1847
“Poshlost” is a wonderful Russian word, untranslatable because of its capacity to signify so many things at once: banality, crassness, cheesiness, crudeness, the whole spectrum of the trivially absurd and the absurdly trivial. The original master of “poshlost” was the 19th century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol whose works featured the absurdity and horror of day to day life among the lower classes and petty bureaucrats. Gogol’s contemporaries inferred from his writing that he had a reformist tendency.
But near the end of his life in 1847 Gogol wrote a book that made it clear he was a political conservative––an opponent of applying Western values to Russia and a supporter of traditional Russian autocracy as imposed by the Tsar, the Church, and the institution of serfdom.
Gogol’s book provoked a critical letter from a surprised and disheartened supporter, an influential radical named Belinsky. Here is an excerpt from Belinsky’s tightly censored letter (a young Dostoyevsky was almost executed for reading it aloud but was sent to Siberia instead.) My comments in bold.
“What [Russia] needs is…the awakening in the people of a sense of their human dignity lost for so many centuries amid dirt and refuse (the deprivations of Russians relative to the West is not new;) she needs rights and laws conforming not to the preaching of the church but to common sense and justice, and their strictest possible observance (i.e., democracy). Instead of which she presents the dire spectacle of a country where men traffic in men, without even having the excuse so insidiously exploited by the American plantation owners who claim that the Negro is not a man (we forget the similarities of Russian serfdom to American slavery; emancipation in both countrie, by law, if not by fact, occurred in the early 1860s)… a country where there are not only no guarantees for individuality, honor and property, but even no police order, and where there is nothing but vast corporations of official thieves and robbers of various descriptions (Kleptocracy).
1947
By 1947, the Tsar had been replaced by Stalin, and the creed of the Church had been replaced by the creed of Communism. With the Russian occupation of the Eastern European countries, the Russian Empire had never been larger or its victorious armies more potent.
1947 was the year that George Kennan published his famous article in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “X.” Kennan was the intellectual father of Containment, the approach to Russia in the Cold War that called for countering any further Russian expansion and patiently waiting for the many structural weaknesses of the Soviet system to cause its self-destruction. Even as early as 1947, Kennan believed that although Soviet power appeared to shine so brightly, the light it cast was like that of a decaying star, doomed to die.
Over four decades, American leaders mostly followed Kennan’s policy of containment and the West won the Cold War. Arguably, it was the greatest foreign policy achievement in all of American history.
After the Soviet Union fell apart, a weakened Russia survived. There was a tragic continuity from Tsarist Autocracy to Communist dictatorship to kleptocratic absolute rule by Putin. All of those regimes ruled with absolute and brutal power, were intolerant of any criticism or rival faction, and were deeply suspicious, if not paranoid, about the West.
The paragraph below from Kennan’s 1947 “X” article is worth studying in light of the present crisis (the entire article is worth reading.) The bolding is mine.
“…it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. It is important to note, however, that such a policy has nothing to do with outward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward "toughness." While the Kremlin is basically flexible in its reaction to political realities, it is by no means unamenable to considerations of prestige. Like almost any other government, it can be placed by tactless and threatening gestures in a position where it cannot afford to yield even though this might be dictated by its sense of realism. The Russian leaders are keen judges of human psychology, and as such they are highly conscious that loss of temper and of self-control is never a source of strength in political affairs. They are quick to exploit such evidences of weakness. For these reasons, it is a sine qua non of successful dealing with Russia that the foreign government in question should remain at all times cool and collected and that its demands on Russian policy should be put forward in such a manner as to leave the way open for a compliance not too detrimental to Russian prestige.”
Kennan was a harsh judge of Soviet rulers. However, he was an idealist about the Russian people. He recognized their great talents and their great potential. He mourned the terrible hardships they had endured under the Tsars and the Communists.
In the 1990s, Kennan was alive to see the triumphant end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. He hoped that at long last the Russian people might be brought into a true partnership with the West.
But NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders in the 1990s dashed his hopes.
As Kennan wrote in the NY Times in 1997,
“…expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
Kennan died in 2005. I don’t think it is speaking ill of the dead to imagine him saying, “I told you so.”
“Poshlost,” Gogol and Belinsky in 1847, Kennan in 1947, the Continuity of Russian History
Apropos to Kennan's 1997 NYT article is Mearsheimer's recent article in The New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine
This tragedy has now morphed into a US led and financed coalition of the US vs Russia. And, borrowing from Chomsky, we are fighting it to the last Ukranian. Let's hope that it does not spin further out of control, and that The Law of Unintended Consequences does not prevail.
Yes, American / Western hubris at the end of the Cold War was reminiscent of the winner-take-all Treaty of Versailles, when what was needed was a Marshall Plan that would have allowed Russia both dignity and the means to rebuild their economy within a democratic framework. Instead Ukraine is reduced to rubble, a lose-lose-lose for Ukraine, for Russia and the Western alliance.