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The publishing house “New Literary Review” publishes a new book by the historian Vladislav Aksenov – about how patriotic feelings were manifested during the wars and conflicts waged by Russia, from 1812 until the October Revolution.
The book by Vladislav Aksenov (his name is familiar to us from the monograph Rumors, Images, Emotions) brings two experiences: consolation and irritation. Consolation – because everything has already happened. For every detail of today’s public space, no matter how stunning and shocking it may be, there is a historical counterpart. The subject of the book is the wars that Russia waged on the near frontiers 100 or 200 years ago, or rather, the public reaction that accompanied them, and there are a myriad of analogies here. The author applies a historical anesthetic to each sore point: look, the same thing happened in Vyazemsky’s letters, or in the Russkiy Vestnik article, or in reports from the front in Galicia … And irritation is because the historical lesson, no matter how you look, remains unlearned , we are moving in a circle, where all the same rakes are laid out, as much as possible!
Censor Alexander Nikitenko captures the mindset of the last years of Nikolaev’s rule: “Now patriotism is in fashion, rejecting everything European, not excluding science and art, and assuring that Russia is so blessed by God that it will live without science and art.” Writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, during the days of the Polish uprising, taunted the public, avoiding their own opinion about current events: “Love the fatherland and read the novels of Paul de Kock – this is a short and uncomplicated code of worldly wisdom that guides a modern well-meaning person.” The head of the Institute for Noble Maidens, Maria Kazem-Bek, on the wave of patriotic upsurge at the beginning of the First World War, talks in her diary about the special mission of the Russian people: “We will prove that only by dying can one live like God; that the Western “knowing how to live” is a deadening principle, while our “knowing how to die” is life-giving!” The range of reactions to each new military conflict, from prematurely glorifying future victories to wishing defeat for one’s own government, is like flipping through the latest Telegram feeds; the analogies are so deliberate that one wants to already feel the difference: if everything repeats itself, what changes?
Ideas change. Behind the manifestations of fear, delight or apathy that accompanies another war, there are narratives that prepare and explain this war, and here they are different. The idea of the “Polish question” as central to Russian statehood (in the middle of the 19th century). Fear of a threat from the East (early XX). Pan-Slavism – that is, the idea of the historical unity of the Slavic peoples, who must again unite under the rule of Russia (more or less the entire period from the beginning of the reign of Nicholas I to the October Revolution). “Seven inland seas and seven great rivers… / From the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China, / From the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube… / Here is the Russian kingdom… and will never pass away…” – Tyutchev’s poem of 1848 today is unlikely to inspire even the hottest heads, and at the time of writing such a statement of the question was quite legitimate and influenced a lot.
Ideas are historical, ideas about geopolitics are changeable, military expansion is justified either by the restoration of historical justice or by economic calculation. Everything is always different, and only the manifestations of patriotic feelings are similar, no matter whether we are fighting today with France and Turkey or against them: all this makes us look for the roots of patriotism in some deep layers that are not subject to historical changes.
For example, in psychology: the author persistently leads us to the idea that patriotism is a complex of feelings, due to the psychological make-up of a person. People are different, hence the plural (“patriotism”) in the title. Give only one reason to create for yourself the image of the enemy and direct all aggression against him; it is an excellent remedy for insecurity and mental disorder. Others will agonize over the people who suffer and die; this is due to the increased level of empathy. Rallying around the flag, dehumanizing the enemy, gloomy “all-faking”, going to charity and “humanitarian”, as well as the ability not to succumb to the whirlwinds of emotions and soberly analyze what is happening – these reactions can be used to make something like a psychological test; each of them is due to some psychological inclination. Someone is looking for protection, someone is trying to make amends for uncertainty, or splashes out the accumulated aggression, or sympathizes with those who feel bad. In moments of patriotic upsurge, everyone manifests what is already inherent in him: from this angle, all reactions become, if not justified, then explainable.
Two things follow from this. If manifestations of patriotism are tied to human psychology, they cannot be “wrong” – as long as ordinary cynicism or cannibalism is not hidden behind patriotic slogans. And the second. Patriotic feelings are powerful and terribly contagious, they make people subject to them easy to manipulate and make them lose touch with reality. No matter how noble they may be at times, the author’s sympathies are certainly on the side of those who are able not to lose their heads and maintain reasonable sobriety.
On the other hand, from the analogies scattered throughout the book, it follows that few people managed to save it: emotions are overwhelming, and this is one of the historical constants. Their spectrum is more or less universal, in similar circumstances it manifests itself in the same way, it is not even particularly tied to a specific “cultural code” – as follows from the relevant chapters, in Germany at the beginning of the First World War, approximately the same thing happens. But analogies are a dangerous thing: the feeling that we are experiencing a new 1904 or 1914 creates its own horizon of expectations, which does not necessarily fit into reality. Once again: what has changed, even if it concerns not the sphere of politics, but only the sphere of feelings?
Perhaps the first thing is this. The wave of patriotic emotions that swept over our great-grandfathers was transmitted through newspapers, demonstrations and word of mouth; meanwhile, television talk shows and social networks can launch this wave with much greater effect. To overclock it and maintain it at the right level, no super efforts are needed, except for point injections – in general, the public copes with this on its own, and for sure in the near future it will be supported by a specially trained neural network. All the network phenomena that have been repeatedly described – both closure in hermetic information bubbles, and constant fights over the smallest cause, and campaigns of spontaneous-collective condemnation of those who mourn or rejoice incorrectly – seem to be specially designed to keep the temperature of emotions at a point close to boiling. . Moreover, each network subject can wander for years in an emotional fog, endlessly experiencing inevitable victory, or inevitable defeat, or inescapable ambiguity – and at the same time sincerely believing that only people with a similar way of thinking are in contact with reality, the rest are in a “mania” and the world of pink ponies. And the image of the enemy, which must be defeated or at least neutralized, is not created somewhere in the depths of the collective unconscious – it is always right in front of our eyes, on the screen, in the feed, in the comments. Any war ends sooner or later, whether a truce in the minds is possible in such an information environment is an open question.
And yet Aksenov’s book puts a lot in its place. Collective guilt is not a punishment like reparations or sanctions, but something like a common work on the mistakes, “the result of learning the historical lesson.” The position of “right or wrong, this is my country” already contains an implicit recognition of wrong – and at the same time an attempt to repress the conflict that it generates. An appeal to historical grievances and offended national dignity is dangerous in itself, if only because it can justify any political decision. Another danger is in the build-up of mutual distrust, which leads to the effect of a “self-fulfilling prophecy”: the expectation that the enemy will do some harmful thing creates a situation in which he will actually do it. History does not teach anything – but the historian is still able to place flags and warning signs: be careful, here lies a familiar rake, and these sharp turns, on the contrary, should not be afraid. Perhaps, when entering the next historical circle, this marking will still be needed.
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