HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

But while Russia was building and destroying empires, building even more powerful empires and destroying them again, the world around it was radically changing. As a way of governing people, empires were disappearing. In their place came the concept of the nation state: that is, countries where a single culture dominates (the language, the literature, and daily customs), and people wish to live according to one set of laws and on one territory (I’ll say more later about the ideas of multi-culturalism that have arisen – not entirely successfully – in recent years).

Suddenly Russia was left as the only empire on the planet; a kind of Middle Ages “Last of the Mohicans”.

Today, Russia is surrounded by peoples whose lives are arranged according to completely different principles than empire; and not only do they not perish, they flourish. Although these nation states have plenty of their own problems, the gap between them and “the last empire” is growing apace, in terms of economic and technological progress, in their levels of education and healthcare, and simply in their peoples’ longevity and quality of life. With each day that passes the chasm grows wider, and the day’s not far off when the gap will become disastrous, unbridgeable for one or even two generations.

In the near future, those who have been born and live on what has become “the edge of Russian civilisation”, and who are responsible for the country’s future, are facing an epoch-changing choice between living in an empire or in a nation state. They will have to answer the following question: do they wish to maintain traditions, and therefore try at any cost to re-build their crumbling empire; or are they prepared to ditch their traditions, kick the empire onto the rubbish heap of history, and attempt to build their own nation state in its place?

This truly is Hamlet’s question. The choice is between the old world, that may be imperfect and sentenced to death, but one where they’re familiar with every last detail; and a seductive, unknown world, that promises much – yet at the same time is frightening. The problem for the current generations in Russia is not that they don’t like the actual choice (which is only natural; no one likes having to choose between death or change), but that they don’t have the opportunity to put it off and pass the responsibility for the fate of our Russian civilisation onto the shoulders of their children and grandchildren.

Russia is at the crossroads of civilisation. The choice between an empire and a nation state is a fundamental choice of civilisation. It opens the way for answers to dozens of other questions. These may be less global in scope, but they’re also complicated issues that are facing Russian society in the early years of the twenty-first century. If this choice is not made now – or if the wrong choice is made – then there will be no choice for their children and grandchildren to make.

My choice for Russia is that of the nation state; a choice for the future, not the past.

The Russia of my dreams is an association of people of different ethnic backgrounds who are brought together by an internal civilizational unity, for whom what they have in common is more important than their differences; and not an empire, kept together by a steel ring of militarised bureaucracy, like an old cracked barrel. I don’t deny that the Russia of our children could still exist in the creaking shell of an empire. But if we want our grandchildren  to see Russia, then we need to create something else: a state based on a genuine (and not an imaginary) desire for people to live together inside a space where there are shared values of language, culture, law and politics.

I reject nostalgia for the empire, be it open or dressed up in a pseudo-democratic and pseudo-liberal way. The creation of a Russian nation state is the greatest historical task that Russians and the other peoples who live in the country have been insistently but inconsistently debating for centuries, and one that has to be solved once and for all by the generations that are alive today. We are now in such an historical framework that this decision can no longer be put off: it’s now or never. Either we do it, or no one will.

Russia needs something more than an empire, where the people are kept down by forces that are outside the needs of society – the army, the police and the bureaucracy, that help to give the appearance of order on its territory.

The stronger an empire is, the more all-encompassing it is, and the more uniform its political space. But the weaker it is, the more exceptions there are to the overall rules: so there’s one rule for Moscow, something else for Chechnya, a third for Crimea, and so forth. The unity of the empire is an illusion, and it’s only symbolically embodied in the figure of its leading figure, inevitably producing the impression of being someone sacred: “there is Putin, therefore there is Russia”, and so on.