Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Symbolically the most important development in the collapse of Russia’s communist empire was the fracturing into three of the Slavic nations: Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine. The shrunken Russian empire was left once again with the Kievan birthplace of the Rus sitting outside its borders. The ‘Russian Federation’ had been the largest of the republics in the USSR, but the new Russia was a shadow of what had been before.

  It was an amazing series of events. In freeing the nations, Gorbachev had achieved, albeit by accident, far more than Alexander II had achieved by freeing the serfs or Lincoln had achieved by freeing the slaves. The failure of the old model of military imperialism had already been made plain by the collapse of the British empire half a century before. Now Russia demonstrated again that for an empire to survive economic power was all-important. Not only was a strong economy essential for military reasons, but more subtly it supported the ideological glue that might hold an empire together. The ideology of communism was rejected by Russia’s colonies for two reasons. First was its inherent unreality: proclaiming equality, justice and international brotherhood while demonstrating inequality, injustice and international aggression was never going to convince for long. Second was the simple fact that communism did not work. Even if it was true that universal education, universal employment and universal healthcare provided the citizens of the Russian empire with real advantages, it became increasingly clear that life in the west was ‘better’. Corporatist democracy delivered what communism didn’t, but was it the corporatism or the democracy that produced the goods?

  As Russia continued to evolve it seemed that corporatism might prove a stronger force than democracy and a new corporatist autocracy might emerge from the rubble of empire. The cold war warriors in Washington expected the collapse of communism to herald the arrival of free elections and free markets – an inversion of the historical determinism of Marxist dogma. They forgot that their vision of corporatist democracy did not spring fully formed from the ashes of Britain’s North American empire but from the freebooting ways of the robber barons and party bosses. The Soviet state collapsed into a morass of corruption and chaos out of which seems to be emerging a new oligarchy imbued not with the spirit of modern America but with that of Tammany Hall and Standard Oil. Within fifteen years of the dissolution of the USSR – the supposed workers’ paradise – there were reported to be 88,000 dollar millionaires in Russia; thirty-three Moscow residents were reportedly billionaires. Today the term ‘oligarch’ is associated with Russia and with the kleptocracy of robber barons who seized control of the nation’s economic infrastructure. It is worth remembering that a century earlier the term was being used to abuse the robber barons who had seized control of the American economic infrastructure. President Cleveland described the ringleaders of the Hawaiian coup as oligarchs and others applied it to the likes of J. D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. With time the term faded from use in America as the oligarchs became part of the establishment. It is far too early to speculate on how history will deal with today’s Russian oligarchs, but it seems that they too may be mutating into something with less pejorative connotations. Many of the 1990s oligarchs who made vast fortunes for themselves have been joined, or in some cases replaced, by a new breed who straddle the private and public sectors. Putin’s finance minister, for example, chaired both Russia’s second biggest bank and a company controlling 23 per cent of global diamond production. A 1997 law that made it compulsory for government ministers to declare their earnings from all sources dramatically illustrated the intertwining of politics and business. The minister of natural resources declared an income of £4.2m in 2005 from his extensive business interests, 2,000 times the national average. Many of these new oligarchs have close personal connections to Putin. The chairman of the company producing Lada cars and much of the arms industry served with Putin in the KGB in East Germany.

  As in the United States, the oil industry provides the clearest examples of emerging trends. Russia now has the world’s largest oil and gas reserves after Saudi Arabia and Iran, much of it in the hands of the Gazprom Corporation. In some ways Gazprom resembles American corporations, running schools, health services and even leisure centres, and its influence reaches deep into government. Its chairman was the first deputy prime minister and went on to succeed Putin as president. But it would be far too simplistic to suggest that Gazprom drives government policy; on the contrary, the government seems as likely to be determining corporate policy.

  In the winter of 2005, for example, Gazprom provoked a diplomatic crisis by quadrupling the price of gas supplied to Ukraine, claiming that it was merely harmonising prices with global markets. It soon emerged that Gazprom was operating a very distinct pricing policy. Other former Soviet republics were being charged less, in some cases far less. It looked like the differential pricing once followed by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, designed to drive out competition, except that there was virtually no competition. The prices appeared to reflect the political priorities of the Kremlin, priorities determined by the new Russian leaders’ determination to maintain an American-style ‘sphere of influence’ to replace the old-style empire. Belarus, a staunch Russian ally, got cheap gas; western-leaning Ukraine did not.

  It is clear that in its corporatism Russia is developing along its own path. The same is true of its ‘democracy’. Russia flirted with democracy and unbridled free markets under Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, in the 1990s, and the result was the creation of a few fabulously rich oligarchs, an almost bankrupt government and most of the population being significantly worse off as inflation destroyed their savings. Russia has also become the first industrial society to experience a sustained fall in life expectancy; the average new-born Russian male has a life expectancy of fifty-nine, less than a Bangladeshi.

  Even under Yeltsin elements of the old autocratic mindset remained, and these came to the forefront again with what has been called the ‘managed democracy’ of Putin, documented in works like Andrew Wilson’s Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World. Despite his authoritarian tendencies – Putin effectively abolished free elections for the eighty-nine regional governors, for example – he achieved approval ratings undreamt of in western countries. Russia may have abandoned the formal ideology of autocracy but that does not imply the triumph of democracy in the American sense. In one survey ‘strengthening democracy and freedom of speech’ was ranked only eighth in a list of political priorities after such objectives as ‘developing industry’. On 20 December 2006 President Putin celebrated ‘Chekist Day’ with a lavish televised party in the Kremlin. The day, officially Security Service Workers Day, commemorates the foundation in 1917 of the Bolshevik’s notorious secret police, the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB.

  Values that become embedded in ruling elites can continue even when leaders change. The casual assumptions implicit in American interventions in the Caribbean basin towards the end of the nineteenth century continued into the twentieth and twenty-first in Iran, Vietnam, Iraq and countless other places. The culture of violence inherent in communist autocracy has continued in the brave new world of managed democracy, with dissidents like television supremo Vladislav Listev and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya gunned down in what looked suspiciously like officially approved assassinations. Weeks before her murder, Politkovskaya warned that Putin had become a ‘tsar’ who believed he could do anything he liked with Russia and the Russian people.

  Nor does the arrival of ‘managed democracy’ and the disappearance of most of the Russian empire imply that the imperial instinct has vanished. Putin called the break-up of the Soviet Union ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’. Russia’s vast gas reserves give it enormous power and this, coupled with the political stability that followed the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years, has renewed the nation’s self-confidence. That in turn is reflected in the re-emerging imperial ideology, an ideology again presenting a mirror image of developments in the American empire. The a
ttempts by the US to incorporate Georgia into its sphere of influence to ‘protect’ its oil supplies prompted the sort of military response from Russia that generations of tsars would have immediately recognised.

  The Russian invasion of South Ossetia in 2008 is just one example of Russia’s continuing imperial pretensions that continue to colour the Russian view of history. Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Vladimir Putin’s European affairs adviser, was still insisting in May 2005 that there had been no Russian invasion of the Baltic states during the Second World War. ‘There was no occupation,’ he said; ‘there were agreements at the time with the legitimately elected authorities in the Baltic countries.’

  Russia has a thousand-year tradition of autocracy and imperialism. It is far too early to say that either has died. And yet there are those who asserted exactly that. Francis Fukuyama achieved celebrity status by proclaiming that the collapse of communism marked ‘the end of history’. Rarely can a soundbite so absurd have achieved such fame. Fukuyama argued that at the time of the American Revolution democracy was just one among many competing theories of government, but as the twentieth century drew to a close it had become by far the most prevalent ideology in the world. All the alternatives had become discredited and democracy was accepted by the majority of governments. He asserted in effect that rather than Marx’s proletariat destroying the bourgeoisie history had proved that by living peacefully together the two classes would maximise human welfare; only corporatist democracy made this possible. ‘What we may be witnessing’, he wrote, ‘is not just the end of the cold war, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’

  To its advocates the triumph of corporatist democracy as an ideology and the triumph of America as the sole remaining superpower were merely two sides of the same coin. The world would be subject to Pax Americana not as the manifestation of Yankee imperialism but as the guarantee of prosperity, peace and justice. The United States was destined to be both the model for the rest of the world and the tool by which that model would be replicated. America had become a society of unprecedented prosperity, outstanding creativity and unabashed glory. Americans had personal freedoms undreamt of in much of the globe, and their nation – despite occasional alarms – was fundamentally secure within its borders. And this has all been achieved within the framework of democracy. Whether the abundance of easily exploitable resources – agricultural, mineral and human – made this democracy possible or whether democracy made possible the exploitation of those resources is a moot point, but what is certain is that most of its citizens believe that the nation’s achievements are inescapably linked to its democratic values. This ideological certainty has spread far beyond America’s borders.

  Fukuyama was right to argue that in the court of public opinion liberal democracy had triumphed and communism dismally failed. American-style democracy and communism both promised to create the most just and most productive society imaginable; the difference was that one delivered and one did not. The prophecy of de Tocqueville that Russia and America were each destined to hold in their hands ‘the destinies of half the world’ had seemed eerily prescient at the start of the twentieth century; but by the century’s end it seemed that one pair of hands would hold the whole world.

  CHAPTER 15

  PAX AMERICANA

  The road from Roanoke meandered through history to arrive in Baghdad. American troops approached Iraq with the same mixture of arrogance and ignorance that had characterised Englishmen sailing across the Atlantic in the opposite direction more than four hundred years before. Collective certainty eclipsed individual fears. They faced the unknown buttressed with the knowledge that God was on their side and that the natives would succumb to the justice of their cause and the power of their guns. The second Iraq War was not just an imperfect copy of the first but a copy of countless other wars down the years. Army reservists marching proudly off to invade Iraq mirrored the Kentucky militia marching off to invade Canada in 1812. ‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’, the despairing cry of the Vietnam War, became ‘Waist Deep in the Big Sandy’.

  America emerged the undisputed victor from the titanic struggle between the two great twentieth-century empires, but Fukuyama was wrong: history did not end. The fateful wartime meeting of US president and Arab monarch aboard the USS Quincy had triggered a series of events that would lead fifteen fanatics obsessed with the American ‘occupation’ of their Saudi homeland to murderous martyrdom on 9/11. The American response demonstrated the bipolarity that is fundamental to America’s imperial world view: Bush II announced to the rest of the world that ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’ Invading Iraq became part of the ‘war on terror’ just as invading Grenada had been part of the ‘war on communism’. The one demonstrated the power of the United States to those who dared to attack the World Trade Centre; the other responded similarly to the attack on the marine barracks in Beirut.

  George Santayana, paraphrasing Edmund Burke, claimed that ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ It is a maxim repeated so often that it has become conventional wisdom. And yet history never repeats itself exactly. There are parallels between the invasions of Canada, Grenada and Iraq, but there are far more differences. The early Puritans sending mercenaries to murder the natives of Mystic are not totally dissimilar from twentieth-century Americans sending their air force to ‘bomb Vietnam back into the stone age’ or wreak ‘shock and awe’ on the citizens of Baghdad – but they are not identical. More importantly there is no causal link. It is no more logical to say that the United States invaded Afghanistan ‘because’ it had previously invaded countries like Mexico or the Philippines than it would be to say that Afghanistan was invaded by America ‘because’ it had previously been invaded by Britain and Russia. Historical parallels are matters of subjective perception, not undisputed fact. The apparent repetitions in history say as much about how history comes to be written as about the events themselves. Santayana also said, more originally, ‘History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.’

  The history of the American empire is more subjective than most histories because it is not even an established fact that there is or ever has been an American empire. Nevertheless much of the twentieth century can be characterised as a Tale of Two Empires, and by the end of the century one stood alone. The Russian empire had disappeared from the map – but its ideology lingered on: President Putin publicly lamented the break-up of the USSR, his government continued to act as if it were an imperial power, a colonial war dragged on in Chechnya, and in everyday language the lost colonies were termed the ‘near abroad’ to differentiate them from the real abroad. In trying to re-establish Russian imperial authority in the Caucasus and elsewhere, Russia now seems to be following just that policy of ‘determined opportunism’ that America followed in establishing its own empire.

  The ideologies that colour perceptions may arise from history, but they do not change in step with historical realities. The leaders of Britain and France continued to strut the world stage long after Suez punctured their imperial dreams, convinced that the trappings of yesteryear guaranteed them starring roles. In the United States, as in Russia, the ideology of empire continued to evolve while at its core remaining unchanged. It is this imperial ideology – unspoken because unconscious – that has guided the American nation from Roanoke to Baghdad.

  American Democracy

  Lenin and Stalin claimed to have a vision of a community of nations bound together not by force but by a common ideology: communism. They failed to achieve this vision. Many of America’s Founding Fathers proclaimed a similar vision of a world united by a common ideology: democracy. At least within the American hegemon they succeeded. The American empire is bound together by economic ties and military alliances, but abo
ve all by this common ideology.

  Right from its inception ideology was uniquely important to the American empire. The Russian people have a common Slavic ethnicity, a unique language, centuries of imperial history, and a territory whose borders may have been mobile but have always been relatively clear. The United States was born a melting pot with virtually no history and a borrowed language. Above all it had no sense of its territory. The Founding Fathers were agreed that their vision went far beyond the boundaries of the existing thirteen colonies – one of the reasons for the American Rebellion itself was the attempt by George III to limit colonial expansion – but how far beyond? The Ohio Valley? The Mississippi? The Canadian colonies? The Pacific? Or even further? With no instinctive patriotism linked to race or place, there evolved a patriotism linked to ideals. American greatness derived from American democracy. America deserved its empire not because Americans were superior to everyone else but because their form of government was superior. The global success of the United States rests in large part on its ability to convince itself and its followers around the world that Fukuyama was right to proclaim that democracy is ‘the final form of human government’.