Analysis / Russian Guy Suffers Most

It Always Gets Worse

For almost all of its history, Russia had several running themes: a corrupt leader who will sacrifice the population for his or her goals, a corrupt bureaucracy that violently struggles for power, and awful working and living conditions for the vast majority of the people. With only a few intervals, Russians have never experienced a fully democratic system, first-world prosperity, or the rule of law. Despite having vast natural resources and a highly educated population that had produced innovations like the periodic table and space travel, Russia has remained under some authoritarianism for centuries.

Why have Russian leaders been so harsh to their populations?

Insecure Geography

Russia is such a massive country that the European portion alone, where the majority of the population lives, is 3,969,100 square kilometers (1,532,500 sq mi) bigger than India. While this region is large, it also has several weaknesses:

1. No warm water ports: European Russia is so far north that much of its water is frozen for much of the year.^note However, climate change is beginning to create more ice-free waters for Russia to use. There is a reason Russian leaders have coveted Constantinople: aside from believing itself to be a "Third Rome," the Spiritual Successor of the Byzantine Empire, controlling Istanbul would give Russia control of the straight through which Black Sea commerce flows, as well as warm Mediterranean waters.

2. Flat land: Much of the Russian core is situated on the East European Plain, a flat territory with no big geographic barriers that can deter invasion.

The Tatar Yoke

The geographic weaknesses of Kievan Rus' would become apparent with the arrival of a particular enemy: the Mongols under the command of Batu Khan, Genghis Khan's grandson, wholly leveled the Rus principalities, with the only principalities that agreed to pay tribute being spared, most famously the Novgorod Republic. When Kyiv fell to the Mongols, only 2,000 people out of a population of 50,000 were left.

The Golden Horde, the successor state of the Mongols in Eastern Europe, turned the principalities into vassals that would pay tribute or face severe punishment. But one principality was designated as the Horde's tax collector: the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which not only served the Mongols but quickly adopted the political traditions of the Horde: the brutal treatment of peasants to extract wealth, a strongman who centralized authority around himself, and a paramilitary force that would serve the interests of the strongman.

Under Prince Ivan III, Moscow would cast off the Tatar Yoke at the Great Stand on the Ugra River in 1480, ending centuries of paying protection to the Mongols. However, this did not stop Ivan III from desiring to centralize not only his authority over Moscow but all the Rus lands, and he soon occupied and subjugated the other Rus' principalities, including Novgorod. ^note In a foreshadowing of Russia's treatment of prisoners, the Novgorod aristocrats were deported to Siberia. Ivan III would adopt the title "prince of all the Rus". However, it would be his more famous grandson, Ivan the Terrible, who would be the first man to officially granted the title "Tsar of All Russia," and who would also be notorious for his brutal attempts at maintaining absolute authority, including purge of princely families.

It was under Muscovy that Russia's political structure for centuries to come was set up:

1. A leader who held absolute power, whether they were a tsar, emperor, General Secretary, or President.
2. A State Sec that would viciously protect the centralized leader's interests from any (supposed) enemy, whether they were Oprichnina, Okhrana, Cheka, NKVD, KGB, or FSB.
3. A population that existed to serve the whims of whoever held power and could be culled if necessary, which meant forced servitude, whether it was serfdom or gulag labor or recruitment into an army that would use its soldiers as cannon fodder.

Defensive Expansion

The end of Mongol/Tatar subjugation was not the end of Russia's troubles. Russia continued to be menaced by several enemies in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as the Crimean Khanate, which built an economy on enslaving Russian serfs, brutal nomads who raided and pillaged Russian cities, and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

As a result of these constant invasions, the Russian peasantry developed a degree of nationalism and loyalty to the state that did not exist in the rest of Europe for another couple of centuries and was quite willing to die if it meant the survival of Russia. The Russian leader also decided that expanding into as much territory as possible was the best way to ensure security. Aside from also getting access to more warm water, the centralized government believed a buffer would be the best way to shield Russia from invasion. Hence Russia's expansion into Siberia, Poland, the Baltic, Ukraine, and Central Asia. One of the reasons for the Cold War was Russia's desire to turn Eastern Europe into defensive barriers against a potential Western invasion.

By the early 19th century, Russia controlled an area stretching from the Baltic to Alaska. While "don't invade Russia in winter" is the common canard in military history, there have other significant obstacles for any potential invader of Russia:

1. Size: holding onto any piece of land in Russia requires a commitment of land and troops, and whenever there's an invasion, the Russians can fall back into places like Siberia. In World War II, millions of Russian workers and their factories were sent beyond the Urals, keeping them out of reach of Nazi attack.
2. The elements: While the Russian winter is harsh, Russia also has harsh summers and a a mud season that can slow down invaders. Napoleon's forces fumbled around because the mud made lightning warfare extremely difficult.
3. Guerilla warfare: the Russians not only adopt guerilla warfare to harass any invader, but they are also willing to burn down their resources and cities to spite their potential invaders. The governor of Moscow during Napoleon's invasion, Fyodor Rostopchin, had his own house burned to the ground to keep Napoleon from getting any supplies.

All invaders of Russia, whether they be the Napoleonic French or the Nazis, have found Russia an excruciating place to conquer.

Too Many Nationalities

The inevitable consequence of occupying these territories is large numbers of non-Russians came under the rule of a Russian state, some of whom didn't like their overlords that much and often rebelled and resisted Russian dominance.

The Russian leaders, desperate to control these diverse people and the buffer, often used their army and State Sec to keep non-Russian people in line. Russian leaders varied in their responses to the nationalities under their rule, but they usually boiled down to three strategies:

1. Autonomy: sometimes the centralized authority offered a modicum of self-rule: Finland was given a duchy, the Cossacks were allowed autonomous communities, and under the German-born Catherine the Great, Germans were encouraged to settle along the Volga and even rise to become generals. The Soviet Union allowed (at times) cultural autonomy to its various republics, and the modern Russian Federation gives people like the Chuvash control over autonomous territory.
2. Forced assimilation and persecution: other times, Russian leaders would try and force other non-Russians to assimilate into Russian society. When Russia gained a sizeable Jewish population after the annexation of Poland, the tsars segregated Jews into a Pale of Settlement, conscripted Jewish boys into the army for 25 years to be bullied into renouncing their heritage, or tormented them with pogroms.
3. Straight-up genocide and ethnic cleansing: if an ethnic minority were seen as a significant enough threat, the Russian leadership would brutally suppress that group to keep them from becoming a (potential fifth column). Examples include the genocide of the Circassians, the starvation of the Ukrainians during the The Holodomor, and the deportation of Chechens and Crimean Tatars during World War II.

Conclusion

Between the fear of conquest, fragile geography, the (perceived) need to control massive amounts of territory at the expense of those who lived there, and the legacies of Mongol rule, the Russian state in all its forms was authoritarian to defend against an outside world.

On some level, this kind of governance did turn Russia from a series of principalities on the fringes of Europe into a transcontinental power, still the largest contiguous nation in the world.

However, by the dawn of the 21st century, the brutal political traditions, on top of centuries of warfare, left behind a terrible legacy: The Russian Cross, which has left Russia in a demographic decline since the Soviet Union collapsed. Decades of authoritarian and totalitarian governance have left Russian society poor, underpopulated, and with dim future views.

Roads Not Taken

It is important to note that while oppression and poverty are common in Russian history, they are far from the only parts of Russian history. Russia had many opportunities when it almost became a wealthy and democratic nation.

1. Under Alexander I, Russia enacted many liberal reforms, including a more modernized political structure, landlords being allowed to emancipate their serfs, and the expansion of universities. However, further reforms were halted because the trauma of the Napoleonic wars left Alexander I with a deep distrust of liberalism.
2. Alexander II's reign saw even further reforms, including the abolition of serfdom, the modernization of the judiciary, and the creation of local government councils known as Zemstvos. Alexander II came very close to establishing a kind of constitutional monarchy...only to be blown up by anarchists in 1881. His successor, the arch-reactionary Alexander III, canceled this government reform, and in the "Manifesto of Unshakable Autocracy", he asserted his belief that Russia had to be governed autocratically.
3. While Nicholas II was a stubborn and out-of-touch autocrat, his final years did see some reforms, including the creation of a parliamentary system, albeit one that left the tsar with lots of power, the granting of peasants their land, and rapid industrial and scientific expansion ^note Russia was expanding so quickly, one of the reasons Germany wanted to start a war was because they feared Russia would get too strong to beat. Of course, all this progress was blown out of the war once Nicholas dragged his unprepared country into World War I.
4. The initial February Revolution led to the toppling of the tsar and its replacement with a Provisional Government that enacted an incredibly progressive set of laws that, on paper, granted things like ethnic autonomy and freedom of speech. Unfortunately, the Provisional Government leaders burned their goodwill by continuing World War I, leading to their overthrow by the Bolsheviks in November 1917. An election was still held for an elected body, but the Bolsheviks shut that down and seized absolute power.
5. In 1991, Gorbachev tried to democratize the weakening Soviet regime by turning it into a democratic confederation. While some of the Soviet republics were disinterested in anything but total independence, many of the Republics did sign up and hosted referendums in support of a new confederation. August 20 of that year was scheduled for the treaty's ratification... only for Gorbachev to be nearly overthrown by Soviet hardliners. While the coup fizzled out, it killed any chances for the Soviet republics to stay together, and a new Russia of widespread corruption, inflation, economic collapse, social problems, and eventually war, under Boris Yeltsin then Vladimir Putin was born.

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