Hatred against minorities went hand in hand with hatred against foreigners and West
Europeans. This xenophobic hatred was often presented as a reaction to a real or imagined
disrespect on the part of the Europeans. Already in 1841 Stepan Shevyrev, a conservative Slavophile,
wrote: “The West . . . expresses to us at every opportunity its aversion, which resembles
almost a kind of hatred, and which is offensive to every Russian who enters his country.”[46] Another writer, Nikolay Danilevsky, a Russian Pan Slavist who gave Russian nationalism
its biological basis, wrote in a famous article, Rossiya i Evropa (Russia and Europe), that “Europe does not recognize us as its equal. . . . Everything
that is pure Russian and Slav, seems to him to be despicable. . . . Europe considers
. . . the Russians and the Slavs as not only a strange, but also an inimical element.”[47] The Pan Slavist’s xenophobic hatred of foreigners was justified by a—largely constructed—hatred
that foreigners were believed to feel against the Russian people. Hatred of the West
was, therefore, considered a justified reaction, a sound defense, and a confirmation
of one’s own right to exist. If you are surrounded by enemies, is not the only sound
reaction that of hating your enemies and preparing for war? According to Hannah Arendt
the nationalism of the Pan Slavists was “a tribal nationalism [that] always insists
that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that
a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its
people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically
the very possibility of a common mankind long before it used to destroy the humanity
of man.”[48]
Masaryk spoke in this context of a zoological nationalism that celebrated the supposed natural, innate qualities of the Russian
people.[49] Russian feelings of inferiority vis-à-vis the inhabitants of Western Europe are
overcompensated by feelings of superiority. In this process Russia’s continental imperialism
becomes much more racist than the overseas imperialism of the Western European countries.
The Pan-Slav ideology is double edged: it gives the—superior—Russians the right to
dominate the “inferior” peoples who already live in the empire. At the same time,
it gives them a mission to “liberate” the other Slav peoples. Danilevsky, for instance,
“included in a future Russian empire all Balkan countries, Turkey, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Galicia, and Istria with Trieste.”[50] Nationalist racism was the dominant legitimation theory for imperialist expansion in pre–World War I
Russia. This racism, however, was, as such, rather fragile as an ideological foundation—for
two reasons. First, by denying the fundamental equality of mankind one exposed oneself
to the racism of other peoples that considered themselves—on the same racist grounds—to
be superior to the Russians. This is what happened in effect when Nazi racists considered
the German race superior to the “inferior” Slavs. Second, to proclaim one’s racial
superiority vis-à-vis other peoples living in the empire who, in some cases, had developed
a higher culture and standard of living, such as the Balts, reveals an arrogance that
can easily be exposed. This was the reason, according to Galbraith, that in continental,
territorially contiguous empires, such as Russia,
The tensions were far greater than in the outlying empires of the Western Europeans
because the subject peoples in this colonialism could not be persuaded that they were
inferior to their rulers. Rulers and ruled alike, when washed, were white. Many of
the ruled were the equal of their colonial masters in education, cultural achievement,
economic well-being. Some regarded themselves as superior; this was almost always
true of those who were ruled by the Russians. To be governed by one’s inferiors or,
more exactly, those so regarded is an especially bitter thing.[51]
How the Russian Revolution Forged a New Legitimation Theory for Imperialist Expansion
