MY VERSION OF "IMAGINE"

(In case this may not be as obvious to the reader as I would have liked it to be, this entry’s title is an allusion to John Lennon’s famous song Imagine.)

A curious moment, vividly etched in my memory, occurred back in 1984, during a seminar that I conducted at the UC San Diego, when on the inspiration of the moment (it was not a part of my prepared notes) I mused most prophetically about one seemingly impossible what if, inviting the class to imagine what would happen differently if one day they should wake up to find that the Communist Soviet Union was gone, and only an un-Communist Russia was left in its place. Would this new Russia, under the circumstances, all of a sudden become a friend to the United States, I asked the group, or would it still remain America’s main adversary? I gave them my own answer that the current cold war status quo had little to do with ideology, as the Soviet Union was the structural antithesis to the United States, which in that case constituted the structural thesis of the modern world order, and this dialectical equation could not be broken by a mere change of some superficial political slogan.

I remember expecting to be vociferously challenged on my so politically incorrect hypothesis, and I confess that I was eagerly looking forward to an exhilaratingly healthy confrontation. But to my surprise the students must have been so utterly shocked by my promotion of such an incredible hypothesis that my challenge had frozen stiff in the air, probably without ever sinking in.

Too bad! Had their minds been more open to my revolutionary suggestion, we could have had a marvelous discussion, with some enormously important implications for the “inconceivable” future which happened to be only seven short years away.

Recapping what I have just said in this entry, my version of Imagine was not exactly a poetic musing. It was a reasoned assessment of Russia’s lasting historical role in the world, built on the firm ground of historical examination, personal experience, and commonsense logic. Geographically, politically, and mathematically, or as I put it at UCSD, structurally, Russia had to be globally important, no matter what “political religion” she had adhered to. It is also important to realize that the United States was destined to be Russia’s strategic peer and antipode no matter what, just as Tocqueville prophesied at the time when Russia was still a Tsarist Empire. This assessment of mine was never professionally challenged and debated, but was dismissed as an unacceptable rant totally incompatible with the American strategic vision and posture. Even today when the truth of my assessment has been supported by fact, Washington’s ideologues and their beholden politicians, prefer to view Russia’s revitalization under Putin and Medvedev as an anti-democratic aberration, which is bound to end up on the garbage dump of history, as soon as the unstoppable march of Western freedom and democracy resumes across Russia, under the leadership of Western-style Russian politicians, helped in their effort by the mightiest force in the world: the American dollar…

Getting back to my version of Imagine, the truth of my assessment is further corroborated by two powerful arguments. The first one is that, despite all her historical twists and turns, Russia’s immutable nature is never affected by the superficiality of the changing slogans and banners. Winston Churchill not for nothing called her “a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.” What his famous dictum means is that there are deep layers of substance underneath the layers of appearances, and an outsider ought not to be fooled by his own cleverness, seeing something under the slightly scratched surface and assuming that he has discovered what Russia is all about. For instance, investigating the standard Western perception of Soviet Russia as a land of “Godless Commies,” the honest open-minded Westerner could be stunned to find open functioning churches with magnificent bearded priests shaking fumes of aromatic incense at the people praying inside, and choirs singing the most beautiful church hymns one could hear anywhere in a Christian church. What conclusion would our Westerner make about this unexpected occurrence? Would he be tempted to conclude that these churches were some kind of “Potemkin villages,” raised in places accessible to foreigners for their benefit, that is, as a means of deception? Or would he be more discerning, proposing that keeping the churches open is a tough concession of Russia’s rulers to her “religious dissidents,” that is, those Russians who still believe in God and in other Western values? I strongly doubt that Russia’s Third Rome substance, and the fact that the Russian Church had indeed welcomed upon itself the purifying persecution, a new baptism by fire, and that, in this case, the persecuted, and not the persecutors, were running the show, could ever enter our Westerner’s mind, even by a stroke of genius. It goes without saying that the shocking proposition that during the Soviet era of Russian history the Russian people were definitely the most devout Christians anywhere in the world was always one of the Grundthemen of my lectures, talks, and professional conversations, invariably taken by my audiences with incredulous disbelief.

Then there is another powerful argument when we consider the attitude of the great Western powers toward Russia prior to the 1917 Revolution. Anyone who has looked into the causes and the conduct of the Crimean War (1853-1856), and especially read the monumental work Russia and Europe written by Nikolai Yakovlevich Danilevsky in the 1860’s, will realize (as long as he keeps an open mind about this) that Tsarist Russia was as much unacceptable to the Western world as the USSR would later be. From this realization it will be easy to make the logical bridge into the post-Soviet world and to agree with my version of Imagine that there is no difference to the Western world whether it is a pre-Soviet, Soviet, or post-Soviet Russia, as long as there is a Russia who will always be more than just a great power, but the logical antipode to Western capitalist power (now represented by the United States of America). It is well worth remembering that Tocqueville’s prophesy was about Russia as such (it was Tsarist Russia in his day, not the red Commies, or the post-Yeltsin Putinistas), and it is still valid, as always intended by him, in our day and age, and in the ages to come.