Victor Erofeyev
28.10.2013, 00:00  Kommersant.Ru

Translated by Paweł Łapiński
Edited by Isis Wisdom
Source:http://www.facebook.com/l/OAQFfTYQEAQFM1JyM5RNC345Re4Jl0gKOPYfOEzGw6N5Kcg/www.kommersant.ru/doc/2314749

The microbe of imperialism

Writer Victor Erofeyev diagnoses Russian history

November 2nd, 1721 , Tsar Peter – on the petition of his senators of course – took the title of Father of the Fatherland and Emperor. Our author reflects about the complications of the disease called “imperialism” brought to Russian society:

There’s a man visiting me, a nice, bearded Russian, not a Soviet-fanatic, but rather a blogger of an artistic nature, who travels around the world, who has enlightened blue eyes, who looks good, and there, confidentially squinting above the wine and the pleasures of life, he speaks to me:
“– France – is just a province of Russia.”

STOP, my mind! I won’t argue with him. A province is a province. In front of me is just a normal Russian imperialist. He is neither the first, nor the last. He has such a mature imperialist bacillus. A fully-cultivated one! He is confident that we are the best, better than France, America and all other nations. He is confident that all of these countries should serve us and try to be useful, standing on their hind legs in front of us, while we laugh at them. Eventually we will conquer them all. We are genetically prepared for that.

Historically, we belong to the obvious, natural conquerors, human predators, who have imposed our order on things in all countries around us. We won Kazan. We have won the Astrakhan. We have won the Far East and Siberia. We have won the Crimea. We annexed Poland. Finland? Also ours! We have spread to all corners of the world. We could go on and on. Not only Alaska but Hawaii could exist under the Russian flag. Not only the Crimea, but Constantinople could be ours as well, if, instead of spreading the revolution of 1917 we would have remained allies of France and England. With Constantinople we failed, but then we quietly ate half of Europe after World War II, and if we could, we would devour Paris, Athens and Rome as well.

From where does our imperial spirit come? After all, even the traditional imperial states, like England, were willing to absorb the underdeveloped areas of Asia and Africa, bringing them education, and we fearlessly brought only ourselves, our ideology, first the Orthodox-monarchist, then the communist one, and when it was necessary to destroy the defeated enemy, not a muscle quivered. Just as we did with the Polish officers shot at Katyn. Even now, we’re not particularly sorry for them. And not just for them. We feel neither sorry, nor awkward, when it comes to explain why we shot them. We did it, because we have the right to shoot everybody, including ourselves. And if we shot ourselves, and maybe we’ll be shooting again one day, then why should we report on the shootings of people quite alien to us?

This innate, subcutaneous, completely unconscious imperialism our people have a special passion for, in a very intense way, in our attitudes towards Ukraine. We are all convinced that Ukraine – it is our Krajina [frontier, or march] and that its separation from us was a great misunderstanding, that needs to be corrected. Therefore, we do not hide our sense of superiority to our younger brother, the Ukrainian, or should I say khokhol. We call him to us as if he was a lost sheep, and when the sheep will come back, we will thrash it. The cheerful conviction that an independent Ukraine – is only a temporary misunderstanding – permeates almost our entire society, and no one thinks about whether for the khokhol it may not be to his liking. We do not think about other people’s souls. We don’t reflect on the soul of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Ukraine. We don’t reflect on the soul of the Baltic nations, because they too, by a strange coincidence, were orphaned without anyone to look after them. We’ll grab all of them back. Our imperial microbe will remain in us for many years. If not forever.

Where does it come from, this imperial microbe that traipses through the Russian soul? It would be strange just to assume that Peter I, together with the idea of empire, brought us also imperial ambitions. They were already there under Ivan the Terrible. They existed as an opportunity to impose redistribution and ideologies during the Mongol-Tatar slavery. We were agile in our dreams, when we were conquering foreign unbelievers, and we remain agile today in our imperial desires.

It’s possible that today, we’re no longer so scary. It is possible that today, our subcutaneous imperialism is working against us, so that whomever was part of the former Soviet Union runs like hell from us and into Europe. We are becoming not scary, but funny. Imperial ambitions are working against Russia. Imperial microbe will destroy Russia’s future. But still:

– France – is just a province of Russia.

…And do not even dare to ask why.