Tolstoy: A Russian Life

7 posts

Drieu

One of the driving forces behind fascism was to create a new aristocracy. This wasn't limited to the Italian version, but is also manifested in the others, including the German variant. Of course, any society worth its salt is aristocratic. I find serfdom preferable to what we have now, and regardless, I'm convinced that at some point in the future, universal education (rivaled only by feminism for the title of "the worst liberal idea") will have to be dismantled and a new underclass formed.

It's also plainly not true that the Tsar was contemptuous of the lower orders. His main failing, and that of many other monarchs of the time, was that he dithered too much. As Tocqueville pointed out, revolutions often occur after some reforms have already been undertaken and the masses grow impatient for more. If Pyotr Stolypin hadn't been assassinated, the Tsar might've had a chance, but once he was gone, there just weren't many people left who knew how to handle the needed reforms with the proper delicacy.

There were numerous conservatives throughout the nineteenth century who attempted to co-opt the lower classes, often proposing improved conditions through a form of paternalist corporatism: Franz von Baader, Frédéric le Play, Albert de Mun, and René de La Tour du Pin, to name several. Bismarck and others introduced many welfare programs to lure people away from left-wing doctrines. The fascists were not the first to do this.

And finally, Europe would've been much better off with an aristocrat like von Stauffenberg at the helm in Germany rather than a vulgar piece of trash like Hitler.

Stars Down To Earth
Alright, I'll read it when I have the time. Not that familiar with Spengler, other than his "clash of civilisations" stuff - where he described Russia as a younger civilisation that would outlast the Western world.

It's impossible to say what would've happened to Russian society if not for Peter the Great and his half-arsed Westernisation project. The country was very stagnant and backwards before his reign, a white Third World country, so it's obvious that something needed to be done. Otherwise, the Russians would've remained in a Dark Age, and eventually been outstripped and conquered by their Western neighbours. And even then, his fancy new Enlightenment ideas only reached the top of the Russian social pyramid, while the serfs remained as medieval as ever (leading to the posh and plebs becoming two different "civilisations"). It's quite bizarre, that the Russian elite never once tried co-opting the lower classes into the society, until it was far too late.
Stars Down To Earth

I suppose the original problem was that the Tsars tried to make Mother Russia into something she wasn't - but what would happen with the country if it was left as a backwards Eurasian shithole (which it was in many ways, after the Tatar Yoke) and this forced Westernisation had never taken place?

President Camacho
It would have remainied a feudal, agricultural society, and there would have been no urban revolution in 1917 as there would have been no urban "society" to speak of, and no intelligenstia absorbed in Enlightenment philosophy to agitate on behalf of abstract ideas like "economic equality".

It bears remembering that the Jews-- the only people in the Russian Empire who lived wholly as urbanites in fact and in feeling-- were the ones attracted to Bolshevism most steadfastly, and it was through the Jews, as a sort of inorganic, intellectual aristocracy of the "labor movement", that the Russian peasant was mobilized against the false Petrine state. But the hatred and disconnect between ruler and ruled had been building amongst the peasantry for centuries as a result of Peter's reforms.

Had Peter the Great not intervened, Russia at the turn of the 20th century would have looked like a mature feudal state-- much like the Gothic world in the 13th-14th centuries-- with the power of the landowning boyars preeminent and the tsar dependent on them for support. What Peter did was attempt to centralize the army, civil service, aristocracy, economy, etc, in one fell swoop-- and thus condense the center of gravity of Russian politics from the broad sweeping plains of Mother Russia to the urban locale of St. Petersberg. The Russian "aristocracy" was uprooted from its connection with the peasantry; their role as feudal lords was twisted into that of an urban civil service patriciate in imitation of contemporary French trends.

Had its organic development not been interrupted-- first by the Mongol onslaught, and then by Peter the Great-- Russia eventually would have passed through its own reformation movement, its own version of absolutism, its own form of personalized "democratic" politics, and finally broken through to its own end-form of civilization, but this process takes almost an entire millenium to complete.
Stars Down To Earth
And that's the key phrase here, IMO. The Russians simply wouldn't have been left alone to complete their "civilisational cycle", as they would be in constant competition with outsiders. If the country had cut off all Western influence and remained an organic feudal society, it would be vulnerable to its more advanced neighbours. They'd be living anachronisms, like the Japanese before the Meiji era (who rapidly industrialised their country for this exact reason). I can't imagine the Russians putting up any effective resistance against their enemy in WW2, if they hadn't undergone a forced industrialisation. Ideally, the Russian Empire would've been left to develop on its own organic path, but realistically, this wasn't possible.

From the perspective of Petrine aristocracy, you don't have much of a choice - either you refuse to adapt and get smashed by your more advanced enemy, or you use the enemy's tactics even if they're ultimately alien to your own culture.

(One could also argue that the idea of "Westernising" the Russians wasn't bad in itself, only the way it was applied. The Mongol-Tatar rule already had an "Orientalising" effect on the original Russian society, so a counter-reaction wouldn't be an entirely bad thing.)
Ash
And given Spengler's view that the Bolshevik revolution was ultimately just a way for the Culture to escape its Petrine pseudomorphosis, the question now is: is it back on track? It is certainly beginning to look that way.
Stars Down To Earth
If the Russians even are a majority in their country within a hundred years, that is.

The combination of very low Russian birth rates and the country being flooded by Caucasus and Asian immigration doesn't really bode well for the future. Although the Russians are less culturally damaged than Westerners, they're demographically in the same downward spiral.