Some Insights from Carl Schmitt for the 21st Century

In order to interpret the present political situation, Carl Schmitt’s thought is still topical; regardless of the many insights that can be drawn from it, at the present time some theses advocated by the Plettenberg thinker in the late 1920s and early 1960s, well before the contemporary “epoch,” following the collapse of communism, the “rise” of globalization (and the death of the jurist), are particularly interesting.

First, it is appropriate to explain the extraordinary increase, a few years after the collapse of communism, of populo-sovereign-identitarian parties, by recalling what he wrote in his speech, “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierung und Entpolitisierungen” (“The Era of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations“), (of 1929).

Schmitt argues in this text that European spiritual life has developed over the last four centuries (i.e., in modernity) by changing centers of reference (from the theological to the metaphysical, from this to the moral-humanitarian and finally to the economic): “If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain—they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved. In a theological age, everything runs smoothly if theological questions are in order; everything else is “provided” by definition. The same is true of other ages” (86).

This center of reference is decisive and prevalent” “Above all the state also derives its reality and power from the respective central domain, because the decisive disputes of friend-enemy groupings are also determined by it” (87).

He continues: “As long as religious-theological matters were the central focus, the maxim cujus regio ejus religio3 had a political meaning. When religious-theoretical matters ceased to dominate the central domain, this maxim also lost its practical import. In the meantime, however, it moved from the cultural stage of the nation and the principle of nationality (cujus regio ejus natio) to the economic domain, where it came to mean: one and the same state cannot accommodate two contradictory economic systems, i.e., capitalism and communism are mutually exclusive (87-88).

After the collapse of communism, the last exculpatory of the “political” (i.e., that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) disappeared. Fukuyama wrote that after the victory of liberal democracies, the end of history had come. This prediction is wrong because it presupposes the exhaustion of all reason for conflict; which is impossible because the element of conflict and struggle (Machiavelli and Duverger among many) is a presupposition of the political that is connatural to it (Freund). To think that man, zoon politikon, can exist without a political dimension presupposes changing his nature, which is what the young Marx thought he could do and has instead turned out to be impossible.

Rather, the bourgeois/proletarian justification has been replaced by a different one. The transition between one friend/foe justification and the next, Schmitt wrote, has a decisive political effect: “The succession of stages—from the theological, over the metaphysical and the moral to the economic—simultaneously signifies a series of progressive neutralizations of domains whose centers have shifted” (89). In this process, “The former central domain became neutralized in that it ceased to be the central domain,” but at the same time and progressively “in the dialectic of such a development one creates a new domain of struggle precisely through the shifting of the central domain. In the new domain, at first considered neutral, the antitheses of men and interests unfold with a new intensity and become increasingly sharper. Europeans always have wandered from a conflictual to a neutral domain, and always the newly won neutral domain has become immediately another arena of struggle, once again necessitating the search for a new neutral domain” (90; italics mine). Which appears to be precisely what has happened in the last 30 years. After a (brief) phase in which “post-communist” globalization was thought of as a stable and “peaceful” era, given the planetary hegemony of the U.S., the first cracks, evenly distributed in two categories, were glimpsed: humanitarian wars and, even more, the emergence of antagonists—enemies—of the globalized order. Both converged in supporting the thesis that history—and conflicts—were far from over. As for the “humanitarian” wars, mostly denominated as such in English and qualified as international police operations, definitions aside, they remained wars nonetheless; nor even very appreciable according to the intentions expressed, since already four centuries ago Francisco Suarez warned against such wars. As regards the enemy of the “new order,” at first Islamic fundamentalism, the whole thing proved that an order, however desirable, cannot disregard the fact that some group of men do not appreciate it, and to such an intense degree that they go so far (always) as to fight it politically, and in extreme cases, with arms.

It was so evident that the “new order” was dialectically generating new hostilities, new enemies and new conflicts.

It remained, and in part remains, unclear on what spiritual center of reference the opposition, internal to the Euro-Atlantic West, between populists and globalists is based. What is clear, however—and can serve to identify the center of reference—is that sovereign-populist-identitarians on the one hand and globalists on the other refer to opposing pairs of values/ideas that we list below (without claiming to be exhaustive), of which the first column refers to sovereign-populism, the second to globalization:

NATION/HUMANITY
EXISTING/NORMATIVE
COMMUNITY/SOCIETY
NATIONAL INTEREST/GLOBAL INTEREST

It is barely worth mentioning a few examples. For existing/normative, I would refer to what I wrote about the Hungarian Constitution. As for the community/society opposition, it is less obvious but begins to emerge from the constitutional declarations of “sovereigntist” countries (see the Polish and Hungarian Constitutions).

That the term a quo and ad quem of these is the nation and not humanity is quite obvious and needs no explanation.

When it comes to the national interest, it is also evident as a government objective, apart from the recent events of Diciotti and Interior Minister Salvini, which have brought it back to the center of the political debate. And it could be referred to as a “re-establishment” because it has always been the compass of the modern state (and ancient political syntheses).

To find a phrase that sums up the position of the sovereigntists in a few words, one can just go back to Sieyès’ statement: “The Nation is all that it can be by the mere fact of existing.” A statement that would surely shock a globalist.

And continuing the abbot’s quotations, among many: “The nations of the earth are to be regarded as individuals devoid of all social ties, that is, as they say, in the state of nature. The exercise of their will is free and independent of all civil forms…However a nation wills, it is sufficient that it wills; all forms are good, and its will is always supreme law…a nation can neither alienate nor interdict to itself the faculty of will; and whatever its will may be, it cannot lose the right to change it should its interest demand it.”

The second conception to be considered in assessing the contemporary political situation is the one that emerges, among Schmitt’s writings, from Land and Sea (Land und Meer). The foundation of this text is that human existence is determined by the space in which it lives, its perception of it and the opportunities space offers. Therefore, this determines or co-determines political, economic and social relations—in particular, law. Maurice Hauriou wrote that the law known, elaborated, and applied by jurists is that of sedentary societies, based on the relationship with the land (and thus, also with territory as an element of the political institution, particularly—but not only—of the modern state). While the French jurist contrasted sedentary societies with nomadic ones and explained much of the institutions of the former with the relationship with the land and with an existence oriented to regular production, Schmitt deepened the diversity between maritime existence and land existence, and in particular that “universal history is a history of the struggle of the power of the sea against the power of the land.”

What was new in modern history, Schmitt argued, was that Britain, in the 16th century, decided on a maritime existence, far more than maritime powers such as Athens or Venice and to some extent, even Carthage had done in other eras. Hence the English commercial (and industrial) expansion. Hegel also emphasizes certain different types of activities, and tying the development of industry and trade to the sea (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §247).

This fact was considered by Schmitt to be decisive for both international law and the Westphalian European political order. The resulting balance, he derived from that of land and sea (continental powers and maritime power) and between European states. None of which were capable of hegemonizing the others, because they would not have the strength to impose themselves on a coalition of them, somewhat as Machiavelli noted for the Italian states (and the balance among them) of his era. In this sense, the sovereignty of the states, built around the legal equality of the states—disregarding the factual equality, made some sense, precisely because the factual equality among them—or at least among the major ones—was not so far off; and, on the other hand, the disparity could be compensated for by a shrewd policy of alliances (and conversely of neutrality).

This all came into crisis with the 20th century; Schmitt argued that “in international law, generic and universalistic ideas are the typical weapons of interventionism;” and that “A legal conception coordinated with an empire spread over the whole earth (i.e., the British empire) naturally tends toward universalistic arguments.” He continues: “Such a conception does not concern a determined and united space nor its internal order, but in the first instance the security of communications between the scattered portions of the empire” (Völkerrechtliche Formen des modernen Imperialismus).

In the paper, “Great Space against Universalism,” (“Großraum gegen Universalismus“) the Plettenberg jurist reiterated, with reference to the Monroe doctrine, the contradictory nature of the universalist interpretation to the original enunciation of that doctrine. Schmitt writes, “It is essential that the Monroe doctrine remain authentic and not falsified, as long as the idea of a concretely determined great space, in which powers foreign to space cannot meddle, is fixed. The opposite of such a fundamental principle, conceived from concrete space, is a universalistic world principle, embracing the whole earth and humanity. This naturally leads to intrusions of everyone into everything. While the idea of space contains a point of view of delimitation and division and for this reason enunciates an ordering juridical principle, the universalistic claim of world intromission destroys all rational delimitation and distinction” (italics mine).

Schmitt continues: “In effect, the original American Monroe doctrine has nothing to do with the fundamental principles and methods of modern liberal-capitalist imperialism. As a true doctrine of space it stands, on the contrary, in pronounced opposition to a transformation of the earth into an abstract world market of capital without regard to space… That such a falsification of the Monroe doctrine into an imperialistic principle of world trade was possible will remain for all time a striking example of the intoxicating influence of empty buzzwords.” As for the interpretation given it by Woodrow Wilson: “he did not mean roughly a conforming transference of the spatial, non-interventionist thinking contained in the true Monroe doctrine to other spaces, but on the contrary a spatial and unlimited extension of liberal democratic principles to the whole earth and to all mankind. In this way he sought a justification for his unprecedented interference in non-European space” (italics mine).

Scmitt continues that the two Roosevelts and Wilson made “a specifically American spatial thinking a world ideology above states and peoples; they attempted to use the Monroe Doctrine as an instrument of Anglo-Saxon capital’s domination of the world market.”

This has resulted in converting “a spatially conceived principle of non-interference into a general system of delocalized meddling” and thus has become an ideological tool of democracy and “the conceptions associated with it, particularly ‘free’ world trade and ‘free’ world markets, in place of the original and true Monroe principle.” Combining for the purpose status quo and pacta sunt servanda, “that is, a simple contractual positivism,” with the ideological principles of liberal-capitalism.

The overall result is that the Monroe Doctrine, as interpreted in the years between the two world wars, gives the measure “of the contrast between a clear spatial order resting on the fundamental principle of non-intervention by foreign powers in space against a universalist ideology, which turns the whole earth into the battleground of its interventions and stands in the way of any natural growth of living peoples” (italics mine).

The situation today is different: the evolution of the international order with the UN (and the UN Charter), the prohibition of the use of force (see Art. 2, 4 of the UN Charter), the powers of the Security Council, the doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” peacekeeping operations, and especially the “defense of human rights” (and more) have complicated the situation.

What can the lessons of Carl Schmitt and, in particular, the doctrine of “large spaces” be used for?

It seems to be possible to answer that two conceptions (explicit and implicit to the same) and yet intersecting can be usefully applied. The first of which is political realism in relation to the concept of sovereignty. As the German jurist writes, the problem of sovereignty, arguably the main one, is to reconcile the political aspect with the legal aspect. For if the distinctive feature of sovereignty is legal absoluteness (not being conditioned by law but being “above” it), it must be combined with factual limits (with the familiar problematic issue of how much absoluteness applies internally and how much absoluteness can apply externally, i.e., with respect to subjects of international law (states and “order in fieri” distinguished by Bodin early on). As Schmitt writes “In political reality there is no supreme power, that is, greater than all, irresistible and functioning with the security of the law of nature… The reconciliation of supreme power in fact and in law constitutes the basic problem of the concept of sovereignty. Hence all difficulties arise” (italics mine). For another is the sovereignty of the U.S.A. or China, another that of San Marino or Liechtenstein. Transposed to the contemporary situation, this means that while one censures—rightly—violations of “human rights” or genocide (e.g., of the Kurds in Iraq) and goes off to wage a “just war” on the Rwandans or Saddam, one is careful not to wage war on Putin over the Donbass or Crimea, nor on China over Hong-Kong. It should be noted that while Hong-Kong is under Chinese sovereignty—and at least the classical territorial character of this may apply—this is not the case for the aforementioned territories in Eastern Europe, both of which—prior to annexations and occupations—were part of Ukraine; which has thus suffered a violation of (its own) sovereignty—as opposed to China. At this point, given the “double standards, double measures,” one wonders whether the criterion of “big space” does not apply as a concrete criterion of behavior and decision: while Russia was (in fact) granted intervention in a republic formerly part of the USSR, i.e., its own “big space,” the same was not exercised to protect populations, human rights, and in the case of Ukraine, territorial integrity. Hence the realism intrinsic to the Schmittian conception (registers) and rules much more than the idealism of such. (Idealism, which in practice, is often the fusion of interests and patronage).

The second conception that appears to underlie the concept of “great space” is one that links Max Weber’s concept of power (and of authority) and “law” understood here as “order.” Weber writes in defining it, that “power designates any possibility of asserting within a social relation, even in the face of opposition, one’s will.” Shortly thereafter, he writes: “The State should be understood to mean an institutional enterprise of a political character in which, and to the extent that, the administrative apparatus successfully advances a claim to a monopoly of legitimate physical coercion, with a view to the implementation of orders” (Economy and Society).

In current usage, until a few decades ago, states were called powers, at least those capable of exercising command internally and thus protecting their independence, even without (or with minimal) external political hegemony. In factual terms, it is the ability to assert one’s will that determines being a power. Which by applying Spinoza’s formula, tantum juris quantum potentiae, determines the factual limits of powers and thus of the legal capacity to exercise them. As the Dutch philosopher wrote, “If therefore the power by which natural things exist and operate is the same power as God, it is easy to understand what natural law is…. By natural right I therefore mean the same laws or rules of nature, according to which everything happens, that is, the same power of nature; therefore, the natural law of the whole of nature, and consequently of each individual, extends as far as its power” (Theologico-Political Treatise; italics mine). And within the “great space” it is relatively easy for the hegemonic power to exercise it. Likewise, for the most part, it has an interest in doing so because of the connections and relationships that join it to its neighbors or satellites. Respecting them is the condition for a state of peace to be easily achieved. Far more than trying to impose a unity of the world, without that unity being achieved in peace by the only historically possible way: by maintaining the pluriverse, conforming to the arrangement of interests, powers and borders; that is, by limiting and determining it with objective criteria that can be easily perceived and applied. For as Schmitt wrote, the unity of the world is not the unity of the ecumene, but “of the unitary organization of human power, the purpose of which would be to plan, direct and dominate the earth and the whole of humanity. It is the great question whether humanity is already ripe to endure a single center of political power” (Concept of the Political).

That there is a religion, a theology supporting such a hypothetical center, which has the capacity to resist elementary objections and criticism, Schmitt does not believe so. Certainly not the ideology of progress, since technical and moral progress “do not walk together” (neither among the rulers nor the ruled). Nor can rationalism bring us comfort, if only, I would add, because De Maistre’s judgment that man “by the fact of being simultaneously moral and corrupt, just in intelligence and perverse in will, must necessarily be governed” (so that reason is not enough) still applies; moreover, technical progress has the drawback of increasing the power of government. As Goethe wrote, “it is dangerous to man that what makes him more powerful, without making him better.

Nor do we see it today in that (attempt/project) of world unity in which still find ourselves, even though it now seems to be drawing to a close. Behind the unity of a world, dominated by the victorious power in the bourgeois/proletarian opposition, it must be acknowledged that the Plettenberg thinker saw the political future well: a new friend-enemy opposition, a constant land/sea dichotomy, a peace through the balance of (and between) large spaces. That is, everything opposite of what mainstream propaganda spreads.


Teodoro Katte Klitsche de la Grange is an attorney in Rome and is the editor of the well-regarded and influential law journal Behemoth.


On the Extent of Political Repressions in the USSR: Through the Maze of Speculations, Distortions and Hoaxes

Viktor Nikolayevich Zemskov (1946—2015), the eminent Russia historian, carried out pivotal and decisive archival research, often in fonds that were previously closed to researchers, for over a decade (1980s to 1990s). He focused on the history of political repression in the USSR, the statistics of Gulag prisoners, the fate of those repatriated after the Second World War, the Soviet working class, and military history of Russia. In the process, he answered a grim but crucial question—how many people did Stalin really kill?

In the West, the Great Purge, or the Great Terror has acquired mythic dimensions (thanks to Solzhenitsyn), in which millions are said to have perished. But the meticulous, cool-headed work of Professor Zemskov uncovered a different—and surprising—reality: from 1930 to 1953, a total of 786,000 people were “purged.”

We are able to bring you Professor Zemskov’s foundational article on Soviet repression, which he published in 1995, in Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya (Sociological Research), No. 9. His work continues to be ignored in the West, perhaps because it denies the various Cold War myths about Russia. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya.

Human life is priceless. The murder of innocent people cannot be justified—whether it is one person or millions. But the researcher cannot limit himself to moral evaluation of historical events and phenomena. His duty is to resurrect the true image of our past. All the more so when certain aspects of it become the object of political speculation. All this fully applies to the problem of statistics (scale) of political repressions in the USSR. This article attempts to deal objectively with this acute and painful issue.

By the end of the 1980s, historical science was faced with an urgent need for access to the secret fonds of the security agencies (former and present), since the literature and radio and television constantly mentioned various estimated, virtual figures of repressions, which were not confirmed by anything, and which we, professional historians, could not introduce into the scientific discourse without appropriate documentary confirmation.

In the second half of the 1980s, a somewhat paradoxical situation emerged for a while, when the lifting of the ban on the publication of works and materials on this topic was combined with the traditional lack of a source base, since the relevant archival fonds were still closed to researchers. In terms of style and tone, the bulk of publications from Gorbachev’s “perestroika” period (and later, too) were, as a rule, sharply expositional in nature, being in line with the anti-Stalinist propaganda campaign launched at that time (we are referring primarily to the numerous journalistic articles and notes in newspapers, Ogonyok magazine, etc.). The scarcity of concrete-historical material in these publications was more than compensated for by repeatedly exaggerated “homemade statistics” of the victims of repression, which amazed the readership with their gigantism.

In early 1989, by decision of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a commission of the History Department of the USSR Academy of Sciences, headed by corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences Yuri A. Polyakov, was established to determine population losses. As a member of this commission, we were among the first historians to gain access to the statistical reports of the OGPUNKVDMVDMGB, the highest bodies of state power and state administration of the USSR, which had not been given to researchers before, and which were in special storage in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (TsGaOR USSR), now renamed the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF).

The Commission of the History Department was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and even then we published a series of articles on the statistics of repressions, prisoners, special settlers, displaced persons, etc. We continued this work in the years that followed, right up to the present time.

The Commission of the History Department was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and even then we published a series of articles on the statistics of repressions, prisoners, special settlers, displaced persons, etc. We continued this work in the years that followed and up to the present time.

As early as the beginning of 1954, the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs drew up a certificate addressed to Nikita S. Khrushchev on the number of those convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes, i.e., under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR and under the corresponding articles of the Criminal Codes of other Union republics, for the period 1921-1953. (The document was signed by three persons—the USSR Prosecutor, General Roman A. Rudenko, the USSR Minister of Internal Affairs, Sergei N. Kruglov, and the USSR Minister of Justice, Konstantin P. Gorshenin).

The document stated that, according to the data available in the USSR Interior Ministry, for the period from 1921 to the present, that is, until the beginning of 1954, 3,777,380 people had been convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes by the OGPU Collegium, NKVD troikas, Special Consultation, Military Collegium, courts and military tribunals, including 642,980 to capital punishment (see, State Archive of the Russian Federation, Ф. 9401. Op. 2. Д. 450).

At the end of 1953, the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs prepared another report. Based on statistical reports of the 1st Special Department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. It gave the number of those convicted for counter-revolutionary and other particularly dangerous state crimes for the period from January 1, 1921 to July 1, 1953—4,060,306 people (on January 5, 1954, a letter signed by Sergei N. Kruglov, with the content of this information, was sent to Georgy M. Malenkov and Nikita S. Khrushchev).

This figure consisted of 3,777,380 convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes and 282,926 for other especially dangerous state crimes. The latter were convicted not under Article 58, but under other articles equivalent to it, primarily, under paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article 59 (especially dangerous banditry) and Article 193-24 (military espionage). For example, some Basmachi were convicted not under Article 58, but under Article 59. (See Table 1):

Table 1: Number of Persons Convicted of Counter-Revolutionary and other Particularly Dangerous State Crimes in 1921-1953

Note: Between June 1947 and January 1950, the death penalty was abolished in the USSR. This explains the absence of death sentences in 1948-1949. Other penalties included credit for time in custody, compulsory treatment and expulsion abroad.

It should be borne in mind that the terms “arrested” and “convicted” are not identical. The total number of convicted persons does not include those arrested who, during the preliminary investigation, i.e., before conviction, died, fled or were released.

This information was a state secret in the USSR until the late 1980s. For the first time the true statistics of those convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes (3,777,380 for 1921-1953) was published in September 1989, in an article by Vladimir F. Nekrasov in Komsomolskaya Pravda. Then this information was presented in more detail, in articles by Aleksandr N. Dugin (in the newspaper, Na boyevom postu, December 1989), Viktor N. Zemskov and D. N. Nokhotovich (Argumenty i Fakty, February 1990), in other publications by Viktor N. Zemskov and Aleksandr N. Dugin. The number of those convicted for counter-revolutionary and other particularly dangerous state crimes (4,060,306 for 1921-1953) was first publicized in 1990, in an article by Aleksandr N. Yakovlev, a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, in the newspaper Izvestya. In more detail, these statistics (1st Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), with trends by years, was published in 1992 by V. P. Popov in the journal, Otechestvennyye arkhivy,

We specifically draw attention to these publications, because they contain the true statistics of political repressions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were, figuratively speaking, a drop in the ocean, compared to numerous publications of another kind, which gave unreliable figures, usually exaggerated many times.

The public reaction to the publication of authentic statistics of political repressions was mixed. It was often suggested that it was fake. The journalist Anto V. Antonov-Ovseenko, emphasizing that these documents were signed by such vested individuals as Rudenko, Kruglov and Gorshenin, insinuated to the readers of the Literaturnaya gazeta in 1991: “The disinformation service was at its best at all times. Under Khrushchev, too… So, in 32 years—less than four million. It is clear who needs such criminal certificates” (A.V. Antonov-Ovseenko, “Protivostoyaniye,” Literaturnaya gazeta, April 3, 1991, p. 3). Despite Antonov-Ovseenko’s confidence that these statistics were disinformation, we will allow ourselves the courage to assert that he is wrong. These are genuine statistics, compiled by totaling, for the years 1921-1953, the relevant data available in the 1st Special Department. This special department, which at different times was part of the structure of the OGPU, NKVD, MGB (since 1953 and up to now, the Ministry of Internal Affairs), was engaged in collecting complete information on the number of those convicted on political grounds from all judicial and non-judicial bodies. The 1st Special Department was not a body for disinformation, but for comprehensive objective information collection.

After Antonov-Ovseenko, another journalist, Lev E. Razgon, sharply criticized us in 1992 (L.E. Razgon, “Lozh’ pod vidom statistiki: Ob odnoy publikatsii,” in the journal, Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya, (8)1992, pp., 13-14). The essence of Antonov-Ovseenko’s and Razgon’s accusations boiled down to the fact that Viktor N. Zemskov was engaged in falsification, operating with fabricated statistics, and that the documents he used were unreliable and even false. Moreover, Razgon insinuated that Zemskov was involved in the production of these false documents. At the same time, they failed to back up such accusations with any convincing evidence. My responses to Antonov-Ovseenko’s and Razgon’s criticism of us were published in 1991-1992 in the academic journals Istoriya SSSR and Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya (see, Istoriya SSSR, No. 5, 1991, pp. 151-152; Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya, No. 6, 1992, pp. 155-156).

Antonov-Ovseenko’s and Razgon’s sharp rejection of our publications based on archival documents was also triggered by their desire to “save” their “homemade statistics,” which were not supported by any documents and were nothing more than the fruit of their own fantasy. Thus, Antonov-Ovseenko published a book in English in the United States as early as 1980 called Portrait of a Tyrant, where he named the number of those arrested for political reasons only for the period 1935-1940—as 18.8 million people (see, Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny, p. 212). Our publications, based on archival documents, directly exposed his “statistics” as pure charlatanism. Hence Antonov-Ovseenko’s and Razgon’s clumsy attempts to present the case in such a way that their “statistics” were correct, and Zemskov was allegedly a falsifier and published fabricated statistics.

Razgon attempted to contrast the archival documents with the testimonies of repressed NKVD officers with whom he interacted in detention. According to Razgon, “at the beginning of 1940, a former head of the financial department of the NKVD, who met me at one of the transit stations, when asked: ‘How many people were imprisoned?’—hesitated and answered: ‘I know that on January 1, 1939 in prisons and camps there were about 9 million living prisoners’” (“Lozh’ pod vidom statistiki: Ob odnoy publikatsii,” in the journal, Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya, No. 8, 1992, p. 14). We, professional historians, know very well how doubtful such information is and how dangerous it is to introduce it into scientific circulation without careful checking and double-checking. A detailed study of the current and summary statistical reports of the NKVD led, as one would expect, to the refutation of this “evidence”—in fact, in early 1939, there were about 2 million prisoners in camps, penal colonies and prisons, of whom 1,317,000 were in camps (see, GARF: Ф. 9413. Оп. 1. Д. 6. Л. 7—8; Ф. 9414. Оп. 1. Д. 1154. Л. 2—4; Д. 1155. Л. 2, 20—22).

It should be noted that the total number of prisoners in all places of deprivation of liberty (camps, penal colonies, prisons) on certain dates rarely exceeded 2.5 million. Usually, it fluctuated in different periods from 1.5 million to 2.5 million. The highest number of prisoners in Soviet history was recorded as of January 1, 1950—2,760,095 people, of whom 1,416,300 were in camps, 1,145,051 were in penal colonies and 198,744 were in prisons (see, GARF: Ф. 9414. Оп. 1. Д. 330. Л. 55; Д. 1155. Л. 1—3; Д. 1190. Л. 1—34; Д. 1390. Л. 1—21; Д. 1398. Л. 1; Д. 1426. Л. 39; Д. 1427. Л. 132–133, 140–141, 177—178).

Therefore, one cannot take seriously, for example, Antonov-Ovseenko’s assertions that after the war there were 16 million prisoners in the camps and penal colonies of the Gulag (see, Antonov-Ovseenko, “Protivostoyaniye,” Literaturnaya gazeta, April 3, 1991, p. 3). It should be understood that on the date Antonov-Ovseenko has in mind (1946), there were not 16 million but 1.6 million prisoners in the camps and penal colonies of the Gulag. One really should pay attention to the point in-between the two figures.

Antonov-Ovseenko and Razgon were powerless to prevent the mass introduction of archival documents into scientific circulation, including the statistics of repressions, which they hated. This direction of historical science became firmly grounded in the documentary archival database (and not only in our country, but also abroad). In this connection, in 1999, Antonov-Ovseenko, still in the deeply erroneous belief that the statistics published by Zemskov were false, and his (Antonov-Ovseenko’s) “own statistics” being supposedly correct (in reality—monstrously perverted), again sadly stated: “The disinformation service was at its best at all times. It is alive and well nowadays. Otherwise, how to explain the ‘sensational’ discoveries of V. N. Zemskov? Unfortunately, obviously falsified (for the archive) statistics flew around many printed publications and found supporters among scientists” (A.V. Antonov-Ovseyenko, “Chernyye advokaty,” Vozrozhdeniye nadezhdy, No. 8, 1999, p. 3). This “cry of the soul” was nothing more than a cry in the wilderness, useless and hopeless (for Antonov-Ovseenko). The idea of “obviously falsified (for the archive) statistics” has long been perceived in the scholarly world as ridiculous and absurd; such assessments do not provoke any reaction other than amazement and ridicule.

This was the natural result of the battle between professionalism and dilettantism—because professionalism must win in the end. Antonov-Ovseenko’s and Razgon’s “criticism” of us was thus in the general vein of the attack of militant dilettantism, with the aim of subjugating historical science, imposing its own rules and methods of scientific (or rather, pseudoscientific) research, which from a professional point of view are completely unacceptable.

Nikita Khrushchev also contributed to the falsification of the issue of the number of prisoners, when he wrote in his memoirs: “…When Stalin died, there were up to 10 million people in the camps” (“Memuary Nikity Sergeyevicha Khrushchova,” Voprosy istorii, No. 3, 1990, p. 82). Even if we understand the term “camps” broadly, including also colonies and prisons, then even taking this into account, in early 1953 there were about 2.6 million prisoners (see, Naseleniye Rossii v XX veke: Istoricheskiye ocherki, 2001, Vol. 2, p. 183). The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) keeps copies of the report of the USSR Interior Ministry leadership to Khrushchev indicating the exact number of prisoners, including at the time of Stalin’s death. Consequently, Khrushchev was well informed about the true number of prisoners and exaggerated it almost 4 times deliberately.

The publication of Roy A. Medvedev in Moskovskie Novosti (November 1988) about the statistics of the victims of Stalinism provoked a great reaction in society (see, Roy A. Medvedev, “Nash isk Stalinu,” Moskovskie Novosti, November 27, 1988). According to his calculations, during the period 1927-1953, about 40 million people were repressed, including the kulaks, deportees, those who died of starvation in 1933, and others. In 1989-1991, this figure was one of the most popular in the propaganda of Stalinist crimes and became quite firmly embedded in the mass consciousness.

In fact, such a number (40 million) is not possible even with the most expansive interpretation of the concept of “victims of repression.” In these 40 million, Medvedev included 10 million of those who were kulaks in 1929-1933 (in reality, there were about 4 million of them), almost 2 million Poles evicted in 1939-1940 (in reality—about 380,000), and in like manner for absolutely all the elements that made up this astronomical figure.

However, these 40 million soon ceased to satisfy the “growing needs” of certain political forces to denigrate the national history of the Soviet period. The “research” of American and other Western Sovietologists, according to which 50-60 million people died of terror and repression in the USSR, was used. Like Medvedev, all components of such calculations were extremely overstated; the difference of 10-20 million was explained by the fact that Medvedev started counting from 1927, while Western Sovietologists—started counting from 1917. While Medvedev stipulated in his article that repressions are not always death, that the majority of the kulaks survived, that a smaller part of those repressed in 1937-1938 were shot, etc., a number of his Western colleagues called the figure of 50-60 million people as physically exterminated and as having died as a result of terror, repressions, famine, collectivization, and so on, and the number of those who died as a result of repressions, famine, collectivization, etc., as a result of the repressions. In short, they worked hard to fulfill the demands of politicians and special interests of their countries in order to discredit in a scientific form their opponent in the “Cold War,” not hesitating to fabricate direct slander.

This, of course, does not mean that there were no researchers in foreign Sovietology who tried to study Soviet history objectively and in good faith. Major scientists, experts on Soviet history J. Arch Getty (USA), Stephen G. Wheatcroft (Australia), Robert W. Davies (England), Gabor Rittersporn (France) and some others openly criticized the research of most Sovietologists and proved that in reality the number of victims of repression, collectivization, famine, etc. in the USSR was much lower.

However, the works of these foreign scientists with their incomparably more objective assessment of the scale of repressions were silenced in our country. Only that which contained unreliable, many-times exaggerated statistics of repressions was actively introduced into the mass consciousness. And the mythical 50-60 million soon eclipsed Roy Medvedev’s 40 million in the mass consciousness.

Therefore, when the chairman of the KGB of the USSR Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, in his speeches on television, referred to the true statistics of political repressions (he repeatedly cited the data in the records of the KGB of the USSR for 1930-1953—3,778,234 convicted political prisoners, of whom 786,098 were sentenced to execution) (see, Pravda, February 14, 1990), many people literally could not believe their ears, thinking that they had misheard. In 1990, the journalist A. Milchakov shared his impression of V. A. Kryuchkov’s speech with the readers of Vechernyaya Moskva: “…And then he went on to say: thus, tens of millions are out of the question. I don’t know whether he did it consciously. But I am familiar with the latest widespread studies, which I believe, and I ask the readers of Vechernyaya Moskva once again to carefully read Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s work, The Gulag Archipelago. I ask you to familiarize yourself with the studies published in Moskovsky Komsomolets by I. Vinogradov, our most famous literary scholar. He cites the figure of 50-60 million people. I would like to draw attention to the studies of American Sovietologists, which confirm this figure. And I am deeply convinced of it” (Vechernaya Moskva, April 14, 1990).

Comments, as they say, are superfluous. Distrust was shown only for documented information and immense trust for information of the opposite nature.

However, even this was not the limit of deceiving the public. In June 1991, Komsomolskaya Pravda published Solzhenitsyn’s interview with Spanish television in 1976. From it we learn the following: “Professor Kurganov indirectly calculated that from 1917 to 1959, just from the internal war of the Soviet regime against its people, i.e., from annihilation by hunger, collectivization, exile of peasants for extermination, prisons, camps, simple shootings—just from this alone we lost, together with our civil war, 66 million people… According to his calculations, we lost in the Second World War from its [the government’s] negligent, from its sloppy conduct, 44 million people! So, in total, we lost 110 million people from the socialist system!” (“Razmyshleniya po povodu dvukh grazhdanskikh voyn: Interv’yu A.I. Solzhenitsyna ispanskomu televideniyu v 1976 g,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, June 4, 1991).

With the wording “from its negligent, from its sloppy conduct” Solzhenitsyn actually equated all the human losses in the Great Patriotic War with those who died and perished as a result of collectivization and famine, which many historians and publicists include in the number of victims of political terror and repression. We are inclined to strongly distance ourselves from such an equation.

The estimate of these losses of 44 million people is, of course, extremely overstated. We are also skeptical of the recently accepted estimate of 27 million, which has been included in many textbooks, and also consider it overstated. Without taking into account the usual annual mortality of the population (as well as the decline in birth rate), we tried to establish the human losses (military and civilian), in one way or another related to the fighting. To the losses of the armed forces who died (11.5 million, including those who died in captivity), were added the losses of civilian volunteer formations (militias, partisans, etc.), Leningrad blockades, victims of the Nazi genocide in the occupied territory, killed and tortured Soviet citizens in fascist camps, etc. The final figure does not exceed 16 million people.

In the mass media from time to time, but quite regularly, statistics of political repressions based on the memoirs of Olga G. Shatunovskaya were quoted. She was a former member of the Committee for Party Control under the CPSU Central Committee, the commission to investigate the murder of Sergei M. Kirov and the political trials of the 1930s, during the time of Khrushchev. In 1990, Argumenty i Fakty published her memoirs, where she, referring to a certain document of the KGB of the USSR, later allegedly mysteriously disappeared, noted: “…From January 1, 1935 to June 22, 1941, 19,840,000 “enemies of the people” were arrested. Of these, 7 million were shot. Most of the rest died in the camps” (O.G. Shatunovskaya, “Fal’sifikatsiya,” Argumenty i Fakty, No. 22, 1990).

The motives of Shatunovskaya’s actions are not quite clear; whether she deliberately invented these figures for the purpose of revenge (she was repressed), or whether she herself became a victim of some misinformation. Shatunovskaya asserted that Khrushchev allegedly requested the certificate, which contained these sensational figures, in 1956. This is very doubtful. All the information on the statistics of political repressions was set forth in the two certificates prepared at the end of 1953 and the beginning of 1954, which we have mentioned above.

We are sure that such a document never existed. After all, the relevant question is: what prevents the political forces currently in power, no less interested, we must assume, in exposing the crimes of Stalinism, to officially confirm Shatunovskaya’s statistics with reference to a credible document? If, according to Shatunovskaya’s version, the security service prepared such a summary in 1956, what prevented it from doing the same in 1991-1993 and later? Even if the summary of 1956 was destroyed, the primary data were preserved.

Neither the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation (MBRF, later the FSB of the Russian Federation), nor the Ministry of Internal Affairs, nor other bodies could do this for the simple reason that all the relevant information they have directly refutes Shatunovskaya’s statistics.

Shatunovskaya’s statement that “most of the rest died in the camps” (we must assume 7-10 million, if we count from her virtual almost 13 million “others”), of course, also does not correspond to the truth. Such statements can be perceived as reliable only in an environment dominated by misconceptions that tens of millions of people allegedly died and perished in the Gulag. A detailed study of statistical reports on prisoner mortality gives a different picture. In 1930-1953, about 1.8 million prisoners died in places of deprivation of liberty (camps, penal colonies and prisons), of which almost 1.2 million died in camps and over 0.6 million in colonies and prisons. These calculations are not estimates, but are based on documents. And here arises a difficult question: what is the share of those political among these 1.8 million dead prisoners (political and criminal). There is no answer to this question in the documents. It seems that political prisoners accounted for about one third, i.e., about 600,000. This conclusion is based on the fact that those convicted of criminal offenses usually accounted for about 2/3rd of the prisoners. Consequently, out of the number of those sentenced to serve their sentences in camps, penal colonies and prisons, indicated in Tables 1 and 2, approximately this number (about 600,000) did not live to be released (between 1930 and 1953).

The highest mortality rate occurred in 1942-1943—during these two years, 661,000 prisoners died in camps, penal colonies, and prisons, which was mainly a consequence of significant cuts in nutritional standards due to the extreme war situation. Later on, the mortality rate began to steadily decline and amounted in 1951-1952 to 45.3 thousand people, or 14.6 times less than in 1942-1943 (see, Naseleniye Rossii v XX veke: Istoricheskiye ocherki, 2001, Vol. 2, p. 195). At the same time, we would like to draw attention to one curious nuance: according to the data we have for 1954, among the free population of the Soviet Union, for every 1,000 people, there died an average of 8.9 people, while in the camps and colonies of the Gulag, for every 1,000 prisoners—only 6.5 people died (see, GARF: Ф. 9414. Оп. 1. Д. 2887. Л. 64).

Having documented evidence that Shatunovskaya’s statistics are unreliable, in 1991 we published the relevant refutation in the pages of the academic journal, Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya (see, V.N. Zemskov, “GULAG: istoriko-sotsiologicheskiy aspekt,” in Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya, No. 6, 1991, p. 13).

It seemed that with Shatunovskaya’s version the question was solved even then. But that was not the case. Both radio and television continued to propagandize her figures in a rather obsessive form. For example, on March 5, 1992, in the evening program, Novosti, the host, T. Komarova, broadcast to a multimillion audience about the 19,840,000 repressed, including 7 million shot in 1935-1940, as an allegedly unquestionable fact. And this was happening at a time when historical science had proved the unreliability of this information and had genuine statistics on hand.

On August 2, 1992, a briefing was held in the press center of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation (MBRF), at which Major General A. Krayushkin, head of the MBRF’s Department of Registration and Archival Fonds, told journalists and other invitees that during the entire period of communist rule (1918-1990) in the USSR, 3,853,900 people were convicted on charges of state crimes and some other articles of criminal legislation of similar nature, 827,995 of whom were sentenced to execution. In the terminology used at the briefing, this corresponds to the wording “for counter-revolutionary and other particularly dangerous crimes against the state.” The reaction of the mass media to this event was curious—most of the newspapers kept a sepulchral silence. To some, these figures seemed too large; to others—too small; and as a result the editorial boards of newspapers and magazines of various directions preferred not to publish this material, thus withholding from their readers socially significant information (silence, as we know, is a form of slander). We should pay tribute to the editorial board of Izvestya newspaper, which published a detailed report on the briefing with the statistics quoted there (see, V. Rudnev, “NKVD—rasstrelival, MBRF—reabilitiruyet,” in Izvestya, August 3, 1992).

It is noteworthy that the addition of information for 1918-1920 and 1954-1990, in the above-mentioned MBRF data, did not fundamentally change the statistics of political repressions for the period 1921-1953. The MBRF staff used some other source, the data of which slightly diverge from the statistics of the 1st Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Comparison of data from these two sources leads to a very unexpected result: according to IBRF information, in 1918-1990, 3,853,900 people were convicted on political grounds; while according to the statistics of the 1st Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1921-1953—4,060,306 people. In our opinion, this discrepancy should be explained not by the incompleteness of the MBRF source, but by the more strict approach of the compilers of this source to the concept of “victims of political repression.” When working in the GARF with operational materials of the OGPU-NKVD, we noticed that quite often cases were submitted for consideration by the Collegium of the OGPU, the Special Conference and other bodies, of ordinary criminals who robbed factory warehouses, collective farm storerooms, etc., as political or especially dangerous state criminals.

For this reason, they were included in the statistics of the 1st Special Department as “counter-revolutionaries” and, according to present-day concepts, are “victims of political repressions” (this can be said of recidivist thieves only in mockery); while in the IBRF source they are excluded.

The problem of eliminating criminals from the total number of those convicted of counter-revolutionary and other particularly dangerous state crimes is much more serious than it may seem at first glance. If the IBRF source did screen them out, it was far from complete. In one of the certificates prepared by the 1st Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, in December 1953, there is a note: “Total convicted for 1921-1938—2,944,849 people, of whom 30 percent (1,062,000)—criminals” (GARF: Ф. 9401. Оп. 1. Д. 4157. Л. 202). This means that in 1921-1938 there were 1,883,000 people convicted as purely political; for the period of 1921-1953 it turns out not 4,060,000, but less than 3 million. This is, provided that in 1939-1953 there were no criminals among the convicted “counter-revolutionaries,” which is very doubtful. However, in practice there were facts when even political persons were convicted under criminal articles.

In 1997, Viktor V. Luneev published annual statistics of political convicts, taken from the source of the USSR KGB (MBRF, FSB RF) (see, V. V. Luneev, Prestupnost’ XX veka, 1997, p. 180). This made it possible to compile a comparative table of statistics of those convicted in 1921-1952 on political grounds (with the number of those sentenced to execution) according to the data of two sources—the 1st Special Department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB of the USSR (see Table 2). For 15 years, out of 32, the corresponding figures of these two sources coincide exactly (including 1937-1938); for the remaining 17 years, there are discrepancies, the reasons for which are yet to be clarified.

Table 2: Comparative Statistics. Convicted in 1921-1952, on Political Grounds (based on data from the 1st Special Department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs and the USSR KGB)

The comparative statistics for the years 1921-1952 are not without some strange phenomena. Thus, according to the KGB (FSB) records for this period, the number of convicted “counter-revolutionaries” is almost 300,000 less than according to the statistics of the 1st Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, while the number of those sentenced to death among them is 163,000 thousand more. Of course, the main reason for this situation lies in the data for 1941, when the state security agencies took into account 23,726 people sentenced to capital punishment for political reasons, and the 1st Special Department of the NKVD—only 8011.

Two years (1937 and 1938), known as the years of the “Great Terror,” when there was a sharp rise (or jump) in the scale of political repressions, occupy a special place in these statistics. During these two years, 1,345,000 people were convicted on charges of a political nature, or 35 percent of the total number for the period 1918-1990.

The picture is even more impressive in terms of the statistics of those sentenced to death from among them. In total, for the whole Soviet period, there were 828,000 of them, of which 682,000 (or over 82 percent) fall in these two years (1937-1938). The remaining 70 years of the Soviet period accounted for a total of 146,000 death sentences on political grounds, or less than 18 percent.

Since this article is devoted to the scale, i.e., statistics of political repressions, it is not intended to investigate their causes and motivation. But we still wanted to draw attention to one circumstance, namely, the role of Stalin in this case. Recently there have been voices claiming that Stalin did not personally initiate the mass repressions, including the “Great Terror” of 1937-1938, that it was allegedly imposed on him by local party elites, etc. We should realize that this is not true.

There is a large number of documents, including published ones, which clearly show Stalin’s proactive role in repressive policy. Take, for example, his speech at the February-March Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (b) in 1937, after which the “Great Terror” began. In this speech, Stalin said that the country was in an extremely dangerous situation due to the intrigues of saboteurs, spies, subversives, as well as those who artificially generated difficulties, thus creating a large number of the dissatisfied and irritated. This reached into the leadership cadres, who, according to Stalin, were complacent and had lost the ability to recognize the true face of the enemy.

It is quite clear to us that these statements of Stalin at the February-March Plenum of 1937 are a call for the “Great Terror,” and he, Stalin, was its main initiator and inspirer.

It is natural to want to compare the scale of political repression in the USSR with the corresponding indicators in other countries, primarily with Hitler’s Germany and Francoist Spain.

At the same time, I would like to warn against the incorrect nature of comparisons with the scale of political repression in Nazi Germany. It is claimed that the scale of repressions against German citizens in Germany was much smaller. Yes, political repressions against ethnic Germans seem relatively low, although we are talking about tens of thousands of people. But in this case we cannot stay confined in the framework of individual states, and we should put the question in a different way: what did Hitler’s regime bring to humanity? And it turns out that it is the Holocaust with six million victims and a long series of humanitarian crimes with many victims numbering many millions against the Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Serbian and other peoples.

Or another example—a comparison with the scale of political repression in Francoist Spain. Now, in the USSR there were over 800,000 death sentences for political reasons. In Spain under Franco—over 80,000, or 10 times less. Hence the conclusion is made that the scale of political terror in the USSR was immeasurably higher than in Spain. This conclusion is completely wrong, in fact; these scales were approximately the same. The lion’s share of death sentences on political grounds in Spain falls on the late 1930s—early 1940s, when the population of Spain was about 20 million people, and the population of the USSR at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War was approaching 200 million; that is, the difference in population was 10 times. Yes, in Francoist Spain there were 10 times less death sentences for political reasons than in the USSR, but the population of the country was also 10 times less; that is, in terms of per capita these indicators are the same, almost identical.

We are by no means attacking the well-known postulate that there were no politically motivated prosecutions in the United States. However, we have grounds to assert that American jurisprudence deliberately qualifies certain crimes that have a political background as purely criminal. Indeed, in the USSR, Nikolaev, the murderer of Kirov, was unambiguously a political criminal. In the United States, Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, was no less unambiguously a criminal, although he committed a purely political murder. In the USSR, identified spies were convicted under the political Article 58, while in the U.S. such spies are criminals. With such an approach, Americans naturally have every reason to advertise themselves as a society in which there is a complete absence of persecution and conviction on political grounds.

A grandiose mystification is the well-known myth about the total (or almost total) repression in the USSR of Soviet servicemen who were Nazi prisoners of war. The mythology is built, as a rule, in the darkest and most sinister colors. This applies to various publications published in the West and to journalism in our country. In order to present the process of repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war to the USSR from Germany and other countries and its consequences in the most gruesome way possible, an extremely biased selection of facts is used, which in itself is a sophisticated method of slander. In particular, sometimes gruesome scenes of violent repatriation of personnel of collaborationist military units are relished, and the corresponding conclusions and generalizations are transferred to the bulk of prisoners of war, which is wrong in principle. Accordingly, their repatriation, which, despite all the costs, was based on the natural and moving epic of finding the homeland of many hundreds of thousands of people, forcibly deprived of it by foreign invaders, is interpreted as a direction almost to the “belly of the beast.” Moreover, the biased facts are presented in a distorted form with a given interpretation, literally imposing an absurd conclusion on the reader, as if the repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war was carried out allegedly only to repress them in the Soviet Union, and there were no other reasons for repatriation.

However, the data presented in Table 3 do not strongly support such pessimistic assessments. On the contrary, they shatter the myth about the alleged almost universal repression in the USSR of Soviet servicemen who had been in Nazi captivity. This statistic includes 1,539,475 prisoners of war who entered the USSR during the period from October 1944 to March 1, 1946, from Germany and other countries, of which 960,039 came from the zones of action of the Allies (West Germany, France, Italy, etc.) and 579,436 from the zones of action of the Red Army abroad (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.), (see, GARF: Ф. 9526. Оп. 4а. Д. 1. Л. 62, 223—226). In 1945, 13 age-categories of servicemen were demobilized from the army, and accordingly their peers among prisoners of war (over 280,000) were released home. A part of the POWs of non-demobilizable ages were enrolled in work battalions—these were not at all repressed, but were one of the forms of mobilized labor force (a common practice at that time), and their assignment to the place of residence was made dependent on the future demobilization of their peers who continued to serve in the Red (Soviet) Army. The majority of prisoners of war of non-demobilizable ages were reinstated into military service. Only the special contingent of the NKVD remained (the share of the total number of prisoners of war was as follows—less than 15 percent); but we must not forget that the bulk of this category of repatriated prisoners of war were persons who, after their capture, had entered the military or police service of the enemy.

Table 3: Distribution of Repatriated Soviet Prisoners of War by Category (as of March 1, 1946)

The notion that the highest political leadership of the USSR allegedly equated the concepts of “prisoners” and “traitors” belongs to the category of retrospectively invented falsehoods (artifacts). Such “making up” usually pursued the goal of more slander and to discredit Stalin. In particular, the expression attributed to Stalin—”we have no prisoners, we have traitors”—is a fable (artifact), composed in 1956 in the writer-publicist environment, during the wave of criticism of the personality cult of Stalin. Actually, there are quite a lot of invented artifacts. They include, for example, the tale of Stalin’s “refusal” to exchange prisoners—Field Marshal Paulus for his son Yakov Dzhugashvili (in reality, this did not happen; it is a later fiction). Specially for the purpose of discrediting Stalin in Khrushchev’s time was fabricated the fake “report” of Soviet intelligence officer Richard Sorge, allegedly dated June 15, 1941 and which reported the date of the German invasion—June 22, 1941 (in fact, Sorge did not send such a report, because he did not know the exact date of the German attack on the USSR).

Medvedev suggests that up to 1946 inclusive, NKVD agencies repressed from 2 to 3 million people living on the territory of the USSR, which was subjected to fascist occupation (see, R.A. Medvedev, “Nash isk Stalinu,” in Moskovskiye novosti, November 27, 1988). In reality, 321,651 people were convicted on political grounds throughout the Soviet Union in 1944-1946, of whom 101,77 were sentenced to capital punishment (according to the records of the 1st Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs). It seems that the majority of those convicted from the former occupied territory were punished justly—for specific treasonous activities.

The statement widely used in Western Sovietology that 6-7 million peasants (mostly kulaks) perished during the collectivization of 1929-1932 does not stand up to criticism. In 1930-1931, just over 1.8 million peasants were sent into “kulak exile,” and at the beginning of 1932, 1.3 million remained there. The loss of 0.5 million was due to deaths, escapes, and the release of the “wrongly exiled.” During 1932-1940, in the “kulak exile,” 230,258 people were born, 389,521 died, 629,042 escaped and 235,120 returned after escaping. And from 1935, the birth rate began to exceed the death rate: in 1932-1934, in the “kulak exile,” were born 49,168 and 271,367 died; in 1935-1940—respectively 181,090 and 108,154 people (see, GARF: Ф. 9479. Оп. 1. Д. 89. Л. 205, 216).

There is no agreement in the scientific and journalistic literature on the question of whether or not to include the dispossessed peasants among the victims of political repressions. The kulaks were divided into three categories, and their total number varied from 3.5 million to 4 million (it is still difficult to establish the exact number). Here it should be noted immediately that the kulaks of the 1st category (arrested and convicted) are included in the statistics of political repressions given in Tables 1 and 2. The question of the 2nd category, kulaks sent under escort to live in “cold lands” (special resettlement), is disputable, where they were under the supervision of the NKVD agencies, which looked very much like political exile. As for the kulaks of the 3rd category, who avoided both arrest and conviction, and were sent to special settlement, there is no reason, in our opinion, to include them in the number of victims of political repression. In passing, we note that among the landlords whose property was expropriated in 1918, only those who were subsequently arrested and convicted by the punitive bodies of the Soviet power can be considered victims of political repression. The concepts of “expropriated” and “repressed” should not be equated.

We have studied the entire set of statistical reports of the Special Settlements Department of the NKVD-MVD of the USSR. It shows that in 1930-1940 about 2.5 million people were in “kulak exile,” of whom about 2.3 million were kulak peasants and about 200 thousand were “admixture” in the form of urban declassified element, the “dubious element” from border zones and others. During this period (1930-1940), approximately 700,000 people died there, the vast majority of them in 1930-1933 (see, V. N. Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR. 1930—1960: Abstract of the dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences, Moscow, 2005, pp. 34-35). In light of this well-known and often quoted statement of Winston Churchill that in one of the conversations with him, Stalin allegedly named 10 million expelled and dead kulaks (see, Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate, pp. 447-448), should be perceived as a misunderstanding.

The victims of political terror often include those who died of hunger in 1933, which is hardly legitimate. After all, we are talking about the fiscal policy of the state in the conditions of a natural disaster (drought). At that time, in the regions affected by drought (Ukraine, the North Caucasus, part of the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan), the state did not find it necessary to reduce the volume of obligatory supplies and confiscated from the peasants the meager harvest to the last grain. The polemics on the issue of the number of those who died from the famine is far from being finalized—estimates vary mainly within the range from 2 million to 8 million (see, V.P. Danilov, “”Diskussiya v zapadnoy presse o golode 1932—1933 gg. i «demograficheskaya katastrofa» 30—40-kh godov v SSSR,” in Voprosy istorii, no. 3, 1988, pp. 116-121; R. Konkvest, “Zhatva skorbi,” in Voprosy istorii, No. 4, 1990, p. 86; Naseleniye Rossii v XX veke: Istoricheskiye ocherki, Vol. 1, pp. 270-271). According to our estimates, the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 were about 3 million people, about half of them in Ukraine. Our conclusion, of course, is not original, since approximately the same estimates were given by historians V.P. Danilov (USSR), S. Wheatcroft (Australia) and others back in the 80s of the XX century (see, V.P. Danilov, “Kollektivizatsiya: kak eto bylo,” in Stranitsy istorii sovetskogo obshchestva: fakty, problemy, lyudi, Moscow, 1989, p. 250).

The main obstacle to the inclusion of those who died from the famine in 1933 among the victims of political terror with the formulation developed in human rights organizations of “artificially organized famine with the purpose of causing mass death of people” is the fact that the fiscal policy was a secondary factor, and the primary factor was a natural disaster (drought). Nor was it intended to cause mass deaths (the political leadership of the USSR did not foresee and did not expect such negative consequences of its fiscal policy in conditions of drought).

In recent years, the idea has been actively promoted in Ukraine (including in scientific circles) that the famine of 1932-1933 was the result of Moscow’s anti-Ukrainian policy, that it was a deliberate genocide against Ukrainians, etc. the population of the North Caucasus, the Volga region, Kazakhstan and other areas where there was a famine. There was no selective anti-Russian, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Kazakh or any other orientation here. In fact, the United Nations was guided by the same considerations, which in 2008 refused to recognize the fact of the genocide of the Ukrainian people by a majority vote (although the United States and England voted for such recognition, they were in the minority).

The losses of the peoples deported in 1941-1944—Germans, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, etc.—are also greatly exaggerated. In the press, for example, there were estimates that up to 40 percent of Crimean Tatars died during transportation to the places of expulsion. Whereas the documents show that out of 151,720 Crimean Tatars sent in May 1944 to the Uzbek SSR, 151,529 were accepted by the NKVD of Uzbekistan, and 191 people (0.13%) died on the way (see, GARF: Ф. 9479. Оп. 1. Д. 179. Л. 241—242).

It is another matter that in the first years of life in the special settlement, in the process of painful adaptation, the mortality rate significantly exceeded the birth rate From the moment of the initial settlement until October 1, 1948—25,792 were born and 45,275 died among the evicted Germans (excluding the labor army); among the North Caucasians (Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, etc.)— respectively 28,120 and 146,892; among the Crimeans (Tatars, Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks)—6,564 and 44,887; among those deported in 1944 from Georgia (Meskhetian Turks, etc.)—2,873 and 15,432; among Kalmyks—2,702 and 16,594 people. Since 1949, among all of them, the birth rate became higher than the death rate (see, GARF: Д. 436. Л. 14, 26, 65—67).

History dilettantes include all human losses during the Russian Civil War among the unconditional “victims of the Bolshevik regime.” From the fall of 1917 to the beginning of 1922, the population of the country decreased by 12,741,300 people (see, T.A. Polyakov, Sovetskaya strana posle okonchaniya Grazhdanskoy voyny: territoriya i naseleniye, Moscow, 1986, pp. 98, 118); this also includes White emigration, the number of which is not precisely known (approximately 1.5 to 2 million). Only one warring party (the Red) is declared the culprit of the Civil War, and all the victims, including its own, are attributed to it. How many “exposé” materials have been published in recent years about the “sealed train,” the “intrigues of the Bolsheviks,” etc.?! It is impossible to count. It has often been claimed that if it had not been for Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders, there would have been no revolution, no Red Movement, and no Civil War (we should add, with the same “success” one can claim that if it had not been for Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, and Wrangel, there would have been no White Movement). The absurdity of such assertions is quite obvious. The most powerful social upheaval in world history, such as the events of 1917-1920 in Russia, was predetermined by the entire previous course of history and was caused by a complex set of intractable social, class, national, regional and other tensions. In light of this, science cannot broadly interpret the concept of “victims of political repression” and includes in it only persons arrested and convicted by the punitive bodies of the Soviet power for political reasons. This means that the victims of political repressions are not the millions who died of typhus, typhoid, typhoid fever and other diseases. Nor are the millions of people who died on the fronts of the Civil War on all opposing sides, who died of hunger, cold, etc., the victims of political repression.

And as a result, it turns out that the victims of political repressions (during the years of “Red Terror”) are not counted in millions at all. The most we can talk about is tens of thousands. It is not without reason that when at the briefing in the press center of the IBRF on August 2, 1992, the number of those convicted on political grounds since 1917 was named, it did not fundamentally affect the corresponding statistics, if we count from the year 1921.

According to the available records in the FSB RF, in 1918-1920, 62,231 people were sentenced for “counter-revolutionary crime,” including 25,709 for execution (see, V. V. Luneev, Prestupnost’ XX veka, 1997, p. 180; V.N. Kudryavtsev, A.I. Trusov, Politicheskaya yustitsiya v SSSR, Moscow, 2000, p. 314). This information is part of the statistics above, mentioned at the briefing, at the press center of the IBRF, on August 2, 1992. We believe that the above statistics for the period of the Civil War are incomplete. Many victims of lynchings of “counter-revolutionaries” are probably not taken into account. These lynchings were often not documented at all, and the FSB has clearly taken into account only the number that is confirmed by documents. It is also doubtful that in 1918-1920 Moscow received exhaustive information about the number of the repressed from localities. But even taking all this into consideration, we believe that the total number of repressed “counter-revolutionaries” (including victims of the “Red Terror”) in 1918-1920 hardly exceeded 100,000 people.

Our publications with the statistics of political repressions, Gulag prisoners, and “kulak exile,” based on archival documents, had a significant impact on Western Sovietology, forcing it to abandon its main thesis about the alleged 50-60 million victims of the Soviet regime. Western Sovietologists cannot simply dismiss published archival statistics as an annoying fly and are forced to take them into account. In the Black Book of Communism, written in the late 1990s by French specialists, this figure is reduced to 20 million (see, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, 1999, p. 4).

But even this “reduced” figure (20 million) we cannot recognize as acceptable. It includes both a number of reliable data, confirmed by archival documents, and estimated figures (many millions) of demographic losses in the Civil War, those who died of hunger in different periods, etc. The authors of The Black Book of Communism even included in the number of victims of political terror those who died of starvation in 1921-1922 (famine in the Volga region, caused by a severe drought), which neither Medvedev nor many other experts in this field had never done before.

Nevertheless, the very fact that the estimated scale of victims of the Soviet regime has decreased (from 50-60 million to 20 million) indicates that during the 1990s, Western Sovietology underwent a significant evolution towards common sense, but, however, got stuck halfway through this positive process.

According to our calculations, strictly based on the documents, it turns out to be no more than 2.6 million, with a rather extended interpretation of the concept of “victims of political terror and repression.” This number includes more than 800,000 sentenced to capital punishment on political grounds, about 600,000 political prisoners who died in places of deprivation of liberty, and about 1.2 million who died in places of expulsion (including “kulak exile”), as well as during transportation there (deported peoples, etc.). The components of our calculations correspond readily to four criteria specified in The Black Book of Communism in defining the concept of “victims of political terror and repression,” namely: “shooting, hanging, drowning, beating to death;” “deportation—death during transportation;” “death in places of expulsion;” “death as a result of forced labor (exhausting labor, disease, malnutrition, cold)” (Black Book, p. 4).

As a result, we have four main variants of the scale of victims (executed and killed by other means) of political terror and repression in the USSR: 110 million (Solzhenitsyn); 50-60 million (Western Sovietology during the Cold War); 20 million (Western Sovietology in the post-Soviet period); 2.6 million (our document-based calculations).

The question may arise—where is Roy Medvedev’s 40 million? This figure is not comparable with the above figures; there we are talking only about those executed and killed by other means, while Medvedev’s statistics also includes millions of people who, although subjected to various repressions, remained alive. This, however, does not cancel out the fact that Medvedev’s statistics are still exaggerated many times over.

In the serious scientific literature of the modern period, authors avoid making frivolous statements about the allegedly many tens of millions of victims of Bolshevism and the Soviet regime. In light of this, the book by Yuri L. Dyakov, Ideologiya bol’shevizma i real’nyy sotsializm—The Ideology of Bolshevism and Real Socialism (2009), in which, in the list of crimes of the CPSU, there is also mentioned “the destruction of tens of millions of its people” (p. 146), is in sharp contrast. Moreover, Dyakov considers the so-called “calculations” of Professor Ivan A. Kurganov (which in his time were accepted by Solzhenitsyn) to be quite reliable, according to which, due to the fault of Bolshevism, the population losses in Russia (USSR) in 1918-1958 amounted to more than 110 million people (p. 234). The position of Dyakov in his book rests on the complete disregard of the whole complex of available historical sources. The use of documentarily refuted statistics by Dyakov, on the basis of which he draws far-reaching conclusions and generalizations on the topic under study, cannot be called other than a pathological deviation from the mainstream in this area of historical science.

And the last issue we would like to highlight is the statistics of rehabilitation and its stages. Let us return to our basic figure—3,854,000 (more precisely—3,853,900) convicted on political grounds for all 73 years of Soviet power. This figure was used to calculate the number and proportion of those rehabilitated.

Rehabilitations took place during Stalin’s lifetime, but their scale was quite insignificant. The period of mass rehabilitation began in 1953, immediately after the famous events associated with the death of Stalin, the arrest and execution of Beria, and especially after the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, which condemned the cult of personality of Stalin.

The rehabilitation was led by the former Stalinist entourage headed by Khrushchev, directly involved in the former Stalinist repressions. In this case, they, especially Khrushchev, showed a well-known political foresight. In the first years after Stalin’s death, the situation was such that to continue the line of the late leader without significant adjustments—was a path of deliberate political suicide. The idea of mass rehabilitation for many reasons was politically advantageous and was literally necessary. The fact that this process was initiated and led by Stalin’s former entourage, which was directly involved in the repressions, we can formulate their internal motivations as follows: “It is better that we do it, rather than someone else does it instead of us.” The instinct of political self-preservation worked here.

The rehabilitation process had its ups and downs over time. Its first stage—the mass “Khrushchev’s” rehabilitation—covers the period 1953-1961. Then rehabilitation declined, but nevertheless continued (at a slower pace). Since 1987, the mass “Gorbachev’s” rehabilitation began, which significantly surpassed the “Khrushchev’s” rehabilitation. The number and proportion of the rehabilitated (and unrehabilitated) are presented in Table 4.

Table 4: The Rehabilitation Process, from 1953 to 1999

The term “innocently convicted” does not apply to all those rehabilitated. Indeed, hundreds of thousands were victims of entirely far-fetched and fabricated charges. But there were also many who had done concrete actions (including those of an armed nature) against the existing system. They were rehabilitated on the grounds that their struggle against Bolshevism and Soviet power was allegedly “just.” In particular, in the mid-1990s, under this politically biased and legally questionable thesis, practically all participants in the numerous kulak-peasant uprisings and rebellions of the period 1918-1933 were rehabilitated (and everyone was rehabilitated, including executioners who shot and hanged communists, Komsomol members and non-party Soviet activists).

It even came to the point that in 1996, SS Gruppenführer Helmuth von Pannwitz was rehabilitated by the decision of the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office. Cossack units under the command of Pannwitz—the 1st Cossack Cavalry Division, then deployed in the 15th Cossack Cavalry Corps—participated in punitive operations in Yugoslavia. In 1947, together with other war criminals, he was hanged by sentence of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. However, in 2001 the Military Prosecutor’s office of the Russian Federation made a different conclusion: von Pannwitz was justifiably convicted for his criminal acts and cannot be rehabilitated.

Table 4 shows that out of almost 3,854,000 convicted on political grounds (according to the personalized record available in the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) by the beginning of 2000, 2,438,000 (63.3 percent) were rehabilitated and about 1,416,000 (36.7 percent) remained unrehabilitated.

Later on, the rehabilitation process stalled, because, in fact, there was no one to rehabilitate. The bulk of the unrehabilitated were accomplices of the fascist occupiers—all those Polizei, the Karateli [death squads], Sonderkommando bosses, Vlasovites, etc., etc., who, as a rule, were held under Article 58 as political criminals. There was a provision in Soviet legislation that prohibited the rehabilitation of accomplices of the Nazi occupiers. This provision has passed into the current Russian legislation, i.e., their rehabilitation is expressly prohibited by law. In addition to accomplices of the Nazi occupiers, a number of other persons remain unrehabilitated, whose actions were of such a nature that it is simply impossible to rehabilitate them.

Such are the complex pages of national history, if we do not fantasize, but rely on the facts reflected in the documents.

To answer the question about the impact of repressions in their real scale on Soviet society, we would suggest familiarizing ourselves with the conclusions of the American historian Robert Thurston, who in the mid-1990s published a scientific monograph Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941 (1996). The main conclusions, according to Thurston, are as follows:

  • The Stalinist terror system as described by previous generations of Western researchers never existed; the impact of terror on Soviet society in the Stalin years was not significant;
  • There was no mass fear of repression in the Soviet Union in the 1930s;
  • Repression was limited and did not affect the majority of the Soviet people;
  • Soviet society supported the Stalinist regime rather than feared it;
  • The Stalinist system provided the majority of people with the opportunity to live in the Soviet Union

These conclusions of Thurston, which are almost blasphemous from the perspective of the traditions and spirit of Western Sovietology and as perceived by the majority of Sovietologists, are based on documented facts and statistics. In addition, Thurston, not being a supporter of communism and Soviet power, nevertheless in his endeavor to get to the historical truth managed to be detached from the established anti-communist and anti-Soviet stereotypes and dogmas. This is, figuratively speaking, a ray of light in a dark realm.


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Featured: Still Life, by Yuri Neprintsev; painted in 1979.


Stalin’s Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930–1936

Michael Jabara Carley has just published Stalin’s Gamble. The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930–1936, which is the first volume of his tour de force trilogy on Soviet-Western relations during the 1930s. This work will be an indispensible text in Russian studies.

True to form, Stalin’s Gamble is meticulously researched, lucidly written and prodigious in its many insights. The book has that rare quality in that it appeals both to the scholar and the general reader. We are pleased to bring you an excerpt, courtesy of the University of Toronto Press.

This is a book well worth spending time with., Make sure to pick up your copy.

Prologue to Crisis

On 1 January 1930, few Europeans worried about the outbreak of a Second World War. Parisian fortune tellers might have ventured such a sensational prediction on their advertising coupons. The French, of course, worried instinctively about a new war with a revanchist Germany. In fifteen years, predicted the French politician Edouard Herriot. That was in 1922, and he was not a fortune teller. The Soviet commissar, or narkom for foreign affairs, Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, sometimes speculated about such possibilities. Marxist ideologues thought of world war as the inevitable result of capitalist and imperialist rivalries. Litvinov opined that with the possible exceptions of the Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, and Jozef Piłsudski, the Polish generalissimo, no government in Europe wanted war. Sure, there was a “war scare” in the Soviet Union in 1927, but Litvinov did not make much of it. Apparently, many rank-and-file communists did not take the war scare too seriously either, considering it “a tool of social agitation,” which undoubtedly it was. Besides the Italian Duce Mussolini, another fascist leader was emerging in Germany. This was Adolf Hitler, who headed a fringe party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) or Nazi Party, who had ideas about a German renaissance of power relying on war as a means of achieving it. He even published a long book, Mein Kampf, in 1925, where he elaborated his plans for the future domination of Europe. It was hard to read Mein Kampf to the end, but you did not have to read every page to understand the message. The Nazi Party did not win a great many votes in the Reichstag elections during the 1920s, and thus did not appear to be a threat to European peace. In January 1930, it is unlikely that Litvinov or anyone else among the Soviet leadership worried much about Hitler.

As the new decade opened, it was more or less business as usual at the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in Moscow, or the NKID. The principal objective was normalization of relations with the Western powers and the United States. A new world war was not an agenda item. In the autumn of 1929, the British government renewed diplomatic relations with the USSR, which it had broken off more than two years before on a wave of anti-communist hysteria. This was a victory for Soviet diplomacy. The NKID remained alert for Western attempts to organize an anti-Soviet bloc. Litvinov did not consider it a likely possibility, however, since capitalist political and economic rivalries would prevent the Western powers from ganging up on the USSR.

The Soviet Union and Weimar Germany had reasonably functional relations at the beginning of the 1930s. It certainly did not look in Moscow as if they would be at war a decade later. At the beginning of the 1920s Soviet Russia and Germany were pariahs, the one a proscribed revolutionary socialist state and the other condemned to take the blame for provoking the Great War, even though a democratic Weimar Republic had been established in November 1918. The Treaty of Versailles, concluded in June 1919, was supposed to settle the problem of German power, but did not do so. The German government passed the decade attempting to loosen the constraints of Versailles; and the Soviet government, to break out of its diplomatic isolation. What could have been more natural than these two pariah states joining together to escape isolation? In April 1922 they signed an agreement at Rapallo, Italy, to renounce prewar debts and obligations and to re-establish diplomatic and economic relations. The Entente Powers, France and Britain, were furious, realizing that the two outcasts had slipped out of their control. The pressure, both political and economic, would now be on the Entente Powers to come to terms with Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia.

The pattern of relations in Europe was thus set for the decade of the 1920s with attempts at rapprochement with Britain and France more successful on the German side than on the Soviet. If the Entente Powers succeeded in defeating Wilhelmine Germany during the Great War, they failed to overthrow Soviet power after the Bolshevik Revolution. They tried though as much as they dared. The West’s bete noire in Moscow was the Communist International, or Comintern, established in 1919 not only to pursue the cause of world revolution, but also to defend Soviet Russia against foreign intervention. During the 1920s there were ups and downs in Soviet-Western relations, a crisis now and again, but no danger of another world war.

Western Europe appeared more or less stable and prosperous. It was the Roaring Twenties: the European bourgeoisie had money for leisure and conspicuous consumption. In capital cities like Paris and Berlin, men in tuxedos and women in sleek evening dresses rocked to the beat of big band music and American jazz at nightclubs and cabarets. The menus offered expensive cuisine that went down well with wine and champagne, while dancers perspired on the dance floor. Nor were the slick and well-to-do absent from the terrasses of popular cafes where they rubbed shoulders with American expats, painters, writers, and socialists. “It’s class fraternization,” a Marxist ideologue might have joked.

Politically, France and Britain were often at odds; in fact, their wartime alliance appeared to dissolve on 11 November 1918, the day the Great War ended. This allowed room for both Germany and the Soviet Union to manoeuvre. Germany had the better of the diplomacy. The Red Scare of the 1920s and lingering Soviet revolutionary ambitions hampered efforts to normalize relations in the West. After the premature death in January 1924 of Soviet leader Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, a struggle for power erupted between Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin and Lev Davidovich Trotskii. Hatred is the first word that comes to mind in describing relations between these two Soviet leaders. This conflict had its effects on both Soviet domestic and foreign policy. At the end of the decade, the struggle for power was settled. Stalin established himself as the new, indisputable Soviet leader. Trotskii was sent into exile. Stalin calmed the Bolshevik itch to pursue world revolution and launched a five-year plan for industrialization and collectivization of agricultural lands. The troubles created by these domestic policies were an additional incentive to maintain correct relations with the Western powers.

The architects of Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s were Georgii Vasilievich Chicherin, the narkom for foreign affairs, and his principal deputy, zamnarkom Litvinov.

These two were an odd couple, one descended from the Russian aristocracy, and the other from a rather peculiar middle-class Jewish family. They often differed among themselves, both because of personal rivalries and jealousies and because of differences in temperament. Historians have said they pursued conflicting policies, Chicherin being pro-German, and Litvinov, pro-British. This is untrue, they were not pro this or that Western government, they were pro-Soviet. They sought to protect what they defined as the national interests of the Soviet state. In the northwest that meant the Baltic frontiers; in the south, it meant the borders in Central Asia. On the big issues like Rapallo or better relations with other Western powers, or difficulties with the Comintern, they saw eye to eye. It was on tactics rather than on strategy that their personal rivalries played themselves out. If Chicherin argued white, Litvinov would argue black, and vice versa. This rivalry continued until 1928 when an ailing Chicherin went on leave, never to resume his duties. Litvinov became the acting and then formal narkom of the NKID.

Soviet foreign policy was a complicated business. The NKID had to cope not only with hostile Western governments but also with politics in Moscow where foreign policy was often a stake in the struggle for power between Stalin and Trotskii and then other rivals. There were many arenas where the struggle to succeed Lenin unfolded, but none more important than in the Politburo, which was in effect the cabinet of the Soviet government. In most cabinets, the minister of foreign affairs is a high-ranking member. In the Politburo, Chicherin was not a member. He and Litvinov were invited consultants when foreign policy was discussed. On the other hand, during the 1920s, the Comintern, the nemesis of the NKID as well as of the West, was represented in succession by two of Stalin’s provisional allies, Grigorii Evseievich Zinoviev and Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin. These two Bolshevik politicians not only represented the Comintern, but used it as a platform for influence and power in the Politburo where Stalin sometimes gave them leeway as he manoeuvred for power. Politburo members tended to think they knew more about foreign policy than the NKID, which exasperated Chicherin and Litvinov. Zinoviev and Bukharin, they complained, talked too much, did not think enough, and irritated Western governments for nothing. The NKID often played the unwanted roll of concierge cleaning up their messes. Litvinov let it slip from time to time with foreign diplomats that he was fed up with the Comintern. Of course Stalin could not say that.

A persistent idea survives that the Comintern conducted Soviet foreign policy during the interwar years, or that the priorities of world revolution dominated it. “National interest” was not a concept much in use in Moscow.3 Such assertions do not stand up well in a close examination of Soviet archives. After Stalin consolidated his power, the Comintern faded into the background. It still functioned, still sought to direct the business of foreign communist parties, and still annoyed the Western powers, though less than before. If there was local resistance to French or British colonialism, the Quai d’Orsay or Foreign Office blamed it on the Comintern. When Litvinov heard such complaints, his stock reply was that indigenous resistance to Western colonialism flourished without any help from the Comintern. What was the USSR supposed to do? Should it become an advocate of colonial empires? This question came up, as readers will see, when Italy invaded Abyssinia in October 1935. Even capitalists were getting used to the Comintern. It was, like a stone in your rubber boot, which you could not take off until you stepped out of the bog. Among the Western powers, the said and unsaid idea was that the Soviet Union should abandon socialism and embrace capitalism, thus behaving like every other state. Why should Stalin and his colleagues do that? Would capitalists ever abandon capitalism?

In the 1930s the Comintern, at times, played a role in support of Soviet national interests, in Spain, for example, during the civil war, although that was a point debated inside the NKID. There were sometimes residual tensions left over from the 1920s, but it was the NKID that formulated foreign policy most of the time and the Politburo (but in reality, Stalin) that approved or modified it.

Stalin sometimes told the Comintern leadership, Georgi Dimitrov, for example, to develop policy without him. I was too busy, he would say: “Decide by yourselves.” He never said that to Litvinov or his deputies in the NKID. Stalin’s involvement in foreign policymaking began after Lenin took ill in 1922–3. The narkom proposed and most of the time the vozhd’, who was Stalin, approved. Occasionally there were clashes. A pervasive Western view holds that there were two Soviet foreign policies, Litvinov’s, pro-Western, and Stalin’s, pro-German, even after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The German orientation was Stalin’s preference, but he let Litvinov “talk him into something” in abandoning Rapallo. One often hears the argument, yes, collective security was Litvinov’s policy, but what about Stalin’s real preferences? This view is widespread among Western historians, seeking to explain away Litvinov and the policy of collective security. The fact is there were no personal policies, no duality of policies, only one policy that was Soviet and, perforce, Stalin’s.

It is widely believed in the West that Stalin was a confidence man just waiting for an opportunity to trick the Western powers and to return to the “old” Rapallo policy with Nazi Germany. In the meantime, he would string them along. Collective security and mutual assistance against Nazi Germany were a sham. Stalin was a would-be conqueror, a kind of red Genghis Khan, just waiting for opportunities to strike. The Soviet archival evidence upon which this narrative is based demonstrates that the Soviet leadership was serious about collective security and that Britain and France were not. In the case of France, one can make a partial exception for the period 1933–4. This revelation may come as a surprise to some readers, or others may simply not believe it, sticking to preconceived ideas. There is little evidence to substantiate Stalin’s clandestine pro-German policy, risible in any case because composition with Hitler during 1930s was not a sin, or if it was, everyone was being sinful. Britain and France, not to mention Poland, led the way. Some historians in the West might argue that the Western states had their “liberal scruples” about dealing with “archenemies.” The trouble was that for many European conservatives, Stalin was the arch-enemy, not Hitler.

Two could play at who loves me, who loves me not. Even the narkom Litvinov argued that a minimum of relations with Hitler, mostly economic, should be maintained in order to avoid a diplomatic rupture. Litvinov feared Soviet isolation, which could facilitate Anglo-French security arrangements with Hitler.

The view of Stalin as trickster, “Germanophile,” and “ally” of Hitler has been around for a long time and originates in the anti-communism and Sovietphobia of the interwar years and the second stage of the Cold War after 1945. A.J.P. Taylor, the great British historian of the mid-twentieth century, commented in 1981 that detached study of Soviet foreign policy was unlikely in his lifetime. “Most of my historical colleagues,” he said, “are so corrupted and blinded by their obsession with the Cold War that it is quite impossible for them to see clearly or to speak honestly about Soviet policies.” The same was true of their Soviet counterparts. Taylor was trying to be “balanced.” The Cold War ended in 1991 – at least many people hoped it had – after the dismemberment and disappearance of the Soviet Union. The immense Soviet archives began to open. It was the most extraordinary experience for historians to go to Moscow for the first time and hold in their hands freshly declassified dela, or files, that no one, apart from archivists and a few Soviet historians, had ever before read, let alone explored. Maybe we should talk about “History BC,” before the opening of the Soviet archives, and “History AD,” after the opening. I would respectfully contend that historians cannot study the origins of the Second World War without reference to the Soviet archival sources. Now that we have those files, or a great many of them, it should be possible to get to the bottom of the big questions that divided Taylor’s generation.

Yet here we are, and so far, it has not been possible. A new generation of English-language writers, seemingly disdainful of their predecessors, has resumed old habits. One evokes “memory” to justify not going to the archival records. Another goes to the files, cherry-picking evidence. He uses that part of the archival record which suits his strong ideological objectives and ignores that part which does not. It is dust in the eyes. Such modi operandi, writes one reviewer, “undermine confidence” in the author. Yet even when reviewers catch an author red-handed, it does not appear to bother either author or publisher. In the early 1980s, an untenured “Marxist historian” at Princeton University was drummed out of the profession for mistakes of documentation. Senior historians accused him “of systematically distorting evidence”; he was “called a ‘liar’ and a ‘faker.’” Now, forty years later, those very words, but not the punishment, might apply to certain academics or politicians of a new generation. As politicians go, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, comes to mind, or delegates at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

In the flurry of such Western ideas, it goes against the grain to propose that Soviet foreign policy functioned more or less as it did in other states, I mean based on perceptions of national interest. In fact, in the Politburo there existed considerable animosity towards Germany and towards the Rapallo policy, though it continued with ups and downs throughout the 1920s and into the beginning of the 1930s. Germany was the only Western power with which the Soviet Union had tolerable relations. It was the only foothold in Europe and had to be protected lest the USSR risk dangerous isolation. All the better, Litvinov argued, if relations with other powers could be improved, but not at the risk of damaging Rapallo. Litvinov was under no illusions about the permanency of Rapallo. Eventually, Germany and the USSR would part company. Other options, therefore, had to be cultivated, but for the time being such options were “music of the future.”

Western-Soviet tensions came and went like bad weather. Trade turnover rose and fell according to Soviet economic and political needs. Moscow used trade as bait to obtain better political relations, though this strategy never really worked except in Weimar Germany, and even there, bilateral relations were often strained. It was not trade per se but political calculations of national interest on both sides, which kept Rapallo going.

By the end of the 1920s, the Soviet government managed to achieve prewar production levels. It was slow going, too slow for the Bolsheviks, for they were all industrializers and modernizers whatever the disagreements between them on how fast to proceed. The USSR was burdened with millions of peasant smallholdings, which produced only enough grain and other foodstuffs to sustain the peasant producers. Sometimes it did not, and the poorest peasants had to hire themselves out as labourers to the more prosperous so-called kulaks, to make ends meet. There was not enough agricultural surplus to feed the cities, at reasonable prices, in order to support industrialization or to sell in the West to obtain vital foreign exchange. Something had to be done. Having won the conflict to succeed Lenin, Stalin clenched his fists and smashed all the obstacles to industrialization by launching the First Five-Year Plan in 1928 and by forcing at the same time the collectivization of small peasant holdings, grouping them into large collective farms. Forced collectivization provoked a peasant “Luddite” rebellion (a turn of phrase coined by the late Isaac Deutscher), which along with drought and insect infestations, led in 1932–3 to a disastrous concatenation of circumstances, a famine in the Soviet wheat belt. These developments did not affect Soviet foreign policy or the Soviet need to trade. If anything, industrialization increased the need to buy capital goods and to sell agricultural products, lumber, oil, and manganese in the West.

In the 1930s the stakes in Soviet relations with the West changed rapidly. In October 1929, the stock market crashed in New York, setting off what became the Great Depression, which spread from the United States to Europe. The deceptive political and economic stability of the 1920s was shattered. Credit dried up, banks and businesses went broke, industrial production fell, international trade declined, commodity prices plummeted, and unemployment rose to calamitous levels.

The Roaring Twenties became a memory. One imagines that many prized tuxedos and evening gowns collected dust in the closet or ended up in secondhand shops. American expats still flocked to Paris, and jazz men still played the cabarets, but in reality, everything had changed. The music sounded the same, but people were not. The legions of unemployed worried about making ends meet. People were desperate and angry. The far-right leagues (or ligues) in France and the Nazi Brownshirts in Germany went out into the streets looking for trouble, fighting with communists and unionists. There were casualties. It was war, not all-out, but war all the same.

The Depression thus brought renewed political instability, especially in Germany, where the Nazi Party under Hitler made impressive gains in federal elections in September 1930, rising from 12 seats in the Reichstag to 107. Hitler was no longer a fringe politician. Nazi power increased rapidly until Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. This should have set off alarm bells in European capitals and in Washington, and it should have led to changes in policy. Sometimes it did and sometimes not. It certainly did in Moscow. The threat of war, which had largely been a theoretical discussion, became a real, tangible danger. As a result, major changes in foreign policy and in relations with the Western powers took place in the Soviet Union as it turned to face the menace to European peace and security posed by Hitlerite Germany. Sooner or later, Litvinov had said in 1927, Germany and the USSR were bound to go their separate ways. That time had come.


Featured: Joseph Stalin, by Viktor Mikhailovich Oreshnikov; painted in 1948.


What is Dictatorship?

In politics, whether we know it or not, we are always fighting against an enemy, whether stationed on our borders or camouflaged within the city. But there is also another form of enmity, much more subtle than the one that bubbles at ground level, incarnated by men who have an ideology or a culture, perhaps a religion or a barbaric anthropology, incompatible with our own. It is the enmity derived from political concepts, polemically handled and exploited against the “moral element,” the criterion by which the true capacity of resistance to the hostility and offenses of the enemy is measured.

What I want to say, now by way of example, is that certain assumed definitions, transformed into taboos, enervate the will, having previously worked the intelligence by “brainwashing,” an expression that, suspiciously, has ceased to be used at a time when political pedagogy is dedicated only to that. Some pontificate on the benefits of ethnic, religious and cultural pluralism—the pluralism of values, in short—and others suffer its consequences: loss of cultural identity, social conflict, babelization. Nor is it strange that the same people who praise “miscegenation”—vaguely in the legal system, but with more determination in public universities and in the Press and Propaganda Section of the mass media—then maintain that races (or cultures) do not exist. It has also become normal for the zealots of “defensive” pan-Melanism—Black Lives Matter is not new, it was previously invented in the 1920s—to promote as just and necessary an anti-white racism and to demand that we finance our own re-education.

War, even in its current “pacifist” variants, takes place in space, that is to say, on the earth, because to control it and to reasonably order life on it is the primary object of politics. The much more decisive and brutal quarrels over concepts are settled in time. The struggle for the meaning of words, for the “story” that obsesses all modern princely counselors—today called “political analysts” or “advisors,” young people with no experience of life, generally coming, as Jules Monnerot used to say, from an educational system dedicated to “the mass production of artificial cretins”: as opposed to those who are so by a natural disposition; those who flourish massively today are “cultivated cretins, like a certain type of pearl.” Once the political logos and dictionary have been colonized, that is, the national “political imaginary,” any capacity for resistance is radically diminished. Then, and only then, the defeat of the external or internal enemy can be presented as a victory or a political and cultural “homologation” with the executioners. Indeed, a few days ago we in Spain spoke, with a sense of opportunity, of the “afrancesados,” Spanish archetype of a colonized political imaginary.

It is therefore necessary, in a certain sense, to “decolonize the imaginary” and give back to political concepts their precise meaning, which is neither invented nor developed in a Think Tank, but is part, however modest its aliquot, of the truth of politics. It is necessary, in order to know where we stand. I do not know if “political realism” has a specific mission; perhaps, some would say, the elaboration of a “decalogue” or program that can be implemented by a political party, a faction or a movement, but I do know that its raison d’être lies in the demystification of political thought. One of the concepts that needs this mental cleansing is “dictatorship,” a frightening notion about which the greatest confusion reigns—a self-interested Confusionism, exploited by those aspiring to power, presenting their rivals as vulgar supporters of authoritarian regimes and themselves as “democrats”—as if that term had a precise meaning beyond the mental tropisms that adorn the demo-liberal right.

Everything conspires against the reputation of political demystifiers. However, writing about the war-phenomenon does not presuppose a bellicose personality; probably only a meek man can write a theory or a sociology of war. A theory of decision… an indecisive one. And a theory of dictatorship is perhaps only within the reach of someone incapable of exercising it.

It is not easy to look “dictatorship” in the face, a highly inflammable political concept that gravitates over particularly intense political situations and which is entangled with legislation of exception, states of necessity and coups d’état. People believe that a dictatorship is what the “anti-Franco vulgate” teaches, but they do not lose sleep over a government that can illegally shut down Parliament and deprive the whole nation of freedom of movement. Anti-parliamentarism has many forms and those of today are nothing like those of a century ago. It would be very interesting to write a palingenesis of dictatorship, for it is periodically reborn and its singularity should be recognized. To turn one’s back on its reality is to culpably ignore the momentary concentration of power, a reality that happens outside our moral or ideological prejudices, independently of our will. Not knowing what it consists of compromises our position vis-à-vis the enemy who does know what it is and how to use it.

Dictatorship is a fundamental institution of Roman public law. It consists of a lifting or suspension of the juridical barriers in order that the dictator, generally pro tempore, faces the exceptional political situation (sedition, civil war, foreign invasion) and restores the public tranquility to the city. Once restored the order or expired the foreseen period, the extraordinary powers of the dictator are cancelled, whose prototype is Cincinnatus. But there are also in Roman history examples of dictators of undefined undertaking (Sila) and those lifelong (Caesar), even omnímodo or, as we would say today, constituent (lex de imperio vespasiani).

Roman pragmatism had grasped the political essence of dictatorship: it is a concentration or intensification of power that opposes the pernicious effect of the impotence of the established power, besieged by the enemy, generally internal. From a conceptual point of view, it is not strictly speaking a “political regime,” but a “political situation,” transitory by definition. Any manifestation of power always generates criticism from rival parties or factions, but in a particularly intense way criticism is aroused by dictatorship, secularly associated with the personal usufruct of command.

Every dictatorship constitutes a political fact, imperfectly subjected to a legal status. Jean Bodin’s notion of sovereignty is, in this sense, the attempt to make normative a particularly intense moment of command. Such is the glory of Bodin and of the French legists of the 16th century.

During the 19th century, dictatorship gradually lost all its former respectability, as a consequence of the generalization of a new juridical ideology: constitutionalism. Liberal historiography, in its fight against the “enemy,” the absolute monarchies, reworked the classical political tradition and generalized the denigration of the dictatorial institution, arbitrarily associated with tyranny and despotism.

However, the constitutional movement has always recognized, implicitly, that political necessity knows no law when it modulates states of exception, siege and war, denominations which push dictatorship into the background. Dictatorship became a political taboo after the coup of Louis Napoléon (December 2, 1851), the most important coup of the 19th century. But the technical meaning of dictatorship remained and developed in the constitutional states of exception. For the first time, the raison d’être of the classic dictatorship was legally enunciated, but without mentioning it by name: the suspension of law to allow its subsistence. Otherwise, liberalism, which at the time was never, to a certain extent, a “neutral and agnostic” doctrinarism—a legend spread by conservative illiberalism—would never have built the prepotent European nation-states.

Dictatorship formally denies the rule it wants to ensure materially, a doctrine established by Carl Schmitt in his research on the evolution of the institution: Dictatorship (1921), a book of conceptual history, diaphanous and without equivocation, whose non-readers (a very interesting intellectual fauna) figure, against all odds, that it is an apology for Nazism. According to the German jurist, “the essence of dictatorship from the point of view of the philosophy of law consists in the general possibility of separating the norms of law and the norms of the realization of law.” At the same time, dictatorship also implies an effective suppression of the division or separation of powers. Schmitt, being in need of the necessary conceptual demarcation as a jurist, contrasts commissariat dictatorship with constituent dictatorship, categories currently received in the healthiest part of the theory of the State and constitutional theory. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will plays a crucial role in the transition from one to the other.

Hermann Heller, a brilliant jurist, like Carl Schmitt, politicized by his leftist militancy and also committed to national socialism—but the opposite side of the other national socialism—was equally concerned about legal taxonomies. Less perspicacious than his colleague, rival and friend when political or juridical realism (concepts) come into conflict with ideology (positions), for Heller, dictatorship, condemned en bloc, is nothing more than a personalistic and corrupt government (“individuality without law”) opposed to the rule of law (“law without individuality”); in short, “a political regime manifestation of anarchy.” Simplifying a lot, this is the idea of dictatorship generalized among constitutionalists since 1945, the heyday of the “Potsdam democracies.” Carlos Ollero Gómez explained very effectively the constitutional “archaism” that weighed down these regimes.

The commissariat type of dictatorship, an updated formula, at the beginning of the 20th century, of the Roman dictatorship, presupposes a prior mandate or commission, spontaneous (royal call or invitation of a parliament or national assembly to assume extraordinary powers), or forced (pronunciamiento, coup d’état). The commissioned dictator’s mission is to restore the violated constitutional order without going outside the constitution or questioning its essential decisions (form of government). A good example of this is the Spanish dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, the “iron surgeon” expected by all. Have political and legal historians ever stopped to think why dictatorship got such a good press after World War I? They should read more Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, for example, a left-liberal constitutionalist, and think less about the ANECA, cancer of the Spanish university.

Sovereign dictatorship, on the other hand, pursues the establishment of a new political order, using for this purpose a power without legal limitations and operating as a constituent power. Charles de Gaulle in 1958 (dictator ad tempus). This type of dictatorship is associated in the 20th century with totalitarian regimes (total states and popular democracies), while the commissariat dictatorship falls more into the field of authoritarian regimes (Boulangism, authoritarian states and, however bizarre the term may sound, “Catholic dictatorships”). The possible effects of revolution having been limited by the experience of the Paris Commune, the lessons of which led to a turning point in insurrectionary techniques, the alternative to violent subversion is from then on the surgical coup d’état or legal revolution.

In its modern (Baroque) meaning, coups d’état are “audacious and extraordinary actions that princes are forced to undertake, against common law, in difficult and desperate affairs, relativizing the established order and legal formulas and subordinating the interest of individuals to the public good.” Thus speaks, in a secret book, Gabriel Naudé, so mistreated by political ignorance. Naudé, a librarian by profession and a harmless spirit, considers coups legitimate and defensive. Their usefulness depends on the prudence of the prince and, above all, on his ability to anticipate, for “the execution always precedes the sentence”: thus “the coup is received by the one who weighs to give it.” The reputation of a coup d’état depends on those who exploit it: it will be beneficial if it is carried out by friends or allies (salus populi suprema lex esto) and disturbing if it is plotted by enemies (violation of the constitution, counter-coup). Judgment thus depends on the relative position of the observer and his commitments and objectives.

The contemporary sequel to Naudé’s Considerations politiques sur les coups d’Estat (Political Considerations on Coups d’Etat), (1639), is Curzio Malaparte’s Tecnica Del Golpe De Estado (Technique of the Coup d’Etat), (1931). Malaparte, on whom the opprobrium of the right and the left falls indiscriminately, discusses the nature of coups in order to teach how to defeat them with a paralyzing “counter-coup” (coup d’arrêt) and defend the State.

Triumphs like Mussolini’s March on Rome (1922), wrapped in an aura of political romanticism, may never happen again… in the same way. After World War II the general impression was that the coup d’état is an infertile technique. All the more reason why, because of its congenital romanticism, the pronunciamiento can no longer have any effect. From all this we can only expect, as the theoretician of the State Jesús F. Fueyo used to say, an “acceleration of disorder.”

The violence of the coup is logically unacceptable to public opinion in pluralist constitutional regimes. However, that same “public opinion,” by inadvertence or by seduction, can willingly accept what Malaparte calls a “parliamentary coup,” in the style of the one executed by Napoleon Bonaparte on the 18th Brumaire (1799). Carl Schmitt calls it “legal revolution” in a famous article of 1977, written against the non-violent and electoral strategy of the Western communist parties (the Eurocommunism of Santiago Carrillo, a senile disease of Marxism-Leninism, a political religion then beginning to decline, although they, the Western communists, do not yet know it). In reality, the same result can be reached without going through the “legal revolution.” For this, it is necessary to count on the artful political strategy of occupying the constitutional courts—much more than a “negative legislator”—to turn them into the architects of an unnamed constitutional mutation, the greatest danger for the constitutions they are supposed to defend.

But it was not these communists, neither the Soviets nor those of the West, but Adolf Hitler, who, almost half a century before the publication of Eurocommunism and the State, set up the leverage to build a constituent dictatorship with totalitarian roots. Unlike dictatorships of the other species, the authoritarian, the totalitarian dictatorship pretends to have a mission not only political, but also moral, even religious: to give birth to the new man—Bolshevik, Aryan or Khmer Rouge—by disenfranchising the old.

The futility of the Munich coup of 1923 instructed Hitler on the tactical convenience of the electoral struggle and the possibility of legally attaining power in order to activate from the government the de facto abrogation of the constitution. It is a matter of exploiting the “legality premium” to revoke legitimacy. It is precisely against this process of constitutional subversion that Carl Schmitt warned, once again the Cassandra, in the summer of 1932.

The history of the Weimar system is well known and its last gasps have a name: the Authorization Law or Ermächtigungsgesetz (1933), a bridging constitution that suspended and emptied the Weimar constitution of content, opening the door to a constituent (totalitarian) dictatorship that ended up becoming a political oxymoron: a permanent regime of exception.

One of these bridge-constitutions, the Law for Political Reform of 1977, also served as a fuse for the “controlled explosion”—as it was called during the Transition—of the regime of the Fundamental Laws. The truth is that in Spain no one was fooled at that time; or, to be more exact, only those who allowed themselves to be fooled were fooled: “From the law to the law, passing through the law.” It portrays a generation of constitutionalists that no one has dealt with that bridging constitution. In reality, these jurists have powerful reasons to avoid it, since in very few European constitutional processes its character of supreme political decision is so evident, beyond the Kelsenian supercheries and fictions about the Grundnorm or fundamental normal on which everything hypothetically depends. Another fantastic exception to constitutional normativism is found in De Gaulle, playing, for the love of France, the Solon of the Fifth Republic.

The same school as the German National Socialist law of 1933 has held the Hispanic American populism since the end of the 1990s. The case of Hugo Chavez is a paradigm that transcends Venezuelan politics: from the failure of his 1992 “coup d’état” to the success of the “legal revolution” that began with his victory in the 1998 presidential elections and his famous oath of investiture on “the dying constitution” by virtue of which he had been elected.

The politically neutralized constitutionalist has no answer to this political challenge exported to almost all Latin American republics. He is paralyzed by the paradox. It is the ankylosis of Karlsruhe.


Jerónimo Molina Cano is a jurist, historian of political and legal ideas, translator and author. He is a corresponding member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas in Madrid. This article appears through the kind courtesy of La gaceta de la Iberosfera.


Featured: Cincinato abandona el arado para dictar leyes a Roma (Cincinnatus Leaves the Plough to Dictate Laws to Rome), by Juan Antonio Ribera; painted ca. 1806.


Simenon on the Noble Refugee

With his most recent film, Maigret (2022), French iconic actor, Gérard Depardieu, was hailed as having found a role cut for him. In fact, he missed out on a far better one. If he, and filmmaker Patrice Leconte, had been more astute, and better read, they would have realized the opportunity presented by the Ukrainian refugee crisis in France. They would have realized Simenon, not the Simenon of the Maigret stories, had written a novel about refugees: Le clan des Ostendais (The Ostenders). The central character, Omer, is a perfect fit for Depardieu: a larger-than-life, sea-faring boss, the brooding hulk of a fisherman thrown into the maelstrom of the collapse of Belgium and France, in May and June 1940.

Simenon, as is well known, led a quiet life during the Occupation of France, where he had settled in Vendée. He witnessed first-hand the “exodus” (l’Exode with a capital E, in French), the desperate rush of French civilians (as well as escapees from the Low Countries), fleeing by the millions the invading German armies, going as far south as they could. The Exode remains today the largest mass refugee movement in Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries. Eight million “evacuees,” to use the French bureaucratic euphemism, were displaced, and among them the fictional Omer, and his clan of Flemish-speaking Belgians.

To Flee and to Exist

This refugee novel, for lack of adhering to the hallowed (French) dramatic rule of the three unities ( in one place, in one day, a single plot shall unfold; not very easy with a novel) is nonetheless a virtuoso exercise in narrative conciseness: the action is focused; the setting is the coastal region of La Rochelle; time is framed by two events: the first, in May 1940, is the theatrical arrival of five trawlers in the harbor of La Rochelle, a high-spirited scene worthy of Fellini’s E la nave va—a different ship, for the beginning of a different war. The second event, just after the armistice of June 1940, is the almost mystical departure of the boats, at night, during a funereal wake.

Who is Omer, the baes, the boss? Words matter: until some plaques were updated to please politics, the French countryside was strewn with such memorials: “Here the Germans massacred….” Not “Nazis”—that was added later.

In Old Germanic, Omer is noble: “Odomar,” or “master of resources.” Omer is the skipper of a fleet of trawlers, who, having learned of the German invasion of Belgium off the coast of Iceland, heads out for Ostend to save what he can. On his five fishing boats, Omer loads the entire households of his crews, with all their belongings, from children’s rompers to silver cutlery, from heavy Flemish wardrobes to ancestral trousseau sheets. Nothing is left behind. Omer, Master of Resources, reigns taciturn over the fugitives whom he steers to safety. They put in at La Rochelle, intent to do what sailors do: sailing further south, away from the war, and what fishermen do—to fish for “resources,” under his command.

But, in La Rochelle, they get bogged down in French bureaucracy, caught up in the rout, debacle and defeat, and then the arrival of the victors. French and German officials let the Ostenders fish—and they offer their catch, by the caseload, to the thousands of refugees who have filled up the region. Parked in sheds and under trees, these refugees are starving and throw themselves on the manna, free-riding, pilfering, deploying the resourcefulness of French “Système D” (go get what you can). These haggard, scavenging fugitives follow the army’s defeat, like rats follow the plague. At that moment Camus began to conceive his novel of the same name—which may not be about what the post-war existentialist bien-pensant legend says it is. Unlike the main character of The Plague, Omer is not powerless, quite the contrary. And he believes in God, to boot. Whom he serves. To have his clan exist.

Existentialism, one should never forget it, was born out of these dark years’ struggle to survive, as a nation, as a State, as a way of life, as a culture, and as free and honorable human beings—out of a will to exist. A moral philosophy does not spring from abstract vagaries, but from living and dying. Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness under German oppression: how to be when nothing is. Hence how to be more than to endure. That is, to exist.

The Organic Morality of Refugees

So, the Ostenders are accommodated in an economically depressed coastal hamlet, a far cry from the gay daily life of La Rochelle. The locals pity them heartily, because everyone knows, and is told, we should pity these “poor people,” insulting them on account of their king’s surrender, “a stab in the back,” letting the Germans in. Come June 1940, the Rochelais and the villagers start to feel ashamed for having blamed the Ostenders for what the French army, routed in one fell swoop, inflicted in its turn on millions of refugees. The Ostenders do not say a word about it.

The hamlet is half in ruins, and its filth appalls the Ostenders. They are blond, hygienic and organized; they wash every day. They are Nordic and do not speak French, but rather a language that sounds like “Boche,” which intimidates the locals but enables them to get by with the occupiers once the region is under military rule. Omer rents an uninhabited, once bourgeois, dwelling for his family. He settles his lesser relatives to a house “across the yard,” immediately cleaned and whitewashed, while his deckhands’ families settle “at the back” in hovels turned into cottages made spic and span. Simenon—and this is his great art—plants a Vermeer painting in a scene from Les Misérables. An organic community is resurrected, and with it, its values.

The Ostenders create a natural yet civic microcosm, made of distinctions between the master of the trawlers, the skippers, the sailors, and their families. They observe etiquette. It is not a feudal order, but a vertical, kin and clan arrangement, based on a single, natural certainty—a fisherman fishes, the fishing boat provides work that determines duties and rights, and a hierarchy of labor. No one goes hungry, no one goes in rags, no one is unruly. Children attend classes. Every adult can speak their mind. Going astray results in quiet and firm ostracism. This is a natural, organic community.

The Ostenders’ relationship with the locals follows the same ethos. They never complain. They never raise their voice. But their fortitude comes across as arrogance, and it pains the villagers so cruelly that, going hungry themselves, they leave large crates of flounder to rot on the doorstep of the town hall: how can one accept to be fed by refugees? The locals reject this miraculous, yet in their eyes, immoral fishing. None see the Christ-like allegory.

It is so, because Omer and his injured clan will not ask for help, even in grief. What they need, they purchase. They never demean themselves to seek some special treatment. Actually, their only French word is “non,” thrown politely at bureaucrats when they try to pull a fast one on them. They are respectful of the law. They expect the locals to do the same. They are not idle, drinking white wine in port cafes, smoking cigarettes, or chatting in front of the fateful wireless claiming, “Paris, open city!“

The Ostenders offend popular common sense and the moralizing propaganda that proclaims, “Welcome them! We have to help them, no matter how, because it is the gesture that matters.” They will not allow authorities to put a checkmark on a to-do list: “Les Belges, c’est réglé.” They are, strictly speaking, demoralizing.

However, in the mine-infested waters Omer, loses a cherished boat, with her crew and his eldest son, and then more trawlers are hit and sunk, with his youngest son at the helm. The stopover in La Rochelle has come at a high price. Omer’s brood is decimated. A daughter-in-law goes mad with grief.

Refugees’ Fear

Of the sea they have no fear. The sea gives, the sea takes.

Nor do they live in the same fear as the thousands of refugees, corralled in cantonments, and quickly sliding back to a state of nature where homo homini lupus soon rules. The Ostenders live in a fear of their own—that of no longer being what they are. They fear to be denatured. They fear losing their organic civility.

This is the profound reason why they work, day and night; the women are cooking, mending, washing, mothering; and the men and boys, at every tide, when the weather is right and the anti-aircraft guns are not firing, go fishing as far away as the coasts of Morocco and the Balearics, passing destroyers and submarines, friends and foes, to whose captains Omer, strong in his rights, shows his “papers” of a fisherman from Ostend. Captain to captain, they understand each other. They salute him.

And then it happens. In the hazy coolness of a summer’s dawn, having transported aboard their bare essentials, the Ostenders weigh anchor and silently prepare to sail away. The two surviving trawlers depart, in defiance of the Germans and the French. That night was also the night of the wake for their dead, sons and sailors. The small flotilla is crossing their chosen Acheron. But it is also the night they wake up, as free and honorable.

The Noble Refugee

So, what is the lesson of The Ostenders?

Published in 1947 (in the same year as The Plague) by a Simenon whose conduct during the Second European General War was prudent, The Ostenders redeemed his cowardice. Indeed Simenon had taken refuge in a fantasy world of good detective work, while, at the same time, the French odious secret police, the Carlingue, was busy torturing Resistants, aided by the French Police nationale and the Gendarmerie that, somehow, escaped opprobrium, and worse, when accounts were settled in 1945.

Quite possibly Simenon tried to expiate his bystander’s behaviour, when he carried on with his dystopian Maigret novels, as well as not disowning movies adapted from his works with the Germans’ stamp of approval and material help.

But what is not ambiguous is the meaning of this allegory about refugees. Who are they? Are they fugitives, the destitute, the weak, the “expelled” like millions of Germans driven later from their ancestral lands now in Polish hands? The Ostenders are nothing of the sort. They came back to Ostend from Iceland instead of anchoring safely in North America. And from Ostend they left again, some twenty families, under heavy artillery fire. They anchored at La Rochelle, to get supplies, and with the intent to push on, probably crossing over to the Argentines. And it is not their fault if the local bureaucrats and their chorus of villagers wanted to entangle them in the mantra of “welcome to our refugees,” and in the last instance to turn them into detainees at the mercy of the enemy.

So, they set off to remain themselves, leaving their dead in the shell-strewn sands and in Heaven, and to remain honorable. For them, all but honor was lost. And the honor of a fisherman is to be a “toiler of the sea,” as in Victor Hugo’s famous novel. The people, now fleeing back to Paris, channeled by German troops, in the delusional peace of the armistice, were willing to live lives without honor. In June 1940, the Resistance and the Free French were yet to come. The first to join De Gaulle were a clan of hundred Briton fishermen from the Isle of Sein.

The Ostenders’ only respect, as they regroup, mourn their dead, pray for the living, and prepare to depart is reserved to their rustic counterparts, those peasants in wooden clogs pushing their exhausted cattle ahead of them, back to their far away farms soon to be plundered by the Germans, then plowed and razed by Anglo-American bombings.

The Ostenders did not conform to any coded expectations that would reassure the villagers, and neighboring Rochelais, of their moral rectitude. The Ostenders turned the tables—they showed how not to be a refugee. They set themselves apart. Indeed, as they set sail, the armistice Demarcation line comes into effect, a divide that would soon turn this region into a no-go military zone, in addition to the main split between the harshly occupied North and the vassal “free” South basking, for another two short years, in the meridional sunshine sung by Charles Trenet.

The Ostenders had swallowed bitter tears in the winds and frosts of Newfoundland, humiliated by their king’s surrender. They are now restoring their honor, not of a vainglorious military kind but of a deeply civic and organic communal virtue.

Redeeming Honor

The wake—in both senses, funereal and nautical—of the trawlers powering up in a yellow mist toward England drew the Ostenders’ very own demarcation line, between being and existing. So doing, they were also drawing another demarcation line, between the rhetoric of good feelings about “refugees,” contrived to ennoble those who give refuge and find moral reward in it, and the nobility of the fugitives or the expelled who act to restore for themselves honor and self-respect.

The final sentences of Le clan des Ostendais sum up the metaphysical meaning of the escape. “We are there, aren’t we?” replies Omer to his wife and matriarch Maria’s interrogation, half-question, half-puzzlement: “England?” Omer says this, if one pays attention to his words beyond the idiomatic turn of phrase: that “there,” that place, “is it not” or “is it?” Is this landing a stage in a journey of self-respect and the organic preservation of who we are? Omer adds: “Lord, I’ve done what you would have me do”—that is, my natural community has held, and will hold, here or there, so long as we remain ourselves. Honor is our place.

This gives an entire new meaning to the cliché of cosmopolites and soccer players (not that we expect these morons to know about it), ubi bene, ibi patria: where my honor exists (honor being the “bene,” the true summum bonum), there is my homeland. England is merely a stage emerging from a yellow mist. It is a harbor; it is no more than that. For when one’s autochthony has been lost, when the ancestral ground has caved in, when the natural ruler has surrendered, then existing in honor replaces it all.

Le clan des Ostandais carries a powerful lesson about virtue among refugees, and the inner life of organic fortitude whose roots are deep, autochthonous, if one cares about them.

Recently, in a village of the French Pyrenees, the local mayor welcomed a motley group of refugees from the Ukraine. One woman was reported as saying she would go back when the moment is right, hardly expressing any gratitude. How this moment will come, she has no idea. There is no honor and no virtue in her reply. The pained mayor turned then to a family and explained that integration may not be easy: “France is a very old country.” The father, surrounded by his wife and two teenagers, a boy and a girl, replied: “We are learning French, we want to belong to our new motherland.” It is unlikely the rural mayor or the Ukrainian father knew that French kings, otherwise proud of their Frankish names, were the first European dynasts, in the 11th century, to adopt the outlandish “Philippe” as a royal name, which endured till the last monarch. It is owed to Anne of Kiev, queen-regent of the Franks, mother of Philippe the First. Honor is indeed organic, or it is not, among refugees. It may, or may not, rekindle roots a thousand years later. Whether those who welcome refugees in France today have a sense of organic honor, and a will to exist, is another matter.


French philosopher and essayist Philippe-Joseph Salazar writes on rhetoric as philosophy of power. Laureate of the Prix Bristol des Lumières in 2015 for his book on jihad (translated as, Words are Weapons. Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror, Yale UP). In 2022, the international community of rhetoricians honoured him with a Festschrift, The Incomprehensible: The Critical Rhetoric of Philippe-Joseph Salazar. He holds a Distinguished Professorship in Rhetoric and Humane Letters in the Law Faculty of the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

A much different version of this text appeared first, in French, at Les Influences.


Featured: Three Fishermen Pulling a Boat, by Peder Severin Krøyer; painted in 1885.


Cultural Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism and Cultural Pluralism

We note in the present discussions the effectiveness of a trilemma between whose options it would be necessary to choose (whoever contests cultural relativism will be classified as ethnocentrist or as pluralist, etc.), we denounce what could be the source of this trilemma, and we propose a fourth way through which we can free ourselves from the system of disjunctions noted.

1. The Increase in Immigration Resuscitates the Debate between Relativism and Ethnocentrism.

In recent years, and as a result of the increase of immigrants from the so-called “third world” to the various countries of Europe, the debates between cultural relativists or integrationists and the “intolerant” who demand the adaptation of the immigrant to the culture of the host country have resurfaced with great virulence. And this is without prejudice to the fact that “adaptation” requires, on the part of the one who must adapt, to get rid of institutions considered as “signs of identity” of the culture of origin (for example: the chador, the burqa, polygamy, clitoral ablation, circumcision, the lip disc, voodoo, the institution of visiting husbands, the penalty of stoning or mutilation, vendetta, etc.).

The accusations that the defenders of cultural relativism, or the defenders of pluralism, direct against those who do not share their points of view, are usually channeled through something they consider to be the most terrible denunciation: “ethnocentrism.” To be accused of ethnocentrism is as much, practically, as to be accused of being intolerant, intransigent, archaic, racist, violator of human rights, “puppet of the most conservative right wing”, and ignorant of the ABC of modern Anthropology, characterized ad hoc precisely as a discipline constituted from the perspective of pluralism or cultural relativism.

And, in fact, Anthropology, as a scientific discipline, began in the 19th century (Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, etc.), not to mention its precedents (Joseph François Lafiteau, Charles de Brosses, etc.), recognizing the plurality of cultures (understood as “cultural spheres”); a plurality that seemed to be linked to the comparative methods characteristic of the new discipline.

Cultural pluralism, at the stage of anthropological evolutionism (Morgan, Friedrich Engels) often seemed compatible with the postulate of a possible confluence of the various cultural spheres in a universal Civilization. A postulate that many considered as concealing a cultural monism, and even an ethnocentrism of European sign, given that “Civilization” was generally conceived in the image and likeness of “European Culture,” which also found in this ideology the justification of colonialism (colonialism, understood as the only way through which the cultures of the present, situated in the epoch of savagery or barbarism, could reach, without the need for centuries or millennia to elapse, the superior stage of European civilization).

In the anthropological schools after “evolutionism,” for example, in the functionalist schools (represented by Bronislaw Malinowski) and later, in some variables of structuralism (represented by Claude Levi-Strauss), cultural pluralism gradually slid towards a radical relativism: each cultural sphere would have its own internal structure (emic), which would be impossible to understand from the outside (etic). Therefore, with Levi-Strauss, it could be said: “Savage is he who calls another savage.” In this way, cultural relativism began to be associated with a “modern spirit” (which some would interpret Pascalianly as an esprit de finesse), the spirit of understanding, of tolerance, of respect for the “other” and for his “sensibility,” which is opposed to the esprit géométrique, rigid, intolerant, “imperialist,” blind to everything that does not presuppose universal evidence, above any individual or group sensibility.

2. We are not Faced not with Alternatives, but with Disjunctions: The Trilemma.

The most serious aspect of the matter is that these three attitudes or philosophies of culture, which we designate as cultural monism (“ethnocentrism,” for their adversaries), relativism and cultural pluralism, are not presented as mere alternatives, but as disjunctions among which we must choose. From where does the disjunctive disposition of these three ways of understanding the relations that cultural spheres can supposedly maintain among themselves derive?

Undoubtedly, in our opinion, from the very concept of “cultural sphere,” understood as a relatively closed totality (a “complex whole,” in the attributive sense), self-sufficient, without prejudice to the benefits and influences that it may receive from the remaining cultural spheres that constitute the distributive whole or totality of culture, understood as a cultural sphere. As a paradigm of the concept of “cultural sphere,” in this sense, one could consider each of those “superorganisms” that Oswald Spengler precisely called “cultures.”

However, perhaps the best way to show to what extent the scheme of cultural spheres is alive and active today, even among people who do not even use this denomination, is to analyze the expression “signs of identity,” so often used by politicians, journalists, intellectuals or radio broadcasters to refer to what they consider “their own culture.” Because the innocent formula—”signs of identity”—in reality only makes sense in terms of a presupposed cultural sphere; that is to say, of a sphere whose identity (of a substantial nature) is presupposed, and of which the “sign of identity” considered would turn out to be a mere indication. Thus, the sardana would be a sign of identity of a supposed Catalan culture or cultural sphere, and the aurresku would be a sign of identity of a supposed Basque culture or cultural sphere. What is equivalent to say that the importance, the meaning, the scope, etc., of the sardana (or that of the aurresku) cannot be grasped by itself, not even by the similarities that it can maintain with institutions of other cultural spheres, but by what it has of revelation, indication or sign of a presupposed identity, which is applied precisely to the culture of reference, and not to the sign of identity in itself, in its material supposition.

Now, by placing the various cultural spheres on a plane of confrontation, in terms of value, consistency, dignity, originality, etc., it is possible to give a “logical reason” for the system of (disjunctive) alternatives that we have established; for this system has to do with the system of quantifiers of predicate logic, linked to the {1, 0} values of truth:

(1) Either we assert that, among the various cultural spheres of the distributive whole of cultures, only one cultural sphere can be considered as supporting authentic values; that is, that there is only one cultural sphere that deserves to be considered as authentic or true culture (the other cultural spheres would be reflections, de-generations, or mere appearances or phenomena of the “true culture”).

(2) Or we affirm that all cultural spheres are of equal value, as cultures that find their meaning precisely in the concavity of their own sphere: “All cultures are equal,” we read on a huge plaque installed in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

And this statement is developed in two other dichotomous versions (since equality does not imply connectedness):

(2A) “All cultures are equal,” except in a regime of disjunction, of separation, even of “megaric” incommensurability (which can reach the situation of incompatibility). It is evident that the formula of this option is equivalent to the opposite formula: “All cultures are unequal,” without being able to speak of logical contradiction, because the postulated equality refers in some cases to equality in dignity, in rights, etc., of the spheres that, however, are considered unequal in contents or in numerical or substantial identity.

(2B) “All cultures are equal,” except without the need to presuppose between them a regime of separation; on the contrary, postulating the possibility and convenience of a coexistence or juxtaposition of men belonging to the various cultures (this was the scheme that Americo Castro used to describe the supposed coexistence, under Ferdinand III the Saint, of the three religions—Jews, Moors and Christians—which today it is customary to translate as the coexistence between “the three cultures”).

Option (1) is that of cultural monism (which from the other options will be perceived as ethnocentrism); option (2A) is that of cultural relativism; and option (2B) is that of cultural pluralism or multiculturalism. It would seem that a choice must be made among these three options.

3. Critical Illustrations of each of the Members of the Trilemma

Cultural monism (practically ethnocentrism, if we leave aside, for the moment, the attempts to create a “universal culture” obtained by recasting all cultural spheres) is certainly, without needing to be called in this way, the most traditional perspective, without prejudice to the interpretations of Protagoras’ principle of homomensura—”man is the measure of all things”—as a man shaped by each culture (in the sense of cultural relativism). However, cultural monism can be presented and “justified” from two quite different sources:

The first wants to remain in the realm of facts, i.e., outside of value judgments. If it is only possible to speak of one cultural sphere of reference, of which all the others were reflections or even degenerations, it is because all the cultural spheres that really exist on earth would have been originated by an original culture, and would be like pulsations of that mother culture, identified with the Egyptian culture. Such was, as is well known, the monistic vision of culture defended by the school of so-called radical diffusionism, of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, or of William James Perry (The Children of the Sun, 1923).

The second does not hesitate to vindicate cultural monism, even ethnocentrism, but in the name, not of realities that are perhaps only demonstrated by science fiction, but in the name of values, no longer past but future, that are imposed from a given cultural sphere on those who identify with it. For Pericles or Plato, the values of the “paideia” (or Greek culture) were the only values that could oppose the barbarian peoples; for the Spaniards who entered America, Christian values (which were not only religious values, but also moral, ethical, ceremonial, political, artistic), were usually seen as the only values that should prevail over the barbarian gods, inspired by the devil; for most Western scientists and engineers (and not only those of the positivist era), the values of “Western culture” (which include both scientific values and democratic values) are the only values that can be accepted and that must be offered to other peoples; within this same perspective Richard Rorty has recently defended the need to assume the “ethnocentric” position in everything that concerns the values of truth and other criteria proper to our culture.

Now then, cultural monism, as ethnocentrism, is difficult to defend today, and many of the arguments of relativism and multiculturalism can serve to reduce it to its fair limits. But neither do we consider cultural relativism defensible, insofar as it faces the evidence of the superiority of some “cultures” over others, in the technological, scientific and even political fields. What about the option of cultural integrationism? If it is interpreted as a mere coexistence or juxtaposition of different peoples or religions, it seems obvious to us that such an option is, in reality, empty, rather a wish, of an irenistic nature. It cannot be said that social groups with different cultures coexist, or that they coexist, even peacefully, unless some remain in their ghettos, in the face of those who hold the dominant positions. Effective integration will only be apparent (an integration by juxtaposition), until the social groups in the dominated position either reach dominant positions or get rid of their institutions incompatible with those of the host society. This is what happened with Moors, Jews and Christians in medieval Seville: the myth of coexistence put into circulation by Américo Castro is being challenged in our days (Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, Serafín Fanjul García).

4. The Myth of the Cultural Spheres as the Source of the Trilemma

But how could we reject each of the three options of the trilemma (monism, relativism, pluralism) without rejecting the trilemma itself? For it is evident that once we have accepted the trilemma (in our case, the bifurcated dilemma), we would have no choice but to embrace one of its options. It is evident that, once the trilemma has been accepted by a critic, if he rules out that the author he criticizes is a relativist or pluralist, he will have to launch against him the dreaded accusation of ethnocentrism.

It is therefore a question, for my part, of going back further behind the trilemma, that is to say, it is a question of denouncing the assumption on which the trilemma is running at full speed in our days, without journalists, intellectuals, politicians and radio broadcasters, but also historians, sociologists and anthropologists, being aware of it.

And this assumption is that of cultural spheres, understood as substantive entities that offer the researcher very diverse “signs of identity” of their substance (of what else?); of a substance that is supposed to come from the most arcane times and that pretends to maintain its identity, considered as the supreme and sacred value. But there are no cultural spheres in that sense. Cultural spheres are only ideological constructions, purely and simply myths.

This will allow us to add a fourth option to the system of the three options, (1) (2A) (2B), which we have established on the basis of the assumption of cultural spheres: that not one or all cultural spheres can be taken as subjects or supports of value, not one.

And if there are no cultural spheres as entities endowed with a substantive identity (idiographic, numerical, delimited in the distributive whole), then the options, or the very concepts of ethnocentrism, cultural relativism and pluralism of cultural spheres dissolve. Cultural spheres are not entities endowed with a substantial identity of their own; at most, they are phenomenal entities, delimited perhaps over the centuries (when not invented ad hoc by groups, peoples or nations in search of a state), by isolation from other phenomenal spheres, or by a mixture of some of them. And by this we mean that the diagnoses (or accusations) of ethnocentrism, relativism or pluralism, are impossible diagnoses or accusations, if we keep to a scientific or philosophical terrain. They are diagnoses or accusations that can only be maintained in the doxographical terrain of confused and obscure opinions about the ideological nebulae that are formed at a given juncture. Can possession or diabolical obsession be admitted, in the scientific terrain, as a psychological or psychiatric diagnosis? But, according to our thesis, the diagnosis of ethnocentrism or relativism, in the field of anthropology, does not go further than the diagnosis of diabolical possession or diabolical obsession, in the field of psychiatry.

5. Reduction of Substantive Cultural Spheres to Phenomenal Cultural Spheres.

There are no cultural spheres endowed with a substantive identity. These spheres only have a phenomenal identity, enough to begin to organize the relevant ethnographic and ethnological descriptions.

Phenomenal identities, because their unity is resolved in a system, conglomerate or concatenation, whether of cultural traits (patterns, institutions, elements) but also natural (racial, for example) or tertiogenic (such as the Pythagorean relations of the right triangle, which are neither natural nor cultural, and this is said in the face of dualists who continue to consider as a fundamental principle that of the distinction in the Universe between Nature and Culture, perhaps a last pulsation of the ancient distinction between Matter and Spirit).

Now then, the reduction of cultural spheres, endowed with substantial identity, to the condition of cultural spheres endowed with phenomenal unity, should not be confused with the reduction of the theory of cultural spheres to one of the aggregationist theories of culture (to the theory of cultural mosaics, for example). The key to the latter theories can be found in a process of “substantivation of the parts” (of traits, patterns, elements) confronted with the process of “substantivation of the complex whole” that leads to the substantive cultural sphere.

But the substantivization of the parts would also be gratuitous—a cultural sphere is not the result of the aggregation of supposedly pre-existing cultural elements (which some call memes). Cultural elements or features are figures that are shaped from the phenomenal totalities themselves, and precisely at the moment when these are decomposed or broken down into formal parts in the very process of cultural shock. Nor did eyes, or foreheads, as Empedocles thought, pre-exist the animals that could have been formed from the union of those “solitary limbs” that would have given rise, first, to hideous monsters that adaptation to the environment would have had to polish little by little. A femur bone does not precede the vertebrate organism; but once formed it can be extracted from the animal, becoming a figure, element, value or countervalue of the organic factory. The elements, traits, cultural institutions—are not prior to the phenomenal cultural spheres, but can be taken apart, transported and incorporated, with eventual deformations, into other cultural spheres, either as elements with the capacity of integration with other parts of their own, or as elements with the capacity to dissolve the phenomenal whole constituted by a given cultural sphere. And all this without prejudice to the fact that the incorporation of an element or trait from a given cultural sphere into another is not always “clean,” since it will almost always drag along other elements, splinters or traits from the cultural sphere of origin.

6. There is no Conflict of Cultures, but neither is there Integration of Cultures or Cultural Relativism.

According to what we have said, therefore, it is not possible to speak of conflicts of cultures, or of conflicts of civilizations; nor is it possible to speak of integration or expansion of cultures. All these expressions would have to be restated in terms of conflicts of cultural elements, or of integration, or of diffusion of cultural elements or traits. Therefore, whoever considers a cultural element (let us take the democratic system, for example) as universal cannot be accused of ethnocentrism. Even less can anyone be accused of ethnocentrism (or of cultural monism) who recognizes and defends the universality of the Pythagorean theorem, as a detached element, no longer of Greek culture, but of all culture, as a structure valid for all cultures, above any relativism.

Niembro, March 23, 2002


Gustavo Bueno Martínez (1924-2016) was a foremost Spanish philosopher who has had a deep influence among thinkers of tradition. This article comes courtesy of El Catoblepas.


Featured: Still life with musical instruments on a laid table, by Pieter Claesz; painted in 1623.


Reguli virtus

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Prima bella, quae Romani extra fines Italiae gesserunt, cum Carthaginiensibus fuerunt.

Inter Romam et Carthaginem prima de possessione Siciliae fuit. Bellumque ita incohatum per octo annos, cum exercitum in litoribus suis Carthaginiensibus mittere placuisset. Duobus consulibus L. Manlius et Attilius Regulus exercitui praeerant. In itinere magnum navale proelium cum classe Carthaginiensi fuit; hoc primum navale proelium fuit, quod semper Romani fuerat. Is liberam in Africam viam fecit; milites vero, qui numquam procul domo aberant, murmurabant, non solum humanis hostibus, sed immanibus serpentibus, leonibus, elephantis, asinis cornibus, caniculae monstris, supra caput solis ardorem habere ac paludem sub pedibus eorum. Sed Regulus graviter ad omnia murmura constitit, cum manifestaret se mortem infensos esse, et exercitus incolumis expositis munitionem Clypeae posuit, agrosque omnem circa diripuit. Imperat hic Roma ut Manlius illuc rediret, sed ut bellum gereret Regulus maneret. Etiam luctus magna erat. Pauperrimus, cum nihil suo, sed agello septem iugerum, absens decessisset, quem ad usum colendum curaverat. Susceperat mercennarius curam, sed non contempserat, et cum instrumentis et iumentis aufugerat, ne, nisi cito rediret, uxor et liberi esurirent. Senatus tamen familiae suae consulere decrevit, et expeditiones in villam faciens, in qua re vera Romani cum serpente cecidissent, tam immanis, quam mente depinxerat. Dictum est CXX pedes longum esse, et super ripas fluminis Bagradae habitasse, ubi milites Romanos aquatum ibant devorabat. Squamarum adeo lenta erat ut machinis quae ad quatiendas muros urbis necessaria erant oppugnare cogerentur; quod aegerrime tulit.

Pulcherrima regio erat, frugibus et frugibus plena, uberrimis arboribus consita, et omnes Carthaginienses praedives villas hortosque habebant, iucunda fontibus, arboribus, floribus. Romani milites, campi, duri, crudeles, immites, timendum, crudele damnum inter has scenas tulerunt; direptis castellis CCC, et nondum eis nota misericordiae erat. Poenus exercitus, cum validus equitibus atque elephantis stetisset in collibus, nihil praeter patriam egit, et ferae Numidarum gentes ad diripiendas res relictas invadunt. Carthaginienses ad condiciones pacis miserunt; sed Regulus, qui rebus suis elatus postulabat ut nuncii expostularent. Ille respondit: “Viri boni sunt ad aliquid, aut vincant aut subiciant melioribus,” et dimisit eos, ut erat severus senex Romanus.

Meritum eius fuit, quod non sui ipsius magis quam aliorum misereretur.

Poeni ad extrema pelluntur, et Moloch horrenda sacrificia faciebant, parvulis nobilium familiarum inter aenea statuae manus in ignem demitti, adulti nobilium familiarum suorum irruperunt. Ita diis suis salutem petentes pro patria sperantes. Nondum tempus eorum advenit, et eis quies dabatur. Miserant, quos in angustiis ad conducendos milites in Graeciam miserat, inter quos et Lacedaemonius, nomine Xanthippus, qui extemplo praefuerat, instructo agmine elephantorum in aciem eduxit. Et nubila alis volitantes, nondum Romani cum elephantis optimam pugnandi rationem didicerant, ut in agmine excederet vicis, ubi innoxia illae ferae proficerent; pro quo, detrusi atque obtriti mole animalium, atrocem cladem acceperunt. Ipse Regulus ab equitibus comprehensus in Carthaginem trahitur, ubi victores media nocte epulati laetique gratulati Moloch se captivorum fortissimum incendiis testabantur.

Neque tamen unus ex his Regulus erat. Per biennium arctissimus et maeror et aeger solitudinis, cum interim bellum continuaretur, et ad postremum tam dubiae victoriae a Romanis parta est, ut populus Carthaginiensis dissolutus peteret. Pacis leges. Nemo tam facile Romae audiri quam Regulus putabat; eoque cum legatis missis, iuravit primo se in carcerem rediturum, si nec pax esset nec commutatio captivorum. Parum cognoverunt quanto verius pavidum civitati eius quam sibi ipsi, verbo quam vita fuit consultum.

Captivus miles confectus et abiectus extra portas civitatis suae venit, et ibi restitit ingredi nolens. “Civis Romanus iam non sum”, inquit; “Servus barbarorum sum, et senatus non audiendi extra muros.”

Marcia uxor procurrit cum duobus filiis salutatum, sed non aspiciens, et blanditias sub se ferens, in servili parte, invito omni precibus, extra mansura est. Et ne ad agellum quidem amaverat.

Senatus Romanus, cum ad eos venire nollet, ad contionem in Campagnam habendam venit.

Legati primum, deinde stantes Regulus dictitans munus repetit: “Patres conscripti, Carthaginiensibus serviens, dominis meis vobiscum de pace et de permutandis captivis tractaturus sum. Is inde cum legatis abire, ne peregrinus consiliis senatus adesset. Veteres amici eum manere ac se senatorem bis consulem censere debere; sed ille noluit eam dignitatem vindicare, ut erat in servitute. Sed ad imperium domini Carthaginiensis mansit, non assedit.

Tum dixit senatoribus dixit in bello perseverare. Dixit se videri aegritudinem Carthaginis, et pacem modo sibi, non Romano esse, et ob id magnopere suadendum, ut bellum maneat. De permutatione captivorum Carthaginiensium duces, qui in potestate Romanorum erant, integri ac virium erant, dum ipse nimis fractus erat, ut idoneos rursus ad militiam esse credebat. Inimici venenum lentum dedissent, neque diu vivere posse. Sic negat permutationem captivorum faciendam.

Mirabile fuit etiam Romanis, qui contra se hominem sic deprecantem audirent, et princeps eorum sacerdos exstitisset, et eum vi extortum iurasse diceret, se ad captivitatem redire non debere. Sed Regulus nimis erat nobilis, ut hoc tempore audiret. “Confirmasti me dehonestare?” dixit. “Non sum nescius mortem et extrema tormenta parari mihi; sed quid haec ad ignominiam infamis aut nocens vulnera mentis? Roman iuravi reddere. Meum est ire; di ceterorum curam habeant.”

Senatus consilium Reguli sequi placuit, quamquam acerbe eius sacrificii paenitebat. Uxor eius flebat et frustra orabat, ut eum tenerent; manere apud se modo liceat; sed nihil apud eum potuit praevaricationis verbi causa, et ad vincula et mortem conversus tam aequo animo est quam si domum rediisset. Fuit hoc anno ante Christum natum CCXLIX.

“Cetera,” inquit, “dii caveant,” inquit Romanus. Quos solos noverat, et per quos verum Deum ignoranter colebat, cuius etiam in veritate et constantia gentilis lux lucebat. Quomodo impleta sit eius fides ignoratur. Senatus post proximam victoriam duos Carthaginiensium duces uxorem ac filios in fidem pro remedio dedit; sed cum nuntiatum esset mortuum Regulum, ambos saevire saevitia coepit Marcia tractare, quorum alter alterum virum bene usus fuisse caveret. Regulum in sole extinctum cum spicis spicis in dolio collis devolutum aut crucifixum assidue necatum. Marcia audisse videtur, et forte in his horroribus credidit, eosque infelicium captivorum usque ad mortem ultus est, quos senatus ad filios suos accersivit et graviter eos incusavit. Matris facere, non suas, et reliquorum captivorum solatium deinceps sollicitos esse dicebant.

Optandum igitur est, Reguli taeterrimam passionem rumore ad libidinem mulieris vindicantis formatam esse, Regulum in pace mori permissum morbi, multo probabilius caelo et carcere quam veneno cui adscriberetur. Non tormenta ferens, quae illum ex amplissimis moribus historiarum acceperit, sed quod nec se in patriae prosperis periculo servaret nec verbum quod pepigerat amitteret.

Scriptum anno MDCC.


Featured: Regulus Returning to Carthage, by Cornelis Lens; painted in 1791.


The Polish Question: The West vs. Russia

The article analyzes the Polish Question in the relationship between Russia and the West. The article considers the Polish Question as an instrument of the West’s ideological struggle against Russia. The article traces the main stages of Russian-Polish relations and concludes that since the Livonian War, Polish authors have been the main transmitters of negative myths about Russia as a barbaric, despotic and expansionist power. The article analyzes the role of the Polish factor in the formation of a negative image of Russia in the West during the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, when the first version of the fake Will of Peter the Great, created by the Polish General Michał Sokolnicki appears. The author analyzes the view of Russia through the prism of the Polish uprisings of 1830-1831 and 1863-1864 and concludes that European Polonophilism had the reverse side of hatred towards Russia. It also concludes that Russia’s suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830-1831 helped to cement its image, not just as an expansionist power, but as a state incompatible with the idea of freedom. It is also noted that despite the fact that after the uprising of 1863-1864 reforms were carried out in Poland, Russia remained the main enemy for new generations of patriotic Poles. The article analyzes the views on Russia of leading European politicians and public figures that were shaped under the influence of the Polish Question. The article also analyzes the racial concepts of Russian inferiority, which were originated by Polish authors, primarily Franciszek Henryk Duchiński, whose ideas had a great influence on the development of European anti-Russian thought.


Introduction

The relationship between Russia and Poland at different stages of historical development was not just complex, but often dramatic, marked by conflicts, Polish interventions, partitions of Poland, and uprisings. It was connected both with political, or, to put it in modern terms, geopolitical contradictions, and with no less important the religious factor, as the origins of the confrontation between Russia and the West are rooted in the split of the churches and the desire to induce Russia to accept the Union.

Beginning in the 14th century, Poland began to pursue an actively offensive policy in the Russian lands. At the same time, as the national researcher Oleg B. Nemensky rightly notes, as the Catholic country territorially closest to Russia, Poland historically was the main source of information about Russians for Western Europe. In 15th-16th centuries, Polish historians created a concept, according to which Russia has long belonged to Poland by right and for all eternity, since the campaigns to Kiev in the 11th century of Bolesław I the Brave and Bolesław II the Bold [Oleg Nemenski, “Rusofobiya kak ideologiya”—”Russophobia as an Ideology,” in Voprosy natsionalizmaQuestions of nationalism, (1)2013, p. 13]. As a result, Poland already by the middle of the 16th century “had a full-fledged ideology of the conquest of Russia and the destruction of the “schisma,” i.e., Eastern Christianity” [Nemenski, 2013, p. 33].

From the Livonian War to the Partitions of Poland

During the years of the Livonian War (1558-1583), it was Polish publicists who came to be seen as the main experts on Russia. They became the main transmitters of negative myths about Russia as a barbaric, despotic and expansionist power.

As noted by historian Aleksandr I. Filiushkin, during the Livonian War, which Filiushkin calls the first confrontation between Russia and Europe, the idea of immanent hostility of “Asian” Russia to civilized Europe became one of the main aporias of European historical memory. It was the Polish nobility that played a key role in the formation of the myth of Asian and barbaric Muscovy, the antagonist of the Christian world, later picked up in other countries [A. Filyushkin, Kak Rossiya stala dlya Evropy Aziej? (How did Russia become Asia for Europe?), Moscow: Izobreteniye imperii. Yazyki i praktiki, 2011, p. 21]. The development of printing allowed publishing in large print runs of numerous works about Muscovy, which were distributed throughout Europe. According to O.B. Nemensky, the mass appearance of pamphlets that “exposed” the Russian people and its customs, the Moscow state and its rulers turned Muscovy in the minds of the West into “anti-Europe, a terrible and very dangerous country, combining all the known vices of the human race” [A. Filyushkin, Kak Rossiya stala dlya Evropy Aziej? (How did Russia become Asia for Europe?), Moscow: Izobreteniye imperii. Yazyki i praktiki, 2011, рр. 10-48., p. 34].

These were small texts written in simple style, mostly in German and Polish, which were the forerunners of the modern periodicals. They were modeled on the anti-Turkish pamphlets published in large numbers throughout the 16th century. As Belgian researcher Stefan Mund notes, it is not by chance that both were printed in the same printing houses [Review: A. Filyushkin, “Stéfane Mund, ORBIS RUSSIARUM: Genèse et development de la representation du monde “russe” en Occident à la Renaissance,” in Ab Imperio, (1)2004, p. 563]. And it is no coincidence that the Russians were subjected to pejorative characteristics attributed to the Turks, such as “bloody dogs,” “eternal cruel enemies,” and Russians were depicted on engravings in Turkish decorations [.F. Kudryavcev, “Neuznannaya civilizaciya. Zametki po povodu knigi Stefana Munda «Orbis Russiarum.» Genezis i razvitie predstavlenij o «Russkom mire» na Zapade v epohu Vozrozhdeniya” [“Unrecognized civilization. Notes on Stéfane Mund’s book Orbis Russiarum. Genesis and development of ideas about the ‘Russian world’ in the West in the Renaissance”], in Ancient Rus, 3(21)2005, p. 125].

The Vatican was concerned that victory in the Livonian War could lead to Muscovy’s domination in the Baltic and even beyond. In the future, the Vatican assumed that the Polish-Lithuanian kings would create an outer rampart of Europe, which would “stop at its foot all Muscovites and Tatars” [I. Noimann, Ispol’zovanie «Drugogo»: Obrazy Vostoka v formirovanii evropeiskih identichnostei [The Use of the “Other”: Images of the East in the Formation of European identities]. Moscow: New Publishing House, 2004, p. 110]. The long-prepared Brest Church Union in 1597 abolished legal Orthodoxy in Western Russia, and by the beginning of the 17th century Poles appeared in the Moscow Kremlin. And the conquest of Moscow immediately went under the slogan of “affirmation of Uniatism” [Oleg Nemenski, “Rusofobiya kak ideologiya”—”Russophobia as an Ideology,” in Voprosy natsionalizmaQuestions of nationalism, (1)2013, p. 33].

For Europe, the Polish question was a trump card in the struggle with Russia and one of the main arguments for its accusations of expansionism and the desire to subjugate the whole world. These accusations intensified especially after the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1772, 1793, 1795). In spite of the fact that Russia, Prussia and Austria took part in them, it was Russia who became the main object of accusations of expansionism and the desire to enslave the unfortunate Poland.

It is no coincidence that it was the Polish author, General Michał Sokolnicki, who wrote the original text of the so-called The Will of Peter the Great. Even the American researcher Raymond McNally in 1958, and in 1967 the French researcher Simone Blanc came to the reasonable conclusion that the author of the original text of the document was Sokolnicki, who in 1797 wrote the document, “General Review of Russia” and offered it to the French Directory. It was a passionate appeal to France, which had forgotten its traditional policy of being an ally and protector of Poland, and which did not know that Poland and the whole of Europe was threatened by Russia [S. Blanc, “Histoire d’une phobie : le Testament de Pierre le Grand,” in Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, 1(3-4)1968, p. 268]. The end of the text contained the “Plan of Peter I,” which, according to the author, was extracted from Russian archives, captured in Warsaw in 1794 [Blanc, 1968, p. 271]. The government of the Directory did not demand this document at that time, because the objectives were different.

However, Sokolnicki was remembered by Napoleon Bonaparte, who became First Consul and then Emperor in 1804, and who himself aspired to world domination, not mythical but real. In 1811, General Sokolnicki was summoned to Paris and took an active part in the secret preparations for war with Russia. It was Napoleon, having viewed and edited the text of Sokolnicki’s “Opinion on Russia,” ordered to include it in the book by Charles-Louis Lesur, Des progrès de la puissance russe: depuis son origine jusqu’au commencement du XIXe siècle (1812), which was to be published just before the beginning of the Russian campaign. The first version of Lesur’s book appeared in 1807, probably on the eve of the Peace of Tilsit. However, the work was actually published in October 1812. In any case, R. McNally has called this work one of the most influential in the history of Russophobia [R. McNally, “The Origins of Russophobia in France 1812-1830,” in American Slavic East and European Review, 3(17)1958, p. 173].

At the end of the chapter devoted to Peter I, a summary of the “Plan of Peter I” was given [Lesur, 1812, pp. 117-179]. As S. Blanc has noted, the summary of Lesur’s book differs only slightly from Sokolnicki’s text [Blanc, 1968, p. 268]. This leaves no doubt that we have before us one and the same “document,” which differed only by minor editing and very small changes.

The Polish Question in the 19th Century: Between the Congress of Vienna and the Polish Uprisings

The Polish Question became a stumbling block at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, as Russia’s allies in the anti-Napoleonic coalition opposed the annexation of the entire territory of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw to Russia. Despite the fact that Russia granted the Grand Duchy of Poland within Russia wide autonomy and constitution, Europe perceived it solely as a propaganda measure to put to sleep the vigilance for further development of Russia’s expansionist plans [N.P. Tanshina, “Pol’skij vopros po zapiskam imperatora Nikolaya I i grafa Sh.-A. Pocco di Borgo” [“The Polish question according to the notes of Emperor Nicholas I and Count S.-A. Pozzo di Borgo”], in Novaya i noveyshaya istoriya, (2)2018, p. 15-26].

Following 1815, the Polish issue continued to be stirred up in Europe, and the ferment of minds was often the result of the hands of the Poles themselves, especially since European public opinion in liberalizing Europe was not in favor of powerful Russia. In particular, in 1829, under the influence of Polish agitation in Paris, L’ Histoire des legions polonaises en Italie sous le commandement du general Dombrovski, in two volumes, (History of the Polish Legions in Italy under the Command of General Dombrowski) was published, written by Leonard Chodzko; the Preface to the book included words about the Russian threat. (Jan Heinrich Dąbrowski (1755-1818), Polish military officer, division general of the Grand Army. After Napoleon’s abdication he returned to Poland).

The July Revolution of 1830 was the catalyst for the revolutionary movement in Europe. On November 29, 1830, an uprising began in Warsaw. The events in Poland went beyond the internal Russian problem and became the object of close attention and political discussions throughout Europe.

For the average Frenchman, supporting the uprising in Poland and favoring the development of the democratic idea in France were roughly the same thing. But King Louis-Philippe of Orleans was not at all inclined to interfere in the events in Poland, seeing it as an internal Russian affair. However, as in the case of the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-1829, government policy diverged from the mood of public opinion. The authorities, of course, were also Polonophile, but Louis-Philippe, wishing to be recognized as a full-fledged monarch who had no intention of fanning the fires of revolution and exporting it, refused to provide armed aid to Poland. Therefore, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Horace François Bastien Sébastiani de La Portam declared France’s non-interference in the affairs of Poland.

Nevertheless, the public did not stop exerting serious pressure on the government, which, in the opinion of the French, was responsible for the current international situation [N.P. Tanshina, Politicheskaya bor’ba vo Francii po voprosam vneshnej politiki v gody Iyul’skoj monarhii (The Political Struggle in France on Foreign Policy Issues During the July Monarchy). Moscow: Prometheus, 2005, pp. 157-159]. In France, there was active propaganda in favor of Poland. Catholics played an important role in this case. For example, in the Catholic publication, L’Avenir, in December 1830, young Count Charles Montalembert (1810-1870) wrote that in the Polish uprising he saw the struggle of oppressed Catholics against Russian Orthodox-oppressors. The liberal Benjamin Constant and the Polish historian, geographer and social activist, Leonard Chodzko (1800-1871), made fiery speeches calling on all friends of freedom to support Poland. Volunteers were sent to Poland from Paris, Lyon, Strasbourg; Poles were helped by doctors; cultural figures organized charity lotteries in favor of the rebels [Charles Corbet, A l’ère des nationalismes. L’opinion française face à l’inconnue russe. 1799-1894 (1967), p. 161].

In the meantime, Field Marshal Ivan F. Paskevich was sent to Poland. He arrived with the troops on the night of June 13-14 and immediately began to prepare an offensive. At the beginning of August, Warsaw was encircled by Russian troops. The commander-in-chief delivered to the besieged an address by Nicholas I, who promised amnesty for the last time on condition of voluntary surrender of arms and submission to the imperial authority. The deputies of the Sejm rejected the proposal. On August 27 (September 7), 1831, after forty-eight hours of bloody fighting, Russian troops triumphantly entered Warsaw. On February 14/26, 1832, the “Organic Statute” was declared. Poland was deprived of the Constitution of 1815, the Sejm was dissolved, the Polish army was liquidated, and independent government was abolished. Poland became part of Russia with provinces instead of traditional voivodships. They retained only the right to some local liberties. According to the “Organic Statute,” Russian representatives were introduced into the Viceroy’s Council. A state of siege was declared in Warsaw. The leaders of the uprising and rebellious generals were exiled to Siberia and deprived of property, and their children were taken to be educated in the Russian army.

From the beginning of September 1831, the front pages of French newspapers were devoted to the events in Poland. When, finally, on September 15, France learned of Warsaw’s surrender, a riot broke out in Paris. In the streets there were shouts of “Long live the republic!” And Parisians broke the windows of the ministries, tried to get into the Palais Royal. For several days, there were anti-Russian popular demonstrations in the capital, which required the intervention of troops to subdue. Under the windows of the hotel building where the Russian embassy was located, shouts were heard: “Down with the Russians! Long live Poland! Revenge!” The windows of the embassy were broken with stones [Blanc, 1968, p. 220].

At times, Paris was covered by popular anger. In March 1831, news spread in the capital that the Russian army had entered Warsaw. Parisians marched on the Champs-Elysees with slogans “Death to the Russians!” The windows of the Russian Embassy were again broken; the police were barely able to protect it.

The French public reacted avidly to the events in Poland. For example, the famous poet, Auguste-Marseille Barthélemy, wrote: “Noble sister! Warsaw! She died for us! Died with weapons in her hands… Without hearing our cry of compassion… Do not talk any more about the glory of our barricades! You want to see the coming of the Russians: they will come.” Abbot Félicité Robert de La Mennais, in his article, “The Taking of Warsaw,” wrote: “Warsaw has fallen! The heroic Polish nation, abandoned by France, rejected by England, fell in the struggle with the barbarian hordes… Glorious nation, our brother in faith and in arms, when you fought for your life, we could only help you with compassion; and now that you are defeated, we can only mourn you. People of heroes, people of our love, rest in the grave where you have ended up because of the crime of some and the meanness of others. But hope is still alive, and the prophetic voice says: You will be reborn!” [A. Dumas (père), Mémoires, vols. 4-6 (1854), pp. 56-63].

Russia’s suppression of the uprising helped to consolidate its image, not just as an expansionist power, but as a state incompatible with the idea of freedom, which was especially used by liberals and radicals of all stripes. According to the American historian Martin Malia, these events produced a real metamorphosis in the perception of Russia and caused a real shock in Europe. Polish patriots were overnight not only suppressed, but also deprived of constitution and autonomy [Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes. From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (1999), p. 92]. As the researcher noted, for the first time, the system of autocracy was imposed, undoubtedly, on European territory. The West created a new image of Russia as a bastion of aggressive militant reaction [Malia (1999), p. 93].

Russia was reminded of the partitions of Poland and the entry of Russian troops into Paris, as well as the heroic resistance of the Poles. The words of French Foreign Minister Sebastiani, “Order reigns in Warsaw,” were circulated by the opposition and became the caption for a popular cartoon by Granville, which depicted a Cossack trampling the corpses of Poles. As the Swiss researcher Guy Mettan notes, “Nicholas I lost the laurels of the ‘liberator’ of Greece, which had long challenged other powers, and consolidated his reputation as an Asian despot” [Guy Mettan, Zapad—Rossiya: tysyacheletnyaya vojna. Istoriya rusofobii ot Karla Velikogo do ukrainskogo krizisa [The West—Russia: The Thousand-Year War. History of Russophobia from Charlemagne to the Ukrainian Crisis] (2016), p. 249].

The personification of the changes that occurred to Russia was Prince Adam Czartoryski, formerly a friend and minister of Emperor Alexander, now opposed to Nicholas as head of the Provisional Government in Warsaw.

According to Martin Malia, Europeans suddenly realized that “after France, Poland is the most heroic nation in Europe.” With the growth of the liberal movement in Europe, after the July Revolution, Poland was perceived as the main bulwark of all progressive values of the time, and received an additional halo of glory as the most faithful of the great emperor’s allies. As Malia correctly noted, the more Poland seemed to be a martyr, the more Russia seemed to be an executioner [Malia, 1999, p. 93].

After the suppression of the uprising, its leaders and, in general, many Poles emigrated and settled in different countries, mainly in France and in Great Britain [21]. It was Poles in the following years who raised a powerful anti-Russian wave and shaped public opinion about Russia. And since the Livonian War, Poles were the main “experts on Russia” and the main source of information, and such information was very much in the soul of the Polonophile-minded European public (V.F. Ratch, Pol’skaya emigraciya do i vo vremya poslednego myatezha 1831-1863 [Polish emigration Before and During the Last Rebellion of 1831-1863] (1866), p. 15).

The French government was sufficiently concerned about the presence of Poles in France. As early as November 1831, the government of Casimir Perrier, in an effort to remove the restless Polish element from the capital, issued a circular forbidding Poles from entering Paris. As a result, Polish emigrants were placed first in two large and then in several dozen small groups in provincial French towns where “Polish depots” were established, while only the wealthiest and generally moderate elements of the emigration remained in Paris.

In the years that followed, Poland was an important element in the internal political life of France, and the Polish Question did not stray far from the parliamentary agenda. Thus, at the January session of 1834, Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy, a prominent politician of those years, compared Russia’s actions in rebellious Poland to the policy of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, but found Russia’s policy even more cruel. François Bignon, an opposition politician, solemnly declared that “the day when the Poles themselves will throw off their chains, or the day when other nations will free them from the bloody yoke pressing on them, will be the day when humanity will triumph over barbarism” [Corbet, 1967, p. 169].

At the same time, it cannot be said that European public opinion was unanimously against Russia, even after the July Revolution and the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. Everything depended on the system of alliances on which European leaders relied within the framework of the “European concert” at any given moment. In particular, in France at that time, the legitimists, i.e., supporters of the overthrown legitimate Bourbon dynasty, were in favor of an alliance with Russia. Thus, the far-right newspaper Le Quotidienne supported Russia in the Polish issue, not without reason noting that the uprising in Warsaw was a consequence of the July Revolution [Corbet, 1967, p. 176].

In 1835, the Polish Question was once again on the pan-European agenda, and this was due to a speech made by Emperor Nicholas I, on October 5, 1835, in the Lazienkowski Palace in Warsaw. Speaking before a deputation of Polish townspeople, the emperor said: “If you obstinately cherish the dream of a separate, national, independent Poland and all these chimeras, you will only bring great misfortunes upon yourselves. At my command a citadel has been erected here, and I declare to you that at the slightest disturbance I will order to crush your city, I will destroy Warsaw and I will certainly not rebuild it again” [3, p. 215]. [3, с. 215]. This speech was perceived extremely negatively in the West. In the report of the Third Department for this year, it was reported: “It is not surprising that this speech neither the British nor the French liked. Having distorted it and given it a wrong meaning, they filled the newspapers with their reprimands, even rude swear words” [M.V. Sidorova, E.I. Shcherbakova, eds., Rocciya pod nadzorom. Otchety III otdeleniya 1827—1869 [Russia Under Surveillance. Reports of the Third Department, 1827-1869] (Moscow: Russian Cultural Foundation, 2006), pp. 129-131].

With this speech, the Emperor put a very powerful weapon in the hands of his detractors. Even if Nicholas’s character had been more accommodating, this speech would still have been the basis for a new wave of propaganda vilifying the Russians.

The famous journalist, politician, and Sorbonne professor Saint-Marc Girardin spoke very harshly of Emperor Nicholas, publishing a scathing article in his newspaper Le journal des débats, on October 10, 1835. Saint-Marc Girardin (Marc Girardin) (1801-1873) was a French politician, writer, journalist, literary critic and publisher, editor of Le Journal des Débats, and a member of the French Academy. A few months later, speaking in Parliament, on January 11, 1836, he declared that by “confiscating” Poland for itself, Russia had destroyed “one of the barriers protecting it” in Europe; and Girardin went on to trundle out the liberals’ favorite song that Russia and freedom are incompatible, and therefore “freedom is the best barrier against Russia.” And quite in the spirit of the already formed tradition, he frightened his fellow parliamentarians with the “Russian threat”: “Russia did not need a hundred years to reach almost to the door of Constantinople from Azov… It took her sixty years to be where she is now… Sixty more years will pass, and where will she be?” [Corbet, 1967, p. 178].

Many such pro-Polish statements were made. In particular, the already mentioned Count Montalembert until the 1860s consistently opposed Emperor Nicholas I and then Alexander II as far as “Holy Poland” was concerned, and from the Polish Question he turned to the Russian issue. On January 6, 1836, speaking in the House of Peers, he enumerated in detail the “atrocities” of Russia against the Polish people, in an attempt to show that the drama of the Poles was well within the general policy of Russia. The conquest of Poland was only a stage in the realization of a gigantic historical plan: the subjugation of the whole of Europe. Therefore, the Poles were defending not only their independence and their interests, but were defending “civilization against barbarism, the long and noble superiority of the West against the new invasion of the Tartars.” In doing so, Montalembert emphasized that Russia found “admirers and devotees everywhere,” but what did it promise Europe? “Darkness instead of light, military despotism instead of civil liberties, the shame of idolatrous schisma instead of the free beliefs of the West” [Corbet, 1967, pp. 179-180].

Every year, when the French Parliament debated the Address in response to the King’s Speech from the Throne, Montalembert used the opportunity to raise the Polish Question and renew his anti-Russian philippics. On November 17, 1840, on the wave of the Eastern crisis and anti-Russian sentiment, he said in the House of Peers: “We are all threatened by an ever-increasing danger, the predominance of Russia in Europe… Russia is already encircling Europe on all sides: its central border is only 200 leagues from the Rhine… From Bukovina to Kotor, the Slavic peoples of Austria profess her religion; she is awaited and called for” [Corbet, 1967, p. 181].

In England, these themes were developed by David Urquhart (1805-1877), whose name later became synonymous with Russophobia. Of course, Urquhart’s Russophobia was the reverse side of his Turkophilia, but Russian policy in Poland was also one of the main objects of his attacks. All the more so, because the documentary basis of the journal he published from November 1835 to 1837 in English and French (Portfolio, or Collection of State Documents … Illustrating the History of our Time) was the diplomatic documents provided to him by Polish emigrants. These were, first of all, the secret correspondence of Russian ambassadors, allegedly taken in 1831 from the chancery of Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich in Warsaw (in fact, most of the documents were forged by Urquhart) [K.V. Dushenko, “Pervye debaty o ‘rusofobii’ (Angliya, 1836–1841)”—”The First Debate about ‘Russophobia’: England, 1836-1841”], in Historical Expertise, 4(2021), p. 230].

Urquhart’s journals had great international resonance and were translated into foreign languages. In 1835, he published a pamphlet “England and Russia” (D.J. Urquhart, England, France, Russia & Turkey), in which he intimidated the reader with the “Russian threat,” emphasizing that for Poland “its space is void in the political map of Europe,” and the powers themselves allowed it, and the French government, moreover, did not help Poland [Urquhart, England & Russia (1835-1856), p. 1-2].

At the same time, in the eyes of Europeans, Poland was a bargaining chip in the defense of their own national interests. Therefore, when Russia was seen as an ally, the Polish Question was interpreted in a completely different way. Such metamorphoses, for example, happened with the famous politician and diplomat, Napoleon’s confessor, Abbé Dominique Dufour de Pradt (1759-1837). From the very beginning of the Restoration regime, he harshly criticized Russian policy, regularly actualizing the theme of the “Russian threat” and intimidating the French that Russia was “fifty leagues from Berlin and Vienna” [D.G.F. Pradt, Système permanent de l’Europe à l’egard de la Russie (1828), p. 6]. However, in 1836, amid the crisis of the French-English “cordial agreement,” Pradt bet on an alliance with Russia and published, Question de l’Orient Sous Les Rapports Généraux Et Particuliers, in which, among other things, he justified Russia’s policy in Poland, emphasizing that at the Congress of Vienna Russia’s demands on Poland were fair, and Poland thanks to Russia received a constitution [Pradt, 1828, pp. 122-123]. He even justified the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830-1831 and the Warsaw speech of Emperor Nicholas, noting that any sovereign in his place would have done the same [Pradt, 1828, p. 134]. For the politically engaged Pradt, in this text, Russia is Poland’s natural protector, its real guardian angel. However, it should be understood that this was pure conjecture; for in general, the negative view of Russia through the Polish lens was dominant.

In 1839, Leonard Chodzko, mentioned above, a participant of the Polish uprising, published another version of the fake Will of Peter the Great. It was a bestseller, going through six editions from 1839 to 1847, and played a decisive role in popularizing, in European countries, the idea of the conquering intentions of Russian sovereigns [V.P. Kozlov, Tajny fal’sifikacii: Posobie dlya prepodavatelej i studentov vuzov (Secrets of Falsification: A Manual for Teachers and University Students), 1996, p. 81].

In the same year, Marquis de Custine traveled to Russia, writing the most famous book about the country, which to this day is perceived as a bible of Russophobes. Custine, being an outcast in the Parisian salons, had close ties, first of all, with the leaders of the Polish emigration and was a guest in the salon of the wife of Prince Adam Czartoryski. And in Russia, Custine came, according to one version, to advocate for his kind Polish friend Ignacy Gurowski, taking him with him (George Frost Kennan, The Marquis De Custine and His Russia in 1839, p. 24-25).

The most important source of information for Custine was one of the most famous Poles then living in Paris, the poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855). After the suppression of the uprising, he lived in France as a political émigré, and in 1840, thanks to the persistent petition of the famous historian Jules Michelet, received a chair in Slavic languages and literature at the Collège de France. According to Michelet, “Mickiewicz had laid out the general features of Slavic life from above, and, descending into detail, cast deep, admirable glimmers on the true character of Russian government. He would have gone further, but they wouldn’t let him. His chair was nullified [Jules Michelet, Legendes démocratiques du Nord (1854), p. 36] (the authorities were dissatisfied with the preaching of Slavic messianism). This happened in 1844; and in 1849, the wave of Polish propaganda in five volumes was published as a collection of his “lectures”: Slavs [Corbet, 1967, pp. 168-169].

A new outbreak of anti-Russian sentiments occurred in 1846, after the suppression of the Krakow Uprising by Austrian troops, and again during the revolutions of 1848-1849, and especially after Russia suppressed the uprising in Hungary (at the request of the Austrian Emperor). But the apotheosis occurred during the Crimean War (1853-1856) [Nemenski, 2013, pp. 46-51].

On the eve of the war, Jules Michelet, who loved Poland with all his romantic heart and hated Russia just as passionately, wrote a series of articles entitled, Legendes démocratiques du Nord (The Democratic Legends of the North), in which he created a cult of unhappy Poland and the heroic Poles, and dehumanized the Russians, reducing them to the state of not just non-humans, but mollusks at the bottom of the sea. He called Russia’s policy towards Poland deceitful and Jesuitical, emphasizing that Empress Catherine “planned to drag Russia into a religious war, to make the Russian peasants think that it was a question of protecting their brothers in the Greek faith, who in Poland were being persecuted by people of the Latin faith. And this war, continued Michelet, “took on a character of appalling barbarity. Under the impetus of this atheist woman, who preached the crusade, populations and entire villages were tortured and burned alive in the name of tolerance” [11, с. 301]. According to Michelet, Catherine’s true goal was the destruction of Poland [Legendes démocratiques, pp. 53-54].

A similarly powerful anti-Russian wave swept over Europe during the Polish uprising of 1863-1864. Michelet worked hard this time too, publishing a series of articles entitled, “Martyr Poland,” while the equally illustrious Victor Hugo, also for the umpteenth time, unleashed invectives against Russia. Michelet called Poland, “the heart of the North.” Moreover, for him Poland is France itself: “La Pologne est une France avec tous nos anciens défauts, nos qualités” [Jules Michelet, La Pologne martyr: Russie—Danube, p. xv].

Concepts of Russian Racial Inferiority

It was Poles who stood at the origins of the concept of racial inferiority of Russians. Such ideas were first developed by the Polish historian and public figure, participant in the uprising of 1830-1831, Joachim Lelewel. In the form of a full-fledged theory, these ideas were formulated by the historian and ethnographer Franciszek Henryk Duchiński (1816-1893). After the suppression of the uprising of 1830-1831, he emigrated to France and was a professor of history at the Polish School in Paris. His main idea was that the Great Russians, or “Moskals,” do not belong to the Slavic and even to the Aryan tribe, but are a branch of the Turanian tribe, on par with the Mongols, and who only appropriated the name of Russians, which belongs, properly, only to the Little Russians and Belarusians, close to the Poles in their origin [F. Duhinski, “Osnovy istorii Pol’shi, inyh slavyanskih stran i Moskvy,” in, Russkij vopros v istorii politiki i mysli, antologiya, Pod red. A.Yu. Shutova and A.A. Shirinyanca (“Fundamentals of the History of Poland, other Slavic countries and Moscow,” in The Russian Question in the History of Politics and Thought, anthology, edited by A.Y. Shutov and A.A. Shirinyants], Moscow: Moscow University Press, 2013., p. 479].

Duchiński’s texts, which had no scientific basis, were aimed at justifying the necessity of creating a buffer between “Aryan” Europe and “Turanian” Moscow. This buffer was to be an independent Poland, including Ukraine-Rus, Belarus, Lithuania, the Baltic States, Smolensk and Veliky Novgorod.

Duchiński’s ideas were enthusiastically received by the Polish emigration, which dreamed of the restoration of a “Great Poland from sea to sea,” and his ideas also had a great influence on the Western European thought of the 19th century. In particular, Karl Marx was very interested in the concept of Duchiński and spoke in favor of it: “He claims that the real Muscovites, i.e., the inhabitants of the former Grand Duchy of Moscow, are mostly Mongols or Finns, etc., as well as the parts of Russia located further to the east and its southeastern part… I wish that Dukhinsky (thus in the text—NT) was right, and that at least this view would prevail among the Slavs” [letter dated June 24, 1865, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1978), vol. 31, pp. 126–127].

Duchiński’s theory was enthusiastically accepted by French intellectuals and politicians—E. Renaud, Aimé Martin, K. Delamar and others [Shutova and Shirinyanca (2013), p. 43]. Thus, the historian, publicist and politician Henri Martin (1810-1883), author of Histoire de France (History of France) in nineteen volumes, characterized by an extremely hostile attitude to Russia, in one of his major works, La Russie et l’Europe (1866) (Russia and Europe) described the Russians as a barbaric people of non-European (Turanian) despotism, who had unjustly appropriated the history of Russia. He considered Duchiński’s concept as “excellent,” and explained the Russian craving for subjugation as follows: “Such a feeling arises in peoples who are at an extremely low stage of cultural development of nations, where an individual person is unable to control his fate and does not even express such a desire” [Shutova and Shirinyanca (2013), p. 382].

Despite the fact that after the uprising of 1863-1864, reforms were carried out in Poland, Russia remained the main enemy for newer generations of patriotic Poles, so that at the end of the 19th century, Józef Piłsudski (1867-1935) proclaimed the main goal of his life as the physical destruction of the Russian state with the subsequent restoration of a new Poland, dominating in Central and Eastern Europe on Russia’s ruins [Shutova and Shirinyanca (2013), p. 45]. In the article “Russia,” first published in 1895, he noted: “The Russian Tsar is the main enemy of the Polish working class. Tsarist autocracy—the main obstacle in our way, now and always” [Shutova and Shirinyanca (2013), p. 514].

Conclusion

As the current situation shows, these ideas did not pass away with Pilsudski—and Poles are still perceived in the West as the main experts on Russia. And, of course, the West willingly believes them, because Polish scary myths about Russia, ideas about Russian “Asianness” and Russians “stealing” history fit very well into the pan-European narrative of a barbaric, despotic and expansionist Russia. And Poles, of course, can speak only “the truth” about Russia, and the West willingly believes in this Polish “truth” and uses it in its ideological and geopolitical confrontation with Russia—without thinking much about the Poles themselves. Only now, Ukraine is the “martyr,” and Western love for Ukraine is the reverse side of hatred for Russia.


Natalia P. Tanshina, is Professor in the Department of General History at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation, and is Professor at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of Europe and America, Moscow State Pedagogical University, Moscow. This article appears courtesy of Nauka Obshestvo Oborona.


Featured: Exposed to the world’s contempt, illustration by Udo J. Keppler, Puck, June 17, 1903.


Metapolitics and the Historical

Every time we have had the opportunity to speak about metapolitics, we have argued that it is interdisciplinary, where other disciplines such as literature, economics, philosophy, theology, history and politics converge in an attempt to explain the major categories that condition the political action of current rulers.

Although there are at least three interpretative currents—those who pretend to make metapolitics without politics, those who limit it to the recovery of public policy and those who interpret it as a metaphysics of politics—all agree on the method: to go to the things themselves and describe them as accurately as possible.

The method is therefore phenomenological in its two aspects: eidetic or essential description and hermeneutic or interpretative.

However, metapolitics and its proponents have developed their own mode of exposition, which we call, festina lente, that is, to hasten calmly, or to be hasty with circumspection, offering quick, prompt answers to the problems that are presented to us but with maximum prudence, sine ira et studio. It is necessary to publish quickly, even fragmentarily, the result of the research (festina), waiting for the intersubjective verification of others, to bring about rectification, clarification or compliment of what has been researched. Today, we are in the age of the Internet and so we have to take advantage of it.

What happened with metapolitics, mutatis mutandi, is what happened with the historical (what is said about history) and historiography in the last half of the 19th century. Humboldt, Dilthey, Droysen and so many others wanted to provide studies of the historical with an agency analogous to that which Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason offered to the physical and natural sciences.

Thus, Droysen states that the method of history is forschend zu verstehen, to understand by inquiring. The difference between scholars of history—according to J.G. Droysen, the philological—and historiography or the historical is that the former is concerned with authentic documents or the chronology of the events of the Lutheran Reformation, while the latter looks into the cognitive orientation and meaning of these documents. The former leads to the preparation of knowledge, while the latter to knowledge itself.

The scholar does not get involved in the human drama he studies, because he lives the placid and restful life of the scholar who has his salary assured month after month. The one who is involved is the one who seeks knowledge itself. The one who wonders about the being of the being of the entity, as Heidegger says. For the meaning of what is.

With metapolitics something analogous occurs; for while the political scientist wonders about the political activity of parties and agents, the one who seeks to do metapolitics wonders about the meaning of these actions—where they come from and where they are going; what are their constraints and what are their freedoms. His method, as we said, is the phenomenological method of dissident hermeneutics whose mode of exposition is the festina lente, to hasten calmly.

As we can see, there is a very close proximity between hastening calmly and understanding by inquiring. But the difference is that the festina lente incorporates the novelty of the Internet by making available to others the concepts to be studied and awaits their answers or verifications in the enrichment of the concepts treated.

In this sense, I am tempted to say that metapolitics finds a very great contemporary ally in historiographic production, both hermeneutic and conceptual; hence authors such as Hans Gadamer and Reinhart Koselleck are recommended reading for the discipline.

We must not forget what Epictetus of old said: “It is not so much the facts that move man, but rather the words about those facts.”

This does not mean, as Nietzsche exaggerated, that there are no facts but only interpretations. No, there are facts that, depending on how we describe them, through political correctness or unique thought, or through the thought police, will produce in the subject’s conscience a preconceived or predetermined reaction by the producers of meaning: basically, the mass media. But there is also another possibility, which consists in working those facts and the concepts that produced those facts, through metapolitics, with the aim of achieving an awakened and incorruptible conscience.

Addendum

There are different types of hermeneutics—existential, analogical, ontological, discursive, language, classical, etc., so we can justify our proposal of a dissident hermeneutics to address studies on metapolitics. We say “dissident” because we start from dissent as a method of metapolitics, according to which we seek another meaning to the social-political disorder we suffer. Its motto could be, opposer pour penser.

Dissident hermeneutics rescues the existential dimension of the interpreter, who starts from the interpreter, who starts from the preference of himself and his situation in a given ecumene of the world. That is to say, there is no universality, as in Kant-Habermas-Apel, in understanding, since it is done from a genius loci. And it is dissident because, first of all, it dissents with the status quo in force and its great categories that condition political action, offering another sense.

Thus, the approach to these major categories is based on dissidence from them because they are products of crypto-politics and not of public policy. All the mega-categories that make up this globalized world are products and creations of the different lobbies or power groups that exist in the world and that end up governing it. Dissident hermeneutics starts from this presupposition but, at the same time, its criterion of truth is based, no longer on the ideologues of different sorts, but on the different ethos of the ecumenes that make up this world, which is a cosmos, meaning both order and beauty. The world, in its ultimate sense, is an ordered and beautiful set of entities that compose it—in such a way that when man disarranges it, it is transformed into something ugly and unlivable.


Alberto Buela is an Argentinian philosopher and professor at National Technological University and the University of Barcelona. He is the author of many books and articles. His website is here.


Featured: Clio, by Lambert Cause. Print, ca. 1600. The caption reads: “Clio gesta canens transactis tempora reddit” (Clio, singing of famous deeds, restores times past to life), which is the opening line of Ausonius’s poem, “Nomina musarum” (“Names of the Muses”).


Feelings, Zentralgebiet, and the Criterion of the Political

Clausewitz writes, in the first pages of Vom Kriege (On War), that war, under the aspect of its main tendencies, presents itself as a compound trinity:

War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical trinity–composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.

The first of these three aspects mainly concerns the people; the second the commander and his army; the third the government. The passions that are to be kindled in war must already be inherent in the people; the scope which the play of courage and talent will enjoy in the realm of probability and chance depends on the particular character of the commander and the army; but the political aims are the business of government alone (p. 89).

And just before he argues that ” The more powerful and inspiring the motives for war, the more they affect the belligerent nations and the fiercer the tensions that precede the outbreak, the closer will war approach its abstract concept, the more important will be the destruction of the enemy, the more closely will the military aims and the political objects of war coincide, and the more military and less political will war appear to be” (pp. 87-88).

It emerges from these and other passages in Vom Kriege that the “fierce tentions” and the original violence of hatred and enmity is the element of the “trinity” that contributes most to the intensity and determination of the war effort.

According to Carl Schmitt, “The concepts of friend and foe must be taken in their concrete, existential meaning, not as metaphors or symbols; they should not be mixed and weakened by economic, moral and other conceptions, and even less should they be understood in an individualistic-private sense,” because “An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity” (Concept of the Political, p. 28).

The enemy is only public as was already written in the Digest. Political opposition is the most intense and extreme; it is not limited on the outside of political unity, although on the inside it is relativized, i.e., it is struggle and not war; if it becomes this, it puts political unity in doubt. War is in itself a political means and can only be such “it would be senseless to wage war for purely religious, purely moral, purely juristic, or purely economic motives” (Concept, p. 36).

However, ” religious, moral, and other antitheses can intensify to political ones and can bring about the decisive friend-or-enemy constellation. If, in fact, this occurs, then the relevant antithesis is no longer purely religious, moral, or economic, but political” (Concept, 36); and he continues: ” Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy” (Concept, p. 37).

In his essay, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” (1929), Schmitt argues (and this also presents interest for the “content” of the political) that Europe has changed its center of reference several times since the 16th century, which has shifted from the theological to the metaphysical, then from this to the moral-humanitarian and then to the economic.

The center of reference determines the meaning of specific concepts from time to time. What is most relevant, “If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domains—they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved” (“Neutralizations,” p. 86). This is also the case with the state and the friend-enemy groupings: “Above all the state also derives its reality and power from the respective central domain, because the decisive disputes of friend-enemy groupings are also determined by it. As long as religious-theological matters were the central focus, the maxim cujus regio ejus religio had a political meaning” (“Neutralizations,” p. 87).

Having changed the center of reference, the conception of the state and the content or discriminant of the political changes, which takes on another meaning and criterion and may result in a different friend-foe grouping and thus, “The former central domain became neutralized in that it ceased to be the central domain. On the basis of the new central domain, one hoped to find minimum agreement and common premises allowing for the possibility of security, clarity, prudence, and peace. Europeans thus moved in the direction of neutralization and minimalization” (“Neutralizations,” pp. 89-90).

However, not even the “neutral” landing place that Europeans arrived at in the 20th century, namely, technics, can realize the aspiration for the elimination of conflict; both because “Technology is always only an instrument and weapon; precisely because it serves all, it is not neutral. No single decision can be derived from the immanence of technology, least of all for neutrality” (“Neutralizations,” p. 91), and also because “So far the hope that a politically dominant elite would develop out of the community of technical inventors has not been fulfilled” (“Neutralizations,” p. 92). Schmitt continues: “The constructions of Saint-Simon and other sociologists who anticipated an “industrial” society are either not purely technical (but rather mixed with humanitarian-moral and economic elements) or simply fantastic. Not even the economic direction of the contemporary economy is in the hands of technicians, and until now nobody has been able to construe a social order led by technicians other than as one lacking any leadership or direction” (“Neutralizations,” p. 92).

The correlation, although not always necessary and inescapable, between center of reference and friend-enemy exculpatory persuades only in part.

This is primarily because it must be coordinated with what Schmitt so often repeated, namely, that it is the concrete situation that determines the enemy. For which there is not only the pair of opposites referring to the center of reference, but there are other oppositions, sometimes more important and so decisive (or at least perceived as such) that determine situations of struggle and hostility.

For example, in the short century and particularly after the conclusion of World War II, the opposition between liberal democracies (with annexes) and communist nations repartitioned almost the entire developed world into two camps one against the other, armed, organized in alliance systems (and related organizations), opposed and ready for mutual destruction. Despite this, it did not prevent these nations states of intense hostility, up to war, within both the “two” camps and between “clients” of them, mostly not induced by the main friend-enemy discriminant.

In fact, there have been wars in the same “camp”: China-Vietnam; Vietnam-Cambodia; China-Russia; (the Ussuri “incidents”) for the communist one; Britain-Argentina (for the Falklands-Malvinas) as well as the Turkish occupation of part of Cyprus with the high tensions between Greece and Turkey.

Moreover, the Arab-Israeli wars did not have at all the content and ideological exculpation of the camps that, to a greater or lesser extent, helped one or the other of the contenders, but the “traditional” character of disputes for the possession of land between different peoples.

Even civil wars are not (always) ideological wars (although this has often been the case in the last two centuries). As Henry de Montherlant wrote in the prologue of his drama, La guerra civile (Civil War), acknowledging this: “I am the civil war… I am not the war of the trenches and battlefields. I am the war of the angry square, the war of prisons and streets, of neighbor against neighbor, of rival against rival, of friend against friend.” That “friend against friend” shows how the playwright saw the dissolution of the friendship relationship as the cause of civil war. Against this, the aggregation resulting from the commonality of laws, traditions, history and language, which in any case produces cohesion, does not (always) count; to this must be added the will to exist together and a common future. The failure of which induces the end of political synthesis, which, as Renan wrote, is an “everyday plebiscite.”

In political reality the constant of domination and its determinants, particularly geo-political, so well enunciated by Thucydides in the famous dialogue between the Melians and the Athenian ambassadors (And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 5.17)—oppositions between peoples accustomed to fighting and asserting their identity over their neighbors (as, often, in the Balkans—and not only); the interests of states, such as De Gaulle’s policy towards the communist world—make the main (and epochal) opposition non-decisive. (As for de Gaulle, Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, clearly revealed the aspiration to relativize the hostility between NATO and the Warsaw Pact and thus the exculpation).

The decisiveness of the opposition should be traced to its influence on the existence of the political community, both in an absolute sense (the destruction of the community or the institution that shapes it) and in a relative sense (the radical modification of its mode of existence).

Political conflict is thus determined primarily by the community’s need for existence: if another human group is perceived as an enemy-in the sense of being a (concrete) danger to the existence of the threatened community—the same religious, ideological, economic “differences” take a back seat. “Values” and the correlative “canon,” mostly stated, in modern states, in the Constitutions, take a back seat at the moment when the existence of the community is at stake. This is done on both the internal side (the decision on the state of exception) and the external side (the decision on the enemy), in homage to the maxim, salus rei publicae suprema lex. The enemy is the one who is such for the salus of the state institution (and the community). It is the concrete situation and the danger to the collective existence, and the hostile feeling that follows from it, more than the contrast on the mode of existence of a people that designates the enemy. Thus, it belongs to each community to decide who is such, and whether the epochal opposition is more or less important than the other oppositions, which have the character not only of concreteness but also of particularity. As Freund wrote, “To fall into error about the enemy out of ideological stupor… is to expose oneself to putting, sooner or later, one’s existence in danger” (Essence du Politique, p. 496).

Gentile wrote that “The political sense is the soil (humus) in which the tree of the State sends down its roots” (Genesis and Structure of Society, p. 182). This statement is complementary to Clausewitz’s statement about the tendency/component/constant of war constituted by the blind instinct—and with that, the political feeling —that “corresponds” to the people. Gentile writes that the living (i.e., vital) state needs political feeling: “This structure must have life, such as it can have only if it is a feeling, a political sense, the secret source of every passion that the political activity of the individual brings to light. When this fountain dries up, political action loses all sincerity and warmth; it is emptied of all constructive energy and decays into a mere game for dilettanti” (Genesis, p. 183), and he continues: “The more vigorous this political sense is, the more powerful and effective political action becomes” (Genesis, p. 183).

Without political feeling there is neither war nor viable state—that one thus has the possibility of being waged and, in the case, won; in this it is resolved in the relativization of oppositions and conflicts, particularly that between rulers and ruled in the consent of the latter to the former, in an idem sentire de republica. This appears to be the meaning given to consent by Gentile: “This consent may be spontaneous or it may be procured by coercion. The moral ideal of the State, within which the government exercises its authority, requires that spontaneity be increased to a maximum and coercion reduced to a minimum; but it is impossible that either element should ever stand alone, unaccompanied by its opposite. The nations swing restlessly between the two poles of a minimum of coercion with a maximum of spontaneity, and a maximum of coercion with a minimum of spontaneity: between democracy and absolutism, for it is very hard to attain that mutual—tempering of the opposed principles which is their dialectical synthesis… For neither of the two terms can stand alone; and the necessity of their synthesis is a consequence of the essentially dialectical character of the spiritual act” (Genesis, pp. 123-124; 125).

The problem of the legitimacy of consent and integration, which contemporary jurists often resolve in legality, without considering that this is based on the conviction of the legitimacy of those who exercise power, and not vice versa; so that, wrote Gentile, there is no police that can provide for it, if the social order is not shared: “Peace takes definite and determinate form as the system of social order, the maintenance of which is the primary task of every State; and no one can pretend that the police force is all that is required to meet this essential and fundamental need. The police may be helpful in preserving peace, but only if order reigns in men’s hearts by virtue of the political sense in which the State is rooted and from which alone it gets its vital sap. Police work is a medicine; and just as no medicine can keep alive an organism threatened by an inner failure of vitality, so no police force can restore the health of a State when the vis medicatrix naturae has run out” (Genesis, p. 182).

A phenomenological analysis of the friend-foe relationship must start from the factual observation that conflict is in itself irrepressible both within and outside the political synthesis. A society, so harmonious as to know no internal conflict is the result of utopianism; that is, of that variant of utopian thought aimed at imagining impossible fantasies because they are opposed to the factual datum.

What, on the other hand, is part of historical experience (and is constant) is that political syntheses exist as such as long as they succeed in relativizing internal conflicts, recomposing and deciding them; conflicts relativized by consent to a higher authority, recognized (by the governed) to make the (unappealable) decisions for the order it ensures. Where this does not happen, the result is that those conflicts move from relative to absolute, in which at stake is the existence and, gradually, the form of government, the regime of political synthesis and no longer internal disagreements. It follows that out of all the innumerable conflicts that may exist within the political synthesis, depowering one, certainly present, is a necessary presupposition of the amicable relationship: that between rulers and ruled. For it enables the recomposition of all others.

Authority, order and rules have as their fundamental requirement to settle and decide conflicts, and thus the struggle that inevitably ensues, limiting and degrading it to agonal competition.

Even more, the relativization of internal disagreements is based on the pacifying role of the third party, internal to the political synthesis, that is, in principle, the sovereign power. In principle because the activity of the third party (including internal) may not be carried out by an organ of the state and, the political result (the settlement of the disagreement), nevertheless achieved. But the role of the “third party” may not be limited to internal conflicts and, especially its action, be aimed at stirring up dissension, not recomposing it.

It has often been thought, in the post-atomic era and following the debellatio of Germany and Japan (the case of Italy is different), that the end of war is identified with the military occupation of a country, previously destroyed by the victor, and thus placed in the material impossibility of defending itself; the terrible effects of a nuclear war in the collective imagination have done the rest.

In reality, a war ends when one side no longer has the will to fight. War is a clash of wills, as Clausewitz and Gentile, among others, wrote. It therefore presupposes that both contenders have the will to make it and continue it—if one of them surrenders, the war ceases.

Rightly de Maistre noted that a battle lost is one that we imagine we have lost. Indeed, De Maistre writes that “it is imagination that loses battles,” but, to some extent, this is also true of the wars (St. Petersburg Dialogues, p. 222). In this regard, this conclusion was drawn by Gustave Le Bon who argued that often “The rout is obviously only the result of a purely psycholoiric impression, and by no means an inescapable necessity.” (La Psychologie politique, p. 96).

Absolute war stands to real war as the (perpetual? universal?) peace of debellatio stands to a treaty (or even “dictate”) of real peace. It is essential to bend the enemy’s will to fight and thus the feeling of (communal belonging and) hostility. To this end, all means are good: both the prospect of superior punishment and harm and the opposite of benefits, advantages or clemency. The armistice with which the First World War ended (militarily), with Germany still master of much of Central and Eastern Europe, is one such case.

Economic pressures (the effects of the blockade), the armistice of Austria-Hungary, and the strategic prospects of this, and increased U.S. intervention contributed to depowering the will to fight.

But even in the 20th century, in the age of technical and total warfare, often determined and motivated partisan armies endured and won under conditions of (abysmal) material inferiority, at the cost of vastly greater casualties than hyper-technological enemies. The material imbalance was offset by the intensity of hostile feeling and so of morale. Enemies could not bear the (far inferior) sacrifices, so they preferred to conclude peace or otherwise give up the war. Hostile feeling is, for the weaker, the factor that can enable them to wage and win war, even though it is marked by a very considerable material asymmetry. (This was the conclusion of many liberation wars: from the Vietnamese to the Algerian to the Soviet-Afghan—and many others).

It is precisely asymmetrical warfare in its various forms that has connoted contemporary conflicts since the collapse of communism and the consequent breakup of the bipolar condominium that had characterized the second half of the 20th century.

Similarly, hostility between human groups, which shares the chameleon-like nature of its most intense product, war (characterized by the use of violence), takes intermediate forms (mostly mystified or entirely concealed). Influenced by derivations (in Pareto’s sense) of pacifism; these consist in denying armed interventions the character of war, in the name of irenic intentions and especially because they are undertaken in order to maintain peace. (Often such externalized intentions match the actual purpose, but, at least as often, they do not).

But the panoply of hostility is not limited to wars in disguise.

Other forms of it are those actions tending to the same purpose as war—to bend the will of the adversary—by non-military means (economic blockade, cyber-attacks, financial raids, all the way to peaceful invasions); that is, conducted by subjects not having the status of legitimate belligerents (justi hostes), a means well known even to centuries past. The common connotation of all these types of hostile acts is that, having the same purpose as “classical” war, they lack one (or more) of the requirements identified by Christian theology for there to be a just war (justum bellum): here the recta intentio is missing, there the auctoritas, elsewhere a justa causa belli. Hence (perhaps) they cannot be considered wars in the proper sense; but they almost always cannot be traced back to the concept of just war elaborated by theologians.

It is precisely in such wars not wars that the need to annihilate the enemy’s will to resist (and to fight) assumes perhaps greater prominence than in classical wars; for the adversary knows full well, as de Gaulle wrote, that strength resides in the order of it and that breaking this destroys that.

In the “atypical” forms of warfare that connote the 21st century, this is possible in various ways, and the means must be congruent with the objectives. The loss of the enemy’s political cohesion, however, appears to be decisive. The degrees of action may be different: they range, in escalation, from the replacement of the hostile government, to the abolition of the political regime, to the destruction of the political synthesis targeted by the hostile intervention.

As examples in modern history, one may recall, for the first type, the fall of governments (and then regimes) of real socialism in Eastern Europe; although, in this case, the intervention of the antagonist (the U.S. and NATO) was unimportant and entirely indirect. In fact, the endogenous cause, that is, the unpopularity of the regimes that made the amicable relationship between rulers and ruled problematic, was totally (or almost totally) decisive. However, this confirms that the amicable relationship is decisive; without this, in the long run, any political regime collapses, even without the intervention of other political actors. Another case, of the same type, although achieved in part by military means, is the Cyprus crisis in 1974 and the fall of the Joannides government. Of the second, the end of the regime was the tsarist collapse and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. Of the third, the end of Czechoslovakia in 1939 with the absorption into the Reich of Bohemia and Moravia and the birth of the Slovak republic of Mgr. Jozef Tiso. In all these (and other) cases, military means were not used at all; or, if used at all, were not decisive. What was decisive was the attenuation or disappearance of the friendly relationship and hostile feeling.

A common notion is that the means used and the purpose make it closer to revolution than to war: even if the end is not always revolutionary it consists of the subversion and overthrow of the hostile order (and so at least the government). Since contemporary hostile interventions have—like so many wars on the other hand—limited goals, the replacement of the government is often sufficient to achieve them.

Despite the non-use of military means, this makes it far more damaging to the principles of international law than a justum bellum: stirring up subversion (up to revolution) in other states has, in the view of many, constituted an international tort, often vituperated and equally practiced.

Political thought has wondered for millennia about who the enemy is, and the answers to the question have been the most varied and not even mutually exclusive. It has been held that there were enemies by nature (see, Alberico Gentili, Il diritto di Guerra, p. 78), and in Cromwell’s speech quoted by Carl Schmitt (Concept, pp. 67-68): “Why, truly, your great Enemy is the Spaniard. He is a natural enemy. He is naturally so; he is naturally so throughout, by reason of that enmity that is in him against whatsoever is of God. ‘Whatsoever is of God’ which is in you, or which may be in you.” Then he repeats: “The Spaniard is your enemy,” his “enmity is put into him by God.” He is “the natural enemy, the providential enemy,” and he who considers him to be an “accidental enemy” is “not well acquainted with Scripture and the things of God,” who says: “‘I will put enmity between your seed and her seed'” (Gen. III:I5).”); or more often by divergence of interests, or even by customs (Alberico Gentili argues that “If there really were causes dependent on nature, the resulting war would surely be just. But causes of this kind do not exist Men are not enemies among themselves by nature; it is activities and customs which, according to their compatibility or incompatibility, induce them to concord or discord” (Il diritto, p. 80); by religion, the source of so many contrasts. (On the basis of two well-known Digest fragments, the one who is not sovereign (and for non-public causes) is normally ruled out (Dig. L.16.118 and Dig. XXXXVII.15.24). Even more so about who is the right enemy.

As argued by Schmitt (and others), the 20th century saw the recognition of the status of just enemy, even to political subjects other than states (particularly revolutionary movements); thus, a legitimization of just wars, predominantly on the basis of the criterion of justa causa belli.

On the phenomenological level, the whole led not to the reduction but to the increase in the role of hostile feeling: in particular, war activity carried out by relatively (little) institutionalized (on this point, see “Revolution,” in Frammenti di un dizionario giuridico, p. 224), non-state organizations led to an increase in the active role of the population in war, according to Mao Zedong’s conception, and thus in political feeling.

Weak institutionalization has similarly made the role of “technical” and specialized personnel less relevant. The command—and cadres—of partisan movements are only occasionally (and rarely) military technicians and bureaucrats; for the most part they either do not possess war experience or have little. Even at the dawn of the modern partisan, we find Cardinal Ruffo, who was not a military man but a religious and civil administrator. On the other hand, he knew very well how to arouse and make use of the hostile anti-Jacobin feeling of the southern populations. So did most of his followers; something repeated in all (or almost all) modern revolutionary movements. Fra Diavolo the partisan leader was a saddler and then enlisted (some time) in the regular Bourbon army; Empecinado the farmer.

And, in this respect, it is necessary to return to Schmitt’s conception, mentioned earlier, of the role of technics and technocracy, relative to political feeling, whether it be aversion to the enemy or cohesion with the friend.

Technics itself is a tool and a means, not an end.

Rather, the shift from the conception of technics (of the first half of the last century) that Schmitt writes about as “faith in an activist metaphysics, faith in man’s boundless power and dominion over nature, and thus also over human physis, faith in the limitless ‘overcoming of natural obstacles,’ in the infinite possibilities of change and refinement of man’s natural existence in this world,” so that he cannot declare it “simply a soulless, spiritless, mechanistic dead thing,” reinforced the null (or scant) suitability to arouse “political feeling.”

If technics at the time was conceived in a Promethean dimension (and function), it is now perceived as the satisfaction of (mostly private) needs of a society of pantomime consumers, who in any case have abdicated any sense of collective existence, other than that of producing and consuming. Which dovetails very well with Tocqueville’s prophecy of mild despotism (Democracy in America, Vol.2, Book IV, Chapter VI. It may also be recalled, as a supplement to Tocqueville’s judgment what Schmitt writes: “Great masses of industrialized peoples today still cling to a torpid religion of technicity because they, like all masses, seek radical results and believe subconsciously that the absolute depoliticization sought after four centuries can be found here and that universal peace begins here. Yet technology can do nothing more than intensify peace or war; it is equally available to both. In this respect, nothing changes by speaking in the name of and employing the magic formula of peace. Today we see through the fog of names and words with which the psycho-technical machinery of mass suggestion works”—”Neutralizations,” p. 95); while according to the Plettenberg jurist, ” All new and great impulses, every revolution and reformation, every new elite originates from asceticism and voluntary or involuntary poverty (poverty meaning above all the renunciation of the security of the status quo)—(“Neutralizations,” p. 94).

Nonetheless given that any choice, as is also the choice to make use of technology (or technologies), can provoke a friend-foe opposition it is the case to see if this (and/or those) can also constitute an aggregating/ discriminating foundation.

First, it must be remembered that the rejection of certain technical (solutions) is, more often than not, only a reflection of a choice of values; in the contemporary world this is evident for (new) technologies traceable to bioethical orientations (Although today, as in past centuries for the most part, such contrasts have not resulted in conflicts between political symbioses, the contrast in internal political struggle even if minor can always be traced back to the friend-enemy pair). The dependence of these on those makes them irrelevant or, at best, secondary.

Second, the total (or nearly total) rejection of technics, as the resultant/component of another science and civilization, has been repeated over and over again throughout history.

In particular, Toynbee considers it one of the types of behavior held by human communities not part of Western civilization (of Christianity) in the face of its planetary expansion. Regarding rejection (as opposed to assimilation/acceptance) he considered “champions” (among other rejectors) Japan before the Meiji Revolution and Abyssinia; of acceptance (modernization) he considered the most typical historical figures Peter the Great, Mehmet Ali and the Japanese statesmen of the Meiji era (Mankind and Mother Earth, p. vii): “Eminent examples of Westernizing statesmen in the first century after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain are Ranjit Singh (ruled 1 799-1839) the founder of the Sikh successor-state, in the Punjab, of the Abdali Afghan Empire; Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman Padishah’s viceroy in Egypt from 1805 to 1848; the Ottoman Padishah Mahmud II (ruled 1808-39); King Mongkut of Thailand (ruled 1851-68); and the band of Japanese statesmen that, in the Emperor’s name, liquidated the Tokugawa regime and took the government of Japan into its own hands in 1868. These Westernizing statesmen have had a greater effect on the history of the Oikoumene than any of their Western contemporaries. They have kept the West’s dominance within limits, and they have done this by propagating, in non-Western countries, the modern West’s way of life” (Mankind and Mother Earth, p. 567). And for rejections: “In 1632 the Abyssinians (present-day Ethiopians) expelled the Portuguese and also Jesuits of all European nationalities, and insulated themselves from the rest of the Oikoumene, without any foreign help. Almost simultaneously the Japanese did the same. Hideyoshi had ordered the expulsion of Christian missionaries as early as 1587. An edict banning the practice of Christianity in Japan…” (Mankind and Mother Earth, p. 532).

But the rejection of technics and technology was the consequence/ result of the rejection of Western civilization as a whole, in its values as well as in social organization (including law), as well as technology, and thus, in part, coincides with the first type of choice.

Even if an opposition to technics is theoretically conceivable, it does not appear in practice, as a real determinant of conflict, nor can it constitute, except in an ancillary role (although sometimes the ancillary function plays a minor, still relevant, role), a decisive and legitimizing factor of power. Every conflictual and nonconflictual situation of enmity or friendship; dissent or consensus of values or interests is left to the human will, while the choice of technics (and the validity of it) is not preference of will, but of appropriateness and expediency.

The contemporary situation, following the collapse of communism (and the institutions-alliances that determined its field) has brought to an end the bourgeois-proletariat opposition that connoted (at least) the “short century.” The recent electoral assertions of movements and candidates that cannot be traced back to the old Zentralgebiet, in Europe first and foremost, and, as appears from Trump’s election, in the U.S. as well, bring out a new friend-foe opposition, ideologically less defined but, at least potentially, virulent. It seems clear that this opposition, as I happened to write recently, is that between nation (national identity) and globalization (see, Nazione e globalizzazione in Nova Historica, 15/56, 2016, pp. 39ff); (or “direct” internationalism). Compared with the old Zentralgebiet, especially the one generating the bourgeoisie-proletariat opposition, it has in common the character of being divisive internally no less than externally—it generates populist parties that oppose the domestic and international elites, represented by the old decaying parties, whose survival strategy is often consistent with the emergence of the new opposition (which makes the old one secondary and unimportant): they tend toward entrenchment, to bloc together (the old right and the old left), to prevent the new amicus-hostis “couple” from seizing power.

Although, it is often the case to speak of parallel divergences rather than entrenchment. But parallel divergences are one of the sources of alliances between different parties on so much (or everything) but united by the enemy.


Teodoro Katte Klitsche de la Grange is an attorney in Rome and is the editor of the well-regarded and influential law journal Behemoth.


Featured: The Battle of Gorossló (Allegory of the Turkish War), by Hans von Aachen; painted ca. 1603-1604.