"How Tolstoy can save Putin's Soul" (Andrew Kaufman)

[MBS]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/10/how-tolstoy-can-save-putin-s-soul.html

Excerpt:

The drama being played out right now in Russia and Ukraine isn’t merely geopolitical. It’s a deep-seated drama of the national soul that’s been around for centuries. And Russian literature is the place we see it in full flower. You see, the question Vladimir Putin is grappling with is the one that recurs throughout the 19th century Russian classics: What is the source of our national greatness?
In approaching this question, Putin, whose two favorite writers happen to be Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, has two distinct traditions to choose from: Dostoevsky’s belief in Russian exceptionalism or Tolstoy’s belief in the universality of all human experience, regardless of one’s nationality, culture, or religion. Alas, he has chosen Dostoevsky, not Tolstoy.
Dostoevsky believed that Russia’s special mission in the world is to create a pan-Slavic Christian empire with Russia at its helm.. . This sort of triumphalist thinking was anathema to Tolstoy, who believed that every nation had its own unique traditions, none better or worse than the others. Tolstoy was a patriot—he loved his people, as is so clearly demonstrated in War and Peace, for example—but he was not a nationalist. He believed in the unique genius and dignity of every culture.
. . .
Unfortunately, amid all the spiritual turmoil following the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians have tended to cling more to the starker, messianic vision of Dostoevsky than the calmer vision of universal humanity Tolstoy espoused. . . After all the tragedies of 20th century Russian history, and the humiliations of the past 20 years in particular, many ordinary Russians are seeking unequivocal proof of their national worthiness—indeed superiority—among the family of nations. . . It is precisely that contingent of the population that Putin plays to. . . .
But genuine strength, as Tolstoy understood so well, comes from humility, not hubris. That is a central message not only of Sevastopol Tales, but of War and Peace, which memorializes Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia in 1812. If Putin draws on the trope of a country under siege in order to justify Russian bellicosity and his own tight grip on power, then Tolstoy uses that self-image to illustrate a very different point: Russia’s greatness, he believed, stems from the ability of its people to maintain their dignity in the face of aggression and keep a clear moral compass in even the very worst of times.
. . .

. . . Tolstoy’s message—which seems to have been entirely lost on Putin—is that when we think we’re winning, we may in fact be losing, or even planting the seeds of our own destruction. . . .Putin’s conquest of Crimea and saber-rattling on the Ukrainian border may seem to him right now like a masterful strategic move to re-establish Russian hegemony, but a few years or even months down the road it could well prove to be his country’s undoing. With sanctions mounting, Russia becoming more ostracized internationally, and the looming administrative and cultural challenges of reintegrating Crimea back into Russia, Putin’s Napoleonic gambit has already cost his country dearly—not just economically and politically, but spiritually, as well.

[swilton]

1. Utter hypocrisy

to criticize Putin for his belief in exceptionalism/ethnocentrism when US policy makers have practiced and do practice that very thing. The author furthermore is mistaken - in alluding to the Soviet Union as if it were an expression of Russian hegemony- the USSR as conceived it was philosophically designed to be multi-ethnic where different nationalities had equivalent representations.