Leaders unworthy of their people

Tsar Peter the Great awaits the condemned at the gallows in The Morning of the Streltsy Execution, by Vasily Surikov (1881)

From AN Wilson’s Tolstoy: A Biography, on the spiritual tensions inherent in “being Russian,” as quoted by Alan Jacobs at his newly renamed blog here:

“How can it be that the country chosen by God, or by the destiny which moves nations, or by the unseen inevitability of dialectical materialism, should have produced, in each succeeding generation, a political system which made life hell for the majority of inhabitants and which, every so often, threw up tyrants of truly horrifying stature?”

Is there any group of leaders anytime, anywhere, as unworthy of the sacrifices of their people as the leaders of Russia?

This realization was a long time coming for me. In the histories of most of the countries I routinely study—Germany, Finland, or, at a greater distance, Britain—the Russians appear as rivals, enemies, invaders, or some combination of all three. But there, in history after history of World War II or Finland’s heroic resistance to Stalin or even the accident at Chernobyl, below the world-historical dimensions of wars and global strategy and ideology, like neglected grains waiting to be gleaned by inference, lie the ordinary Russian people: used, starved, deprived, lied to, placed over and over again in harm’s way, and treated as raw material for daft projects of overnight modernization from Peter the Great with his beard clippers to Stalin with his labor camps and hand-dug canals and collectivized farms. Time and again, the feckless, corrupt, incompetent, and just as often criminal leadership of Russia creates a crisis and, time and again, are only saved through the efforts of anonymous soldiers and civilians.

Putin’s wicked war against Ukraine—and the Russian government’s bungling and mismanagement of everything from logistics and equipment maintenance to a conscription program so dreaded that young men are willing to maim themselves to avoid it—only throws this unworthiness into sharper relief. Here is a regime squandering and perverting the virtues of its people in pursuit of victory in an unjust war.

And yet, somehow, when the time comes and the cause is worthy, these people are willing and able to embrace suffering and sacrifice themselves and do so in appalling numbers.

All of this is an oversimplification, of course (as are the very terms Russia and Russian the way I’m using them), but what I’m describing should be instantly recognizable. And that dogged ability and deep reserve of willingness have to stem from something transcendent, something that renders the relationship of Russians to Russia not cognitive dissonance or Stockholm Syndrome but something so close to the soul as to be beyond human leaders, beyond words, something I might not even be able to grasp. As Wilson puts it later in this passage:

Today [i.e. 1988], we read precisely similar tensions in the utterances and writings of Soviet dissidents, and in particular Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose hatred of his country’s Government seems almost equally balanced by a fervent patriotism, a tragic knowledge that a Russian can only be himself when he is on his native soil.

That, for what it’s worth, describes any real patriotism worth fighting for. Food for thought.