Despotic rulers are sometimes poisoned, sometimes deposed. However, as a rule, they
tend to have longer reigns than those of their democratic counterparts, who, at regular intervals, have to expose
themselves to elections. Their long reigns enable despots to initiate long-term projects,
such as territorial conquests, and bring them to fruition. Russia’s kings and tsars
were often blessed with long lives, which led to extraordinarily long reigns. This
was the case for the first three rulers, who may be considered the founders of the
Russian imperial project. Ivan III (the Great) reigned for forty-three years, his
successor Vassily III, for twenty-eight years, and Ivan IV (the Terrible), who was
the first to call himself tsar, for thirty-seven years. Between 1462 and 1584 these
three rulers reigned for 108 years altogether, a period that was only interrupted
for fourteen years when Ivan IV was a minor. It is, therefore, no surprise that under
this long and stable rule the foundations for Russia’s continuous expansion were laid.
Of course long reigns of monarchs were not a privilege of Russia alone. Absolutist
monarchs in Western Europe equally could reign for long periods during which they
were able to undertake ambitious expansionist projects. Louis XIV, the French roi soleil, is a good example of this. But with the end of absolutism in Western Europe and the
advent of parliamentary democracy, Russia’s autocratic government gained an advantage.
This advantage remained when tsarist autocracy made way for communist dictatorship.
Stalin, who ruled for almost thirty years, was as staunch an empire builder as Ivan
the Terrible, whom—in fact—he surpassed by creating the greatest Russian empire ever.[34] Vladimir Putin’s attempt to rule possibly for twenty-four years must be seen within
this perspective. Putin considers this long personal rule as a necessary precondition
for his supreme geopolitical goal: the restoration of the lost empire.
There exists, furthermore, a fundamental mismatch between democratic rule and imperial
rule. Democracies are based on the principle of the fundamental equality of their citizens. Imperial rule is based on a basic inequality between the rulers and the ruled.[35] Imperial rule, exercised by a despotic ruler, is, therefore, more logical and consistent,
because no distinction is made between the inhabitants of the imperial mother country
and the inhabitants of the imperial possession: in fact no one is a citizen. All are, in the most literal sense, subjects. Jan Nederveen Pieterse stressed the
direct connection, a military nexus, between the exercise of imperialist force overseas
and the application of force to repress domestic unrest; time and again we find that
not only the same methods and equipment were deployed but also the same personnel.[36] . . . In Russia, with tsarist generals, the great Suvorov among them, stamping
on rebels at home and other peoples in Asia were always twin employments. This gives
a concrete significance to the saying that a people that oppresses another nation
cannot itself be free.[37]
The last, and fifth, point is that the vastness of an empire strengthens despotic rule. This was an argument that was already being
used by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers. Their argument was that
huge countries with large populations could be neither prosperous nor democratic.
This argument was used especially by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom the ideal state
was a city-state, the size of Geneva. “Size of states!” he wrote, “first and most
important source of human misery, and especially of the many disasters that undermine
and ruin the civilized peoples. Almost all small states, whether republics or monarchies,
prosper only by the fact of being small.”[38] And he added: “All large states, crushed by their own mass, are suffering.”[39] Rousseau’s aversion to big states was shared by Voltaire, who wrote: “Men seldom
deserve to govern themselves. This happiness seems to be the lot only of small nations
hidden in islands, or between mountains, like rabbits who hide from the carnivorous
animals; but in the end they are found and devoured.”[40] Adam Ferguson, their contemporary, and one of the leading figures of the Scottish
Enlightenment, wrote, in a similar vein, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767):
