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Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum

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It is difficult to explain this book in the space of a few sentences, because the scope of its topic is breathtaking, and its depth considerable. This is not a book about Russia per se; rather, it is about the symbiosis of Russia and Europe over the last 300 years. For as Malia clearly demonstrates, Russia - in all her iterations - cannot be considered without taking into account the philosophical (and hence ideological and political) influences of Europe. Russia is Europe, and very much the product of evolving European movements spawned by the Enlightenment - such rationalism, romanticism, and socialism.

In this reader's analysis, a central theme in Russia Under Western Eyes is how efforts to rationalize human society culminated in the dark experiment launched in the Red October of 1917. Malia demonstrates how Lenin perverted Marx by making the proletariat subservient to the Party, and how sheer folly was maintained through a jettisoning of principles and reliance on `the Method' through the successive stewardship of Stalin, Khruschev, Breshnev, and ending with Gorbachev.

My only complaint: while Malia is right in asserting that the planned economy of the USSR was decaying on its own from the end of World War II, Ronald Reagan's appearance on the world stage, and the effect his policy of confrontation had on bringing the Cold War to its omega point, deserves a more considered treatment. This is mitigated, however, by Malia's excellent treatment of the dissidents and their contribution to exposing the Soviet lie.

This is a tome of erudition, written by a scholar who has an amazing grasp of the `big picture.' One will draw from it a good understanding of the philosophical development of Europe, the ideas that changed the face of the Continent, and their effect on Russia through the centuries.

Like the Marquis de Custine, Malia has peeked through the sometimes brocaded, sometimes iron curtains of Russia and recorded poignant observations for posterity. Unlike Custine, however, Malia has produced a balanced work that will be ranked as indispensable to an understanding of Russia and Europe.

Malia's book, following on similar work in Soviet Tragedy, aims at making history out of the so-called great thinkers that loved or hated Russia in tsarist and Soviet forms. As always, his main target is Karl Marx and the intellectuals who would impose similar ideas onto real life--the nasty results of which were made especially clear in the unqualified disaster of Oct 1917. 1917 plays the critical role of sabotaging one kind of European development in favor of a socialist path (which also can be seen as European). And unfortunately, the only non-Euro perception of Russia emerges from the dissidents who lay bare the bones of the Soviet skeleton. The book interestingly shows how Europeans over centuries wavered in their view of Russia, but the real target is socialism and the horrific spectacle that it finally manifested before 1991 (and which some have not yet recognized).

I'm not quite finished but find the book stimulating and useful. I suspect the title and subtitle are there to garner readers who would not read yet another book about liberalism and marxism. But the book is really about European ideas and not about Russia. Russia is seen through the ideas of Europe. That is not a criticism of the book, only a criticism of its marketing and packaging.

Why I bought this book:

I was reading The Bathhouse at Midnight, which is about magic in Russia. Malia's book was cited lots. I didn't have it, and was starting to feel that "I'm missing something" sensation. So I went on a bookstore crawl and found Russia Under Western Eyes.

This is a good book.

I enter this rather tentatively. I don't usually comment on what I call "real books" even though I read them, feeling that I don't have the qualifications. Ye Olde BA doesn't seem to mean much, anymore.

On the other hand, if you are an educated person who generally flees at high speed from "intellectual history", read this.

Malia is not a socialist. He may or may not deconstruct in other books, for all I know he is a firm believer in what Kelly Neff refers to as literary donatism (which is all I believe deconstruction is in the end). In this book he writes as if you were meant to read it, which makes a nice change.

He chooses to bounce Western intellectual history off dreams of Russia. Is there anything new in it? No. His point is simple and (if you bothered to pay any attention to pre-Revolutionary Russia) glaringly obvious. On the other hand, we are so enamoured of the disaffected intelligent from the 1860's on that we ignore what they were painfully aware of - their ideas were adapted from the West. It irritated them, but there it was. The West has consistently shown a tendency to bounce its ideals and its nightmares off Russia; as a point for guidance in a sea of material, it's not a bad one.

Malia doesn't like what communism did to Russia. Neither do I. Anyone who stands up and says communism was a bad thing tends to get a "good boy!" from me. Good little socialists, beware: he handles hard and soft versions of the ideal briskly. The reviewer who wants to make him an embittered right-winger needs to do a re-think, and maybe a re-read without the blinkers; Malia mentions that Europe asked if Russia was part of it, he never questions it. Malia points up a pattern - Russia tends to hit similar points of politics and economics about 50 years after the West. OK, but this doesn't mean Russia is out of the modern world, and Malia says so. That, in fact, was part of the problem.

Ask the average Russian if he'd like to live like an American without having to be one. He'd probably say "Bring it on!" We're still letting the disaffected intelligentsia form our opinions - oh, suburbia, too boring, such ennui, oh, the deadening of our souls by wealth! Our souls are our personal responsibility, and poverty in my view is miserable, not enlightening. Sharing the wealth is a fine thing, provided that we remember that the point is to have no more poor, not reduce everyone to an identical level of penury.

Malia gets it right, the book is interesting if not new, and it remembers that the question the socialists never ask is, in your new society of fulfillment, who handles the garbage?

Please consider adding the following review to the pubished reviews for this book. I include the review and the email permission to submit this review to Amazon.com

I submitted the review once before, in February or late January. Today, I received an email from the Amazon.com orders department that said the review as not in your database under my email address. I have included this email, as well.

THE REVIEW

GOD SAVE DEBASIA! By John Dolan ...

A review of Russia Under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum By Martin Malia Belknap-Harvard University Press 1999

Russia Under Western Eyes has been praised by the most high mandarins of the Beigeocracy. Only one anonymous reader pipes up on Amazon.com with a quibble about the Emperor's taste in clothes, stammering that the book is "not [actually] about Russia." But then, frightened at his own presumption, the reader quickly adds, "That is not a criticism of the book..." Ah, but it is! And it raises an interesting question: if Malia's book isn't about Russia, what is it about?

Most of the book is actually devoted to a standardized, if slightly right-wing, history of European thought. --"European thought"...that very phrase summons up, in its callow hubris, the syllabi of first-year History courses at any American university. Malia actually believes in "European thought"--not simply that such a thing exists and can be defined

unambiguously, but that it makes history. He is an Idealist--which is to say that, like many professors, he is convinced that the world turns on the opinions of professors. Specifically, he joins Peter Gay in what he calls "the party of humanity"--which actually means, "the party of grumpy old professors who are convinced the world started going to Hell in a handbasket when they stopped requiring ties in the Faculty Club."

Malia sees himself as a great healer, preparing Russia--like the deflowered daughter of a respectable family of burghers--for eventual readmission to that peaceful and dynamic family, Europe. As the fallen woman wrapped in the "lurid" red shroud of Lenin, Russia must trail behind the good daughters of Mother Europe: kind, benificent nations like England, which after all has only exterminated a few few tens of millions from Ireland to Shanghai. Malia's hope for Russia is that, after some years of penance (50 years or so by Malia's calculations), the Russian whore may at long last be allowed to "converge" with Central Europe; and after another 50 years-a full century of Purgatory--Russia might, by Malia's estimate, be fit to walk beside that most glorious corner of the globe, Western Europe. Just think: Moscow, hand in hand with Antwerp! (Or Glasgow, or Nancy...)

Neither Malia nor his reviewers seem worried about how Russians might view this grossly patronizing discussion of Russia's future. As Queen Victoria

would say, one doesn't ask the whore-in-question whether she wishes to be rescued; one simply does one's duty. It doesn't seem to've crossed Malia's mind that the average Russian, contemplating the prospect that Moscow might someday be just like suburban London, might prefer to tell Europe to stick its Protestant Soup up its skinny techno ass, clean off his AK, and walk westward firing from the hip.

The ethical wobbles of the thesis are exceeded only by its intellectual flaccidity. Most of us have had arguments like the one which occupies Malia: "Is Russia actually part of Europe?" But we've had them in the proper circumstances: at age eighteen. On speed. In the dorms. To the music of some roommate-rock college radio station, after taking a first-year survey course titled something like "Modern Europe: Robespierre to Raskolnikov," or "Moliere to Madonna" or "...Nationalism, Rationalism and that Other One"--the sort of huge survey course inevitably taught by one embittered rightwing professor (a role Malia himself played at UC Berkeley) and twelve sullen underpaid TA's.

When you try to take this kind of argument seriously under any other circumstances (outside the dorms, before 3 am, w/o drugs, past the age of 18), the question of Russia's inclusion in Europe tends to devolve into pointless arguments about the definition of "Europe." Either the term refers simply to that part of Eurasia west of the Urals--in which case we

can settle the whole question with a simple road map--or "Europe" is forced to carry an insupportable load of normative baggage: tedious crap about "the essence of the European character." And such questions are better left unasked, because they lead either to massive bloody world wars or, even worse, to Dutch hippies bragging about how bravely they resist Fascism by pinstriping German tourists' BMWs when nobody's looking.

On those rare occasions when Malia actually discusses in detail the history of shifts in the perception of Russia by Europe, he makes some very interesting points, notably that Russia has often been most feared when it was least aggressive and powerful (as in the latter half of the nineteenth century), and most trusted when it was at its most expansionist (especially under Peter I and Catherine the Great).

But there's far too little detail on the history of Western images of Russia, and far too much of the old Daniel Mornet, Lester Crocker potted, tendentious intellectual histories, all focusing on Europe, not Russia. When you reach the end of this odd book, you wonder: Honestly, Professor-Emeritus Malia, what the Hell does Russia have to do with your faculty-club spat ? Russia, in your book, has been dragged, as so many times before, into a Eurpoean war she could well have been spared.

THE PERMISSION Subj:: : (John Dolan)

Please do.

-----Original Message...; To: ; Date: Sunday, January 30, 2000 6:38 PM Subject: A review of Russia Under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman t

> >I check out Amazon.com and your excellent review is not provided under >"editorial reviews." > >If you say OK, I will submit the exile review, with the appropriate >attribution, as a reader review... >

----------------------- Headers -------------------------------- Mar 2000 19:25:21 -0800 (PST) Received: (fr

Russia Under Western Eyes is actually a right-wing history of "European thought.". Malia is an Idealist, which is to say that like many professors he is convinced that the world turns on the opinions of professors. Specifically, he joins Peter Gay in what he calls "the party of humanity"--which actually means, "the party of grumpy old professors who are convinced the world falling apart when they stopped requiring ties in the Faculty Club."

Malia sees himself as a great healer, preparing Russia, like the dishonored daughter of a respectable family, for eventual readmission to Europe. Malia's hope for Russia is that, after fifty years of penance, Russia may at long last be allowed to "converge" with Central Europe, and after another 50 years, be fit to walk beside that most glorious corner of the globe, Western Europe. Russians themselves don't seem to have been consulted on the matter; in proper Victorian manner, Malia diagrams Russia's salvation without asking the mere natives for their opinion.

Most of us have had arguments like the one that occupies Malia: "Is Russia actually part of Europe?" But we've had them in the traditional context: in the dorms, after taking a first-year survey course titled something like "Modern Europe: Robespierre to Raskolnikov," or "Moliere to Madonna" or "...Nationalism, Rationalism and that Other One"--a course invariably taught by one embittered rightwing professor and twelve sullen underpaid TA's.

When you try to take this kind of argument seriously under any other circumstances (outside the dorms, past the age of 18), the question of Russia's inclusion in Europe tends to devolve into pointless arguments about the definition of "Europe." Either the term refers simply to that part of Eurasia west of the Urals--in which case we can settle the whole question with a simple road map--or "Europe" is forced to carry an insupportable load of normative baggage about "the essence of the European character." And such questions are better left unasked, because they lead either to massive bloody world wars or, even worse, to Dutch hippies bragging about how bravely they resist Fascism by pinstriping German tourists' BMWs when nobody's looking.

On those rare occasions when Malia actually discusses in detail the history of shifts in the perception of Russia by Europe, he makes some very interesting points, notably that Russia has often been most feared when it was least aggressive and powerful (as in the latter half of the nineteenth century), and most trusted when it was at its most expansionist (especially under Peter I and Catherine the Great).

But there's far too little detail on the history of Western images of Russia, and far too much of the old Daniel Mornet, Lester Crocker potted, tendentious intellectual histories, all focusing on Europe, not Russia. When you reach the end of this odd book, you wonder: Honestly, Professor-Emeritus Malia, what does Russia have to do with this faculty-club spat ? Russia, in your book, has been dragged, as so many times before, into a European war she could well have been spared.