Kryachkov 2!indd

222
Д. А. Крячков
UNIT VIII
national relations, eventually designated as the concert of Europe and held to be founded 
on a balance of power. Then, suddenly the Second World War, consummating a development 
begun during its predecessor of 1914–1918, precipitated what has been called the “politi-
cal collapse of Europe. The European masters of the international arena not only forfeited 
their continent’s hegemony in world affairs, but even lost full control over their own national 
destinies. Global power shifted to the peripheries of the former system — the United States 
and the Soviet Union while Europe itself was partitioned by the newcomers into two zones 
of allied or dependent states, which in the East were transformed into outright satellites. The 
polarization of international politics inaugurated in 1945 was institutionalized for half a cen-
tury in the Cold War. 
This polarization was reinforced by the institutional and cultural gulf that the experiment had 
opened between East and West. For the two superpowers, together with their respective associ-
ates in the “free world” and the “bloc,” represented radically contrasting systems — the one demo-
cratic and open, the other autocratic and totalitarian. Although world Communism as a unitary 
movement came to an end in the early 1960s, Communism as a world force was still very much 
alive as the antithesis of Western civilization. 
Some commentators pursued the roots of the Soviet Union’s otherness back to distinctively 
Russian institutions and national traits of character. Accordingly, the herdlike collectivism of the 
Communist kolkhoz was attributed to the servile tradition of the old Russian peasant commune; 
or the Soviet police state was held to descend from the Third Section of spies and gendarmes 
maintained by Nicholas I; or Stalinism was traced to the autocracy of Peter the Great and Ivan the 
Terrible, indeed to the khans of the Golden Horde. And some writers, in their quest for the key to 
the Soviet Kremlin, eventually wound up in the Sacred Palace of Byzantium. For was this not the 
source of the Eastern autocratic tradition descending from Constantine the Great to Stalin? Surely, 
the argument went, the Byzantine ideal of Caesaro-papism was the prototype of that fusion of 
absolute state power, ideological orthodoxy, and messianic zeal which, in secular guise, was the 
essence of Soviet totalitarianism. 
The application of such reasoning to Russia’s international behavior yielded an equally static 
explanation. Supposedly, absolute power in internal affairs fuels a drive for absolute power in 
relations with other nations. Thus conquest has always been Russia’s goal, beginning in the 
fifteenth century, when the monk Philotheus of Pskov, speaking for the first Russian prince to 
call himself tsar, or Caesar, boasted that Moscow was the Third Rome predestined to be the final 
seat of world empire — an ambition continued into the twentieth century by the conspiracy 
of the Third International intended to give Moscow universal dominion through world revolu-
tion. In short, the inevitable concomitant of autocracy, whether white or red, is aggression and 
imperialism. 
Even Communism’s great crash in the years 1989–1991 did nothing to efface this sense of oth-
erness. True, for some, that event was enough to proclaim the “end of history,” as socialist Russia 
rallied to market democracy. Yet for others, Communism’s fall meant not so much Russia redeemed 
as eternal Russia’s return in native garb. This suspicion was aggravated when it became apparent 
that the Soviet mode of modernization had hardly ended Russia’s economic backwardness, and 
still less had it readied her for democracy. 

---