NB: This most perceptive essay on concepts of imperium was delivered at the Indian History Congress in 1991, and published by the Indian History Congress proceedings Vol. 52 (1991), pp. 831-887)
The Soviet Union has just expired, and it seems only natural to know why. It appears as a failure; and to most it illustrates a theory have long cherished. The favoured one is that Marxism is flawed. It is forgotten however that multi-national unions are not central to Marxist doctrine any more than they are to what is now ideologically known as the market. It was entirely possible to have a series of communist states alongside the capitalist ones; both species have existed and continue to do so. It is also forgotten that for a long time what were trumpeted by the Soviet Union as its triumphs were adduced as evidence of the invalidity of Marxist theory. In life as in death, in success as in failure, the Soviet Union seems required to reinforce the dogma that Marx, Engels, and the apostolic succession have been in grievous error. Clearly then, the infirmities of Marxism do not provide an answer to the burning question of the day.
The other theory, almost as ardently held, contemned the Union as a Russian empire that was dictatorial, nationalist, and colonial. Like the previous one, this argument belongs to the polemic of the cold war but is derived from the nationalist rivalries of the nineteenth century; for this was the precise charge against the Russian empire overthrown in the civil war of 1917-1921. But it amounts to no more than a facile assertion of historical continuity if not eternity.
The third is that entities like nations, nationalities, and nation-states with their nationalisms are sacred, multinational states are profane, and that morality and justice have at last triumphed. This is by far the most outmoded and patently wrong, if such expressions be permitted in the relativist world of today; but it does not for all that temper the fanaticism of the conviction. To rehearse the obvious points against it, every nation has been built on the pulverised skeletons of a host of other potential nations; most nation – states, on close examination, turn out to be a coalition of nations or nationalities in a multi-national state; and ever more supra-national entities are coming into being, significantly enough a supra-national state on the very breeding-ground of the nation-state, West-Europe.
The last theory, nursed furtively by many, I am sure, is that the Soviet Union has not disintegrated and that it must rise from the ashes. This might be a useful millennial dream to sustain old faithfuls, but it is not a solution to our problem. Even if the Commonwealth of Independent States were to consolidate itself as a single state, it will not be the Soviet Union; and if the Communist Party were to revive as a major political actor, it is unlikely to be in a Soviet Union. Whatever is created now will not be the same as what has been dismantled and we must still explain the Soviet experiment at union-making.
As is evident, every attempted answer is premised on a theory of history, especially of Russia; otherwise it is an historical account outright. It would therefore be only appropriate to study how the Soviet Union was constituted as a Union; how and why its territorial predecessor, the Russian empire rose and fell; and, as a useful historical perspective, how the earlier Muscovite empire was assembled, held, and transformed into the modernising Russian empire of the nineteenth century. It might tell us better what the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet multi-national polity might have been and therefore the legacy that we might expect. Most of all, it might compel us to modify the original from why the collapse to what has collapsed… Find the entire essay here.
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The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon
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After the truth-shower 