Reconciling the Past: Russia's Modern Struggle with Identity

Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist who previously was an analyst for the RAND corporation. The End of History? is an article produced by the National Interest based on a lecture Fukuyama gave at the University of Chicago in 1989. In this article, Fukuyama argues that dialogue surrounding current events lacks a complete framework, which limits our ability to understand these events in a broader context:

“IN WATCHING the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history. The past year has seen a flood of articles commemorating the end of the Cold War, and the fact that "peace" seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world. Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably superficial” (Fukuyama 3).

Fukuyama posits that all other viable alternatives to Western liberalism have been exhausted and the end of the Cold War may signify the end point of mankind's ideological evolution. According to Fukuyama, Western liberal democracy will necessarily become the ideal that governs the world “in the long run”(4). At this point, like a glacier eroding into the rushes around it, all other forms of government will gradually become more similar in their fundamental principles—the key aspects of Western Liberalism, according to Fukuyama.

 The end of history is when all societies have finally adopted a more Western approach to liberal democracy and a new more peaceful era will ensue. Furthermore, Fukuyama suggests there is a global consciousness connecting all of mankind that informs the moral and cultural habits of the physical world. An end to history, Fukuyama clarifies, “is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs's yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world” (4). Instead, he argues that the victory of liberalism, and thus the end of history itself will be realized in two waves: philosophically and physically. The physical victory of liberalism, marked by global adoption of more Western liberal democracy, will happen second and establish the more peaceful world order. The ideological victory of Western Liberalism—already achieved at the end of the Cold War, according to Fukuyama—implies a certain finality as well, because at this point no other political destinations are achievable. In this current period of philosophical but not physical attainment of this worldview that Fukuyama posits, a framework is necessary in order to evaluate its relevance. 

Fukuyama has developed a structure for digesting the events in daily headlines in order to achieve a greater understanding of the larger processes at work and check if his envisioned universalization of Western liberalism is happening or not. While not the center of this article, he suggests that there are accidental and essential events. Accidental events to Fukuyama are events that depart from the universalization of Western liberalism, whereas essential events are those that lead the world closer towards Western ideals. Overall, Fukuyama’s framework prompts discussions that force us to evaluate long term historical continuity. These conversations can provide a lot more insight to our own cultural and moral habits because we are evaluating their relevance in broader historical trends and not as isolated events.

Fukuyama provides a meaningful procedure for discussing current events with historical significance, and although I may not agree with his predictions, considering the larger undercurrents of historical movements in play is very valuable. His arguments underpinned my process of developing a framework with the overall goal of achieving a greater understanding of daily news events and their larger implications. In my exploration of how historical narratives play into Russia’s current events, I held three key questions from Fukuyama’s work in mind:

1. In this constant “flow of events,” what defines a historical event?
2. How are historical narratives relevant to daily news articles?
3. How can we develop a framework for navigating news stories in order to achieve a greater depth of understanding—perhaps one that is more accessible or broadly applicable than Fukuyama’s?

For something to be considered a historical event I think it needs to be relatively significant in terms of the amount of people subsequently displaced or otherwise affected by it. Historical events also need to speak to a larger historical direction, meaning they can either represent a disruption or an extension of historical continuity. A multiplicity of narratives exist all over the world and speak to the movements of larger institutions or governments over time or the interdependent directions of several governing bodies at once. When reading articles each week I looked for events themselves that might be considered historical, but also events that relate to historical narratives more generally. For example, one article spoke about  how World War Two era prison camps are being remembered today , or another that covered  a new movie that plays off of the Romanov family history . I also was able to find stories that talked about the  deliberate manipulation of historical narratives .

Fukuyama’s suggestion of reflecting on whether an event is accidental or essential is deeply rooted in his own theory of the eventual spread Western liberal democracy, and is thus limited in its applicability. Although I agree with Fukuyama in that the daily news articles need to be contextualized with the underlying movements that dictate them, I do not think the overall movement is a global migration towards America’s form of democracy. 

After considering each of the articles I read throughout the semester I saw a dichotomy between their connections to history. In one of these categories, I saw historical knowledge providing meaningful context to an event. In the other category, I saw the event interacting with the narrative of a historical event. These events therefore have either a contextual or a narrative relevance to history, and exploring the interaction allows us to achieve a better understanding of the events at hand. This framework is possibly more accessible than Fukuyama’s refined vision while still seeking to acknowledge the place and meaning of an event in its historical context.

In the articles I have followed over the semester, Russia and ex-Soviet satellite states’ history of Sovietism provides relevant insight into current events. Establishing the historical precedent of issues like censorship, ballet stuffing, and other issues of civil liberties rooted in the countries’ Soviet pasts helps us realize that Russia and its satellites aren't dealing with a novel problem.

Fukuyama hails the end of the Cold War as an integral step in the direction of his predicted future of Western liberal supremacy. However, it seems that most of the subsequent reforms and pushes of Russia’s economy towards capitalism are far from undeniable proof of a superior power structure that lies within America’s democracy. Peter Katzenstein in a 2014 discussion panel at Cornell University refutes Fukuyama’s theories in part because of the assumption that our current global direction indicates America’s unique democracy would prevail and be universally accepted when our present trajectory is towards multiple modernities born from global catalysts and includes other forms democracy and different power structures altogether.

At its heart, Fukuyama’s theory is one that perpetuates the harmful fallacy of America’s ideological hegemony. Epstein in, After the Future, argues Russia’s society has been molded by the will of a few powerful figures, creating institutions that simulate a reality that was never naturally produced by Russia’s people.

"Peter the Great ordered Russia to be educated and vigorously introduced such innovations as newspapers, universities, and academies. These in­stitutions appeared in artificial forms, incapable of concealing their deliber­ateness, the forced nature of their origins. In essence, we are dealing with the simulative, or nominative, character of a civilization composed of plausible labels: this is a "newspaper," this, an "academy," this, a "constitution," none of which grew naturally from the national soil, but were implanted from above in the form of smoothly whittled twigs in hopes they might take root and germinate. Too much in this culture came from ideas, schemes, and conceptions, to which reality was subjugated" (Epstein 191).

Perhaps one of the consequences of these disingenuous institutions is their lack of legitimate authority and tendency to disregard their constituents. Russian leaders like Peter the Great, Stalin, and  Putin  and  Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus  demonstrate a pattern of authoritarian leadership that overlooks the will of its own people. The fall of the Soviet Union should not be seen as another step closer to America’s democracy, but—hopefully—a move in the direction of forming Russian representative institutions. It is clear this process is immensely difficult as evidenced by the failures of Perestroika-era reforms like the economic toll on the citizens during such events and the present  issues with Putin’s leadership  that are similar to Stalinist repressions. Although Putin and Lukashenko’s leaderships struggle from some of the same issues as Stalin’s Soviet Union, such problems seem inevitable as the country desperately tries to fix issues of its identity.

The contextual understanding of history in modern events is rather significant. Fukuyama advocates that we distinguish between accidental and essential events in the context of the spread of Western liberalism, but this framework is limited when considering Russia’s situation. By developing this framework in which we more broadly track events in historical context we can begin to understand the interplay between the past and present. Russia’s struggles with identity and legitimate institutions provides insight into the country's current struggles with leadership and civil liberties. Furthermore, it allows us to look at the toxic nature of an illegitimate figure creating such unrepresentative institutions. Whether that figure be Russian or a foreign power projecting its self-proclaimed supremacy, both perpetuate Russia’s struggles instead of alleviating them. 

The other connection to historical knowledge that I found looking at my articles was those relevant to how historical information is carried through time; how a country stewards historical narratives throughout time proved to be insightful for our focus on Russia.

Russia and Belarus have a distinctly problematic relationship with maintaining historical narratives. Underlying these examples is the dynamic of leaders suppressing their constituents and deliberately altering historical information to encourage complacency. As Russia struggles to answer questions fundamental to its identity and faces new challenges of present leadership looking to the past would be an effective tool, however, the continued suppression and  manipulation  of such conversations stunts the process altogether.  The article on Belarus  suggests that the citizens are able to reclaim the narratives of their ancestors in order to protest the illegitimate election. However, things appear to be less hopeful in Russia where  Putin  seems to capitalize on and promote complacency by distorting narratives. Thompson and Ward articulate a perspective on this complacency towards hiding historical narratives: 

“A few farsighted individuals banded together in the human rights organization Memorial, seeking to collect historical data about Stalin's repressions and to honor the victims by identifying them and erecting monuments and plaques in their memory. But the government most often ignored or hampered these efforts, and the public generally showed no interest or consciously turned a blind eye to Memorial's activities. One citizen, whose father, aunt, and uncle were all executed during Stalin's purges, explained Russian citizens' reluctance to deal with such past horrors: “It's our country's deep wound. You can forget about a wound if you don't touch it, but when you touch it, it bleeds again” (Thompson 321).

Complacency or exhaustion; dealing with these incredibly painful events is taxing. Leaders like Putin are able to take advantage of this momentary weakness and fill the empty space with falsified stories that refuse to acknowledge the government’s previous transgressions, romanticize the role of government in society, and hold unyielding power on the citizens.

"The geiv-gew and meow-meow of Leningrad's lost, / The crystalline quiet - bruit de silence - / Just before the explosion, and after - the shell of the vanished house" (Barksova 39, 25-27).

Shishkin in The Light and the Dark articulates the power of understanding the true essence of life that is able to unite people across impressive boundaries. The essence of life is captured by timeless themes of humanity that the two main characters in the story align themselves with in order to communicate across the boundaries of space of time. Volodya compares his unstable wartime setting to Scheherazade escaping death by improvising her stories: “If you’ve read these lines, it means death’s been postponed. I’m a match for Scheherazade and her stories” (Shishkin 232). Sasha calls her imagined twin “[...] the Dance of Mahanaim, with eyes like the pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim. I remember how shocked I was by the way our PT teacher looked at her during class” (23). By relating her vision of herself to this abstract story she aligns herself to themes that are timeless to the human experience. Because both characters are able to exist partly within this abstract space they are able to communicate through letters which would have otherwise been impossible. 

In our interview with Shishkin, he said he believed that history repeats itself, and by looking backward we can predict what will happen in the future. This notion is similar to the ideas in The Light and the Dark, in that there is a strong connection between the past and the present. The characters in the novel are in totally different time periods, but somehow they are both able to exist in the space of their letters. By aligning themselves to timeless human stories they are able to transcend temporal boundaries, because the timeless themes repeat throughout history.

This cyclical view of history makes a lot of sense when considering the issues that contemporary Russia faces. We have seen Russia ostensibly escape authoritarianism but enter the twenty-first millennium disillusioned and today under a toxic authority figure who seeks to dismantle any structures that inhibit his absolute power. Is Russia stuck in this moment of history, doomed to repeat this cycle of authoritarianism and oppressive leadership indefinitely?

The heavy-jowled fat-cheeked red-faced prince 

Pays a call to the blind lady. 

Speak, says she, 

What sort of man are you, 

Better still, make it a song. 

He cranks up a song about life, 

About the Kremlin, about the black-browed Baltic sailor boys,

About earth soaked, sweetened with lice.

The blind lady sighs beatifically, 

Like a grateful horse twitches its ears,

She foretells: great things will come of you,

For thou shalt write the operetta of the blockade. (Barskova 35, 1-11)

In this excerpt from “V. V. and O. M. — Hearing,” Barskova describes the blind lady dictating a song that the prince will sing. The prince in this song could represent the events in Russia as dictated by the blind lady. Barskova might be articulating Russia’s struggle with identity as the prince calls this omniscient lady for directions about what will happen in the winter. We have seen this issue closely tied to the development of illegitimate institutions that perpetuate oppressive authority. However, Russia does not have the ability to deal with these issues as it quickly approached the Leningrad Siege tragedy and the citizens are even further discouraged and exhausted. In “V.V. and N.K. — Monument,” Barskova indicates this tragedy is still afflicting the citizens today: "The geiv-gew and meow-meow of Leningrad's lost, / The crystalline quiet - bruit de silence - / Just before the explosion, and after - the shell of the vanished house" (39, 25-27). Although the event is over, there is work that needs to be done in order to move past it. In our interview, Barskova indicated that the work of moving past this event largely includes the creation and dissemination of the multitudes of narratives of the event. This idea largely connects to my framework of the narrative relevance to historical events. Barskova tells us that the key to moving past these traumas is reclaiming the narratives of the event and working through it as we engage with our present society. The process of carefully maintaining and protecting historical narratives is incredibly important. However, as I have seen throughout this semester, Russia struggles to commemorate and use historical information constructively.

"When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk." -Georg Hegel

Grief and pain from tragedies like Stalin's Great Purge and the Leningrad Siege flog the morale of the Russian people and exhaust their energy to be able to fix their overextended authority figures and answer questions of their national identity. Furthermore, leaders like Putin deliberately change historical narratives and distract the Russian people from their pain with sentiments of patriotism and a romanticized role of government in society. Until these narratives can be reclaimed and applied constructively, Russia will be trapped in the cycle of creating self-sustaining authoritarian figures. Time will tell if Russia will be able to escape this trap by leveraging oppositional strength against the power structure that perpetuate the status quo and cultivate truly Russian institutions that suite its people best.

Click  here  for works cited list.