia’s problem, but one of its most valuable resources. And the hints of Part I were right, after all: history really does offer one of the best cures for the Russia Anxiety.