SOLOVYOV AND KLEPIKOVA
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It
may be that China's demographic invulnerability is consider–
ably exaggerated in Moscow: fear makes mountains out of molehills.
But even if we are dealing here with that "false imagination" that Plato
talks about in the
Timaeus,
the fact remains that this fear determines
the Russian state of mind on all levels of consciousness. (Among the
many defeatist jokes going the rounds in Moscow, the shortest one is:
"All is quiet on the Chinese-Finnish border.") The recent and still
painful memory of the many millions of lives lost in World War II plus
the inevitable parallels-both historical and ethnic-with the three
hundred-year Tatar occupation intensify the feeling of a threat to the
empire's existence. And the Russians take this to be a threat to their
own existence as a nation, since they have no experience of any other
form of state but the empire.
It
is hard to find anything to compare with the latter. The Roman
Empire, the British Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Third
Reich-none of these is a precedent. The only historical analogy is
with the Ottoman Empire, which under the threat of collapse also
resorted to slepping up its military might, its internal discipline, and
its great-power nationalism (Pan-Islamism, Ottomanism, Pan–
Turkism, and the butchery of the Armenians). A direct parallel can be
established between the present Russian nationalists and the Young
Turks of the early twentieth century: like the former, the latter tried to
save the empire in the belief that they were saving the nation. Ulti–
mately, Turkey almost lost everything that had made it a state: it took
the route-one which was humiliating yet proved
to
be its salvation–
from empire to nationhood. Is it possible for Russia to take such a
course? Not voluntarily, needless to say: this would be interpreted by
the Russians as regression by the state-as the road back to national
humiliation and annihilation . Thus all centrifugal trends (the at–
tempts made in this direction by Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslo–
vakia) have been nipped in the bud. But with the help of China? What
would the Russian nation be like if it were not burdened down–
territorially, politically, and economically-by its empire? Alas, any
analogy has a limited range of application: one can compare the past
with the past or with the present, but that is all. Ultimately, the
Ottoman Empire collapsed as the result of that great earthquake
known as World War
I.
Its epicenter was relatively far away; but its last
shock wave reached Istanbul, and that sufficed. In the present situa–
tion, things are different. Russia itself is impatient for a war, regarding
it as something inevitable, defensive, and preventive-so long as China
has now growh out of its atomic diapers . Even the aspirations of the
subjugated nations are now being taken by the Russians, within the
