One of the privileges of my life is to have rubbed shoulders with one of the most intellectually curious Quebecers there is, Jean Paré. This bulimia earned this journalist to launch the magazine News and make it a transgenerational success. Under his leadership, the penetration rate of News in Quebec homes was higher than that of Time and of Newsweekhandsets, in the US market.
On the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine a year ago, Jean turned to his vast library and immersed himself in what French authors wrote about the complexity of the Russian soul. As he does regularly, because he can’t help writing, he has collected and commented on the most vivid features in the logbook he keeps and which he sometimes publishes in the form of books ( as Erasmus’ notebook at Lemeac). He shared this excerpt with me.
He quotes Russia in 1839, published in 1843 by Astolphe de Custine, who explained Russia as Tocqueville did for America. “While other nations have endured oppression, the Russian nation has loved it; she still loves him; and one can say of the Russians that they are drunk with slavery. Then: “Political obedience has become for them a cult, a religion.” It is only among this people that we have seen the martyrs in adoration before the executioners. And this: “Here, to lie is to protect society, to tell the truth is to upset the state.” »
This obviously ignores the waves of Russian emigrants fleeing sometimes the tsar, sometimes the Soviets, recently Putin. These successive exoduses undoubtedly contribute to weakening the democratic forces which, it must be noted, have never been able to hold their own against triumphant authoritarianism. But Custine gives no quarter by speaking of “this people intoxicated with the desire for glory [qui] has a disorderly, immense ambition; one of those ambitions which can only germinate in the soul of the oppressed. […] This greedy nation, by dint of privations, expiates in advance at home by a degrading submission the hope of exercising tyranny among others. […] the slave, on his knees, dreams of world domination”.
Then there is Balzac, back from Moscow and Kiev: “If later Russia invades the world, she will owe everything to her spirit of obedience. […] No people in the world is better organized for conquest. »
Similarly, André Malraux, a century later, in 1948, warned European intellectuals not to believe in a chimerical Europeanization of Russian political mores. “It is difficult to consider Russia without discomfort for a European country […] Perhaps the truth is that maps should not be taken too seriously, and that Russia is neither in Europe nor in Asia: it is in Russia. […] Russia has never had a Renaissance, or Athens, or Bacon, or Montaigne. »
Superior cultures
Tracing the thread of history, Jean Paré notes the striking similarities between the rantings of Vladimir Putin still heard Monday on the Ukraine which would have started the war, and on the West which would like to put an end to Russia. In November 1936, “Stalin accuses little Finland, with its four million inhabitants, of threatening the USSR (170 million) ‘at the request of the English bourgeoisie’ and of wanting to ‘retreat its frontier to the Urals” (1500 km away)! Either Putin knows this Stalinist episode well, or paranoia is a genetic trait there; Ukraine is Nazi, racist and threatens Russia, he says. The Tsar is thrown out of it”.
How not to recognize Putin, or Stalin, in Custine’s description of the Tsar of the time: “We cannot for a moment forget this unique man by whom Russia thinks, judges, lives… science and conscience of its people, which foresees, measures, orders, distributes all that is necessary and permitted… which it takes the place of reason, will, imagination, passion… because it is not allowed for any creature to breathe, to suffer, to to love, to move outside the frameworks traced by supreme wisdom. Then he asks a central question, of burning topicality: “I do not know whether it is the character of the Russian nation which has formed such autocrats, or whether the autocrats themselves have given this character to the nation.” . »
An anecdote that I borrow from New Yorker, and which, I am sure, will delight Jean, refers to this circular questioning. These days, some Italians wanted to cancel a conference that was to take place in Milan on Dostoevsky for the sole reason that the latter was Russian. A British newspaper, The Spectatorretorted that it would be a shame to want to cancel an author who himself had been imprisoned in Siberia by the tsar for having read banned books, as anti-tsarists.
But here is what lights up the Russian soul. Dostoyevsky’s cellmate in Siberia was a Polish nationalist. In his memoirs, he says that the great Russian author was determined to convince him that Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland were “forever the property of Russia” and that, without it, these countries would sink into “illiteracy the most obscure, barbarism and abject poverty”. In short, even imprisoned by his Russian tyrant, the author relayed his superiority complex and his certainty of possessing for eternity the countries of neighboring peoples. For their good.
A contemporary echo of this trait can be found in a 2017 Pew Research Center poll where, to the question “Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others”, Russians answered yes by 69%.
I leave the conclusion to Jean: “We thought the tsars, Lenin, Stalin were dead and buried. But Russia does not bury her tyrants, she embellishes them and reveres them. Despotism is a normal state there. This nation seems vaccinated against the virus of freedom and its variants of justice, law, democracy, well-being, and more generally happiness. »
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