Crisis in Serbia: The Russian Connection

Crisis in Serbia: The Russian Connection

Roger Cockrell



"Be careful with the Balkans" - (Evgenii Evtushenko)

At the beginning of the final part of his novel Anna Karenina, immediately following the harrowing description of the tormented last hours and suicide of his eponymous heroine, Lev Tolstoi turns to a contemporary topic of far-reaching social and political interest: the declaration of war, in the summer of 1876, by the Serbs, with the aim of liberating their territory from the Turks who had occupied it for nearly five centuries, since the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The Russian reaction to this event is depicted through the eyes of a sceptical member of the intelligentsia, Sergei Ivanovich:

In the circles in which Sergei Ivanovich moved nobody at this time was talking about anything else except the Slav question and the war in Serbia. Everything that usually fills people's leisure time was for the benefit of the Slavs. Balls, concerts dinners, speeches, ladies' fashions, beer, restaurants - everything bore witness to the general fellow-feeling for the Slavs.



Sergei Ivanovich disagreed with much of what was being written and spoken about the war, considering that the 'Slav question' was simply one of those fashionable topics with which society was from time to time carried away, and which was exploited by many people to serve their own selfish and vainglorious interests. But he could not help also acknowledging the force of the emotional response among the Russian people as a whole:

... he saw and recognised the undoubted, ever increasing enthusiasm which united all classes of society, and for which it was impossible not to feel sympathy. The slaughter of fellow Orthodox believers and one's Slav brothers evoked compassion for the sufferers and anger towards the oppressors. And the heroism of the Serbs and Montenegrins, who were fighting for a great cause inspired in the entire Russian people a desire to help their brothers not just with words, but with action.



Anna Karenina is of course a work of fiction, but Tolstoi's purpose in writing his 'novel of contemporary life' was to recreate the spirit of the times; the final part was published less than a year after the events which it describes taking place. All historical accounts confirm the authenticity of Tolstoi's portrayal of these events. [1] The world-weary and broken-hearted Vronskii, whom Sergei Ivanovich is shortly to meet, is a fictional representative of the thousands of Russian volunteers who travelled south by train to Serbia during the summer and autumn of 1876. Like Vronskii, the vast majority of them were army officers who had been forced to retire from the service in order to take part in the campaign, since the government was reluctant officially to endorse their participation. [2] Both Tolstoi's novel and histories of the war emphasise the contrast between the spontaneous and direct response of the Russian people on the one hand, and the ambiguous and vacillating position of the Tsarist regime - 'unable to stifle the pro-Slav movement and unable to lead it' - on the other. [3]

Holding even more sceptical and anarchic views than Sergei Ivanovich, Tolstoi's own attitude of mind towards movements such as Pan-Slavism can be traced back to the time when he was serving as a war correspondent in the Crimea during the 1850s. [4] It is his experiences in the trenches of Sevastopol which convinced him not only of the horror and futility of war (in marked contrast to the usual romanticised perceptions which were current in society), but also of the stupidity and immorality of governments which prosecuted it. He was later to characterise modern governments as 'Genghis Khans with telegraph wires', and to observe that all a government needs to do in order to transform a young man from a human being into 'an insensate machine' is to separate him from his family, put him into a uniform and start beating a drum (The Kingdom of God Is within You, 1893). As a consequence, Tolstoi regarded Pan-Slavism, which served directly or indirectly to support such barbarity, with the utmost suspicion and scorn. In this he was challenged by his great contemporary, Fedor Dostoevskii who, in his Diary of a Writer for March 1877, envisioned the role to be played by the Russian people in the war of liberation against the Turks in messianic terms, advocating as Russia's ultimate objective the capture of Constantinople; [5] together with Moscow, Constantinople would thus become the spiritual centre of a greater Slavic Orthodox empire stretching from Siberia and Archangel to the Black Sea, with the Russian Tsar at its head.[6] The taking of Constantinople would furthermore be of considerable geopolitical significance, since it would secure Russia's access to the Mediterranean, one of the primary and long-term aims of Russian foreign policy.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Dostoevskii's characteristically hyperbolic approach towards Pan-Slavism his views would have been closer to the hearts, if not the minds, of the Russian people than Tolstoi's. As a political force, however, Russian Pan-Slavism never attained sufficient coherence to enable it to realise its objectives. Originally of southern and western Slav provenance, Pan-Slavism first took root in Russia in the 1820s among the members of the Society of United Slavs, one of the revolutionary Decembrist organisations. [7] The movement reached its climax during the crisis with Turkey in the mid-1870s, but its doctrines entailed a number of tensions and paradoxes which, by their very nature, were difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. Firstly, however sincere and principled the intentions of at least some of the proponents of Pan-Slavism, the effect was to increase the friction between the different Slav nations, rather than to bring them together. Secondly, there were some influential Pan-Slavists who held views which can only be described as racist, extolling the special characteristics and 'virtues' of Slavs compared to other nations.[8] Thirdly, the instinctive reaction amongst the smaller Slav nations was to consider Pan-Slavism as, in effect, indistinguishable from greater Russian chauvinism. And finally there was the irony that Russia, of all nations, should be seeking to free other peoples; as Szamuely remarks:

It may seem strange .... that the disaffected subjects of the most oppressive tyranny in the world should devote so much attention to the liberation of other peoples. [9]



Although there was a brief resurgence in Russian Pan-Slavism during the period immediately preceding the First World War, the victory of the Bolsheviks in October 1917 confirmed it as a spent political force, to be replaced for the next seventy years or so by the artificial overlay of Marxist-Leninist ideology, based on the principle of communist internationalism (as opposed to 'bourgeois' chauvinism). It is true that, during the Second World War, a so-called 'Pan-Slavic' Committee was created to act as a link between the Soviet Union and those forces in Yugoslavia which were fighting the Germans but, as Milovan Djilas points out, this was little more than a sham:

... one did not have to be a Communist to see that [the Pan-Slavic Committee] was not only artificial but quite hopeless. Its activity was centred on public relations and propaganda, and even in this it was obviously limited. [10]



The essential hollowness of such a venture was to be confirmed by the events of 1948, when Marshal Tito, whose relationship with Stalin during the war had been at best strained, took the decision to break away from Soviet domination, resulting in the excommunication of Yugoslavia from the Russian-dominated Cominform. [11]

It may be the case that, for the reasons advanced above, all attempts to revive Pan-Slavism as an official political movement will be doomed to failure. Nevertheless, as the reaction in Russia to the current events in Kosovo has shown, the form of 'panslavism', which manifests itself as an expression of fellow-feeling for their 'Serb brothers', remains as strong as ever among the Russian people. This is a feeling, moreover, which is based on something more than a vague and generalised sense of affinity for a related people: the shared Orthodox faith and use of the Old Church Slavonic language (itself based on a South Slav dialect) in the liturgy, together with a common Cyrillic alphabet, are powerfully binding factors. For Russians, just as for the Serbs, the magnificent Orthodox monasteries, churches and convents which dot the landscape of Kosovo are symbols of a culture that has endured for centuries, but which has never been under as great a threat as now. The fact that direct Russian involvement in Kosovo has hitherto been very small - the number of Russians, for example, who have volunteered for service in Serbia during the present Kosovo crisis must probably be measured in scores, or at the most hundreds, rather than thousands as in 1876 [12] - should not blind us to these realities. In any case, there is only a small possibility that the Russians might intervene directly by sending large numbers of troops, either officially, or in the form of volunteers, to Kosovo. Even if this were to happen, such action might not be as effective as it might first appear. The Serbs viewed the presence of large numbers of Russians on their territory in 1876 with at best mixed feelings; at times their reaction was clearly hostile. Russians were accused of behaving as 'uncivilised elements' and 'drunkards', who 'sought to seize as much power as possible and meanwhile, when failures occurred, threw the entire blame on Serbian commanders or army'[13]. One of the Russian volunteers, Major Khvostov, observed that 'before the war the Serbs did not know us and loved us; now, having become acquainted, they hate us'.[14]

The real danger for the West lies not in direct Russian intervention in Kosovo, but in the fact that, by its action, Nato has increased the chances of significant gains for anti-Western parties in Russia, both in the elections for the Duma in December 1999, as well as in the presidential elections scheduled for June 2000. Political figures such as Gennadii Ziuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the highly unstable right-wing leader of the inappropriately named Liberal-Democratic Party (the LDPR), are at present riding on a wave of highly-charged emotion, supported by many people who only a few months ago would have considered themselves political moderates. As the poet Evgenii Evtushenko, no friend of the Russian right, has commented: 'for all these remarkable people, a better gift than the bombs couldn't be imagined'. [15] Co-operative ventures, such as joint exercises with Nato, which only a few months ago were firmly on the agenda, are now out of the question. During this critical period, with Russia reeling from a series of economic and political crises, it is essential that the West do everything in its power to ensure that Russia's needs and wishes are being taken into account, and to rebuild the bridges that have been broken. Above all, it is not Russia itself that should be isolated, but those political parties and all those individuals within it who are preaching and fomenting chauvinistic and, in some cases, openly fascist views. UK and US foreign policy towards Russia must be informed, if it is to be really effective, by an awareness of all the factors - historical, geographical, social and political - which set Russia apart from mainstream Europe, as well as those which one day may play a part in realising de Gaulle's vision of a Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals (if not even further, to the Pacific coast). Whether or not the West's analysis of the Soviet position and its intentions during the Cold War was correct is unclear. What is much less open to debate is that, ever since the Gorbachev era, the West has consistently overestimated the strength of its appeal to the ordinary Russian citizen. Both Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan apparently proceeded from the premise that the West needed only to introduce into Russia the concepts of Western political democracy and a market economy, and everything would, sooner rather than later, fall into place: Russia, with its McDonalds and Pizza Huts, its stock markets and privatised banks, would become a sort of Belgium, only a little larger. Such naivety betrayed an alarming ignorance of the Russian mentality and the particular historical circumstances, which have helped to shape it. In the present Serbian crisis there seems to be no sign that Western leaders have adopted a more discerning or sophisticated approach.

Whether or not politicians actually learn any lessons from history, the parallels between 1876 and 1999, despite a number of obvious differences, are striking. Were they to be alive today, both Tolstoi and Dostoevskii would have found themselves in familiar territory. Around them they would observe as part of the contemporary Russian scene the same peculiarly Russian mixture of patriotic pride and self-flagellation; the same nation-wide emotions mysteriously emanating seemingly from a single source; the same chaotic and impotent government only nominally in control, with President Yeltsin, like his predecessor Alexander II, lurching from one apparently irrational decision to the next; the same perceived threat from a foreign power, except that the opponent of the 1870s, Turkey, has now been relegated to the smallest of roles in an alliance dominated by the USA. At the time of writing, after eight weeks of airstrikes, the outcome of the Nato action seems as far away and uncertain as ever. Nato's only strategy at present is to continue the bombing campaign, and disasters such as the destruction of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade serve merely to convince its leaders that such a campaign should not only continue, but be intensified. The Russian prime minister, Evgenii Primakov, one of the few politicians for several years to command general respect in the country, has been sacked by an increasingly unpredictable president, thereby casting Russia's role as mediator into question. When, finally, there is an agreed settlement Nato will no doubt claim that its policy has been fully vindicated, and that Milosevic would not have backed down had it not been so resolute. The question will, however, remain: at what price has this all been achieved? One certain answer is that the damage arising as a result of the Nato airstrikes will be measured in more than just material terms, and its restitution will require more than the mending of a few diplomatic fences. Perhaps it would be wrong to be too pessimistic: Mark Mazower's assessment that 'conflict in the Balkans .... although still imaginable, can scarcely threaten continental peace' may be justified,[16] and this particular Balkan crisis may not prove to be the powder keg of 1914. Nevertheless, at the very end of a century marked by conflict and suffering on a grotesque scale, we are witnessing the fact that history 'has returned, like Raskolnikov, to the scene of its crime'.[17]