History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0490/04901.txt

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$Unique_ID{how04901}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{World Civilizations: The World Shrinks, 1450-1750
Analysis And Conclusion}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Stearns, Peter N.;Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{russia
russian
west
century
empire
europe
russia's
european
political
western}
$Date{1992}
$Log{}
Title:       World Civilizations: The World Shrinks, 1450-1750
Book:        Chapter 24: The Rise of Russia
Author:      Stearns, Peter N.;Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.
Date:        1992

Analysis And Conclusion

Analysis: Russian History And The Cold War

     It is always difficult fully to appreciate traditions other than our own.
It is hard to grasp the meanings of ideas and habits that differ from what
we're used to, and harder still, in most cases, not to find the differences we
do grasp as somehow inferior. Thus China, in not separating state and society
as we in the West deem proper, can be criticized for bureaucratic
heavy-handedness and lack of innovation - despite the fact that during long
historical periods the Chinese record of initiatives and flexibility is
considerable.

     Consideration of Russian history amplifies the normal problems of
interpreting distinctiveness, for Russians can easily be seen not only as
different from us in the West, but also as particularly backward and hostile.
Since 1947, and to an extent since Russia's communist revolution in 1917, many
Westerners have regarded Russia as an overwhelming threat to world peace and
independence. In 1947 a "cold war" arose that pitted the Soviet Union and its
East European allies in a tense, militarized competition with the West,
particularly with the United States. Diplomatic alliances and arms races stood
at the core of this competition, but there were also rivalries in economic
growth rates, in international sports, and in the arts. While the tensest
cold-war mood eased after the 1950s, and lightened still further after the
mid-1980s, it continues to affect mutual judgments between Russia and the
West.

     These judgments can easily spill over into historical interpretation.
Recent rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union might make it
comforting to see Russia as traditionally backward, doomed always to lag
behind the West. This backwardness judgment picks up earlier Western ideas,
dating from before the cold war, that reflected the West's pride in its
commercial superiority. Westerners have long seen Russia as underdeveloped, by
the West's own standards. Backwardness judgments were also encouraged by a
tendency among some Westernized Russians to hold up foreign standards and
condemn their own society on this basis.

     The cold-war legacy also promotes a more specific tendency toward
oversimplification of the Russian past, as if it were locked into institutions
and habits different from those in the West and predictive of what many
Westerners dislike about what they understand to be Soviet communism. Thus
Russians may be dismissed in cold-war commentary as almost inherently docile
to authority or suspiciously closed-minded. Important features of Russian
history, such as the absence of a Western-style church-state separation, may
be magnified into generalizations about the unendingly authoritarian qualities
of Russian government.

     There are three controls for these kinds of facile generalizations, none
of which oversimplifies in the other direction by ignoring the real
differences in traditions - the fact that Russia did participate in a
civilization distinct from that of the West - that did exist. The first check
on simplistic characterizations of the Russian past involves a recognition of
diversity and tension. Russia was not a simple society. It was autocratic in
government form during the early modern centuries, but it also had a strong
popular protest tradition that demonstrated an ability to shake off deference
to authority. Russians did manifest some suspicions of foreign influences, but
they were also open to selective imitation; again, the cultural qualities were
(and remain) complex. Diversity led to many outright disagreements between
Westernizers and their opponents, peasants and landlords, conservatives and
radicals.

     Secondly, Russia could and did change. The powers of tsarist autocrats
varied over time. Reformist interests oscillated, rising and falling depending
on the personality of the tsar and the larger social context. Russia after
Peter the Great was quite different, culturally and economically, from its
17th-century predecessor. The capacity to change would flower again in the
19th century, as part of Russia's successful industrialization, and of course
abundantly in the revolutionary era after 1920. Russia's capacity to change
blossomed again after 1985. Since the 15th century Russia has probably been
one of the more adaptable of the world's societies, without, however, seeking
to become thoroughly Western.

     Finally, Russia's relationship to the West has not been constant. The
movement of Byzantine influence into Russia from the 9th century onward set a
base largely separate from the West. But new and abundant contacts opened up
from the late 15th century onward. Many Westerners easily accepted Russia as
part of a common cultural and political tradition by the 18th century, because
of shared Enlightenment beliefs at the elite level and also because of
parallel developments in government. Russian absolutists had much in common
with counterparts in France and Prussia. Historical patterns in the 19th
century tended to reemphasize some distance, despite participation in a common
diplomatic framework. Russian politics, like Russian society earlier, did not
march to the Western drum at this point. The nature as well as the extent of
Russian-Western distinctions were not constant, for the two civilizations had
important kinship. Even in the late 20th century some leading West European
conservatives, no friends to communism, argued that Russia was more fully a
part of a real European tradition than was the brash, consumer-minded United
States.

     Russian history, in sum, overlaps Western history without merging with
it. Its distinctiveness should not be confused with unusual changelessness.
Twentieth-century judgments that try to oversimplify Russia's past to argue
that a particularly feared regime, such as the Stalinist police state, is an
inevitable expression of Russianness risk being as silly as any other
culturally determinist approach that fails to allow either for change or for
the diversities of the past itself.

Conclusion: Russia And Eastern Europe

     Russian history did not describe the whole of eastern Europe after the
15th century, though Russia's expansion, particularly its final acquisition of
much of Poland, did merge much of the larger region into the Russian embrace.
Regions west of Russia continued nevertheless to form something of a
fluctuating borderland between West European and East European influences,
aside from the Balkan lands that remained part of the Ottoman Empire. Even in
this last case, by the 18th century growing trade with the West sparked some
new cultural exchange, as Greek merchants, for example, picked up some
Enlightenment ideas.

     Areas such as present-day Poland or Czechoslovakia were more fully a part
of the Western cultural orbit than was Russia, even by the 18th century. Thus
a Polish scientist such as Copernicus participated early on in fundamental
discoveries in what became the scientific revolution. Western currents such as
the Reformation also echoed in parts of east-central Europe such as Hungary.

     It was true that the smaller East European nationalities tended to lose
political autonomy during the early modern era. Hungary, freed from the Turks,
became part of the German-dominated Habsburg Empire. This empire also took
over Czechoslovakia (then called Bohemia). Prussian territory pushed eastward
into Polish lands. These developments meant also that much of eastern Europe
even outside of Russia was described by the trends of absolute monarchy,
largely immune to the political diversities and the new political theories
current in the West at the same time.

     The decline of Poland was particularly striking. In 1500 Poland, formed
in 1386 by a union of the regional kingdoms of Poland and Lithuania, was the
largest state in eastern Europe aside from Russia. Polish cultural life,
linked through shared Roman Catholicism with the West, flourished in the 16th
century. By 1600, however, economic and political setbacks mounted. Polish
aristocrats, charged with electing the king, began deliberately to choose weak
figures. The central government became powerless, while aristocrats ran
roughshod over impoverished peasants. As in Russia, urban centers, and thus a
merchant class, were lacking. The aristocratic parliament vetoed any reform
efforts. As Polish power dwindled, it became ripe for the division by Prussia,
the Habsburgs, and particularly Russia, which erased it as an independent
country.

     Separate cultures survived in the East European borderlands, even if
political independence did not. Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and the southern
Slavs under Turkish rule preserved prior religion, language, and folkways,
refusing assimilation into the larger empires that had swallowed them up.

     At the same time, however, eastern Europe shared with Russia key social
and economic patterns that distinguished the region as a whole from western
Europe. The landed aristocracy loomed large. Most agriculture was controlled
by large estates, with rigid serfdom providing the labor in a pattern
pervasive from Prussia eastward through the Russian steppes and southward
through Hungary and the Balkans. Western merchants gained increasing roles in
eastern Europe because a native commercial class and a significant urban
culture were largely absent - stronger in some cases than in Russia but far
weaker than in the West.

     Despite vital diversities, then, something of an East European economy
had emerged by the 18th century that would significantly shape subsequent
political and social change, despite internal political and cultural
boundaries. For its part, Russia had become more than an East European power.
Its achievement of empire was one of the key developments of the centuries
after 1500. Here, Russia deserves comparison not so much with the West, whose
imperial attainments were rather different, but with the other great landed
empires of the period. Like the Mughals or Ottomans, Russia established rule
through its armies. Also like these empires, the Russian Empire embraced a
number of diverse, indeed potentially conflicting cultures. Expansion into
Siberia brought contact with relatively small hunting-and-gathering groups.
The movement into southern and central Asia gained Russia its large Muslim
minority and a number of distinct racial groups. Fewer Russians moved into
central Asia than into Siberia, a fact that sustained great diversity within
this multinational empire. Finally, penetration farther into Europe produced
control over several different Slavic minorities and some Germans. Many of
these minorities were Catholic, not Orthodox Christian.

     Russia's push westward also brought it a large Jewish population. Jews,
excluded from Russia for religious reasons until the 18th century, were
finally admitted as Russia pushed West. Catherine promised some tolerance but,
bowing to Christian prejudices, did not allow Jews in key centers such as
Moscow. Here, as in other cases, Russia's diversity suggested tensions for the
future. Jews did fan out into many other parts of Russia, becoming an
important, though often deeply resented, minority element of the multinational
empire.

     The multicultural character of the new empire proved a lasting feature.
Yet Russia's fate obviously differed from that of other such empires in the
early modern period, such as the Ottomans or the Mughals. The Russian Empire
lasted longer, its vigor lasted longer still. The ethnic Russian presence was
larger, for Ottomans and Mughals ruled over a majority of people from other
cultures (the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire) or religions (the Hindus in the
Mughal realm). Ethnic Russians with their high birthrate formed a larger
percentage of the empire's total population. Russia also actively pushed
pioneer settlements, which brought Russian presence, and in some cases
dominance, in many of the new regions. Economic development, for all its
hesitations, was also backed more vigorously, which gave the new empire some
coherence and no small energy. Russia, in sum, became not only the new boy on
the imperial block during the centuries after 1500, but one of history's
unusual imperial success stories - still going strong, though much changed, at
least until the end of the 20th century.

     The early modern period was obviously a crucial formative era for Russia
and for its role in Asia and Europe, despite important traditions from before
the Mongol invasions. Tensions and ambiguities in Russia's contacts with the
West, created in this period, continue to define Russian society. Questions
raised by a multinational empire of the sort Russia so successfully created in
this same period rose again to haunt the Russian state at the end of the 20th
century. Issues of economic development, and whether or not to define it in
strictly Russian terms, were recast in the 20th century, but they retained
some of the overtones initially imparted by Peter the Great. Because of the
importance Russia also began to acquire in world affairs in the early modern
period, Russian questions could easily become issues affecting many other
societies around the world.