For a Rapprochement with Russia...

... If Not Quite the One We’re Getting

1.

Anglosphere adepts of a certain strain of online Kremlinology will already know of the common division of the world, among some Russian nationalist intellectuals, into the “thalassocratic” empire of the Anglo-Americans, and the “tellurocratic” one of the Russians. This geopolitical model can be criticized from many angles, but one important thing that has generally been overlooked is that the division it describes is in no way static or eternal.

Until the era of global navigation, Western Europe was no more thalassocratic than was any steppe-dwelling polity. These steppe polities in fact did much to shape the languages, genetics, technology, and statecraft of the West. The countries today making up the European Union, that is, were significantly shaped by successive waves of steppe peoples arriving on this continent-sized peninsula, going back at least as far as the Early Bronze Age Indo-European migrations, but also including, obviously, the Great Migration Period of late antiquity. The Merovingian Empire that gave us the first hints of a polity on its way to becoming what we now call “France” modeled several of its features directly on Hunnic institutions. Some centuries later Charlemagne maintained a significant diplomatic correspondence with the Mongols, in the hope of joining forces and eventually defeating the Saracens to take back the Holy Land.

Subsequently the Hungarians and the Bulgarians arrived in Europe proper from the Eurasian steppe, and completed a process of national identity formation that a millennium later would make them obvious candidates for inclusion in the EU. The Turks, originating somewhere in what is today Mongolia, arrived around the same time in Anatolia, then took Constantinople from the Byzantines in 1453, then made it to the gates of Vienna 200 years later. As the battle over that quintessentially European city was taking place, the ducal and princely courts of the Holy Roman Empire were at the same time indulging a fashion for Ottoman-style ornamentations, including, notably, the prestige-conferring presence of “court Moors” in fezzes. With the retreat of the Turks from Vienna in 1686, the “Atlantic” model of what Europe is thought to be in its deepest essence finally gained ascendancy, so that today it is the only one most of us are even able to conceptualize.

But even after that pivotal moment in history Germany continued to straddle the divide between Eurasia and the Atlantic world. This split in German identity caused significant human suffering in both Western and Eastern Europe, reaching a crescendo by 1945, after which the split was managed, for a while, through a new political division between the DDR and the Bundesrepublik. According to Fritz Stern, Konrad Adenauer used to pull the blinds in his private coupé when he took the train through East Germany to Berlin, explaining that he was in no mood to “see Asia”. It’s been more than a generation now since the beginning of a new experiment, to make Germany an entirely Atlantic polity. The experiment appears to be failing, but this should not be surprising. During the last war the American GIs were in the habit of calling the Germans “Huns” — a last remnant of the broad awareness among German (e.g., G. W. Leibniz) and Scandinavian (e.g., Olaus Rudbeck) intellectuals in the early modern period that the Goths from whom they themselves descended really had been just another barbarian tribe alongside others from the Eurasian steppe — Isaac La Peyrère, for example, is not the only early modern author to describe Odin and the other gods of the Viking pantheon as “Asiatic”. So the Germans are Huns, but so are the French, if you look deeply enough. The only properly indigenous Western Europeans are the Basques, a last vestige of the Paleolithic settlement of this quasi-continent by anatomically modern humans.

It is only the gravitational pull of the European settlements in the Americas, beginning from the end of the 15th century, that could cause a person to see Europe as separable from Eurasia. But now the most significant power in the Americas, and indeed in the world, seems to want to end that centuries-long historical dynamic, and if it succeeds in doing so, it is hard to imagine any other outcome than that Europe will become Eurasian again.

2.

We have not yet touched upon another key part of the story of the rise of thalassocracy. At the same time as Western Europe was extracting untold wealth from the Americas, some of the beneficiaries of this extraction process, back home, were articulating peculiar new ideas about the irreducible dignity and equality of all men. Europe found a nice new arrangement, whereby it could now outsource the greater part of its brutality to another hemisphere, and in so doing concentrate its efforts back in the metropole on the construction of what would come to be called civilization.

After three centuries or so of wealth extraction, slavery, and genocide in the Americas, that hemisphere was practically Europeanized, in some parts more than others, to be sure, but more or less everywhere indexed or anchored to institutions, norms, and manners of expression imported from, or imposed by, European empires — from Patagonia to the Arctic, now, the lingue franche are Latinate or Germanic, the codes of law are English common law, Roman-Germanic civil law, etc. By 1790, a Prussian rationalist philosopher such as Immanuel Kant could suppose that this process of Europeanization —the universal spread of institutions facilitating the full flourishing of reason and duty in all human beings— would eventually extend to all corners of the globe, to the remotest islands of the South Seas, to every igloo and yurt.

But there remained a tertium quid — the world was not so neatly divided up into the civilized and the savage. The paradigmatic representative of the latter was the Native American, whom in the 18th century naturalists such as Buffon had succeeded in representing to Europeans as diminutive, neotenous, feeble, hairless, with shrunken genitals: all the qualities, in short, that boosted confidence in the prediction that these people’s days were numbered. But there were also the peoples of Eurasia, who did not seem likely to be assimilated, exterminated, or otherwise swallowed up so easily. China in particular represented a considerable difficulty, but being so far away, and in the Qing Dynasty mostly focused on maintaining regional hegemony, it was easy for the European imagination to slot it in the “to be dealt with later” category. Russia by contrast, or the Eurasian empire between the Western European peninsula and China, was another matter.

At the time Kant was writing, there had been almost a century of fitful rapprochement, beginning with Peter the Great’s Hollandophilia already in the 1690s, marked subsequently by the founding of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1725, Catherine the Great’s retention of Voltaire as her distance-working court philosopher, and so on. At all such moments, what we are witnessing is a conscious, top-down importation of Enlightenment. In the early years of the St. Petersburg Academy only about 10% of the members were ethnically Russian; the great majority were German, a good number of whom had been trained at the Lutheran University of Halle. Some decades later Catherine adorned herself in Voltairean bons mots practically as if they were Hermès scarves, all while surrounded by a population still ground down by a form of serfdom scarcely more comfortable than life in the silver mines of Potosí.

Imported Enlightenment is still Enlightenment… sort of. By the 1730s Vitus Bering’s wife Anna had succeeded in having a harpsichord delivered to her in the ostrog of Yakutsk, and it is reported to have been, upon arrival, only slightly out of tune. Over time the ethnic German scientists and erudites were joined by a much greater proportion of Russians, first at the St. Petersburg Academy, then, from 1755, at the Imperial Moscow University. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, Russia matured into a scientific powerhouse, often prioritizing scientific and technological innovation —as in the Soviet space program— over the provision of basic necessities.

And as with science and technology, so with the rest of culture. With no small irony, by the time the Soviet system collapsed, Russia had become the world’s last great bastion of 19th century bourgeois values, with no small admixture of medieval chivalry and romanticism to boot. In my early adulthood the only people I had ever met who could sit down at a piano and play a Beethoven sonata, who took it for granted that a man should always help a woman to put on her coat, who found it normal to dress their little boys in sailor suits — all of them came from the Eastern Bloc. Resolutely heteronormative, unaffected by the Western neopagan revolution of the 1960s, deeply traumatized by the political terrors of the 20th century and completely unfamiliar with the concept of “seeking counseling”: the Russians even of the most recent fin-de-siècle represented a weird-ass time-capsule filled with preoccupations first formed in the previous centuries of wealth accumulation in the Atlantic world, but then largely forgotten within the thalassocratic realms themselves.

When I was studying in Moscow in the early 1990s, our program’s American organizers offered a home-stay program as an alternative to the Moscow State dormitories. Upon arrival I immediately fell in love with an American on our program — she was much older, thirty or so, had spent her twenties in the Baltimore punk scene, and was just the pinnacle of everything I thought of as cool at the time. But the organizers somehow strong-armed me into at least giving the home-stay alternative a try. And so one afternoon a gruff man in a shiny track-suit came and picked me up in his lime-green Zhiguli, and explained he was taking me not to his but to his daughter’s apartment. He practically pushed me out of the car and peeled away, and so I took the elevator up and I found the girl waiting with roses and champagne, and throw-pillows covered in hearts. She spoke a comically artificial English: “By the bye, I should so much enjoy going to the theater with you, though I do enjoy the cinema too, of course. Do you go in for Shakespeare? I’m partial to Strindberg, myself. Please, do have another buterbrod with herring roe.” And so on. I was horrified. I feigned a sudden illness and slinked right back across town to the only world I knew, and by the end of that same evening L*** and I were listening to the Pixies and drinking beer and smoking cigs — and at some point she began to sing along with Kim Deal and declared to me: “we’re chained”. What a lovely memory. Enough time has passed, by now, I think, for me to dispense with my usual anonymizations and to tell you that the family name of the girl, whose father had hoped to use this exchange program as a marital agency, was Tatur. I have not quite pinned down the etymology, but I am confident in saying that this girl’s ancestors were Turkic steppe-dwellers.

During that same sojourn I had the occasion briefly to make the acquaintance of Joanna Stingray, the legendary American woman who had done so much to popularize late-Soviet rock bands in the West, and who spearheaded the remarkable 1986 double-album compilation, Red Wave. Something always seemed a bit off about this effort to me. With the notable exception of Kino, headed up by the great Koryo-saram singer Viktor Tsoi, in general my sense was that Russian rock bands weren’t nearly as cool as we were all compelled to pretend they were. I recall a few punk shows in Leningrad in 1990 — by far the most memorable thing about them were the dour security officers lined up in uniform along the walls.

There was something hopelessly paternalistic about the effort of Westerners to foster this art-form in a political and historical context where it could not possibly have had the same meaning, and where it consistently failed to show any of the spark of genius that had been transduced down from Little Richard through Frank Black. But we went along with it, much for the same paternalistic reasons, I think now, that we went along with the reigning ideology of Western economists like Jeffrey Sachs, who at the time were beating the drum of shock-therapy through rapid privatization — exactly the process that facilitated Putin’s rise and led the world, by 2022, to the brink of cataclysm.

3.

The ethnogenesis of the Muscovites was a multilayered and centuries-long process. The historical forces that led me to that rose-bestrewn lair include such notable moments as the Mongol invasion of 1238 (successful), and the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 (militarily unsuccessful, but culturally significant, leaving behind such delicacies as the торт Наполеон, which Mademoiselle Tatur may well have attempted to serve me). Between the early 1990s and today, however, that strange hybrid of imported Enlightenment and enduring steppe-shaped otherness seems, as far as I can tell, finally to have gone extinct.

I have not been to Russia since 2014, but as regular readers will know I spend an unusual amount of time consuming Russian media. Or, let me rephrase that: I spend an unusual amount of time consuming media produced within the political boundaries of the Russian Federation, but not produced by Russian state-media agencies, and not in Russian at all. I have been learning the Sakha language, spoken in the region of Northeastern Siberia commonly known as Yakutia, since 2018. Most of the available Sakha-language materials on YouTube and elsewhere are resolutely apolitical, concerned rather with gardening, fishing, home renovation. There are social-media personalities whom I have listened to, or studied under, long enough to have developed classic “parasocial” feelings toward them — the peppy lifestyle-vlogger and entrepreneurial “coach” Sandaara Kulakovskaya, the earnest and nerdy bookworm Olga Pavlova, the genial interviewer known as Sakhastas. It’s strange to be immersed in their worlds. None of what they care about would have come onto my radar at all had I not needed them for my own language-learning purposes. But over time I have come to understand that my sustained attention to them, to the things that are important to them, to their manner of self-expression, has inadvertently given me a special sort of access, of the sort few Westerners have, to the mundane reality of Russia in the 21st century. And I’m here to tell you: it’s almost certainly not what you think it is.

One does of course see a militarized culture bursting through the cracks in all these content-producers’ efforts at normalcy. I’ve seen more than a few young Yakuts who are obviously gay but can’t admit it. The young men always sit upright, feet wide apart, never cross-legged, in respect or fear of some unspoken code of masculinity — manspreading as top-down policy rather than as bottom-up transgression. There is far too much talk of marriage and family. But in truth I do not think the militarism and the family values are any more apparent than what I could probably find if I were to do a deep dive into, say, the social-media world of undergrads at a Midwestern state university with an active ROTC program (something I’ve never considered doing until now — perhaps I would if Midwesterners spoke a language I did not already know). In all, these are outstandingly normal people, using social media for exactly the same unexceptional reasons you find anywhere else.

Their familiarity, moreover, I want to say, is nothing like Catherine the Great’s Enlightenment-inspired accessorizing; it is not like the sailor-suits on the baby boys; not like the Beethoven sonatas; not like the shoelaces 1980s Soviet rockers wore around their heads in cargo-cult imitation of hippie headbands; and neither is it like Tanya Tatur’s ridiculous performance of some finishing-school idea of “culture”. It’s just content producers producing content, as one does, in the 21st century.

Don’t you see what I’m saying now? I have been harping for a while on the idea that real world-historical transformations are of such a nature that they generally succeed even when their original boosters appear to have failed. Napoleon was defeated, first in Russia then decisively at Waterloo, but he left his desserts and his bureaucracies spread across the very realms that vanquished him. Elon Musk is almost certainly going to get strung up by his heels sooner or later, but the idea that government is something principally seen to by “tech support”, as his t-shirt has recently identified him, is not going to go away. And similarly, notwithstanding the enduring political divide, the technological revolution of the past 15-20 years has left us with a shared global culture, with the same manners, the same hopes and dreams, the same vain longing for virality. The rare media clips I have been able to watch of Yakut collective-farm workers from the Soviet period give me a glimpse into a world that is as far from mine as any you might find deep in the Amazon rainforest. Sandaara Kulakovskaya is as familiar as Martha Stewart.

We still have Putinism to contend with as a political and military force, but the Homo Sovieticus has gone quite extinct, and with him the last trace, at the global scale, of what might be called a heterogeneity of affect and aspiration. In spite of appearances, I am inclined to say, the internet is in fact in the process of destroying the Westphalian order, for better or worse, built as it was on the presumption of absolute and irreducible differences of essence from one sovereign national territory to another. This sounds paradoxical or ill-informed, I know, since the internet is also feverishly stoking geopolitical conflict for the moment. But increasingly I’m inclined to think that’s not the real story of what’s happening in the present moment. Even the recent land grabs, real and threatened (Ukraine, Greenland, Taiwan), which under a certain light look like classic 19th-century Great Game maneuvers, seem to me sometimes to lack the “main event” gravity they are purported to have, especially by the US Democrats, as well as the occasional surviving Neocon, who have convinced themselves to talk in practically sacral terms about the inviolability of the lines on the political map of the world — even when those lines were only recently redrawn, indeed within what is for many of us living memory.

I do not want to open the door to neighbors invading neighbors with impunity. But it does seem to me a bit worrisome when so many people are swayed by the monotonous reasoning of a one-trick pony like Bret Stephens, for whom the only two possible historical actors one might model one’s own conduct on today are the craven Neville Chamberlain or the courageous Winston Churchill. There are other people in the past too! Some of them made peace with one another by shifting the territorial boundaries between their respective realms, and did so without incurring accusations of ignominy. There is no iron law of history that says that if you do not repel an aggressor from the territory they have just seized, then they will go on to seize more. There are no iron laws of history at all, in fact, and anyone who pretends there are is a fool. You deal with each new circumstance as it arises, and you try to minimize death and suffering. That’s all there is to it.

It seems to me that the defense of political boundaries is not ever worth a single human life. It seems to me, likewise, that it is no argument for forcing young men to fight and die for a return to status-quo-ante boundaries —as for example ethnic Sakha conscripts born and raised 6,000 kilometers from Donetsk—, that the other guy started it. It seems to me that this is a fortiori the case when anyway the real prize in 21st century global conflict, the thing that will increasingly confer power, is not territorial domination at all, but technological supremacy. And so I find myself increasingly sympathetic to a view that is still considered a gross impiety and a disdain for basic human rights, but that I see as the most rational and harm-minimizing response to conflict — on which, namely, managed, orderly, humane population resettlement is far preferable (not to mention far cheaper) than fighting and dying over narrow tracts of soil. Until 2022, I had sincerely come to think that we would never see such fighting in Europe again. It is still my hope that what we’re seeing now is only a final swan-song, a last flare-up of the old way of doing things, and one that is happening simultaneously with a growing awareness that the real story of the present era is not a sharpening of the division between groups of people each essentially rooted to its own territory, but a general uniformization, and integration of the ways of being human, across the thalassocratic and tellurocratic dominions.

4.

I’m probably wrong. I know all the eggheads in early 1914 were also saying that the world was just too integrated now to make world war a real option. And yet, just as one can be a historical actor without being either a Chamberlain or a Churchill, one can live, now, in a historical reality that is neither 1914 nor 1939.

I recall in my first job, at a land-grant university in Ohio, one of my colleagues had recently run for state governor on the Lyndon Larouche ticket, and managed to get a robust 0.45% or so of the votes. Like Larouche himself, my colleague loved G. W. Leibniz, and suspected Queen Elizabeth and the other Hannoverian usurpers of all sorts of nefarious deeds. Sometimes he and a few of his fellow partisans would sit at a little folding card-table just off campus, with some signs hastily scrawled with felt-tip pens, speaking of the urgency of shifting our alliances and allegiances away from Great Britain, and towards Russia. A recurring obsession of theirs was the construction of a high-speed rail across the Bering Strait. I shrugged and looked the other way whenever I saw them, and rued my fate at having ended up in such a podunk place with such nutters as my peers.

Why, I now wonder, is that fringe idea, of a new Russian-American alliance, starting, sort of, to become a real possibility? Was Larouche a visionary? As far as I can tell, to the extent that there is any logic at all to what Trump is doing with his chaotic realignment, it is this: he wants radically to reshape global politics in order to form a maximally large coalition of states that can prevent China from rising to world domination. He is acting like an enemy against traditional allies, but only in the aim of bending them to a new super-alliance, which will include, if things go right, all of the Americas, and Europe, and Russia, and Japan, and India, against the one truly formidable obstacle to continued American domination. In this respect the shift could be at least something like the US-Soviet alliance during the last world war, except that China is in so many respects disanalogous to Nazi Germany, and at least for now has not invaded any neighbors (not counting the decades-long occupation of Tibet, and of what I insist, Turcophile that I am, on calling East Turkestan).

This is the best sense I can make of what might be going on, which really isn’t saying much. It is much more likely that Trump, as usual, is just coming up with new plot twists out of an instinctive sense of what makes, as he sometimes puts it, “good TV”. And of course it would also be good TV, perhaps even better TV, if we were suddenly to lurch in the opposite direction again. Now that my own country is purportedly friends with Russia again, will I be heading off to Yakutsk anytime soon for another language-immersion home-stay? Hell no! This newly emerging rapprochement smells far too fishy, and no reasonable person could possibly expect it to hold, or to maintain its pretense of holding, long enough to pass through Siberia in full confidence that they might avoid being detained and held for ransom on trumped-up charges.

And yet, am I wrong for thinking it’s a start? For entertaining some small hope that out of this chaos the arrow of history might be redirected somewhere other than down the path of ever-sharpening antagonism, which was the only path the Democrats had convinced us it was legitimate so much as to consider? I think back to those poorly scrawled signs of the Laroucheans, and as I lie awake at night worrying about the future, I find myself returning for the n-th time to scenes of Vladivostok on Google Street View, and thinking: my, yes, that is a beautiful city. There is no reason why it should not be a mirror-image of Seattle within the next few decades, with all the lore and mystique that we Americans are so good at attaching to our cities. Perhaps it will be home, too, in time, to a home-grown music scene that will change the world. Perhaps someday I will take a high-speed train from the one city to the other.

I don’t know if we’ll ever get there, but I suspect that if we do, it will be because more people learn to value human life over soil, and to be more creative in devising strategies for avoiding war than the terrible piety of American liberal hawkism permitted us to be, when, even at risk of cataclysmic escalation, so much as to suggest that all this death is just not worth it was to risk being mocked and denounced as capitulating to the aggressor. Putin is a nasty fucker, who seems slowly to be morphing into some sort of live-action version of Alice the Goon; Trump is a mafioso and a blowhard. And yet: friendship between the two multinational states these two men pretend to rule —a friendship of the sort US Democrats seem to have trained themselves to rule out a priori— will, if it ever works out, be a wonderful thing for the world, and something I will have been awaiting for most of my life.

We are already, as I’ve been attempting to convey, and as my favorite social-media personalities from Yakutia remind me every day, essentially the same — in part because there really is such a thing as universal human nature underlying cultural diversity, in part because our most recent technological revolution has, for better or worse, largely bulldozed cultural difference and delivered a Great Leap Forward for universalism. You’d never know this, though, if all you knew about Russia came from its portrayal in mainstream Western media, which systematically reduces the people to their regime, and seeks to convince us that nothing of note is going on in that great portion of the world’s land mass other than the despicable actions of its political leaders.

5.

By the bye, I am ever so fond of cinema. Do you go in for musicals? Did you know Sergeï Eisenstein was inspired by Disney’s Fantasia (1940) when he made Part Two of Ivan the Terrible (1946), with an original musical score by Prokofiev? I say, don’t be shy, do have another helping of aspic, unless you’re a “sweet-tooth” like me. Here, have a bon-bon — look, it’s in the shape of a little heart! Do you enjoy reading Jack London? Come now, don’t sulk like that. Be a gentleman! Shall I play some Chopin? Truly, it is such a pleasure to spend some time with you!

—JSR, Paris