Historical Diffidence: A New Look at an Old Russian Debate

We cannot remain in our present state of chaos—that is clear; but in order to consciously escape from it, we need to resolve another question: is the European path of development the only possible and inevitable one, so that each people, wherever it lives, whoever its ancestors may have been, must pass along it, just as an infant must cut its first teeth . . . ? Or is this path itself a particular instance of development, a part of the universal human canvas which was generated and shaped under particular, individual influences . . . ? And in this case wouldn't it be strange for us now to repeat the whole long metamorphosis of Western history, knowing in advance le secret de la comédie . . . ?

—Alexander Herzen

For many observers in Europe and the United States, the collapse of Soviet communism signified the end of a pernicious delusion: that Russia was a unique cultural entity, destined to forge its own distinctive path through history. In a book that was much discussed on its publication in 1999, Martin Malia traces the notion of Russia's enigmatic uniqueness to myths fostered by the romantics' cult of national distinctiveness, which led Russian radical populists and conservative Slavophiles alike to believe that their country's destiny was to create a form of society that would be a model for the rest of humanity. Malia notes that the same notion led many Western intellectuals, disillusioned with the positivist and utilitarian values of bourgeois democracies, to idealize bolshevism—a movement presented by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West as the expression of a "young" culture that would regenerate the world.

The truth, Malia contends, is more prosaic. Until the bolshevik coup, Russian development "tended in the same direction and was governed by the same laws as in the West. Like all other modern nations, Russia was moving from absolutism to some form of liberalism or democracy." ¹ Malia interprets the Soviet period as a mere temporary interruption of this process, which is leading Russia ineluctably to convergence with more advanced neighbors to her west. He reflects an influential strand of American liberal thinking when he confidently predicts that, however painful the process, Russia's economy will eventually come into line with other market democracies and that the benefits of prosperity, civil freedoms, and a pluralistic culture will follow.

Critics of this variety of optimistic liberalism have pointed out that its proclamation of the "end of ideology" is itself the expression of a committed ideological stance. David Joravsky accuses such liberals of self-deception, "clinging to a totalistic vision, while condemning the totalitarian kind." Are we not obsessed, Joravsky asks, with a historical norm or with "the myth of such a norm set by 'the West'?" ² Malia's claim that Russia has no choice but to become a "normal" European power seems to rest less on empirical evidence than on teleological assumptions that (like Marxist historical determinism) are rooted in the European Enlightenment's faith that humanity is progressing toward a single form of society in which rationality and justice will be optimally combined. ³ Some Americans believe this goal to be close at hand. "The twenty-first century will be based on American principles"—the historian Stephen Cohen cites this comment, by Condoleezza Rice, now U.S. national security adviser, as an instance of the missionary faith that has led U.S. policymakers into "a virtual crusade to transform post-Communist Russia into some facsimile of the American democratic and capitalist system." From the beginning of the 1990s, "advisers" spread across Russia and, supported by influential opinionmakers back home, worked to prevent the country from wandering off (in the words of one media supporter of the crusade) on "a strange, ambivalent path of its own confused devising"; they backed Yeltsin's corrupt appointees and ignored less destructive and costly alternatives to his policies, such as a mixed economy. ⁴

In March 1999, Malia...