Jin Yuan on Regilding the Empire

Jin Yan, "Regilding the Empire, Russia's 'New Empire Syndrome'"[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Jin Yan (b. 1954) is a professor (perhaps retired) in the Humanities faculty of China University of Political Science and Law, and is a leading Chinese expert on Russian and Soviet history.  She has published extensively on historical and contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe (see her Aisixiang page here), often penning joint texts with her husband, the well-known historian Qin Hui.
 
The text translated here is one of a large number of texts published by Chinese establishment intellectuals since the beginning of the war in Ukraine which seek to explain the roots of the conflict without necessarily taking sides; in other words, they neither endorse (nor criticize) the Chinese government’s position, nor do they vocally condemn Russian aggression (for another example on this site, see Cui Zhiyuan’s essay).  Jin nonetheless manages to make her point of view clear, even in the title of her text, which literally means “regilding the golden body,” a reference to the golden icons found in Buddhist temples in China and elsewhere.  Although I could find no clever way to render Jin’s nuance into English, she surely meant to compare the notion of “empire” in Russia to a religious symbol, and to suggest that Russia is simply “restoring the temple of empire” and thus recycling the past.  Thus even while she expresses some sympathy for the Russian position—if not for the war—it is clear that she feels no enthusiasm for the idea of empire as the “wave of the future.”
 
Jin’s argument is basically historical:  the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving misery and near anarchy in its wake, and when liberalism and democracy did not work their magic, “empire” came to fill the void and offer a justification of Russia’s past—and future—greatness.  She does not focus particularly on Putin, but points out that acceptance of the idea of “empire” is very widespread among intellectuals and common citizens alike.  Leaving aside NATO or security considerations, she notes that when, in the 1990s and 2000s, Russia—and Putin—reached out to the West for assistance (NATO membership, visa exemptions for European travel), the West generally rebuffed Russia, thus adding insult to injury.  Without taking Russia’s side necessarily, Jin argues that the West could have played its cards better, perhaps offering some version of a Marshall Plan to help Russia traverse a period of great difficulty.  In the absence of such assistance, Putin—and much of Russia—turned hostile, and decided to defend their great power identity in other ways.
 
Jin Yan begins and ends her essay with a subtle plea to China’s rulers to exercise caution.  This is not a new Cold War, she insists, but Putin represents a widespread sentiment in Russia that will not disappear even if Putin were to exit center stage.  Hence the world may wind up divided once again into “camps” that are defined not by ideology but by their attitude toward Russia.  Jin asks:  Which camp does China want to join?  (which largely echoes Sun Liping’s warning). 
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“From an onlooker's point of view, the ‘short-sighted’ strategic error of the West in the 1990s was to accelerate the external conditions encouraging Russian nationalism, which intensified the psychological disequilibrium of the Russian people who had already lost their pride in being a great power.  This in turn stimulated a nationalist backlash and the ‘new empire syndrome’ quickly caught on among the people, so that the public mood quickly shifted toward traditional Russian imperial values after experiencing the loss of the Soviet Union's collapse.
 
One could say that the West was not friendly enough at the outset when friendly relations were possible, and today is not tough enough when toughness is required. In other words, it failed to actively support Russia's democratization and marketization in the 1990s when Russia needed help.
 
Today, when Russia is harming other countries, Europe needs to be tougher, but often, rhetorical toughness stands in inverse proportion to action. Today’s Russia is like Germany after World War I, when the Versailles agreement was too hard on the country, leading to the rise of the Nazis and an overweening militarism that took over the nation as a whole.  Like Germany, Russia’s attitude is ‘I am fearless because I have nothing.’  This is the attitude Putin is playing to when he shows himself flying airplanes and fighting tigers.” 
 
Translation
 
Russia's current conflict with its neighbor is clearly not about defending certain beliefs, and Putin does not believe in socialism, but that does not make the threat of Russian expansionism any less dangerous. Today’s Russia recalls the Tsarist period, when the Tsar's Great Russian chauvinism made its neighbors tremble in fear, which led them to be pro-Western and conservative for reasons of national security. The world landscape may once again be divided into two camps because of various countries’ stances towards Russia.
 
Contemporary Russia has a common heritage with Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, but draws more from the Tsarist empire than from the Soviet experience.
 
The similarity of Putin's policies to the internal and external policies of the Tsars is no longer in doubt. Dolls, paintings, and sculptures reminiscent of the Tsarist era are seen everywhere in Russian streets, and at every tourist attraction travelers clamor to take pictures with people dressed up like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. The symbols and slogans of empire have made a comeback, all the tsars have become positive figures, and Nicholas II has been "canonized" and is now worshipped. Seventy years of ideological work by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have been swept away by a cold Siberian wind. At present, "imperial values" are definitely a positive national ideology in Russia.
 
Regilding the Empire
 
Nationalism is now the only banner under which today’s Russia can rally its troops, and it is Putin's tried and true magic weapon. This is true for the intellectual world as well.  It has been noted that few Russian intellectuals have been able to escape the trap of overweening "statism" when it comes to national issues; even the best and brightest cease to think and lose their way.
 
At Putin's urging, the Russian intelligentsia has noisily embraced a trend of culturally conservative "Slavism," and people inside and outside of government are scrambling to redefine the concept of "empire" as political science and to give it a proper name. "Empire fever" is in full swing, and terms like "independent empire," "free empire," and "national empire” are all the rage, and scholars are saying that "empire is rooted in Russia’s genetic code" and discussing the rationality of empire-building. The political scientist Andrei Saveliyev (b. 1962) has gone so far as to opine that " empire is Russia's destiny" and that "the Russian national spirit has always been grounded in empire."
 
In interviews she carried out for her book, Svetlana Alexievich (b. 1948), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, was told by people she talked to that:  "I love the empire, and without it my life would be meaningless;"  "The genes of imperialism and communism are in our spiritual cells;" "Russia needs an idea that makes people tremble—empire;”  "Russia was, is and always will be an empire;"  "In any event, I am an imperialist anyway, and yes, I want to live in an empire."
 
Russia began to call itself an empire during the reign of Peter the Great (1672-1725), who fought the Great Northern War for 21 years, transforming Russia from a continental country into a maritime power.  On October 22, 1721, in recognition of his achievements, the Senate officially named him "Great Emperor of All Russia," and from that point forward, the Tsar was officially called "the Russian Emperor." The most distinctive features of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great and Caterina the Great were internal suppression and external territorial expansion, as they fought for the hegemony of Europe.  During Catherine’s reign Russia fought six foreign wars—three partitions of Poland, two Russian-Turkish wars and one Russian-Swedish war, and the empire’s territory grew from 730,000 square kilometers in the mid-18th century to 17.05 million square kilometers when the empress died.
 
After the Communists came to power, traditional Russian views of "empire" were thoroughly discredited.
 
Lenin’s depiction of imperialism as parasitic and on the verge of death was well known by people at the time. To put it simply, imperial states were parasitic, monopolistic, contentious, and predatory. Lenin's conclusion was that "imperialism announces the dawn of the proletarian social revolution" which would inevitably signal its final collapse.
 
From this point forward, "empire" became a pejorative term, a signal for revolution in the decaying capitalist countries. Of course, these two “empires” are not exactly the same thing.
 
Thanks to Lenin's theory of world revolution and his internationalist ideas, the Russian Revolution was based on the negation of empire, but in reality, by Stalin’s time, many elements of the traditional empire had been integrated into the system of the Soviet Communist Party, while ideological pragmatism turned Marxism into a cover for "Russian interests" under the banner of internationalism, with an eye toward resolving certain conflicts in the theory of revolution. Under the cover of revolutionary rhetoric, "the Soviet Empire fully inherited and carried forward both the internal and external aspects of the Tsarist Empire," which was the Chinese definition of the Soviet Union during our opposition to its neo-Tsarist period in the 1970s. Everyone knew that the Soviet Union was a "red empire" in its bones, even if the veil of shame had not yet been openly removed.
 
Now Russia is openly reversing the verdict on "empire." At the behest of official ideology, scholars have been writing articles left and right to clear the name of the "empire" that Lenin "destroyed and distorted." Some believe that the current "new nationalism" and "new empire" emerging in Russia represent different trends from historical nationalism and imperial hegemony.
 
This imperial ideology highlights the historical greatness of Russia and its influence on today’s world. The goal is to make the "new imperial outlook" part of domestic spirituality and ideology. The idea is to overcome the instability of Russian history and the problem of “civilizational choice” created by Russia’s position between East and West, which accounts for its own lack of core values and the "discontinuous" nature of its history.  Overcoming this has often required strong mechanisms of integration.
 
To put it bluntly, "imperial values" are meant to be the basis of national cohesion in the post-Soviet era.
 
The "Iron Curtain" of the Cold War period served both to shield and isolate the Soviet Union to a certain extent, but it also set the agenda for the regime.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, "imperial values" became once again a new way of identifying external boundaries, so the overall content of the new Russian state includes these values. In the past, such values were wrapped in the cloak of internationalism, but now it makes sense to play the “empire card” in order to overcome centrifugal forces.
 
Some scholars have also argued that Russia is a country surrounded by enemies, and in geopolitical terms lacks a defensive capacity, so its foreign expansion is not the same as Western colonialism, but instead a defensive self-protection. In this sense, "empire" is a soft power that serves Russia's overall development and power strategy.
　　
The Return of the Empire and the Reasons for its Return
 
Polls conducted after the 2008 Five-Day War with Georgia and after the 2014 Russia-Ukraine conflict showed that nearly 90% of the population believed that Russia's troop deployment in Georgia and deterrence in Ukraine were fully justified, which was the highest approval rating the government had enjoyed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and some Russian media even argued that the government would have been rejected by the population if it had not acted in this manner.
 
In 2011, Putin's approval rating fell to 42% before returning to 86% after the war in Ukraine. Western sanctions and Putin's renewed evocation of the idea that Russia is "isolated" and “under siege” have made him popular at home, and his approval ratings have skyrocketed.
 
Putin has said that the collapse of the Soviet Union “exposed our weaknesses, and weak people always get beaten." The country’s return to empire has been welcomed with a rare unanimity by virtually all groups.  Even the liberal Anatoly Chubais (b. 1955) says that a "free empire" should become Russia's national goal and post-Soviet ideology.
 
The Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov (b. 1944) has said: "Since ancient times, Russia has seen itself as the inheritor and defender of an imperial heritage and Russia should not give up the sense of greatness that has existed for many centuries.”
 
Former president Dmitry Medvedev (b. 1965) has said: "Russia has its own place in the world.  It needs to have its own sphere of interests, and it is unthinkable to deny this." On November 4, 2013, the World Congress of Russians awarded Putin the "Prize for Defending Russia's Great Power Status," which was a recognition of his assertive stance.
 
Under titles such as "The Soviet Union did not really die," the Western media has noted that it is increasingly clear that Russia's state ideology is undergoing "a shift toward traditional Tsarist imperial values.”  Commentary from outside of Russia says that Russia is currently suffering from a "new imperial syndrome."
 
In 2008, the French newspaper Les Échos used the headline "The Return of the Empire" in discussing Russia, arguing that Russia's "resurgent empire may pose a more difficult challenge than the Cold War" and that this empire may well be more dangerous than the Soviet Union. Diplomacy should draw lessons from history and take them seriously.
 
The reasons for Russia's return to "empire" are complex.
 
First, the Russian people have a strong sense of national pride, having historically defeated Napoleon and Hitler, and having become one of two world superpowers virtually overnight. The Russians are used to seeing themselves as big brothers, have always had a savior complex, and are extremely sensitive to issues of territorial security.  How can they not be indifferent to the reduction of the country's territory, to the fact that the West and the United States ignore Russia’s existence and put pressure on Russia’s “zones of privileged interest?”  How can this not inflame the Russians?
 
The Soviet heritage is one of the important elements in the construction of Russia’s current national image, which mixes together Tsarist themes with the sense of domination that marked the Soviet era, so in this sense the tri-colored flag of the Russian empire and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet period overlap one another, the result being the creation of a synthetic “new imperial syndrome.”
 
Second, when, in the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin proposed the four major goals of "demilitarization, non-Bolshevization, privatization, and liberalization," the West did not adopt a Marshall Plan as it did after World War II to help Russia traverse its economic difficulties, but instead suggested that "Russia should be like Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire,” and “limit itself strictly to its proper environment.”
 
At the outset, Russia extended an olive branch to the West: in 2000 Putin invited NATO General Secretary General George Robertson (b. 1946) to Moscow, in 2001 NATO set up an intelligence station in Moscow, followed by a military mission in 2002, and Russia's relations with Western Europe were very cordial. In 2002, President Putin sent a letter to the President of the European Commission, talking about Russia's intention to deepen mutual cooperation with the EU, and Putin asked to join NATO.
 
But the West refused, fearing that polar bears in the bathtub would be a recipe for disaster, and in contrast to Russia's warmth, the West's reaction was much more indifferent and reserved. The EU has was reluctant to relent on the issue of mutual visa exemptions, leaving the sensitive Russians feeling as if they had been snubbed, which led to attacks on liberalism, leading to a nationalist/populist backlash.
 
Most people in the West believe that if Russia were granted the status of Europeans, the cultural and intellectual homogeneity of Europe would be undermined and the foundation of EU legitimacy would be shaken. Eastern European countries have their own reasons for not wanting to get involved with the Russians again. As a former Polish defense minister[2] put it, “European civilization has limits, and the Russian Orthodox Church is too distant from European civilization.  Russian culture is in opposition to Western culture."
　　
Moreover, the U.S., Germany, Britain, and France reneged on their verbal commitment to Gorbachev not to expand NATO, which shocked the Russian elite, after which came the Color Revolutions, the deployment of anti-missile systems, the Ukraine crisis…From the Russian perspective, their one-sided change of strategy had not received the expected response, and Western Europeans continued to view them in the same way Churchill had, i.e., as " children of Genghis Khan from the wilds of Asia."  They had never seen Russians as Europeans and their stance was "to not allow them to cross the Rhine into Europe."
 
Clearly, there has always been a considerable distance between Russia's self-image and the West's perception of Russia. Russia had once envisioned entering the "mainstream of human civilization" through political and economic transformation, but finally, in the face of the Western definition of Russia as a “marginal player,” Russia carried out a kind of  “return to history” in a way that was quite resolute.  It seemed as if they were bravely going against the tide.
 
The attitude of the U.S. and other Western countries greatly stimulated the anti-Western feelings of many Russian elites and the people in general, which strengthened those anti-Western and anti-Latin elements that have long been rooted in the Russian national psyche.
 
At the same time, during the difficult process of economic transition, Russia gradually realized the destructive nature of the idealized image of the West, understanding that, on two fundamental fronts, Western values could not inform Russia’s future development.  First, the West and Russia do not share the same interests, and second, the Western ideological system could not be directly applied to Russian realities. Consequently, it was is necessary to restore the positive meaning of "empire" to the Russian nation, and not dismiss it completely, as the Soviet Communist Party had done.
 
From an onlooker's point of view, the "short-sighted" strategic error of the West in the 1990s was to accelerate the external conditions encouraging Russian nationalism, which intensified the psychological disequilibrium of the Russian people who had already lost their pride in being a great power.  This in turn stimulated a nationalist backlash and the "new empire syndrome" quickly caught on among the people, so that the public mood quickly shifted toward traditional Russian imperial values after experiencing the loss of the Soviet Union's collapse.
 
One could say that the West was not friendly enough at the outset when friendly relations were possible, and today is not tough enough when toughness is required. In other words, it failed to actively support Russia's democratization and marketization in the 1990s when Russia needed help.
 
Today, when Russia is harming other countries, Europe needs to be tougher, but often, rhetorical toughness stands in inverse proportion to action. Today’s Russia is like Germany after World War I, when the Versailles agreement was too hard on the country, leading to the rise of the Nazis and an overweening militarism that took over the nation as a whole.  Like Germany, Russia’s attitude is “I am fearless because I have nothing.”  This is the attitude Putin is playing to when he shows himself flying airplanes and fighting tigers.
 
Characteristics of the Russian Empire Syndrome
 
During Putin's second and third terms in office, Russia's "new imperial syndrome" gradually evolved. Its characteristics are the following:
 
First, there is a mindset in which “a sense of inferiority has been transformed into a sense of arrogance” which overstates the degree of national development.  Valery Tishkov (b. 1941), who served as Minister for Nationalities under Yeltsin, once noted that Russia’s imperial tradition goes very deep, that “while the empire has died, the gene remains,” and especially at a moment when Russia’s power has declined, notions of empire can serve the purposes of national cohesion and provide the social mobilization required of political spectacles.
 
Second, there is also a sort of self-valorization which often damages relations with neighboring peoples and tends to create new tensions.
 
Third, there is a tendency to externalize grievances, which feeds on a hostility to Western/Latin culture, and seeking answers to their problems elsewhere is accompanied by a low capacity for self-reflection.  In the 1950s, Mao Zedong remarked that "the Soviet leaders always thought they were the best, that everything they did was right and that the mistakes were all made by someone else." It looks as if there is still something to this.
 
When we visited Russia in 2013, the head of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Saint Petersburg[3] noted that there was absolutely no doubt that Putin had strengthened central authority and government capacity, and in terms of economic control and social control, there were clear improvements when compared to his first two mandates.  Thus, after state political power has gone through any number of fluctuations since the fall of the Soviet Union, things have now returned to the traditional Russian situation in which concentrated centralized power is in charge.  The central government now stands out as the chief mechanism of integration, putting an end to a period of fragmentation.  The current Russian government thus has a greater capacity for action and essentially in is the process of transforming itself into a hardline government.
 
Putin's basic political tone has gradually become clearer, and the past situation in which his political stance was unclear and his doctrinal identity ambiguous, in which he was something of an “unknown quantity,” is now a thing of the past.  To summarize his stance succinctly, he is “suspicious of globalization, resists Westernization, and limits democratization.”  He pursues national interests, seeks regional and global influence, and practices protectionism and mercantilism.  Having lost the Cold War, Russia will attempt to use every possible opportunity to rewrite history.
 
With oil prices falling, the Russian economy is struggling, Europe's energy dependence on Russia continues to decline, and Russia is turning inward.  This intensifies the mindset of being encircled by hostile external forces, which only makes Russia all the more closed and isolated, and the number of xenophobic and paranoid people saying "Russia is unhappy"[4] has increased significantly, creating a social climate of self-imposed resentment and alienation from the world system.
 
Both the left and the right overreact when it comes to national issues. Putin is representative of this social mood. After the West imposed economic sanctions on Russia, Putin proposed to cut government salaries by 10%, but also insisted that military spending would not decrease.  Twenty percent of the budget is used on defense spending, which is the largest amount in the post-Soviet era.
 
Some people say Putin is manufacturing a new Cold War, and that after the Ukraine incident we have entered a "new Cold War context." The Cold War was a product of ideology, a confrontation between socialism and capitalism, and today’s Russia is clearly not fighting the West for ideological purposes.
 
Russia is neither fighting for liberalism nor for socialism, which means that the current situation is not a Cold War. But it is potentially more dangerous than the Cold War, because if on the one hand ideology can be aggressive, on the other hand ideology can regulate state behavior and the behavior of the people.
 
Contemporary Russia's conflicts with neighboring countries are obviously not about defending certain beliefs, and Putin does not believe in socialism, but this does not reduce the danger of Russian expansionism. Russia now recalls the Tsarist period, when the Tsar's Great Russian chauvinism made its neighbors tremble and "fear Russia," and they have become more pro-Western and conservative from the point of view of national security. The world landscape may once again be divided between two camps, defined by their position towards Russia.
 
Notes

[1]金雁, “为帝国重塑金身，俄罗斯的’新帝国综合征,’” originally published on Qin Hui and Jin Yan’s joint WeChat channel, 秦川雁塔, republished on the Dunjiao website (part of the Fenghua media group, based in Beijing), on March 7, 2022. 

[2]Translator’s note:  Jin Yan provides the name of the defense minister—Nuoshen/诺什—but I am unable to identify him further.

[3]Translator’s note:  Jin Yan provides the name of the representative—Yanci/晏茨—but I am unable to identify him.

[4]Translator’s note:  Jin’s reference here is to Song Jiang’s book Unhappy China, published in 2009, which was similarly populist and anti-Western.