There are two reactions to the loss of empire: to accept or not to accept the loss. Unfortunately, in the Russian situation, after a short period of shock, the loss of empire did not result in a gradual acceptance, but in a swelling tidal wave of chauvinism and nationalism. It resulted in nostalgia for lost greatness mixed with revanchism and hatred of the “enemies” who had brought the Soviet Union down. Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s reform minister, told how this process took place. “In Russia,” he wrote, “the peak of the post-imperial syndrome mixed with radical nationalism did not come immediately after the collapse of the USSR, as I had expected, but later.”[19]
And he continued:
[W]e had assumed that overcoming the transitional recession and the beginning of economic growth and an increase in real income for the population would allow people to replace the impossible dreams of empire restoration with the prosaic cares of personal well-being. We were mistaken. Experience showed that in times of profound economic crisis, when it is not clear whether there will be enough money to feed the family until the next paycheck and whether there will be a next paycheck or whether you will be fired, most people do not worry about imperial grandeur. On the contrary, when economic security is growing and confidence that this year’s salary will be greater than last year’s, and that unemployment . . . will not affect you, and you see that life has changed but is returning to stability, you can come home and watch a Soviet film with your family in which our spies are better than theirs, where we always win, and the life depicted onscreen is cloudless, and then talk about how enemies have destroyed a great country and we’ll still show them who’s best.[20]
Gaidar shows very clearly that the Russian nationalist revival was not the consequence
of some quasi-Marxist
Pitirim Sorokin and the Eternal Cycle
of Ideologies in Revolutions
The counterrevolutionary drawback that takes place after every revolution has been
described by Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), who, before World War I, was a young liberal
opponent of the autocratic tsarist regime. Imprisoned several times under tsar Nicholas
II, he became in 1917 the personal secretary to Kerensky, the leader of the democratic
Provisional Government that was installed after the February Revolution. He was sentenced
to death by the Bolsheviks, but ultimately exiled in 1922. He went to the United States,
where he became one of the leading sociologists and founded the sociology department
of Harvard University. His personal experiences led him to analyze the phenomenon
of revolution and its implications for society. In his book
Theoretically, we can distinguish in any revolution two phases: first, destructive and “liberating,” second, constructive and “restraining.”[21] . . . [In the first phase] all ideologies that attack the oppressing institutions and values from which the revolutionary group suffers gain rapidly in popularity and acceptance.[22] . . . If the revolution is mainly political, the ideologies are primarily political; if the revolution is also economic the ideologies have an economic character; and if the revolution is religious, the ideologies assume a religious nature.[23] . . . However, since economic revolutions are much deeper than political ones, they hardly ever occur without having at the same time their political, religious, or nationalistic aspects. Ordinarily the greatest revolutions become economic.[24]
