Constructing Region through the Past

171 Ab Imperio, 1/2004 Constructing Region through the Past Конструируя регион через прошлое Комментарии / Comments Geoffrey HOSKING Von Hagen’s paper is erudite, lively and innovative. It clearly delineates controversies and attempts to show how contemporary scholarship is moving beyond them in new directions. All the same, I have my doubts about whether his “anti-paradigm” has much tangible content. There is no question that the concept of “Eurasia” is a provocative one, which enables us to take on board ideas analogous to those suggested by Edward Said, and to apply them to the whole former Soviet space, indeed more widely. Unlike the Russia/Orient or the “modernisation” paradigms, however, the Eurasian one does not actually suggest models of society in a way that enables us to ask fruitful questions. If some journals are now using the term “Eurasia”, that is often because they need a term to replace the defunct Soviet Union, not because it actually suggests a new paradigm. “Eurasia” is a geopolitical concept, and it makes sense in terms of the rather abstract geo-political models of thinkers like McKinder and Haushofer, developed in the 1990s by Dugin and Panarin. There is no “Eurasian” model of society , the economy or culture. The Eurasianists of the 1920s and 1930s were in favour of authoritarian politics, but offered few practical suggestions about how it should work. In their views on culture and religion there was a contradiction: they extolled the religious tolerance and syncretism of the Mongols, but most of them professed Orthodoxy in a manner which did not suggest tolerance. They had particular difficulty in coping with Islam, which in theory they should have favoured. Perhaps, though, the idea of Eurasia could be expanded to enable us to tackle what I believe to be one of the great unsolved problems facing historians of Russia/the USSR. That is the question of how social cohesion was 172 Комментарии / Comments generated. After all, we have before us the remarkable story of an empire which persisted in one form or another for four centuries or more – far longer than the British Empire in either of its hypostases – despite having a very difficult climate and minimal access to the world’s oceans. Its resources, of course, were abundant but they were very difficult to mobilise. Some effective model of social cohesion must have been at work to enable this empire to survive for so long. In my Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 I explored the consequences of Russia becoming an empire rather than a nation. It could be argued that I gave too much attention to what Russia was not rather than to what it actually was. I tried to redress the balance somewhat in Russia and the Russians, which locates the sources of Russian social solidarity in (i) a strong state, with a powerful and effective symbolism, and (ii) strong local communities, organised on the basis of krugovaia poruka (joint responsibility ). Mediation between them was conducted not by institutions on the basis of law, but rather by influential individuals on the basis of their capacity to exercise power and provide benefits for their subordinates. For some two and a half centuries one aspect of this system was known as “serfdom”; in recent years we have been learning more about serfdom as part of a political , social and economic system which provided benefits for its members as well as exacting burdens from them. We have also seen how aspects of it were reproduced in the Soviet system. Such a system made it easy for the authorities to extract resources from local communities, notably taxes and recruits. Because the members of such communities were highly inter-dependent, it also encouraged close mutual observation and the denunciation of the lazy, improvident or eccentric . But all the same krugovaia poruka also provided appreciable benefits for the members of those communities: sociability, grass roots input into local decision-making, mutual aid at times of need (pomochi). Such a system also made it relatively easy to absorb non-Russian peoples, most of whom had some version of joint responsibility already, which could easily be plugged into the hierarchical network which was the Russian Empire. Joint responsibility is far from being peculiar...