Geoffrey Hosking, Professor of Russian history at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, is considered one of the best foreign historians of Russia. His classic work, ‘Russia: People and Empire’ (1997), puts forward the thesis that the attempt to hang onto a large multi-ethnic empire always stood in the way of Russia’s development as a Western-style nation state and constitutional democracy. I interviewed him to see if he thought that was still the case.

- Do you think Russia’s imperial aspirations are still standing in the way of its emergence as a constitutional democracy?

- I do think that, on the whole, Russia hasn’t fully succeeded in establishing itself as a nation state. It still thinks of itself as a great power. It has an imperial hangover, rather like the UK did after World War II, with the difference that the UK’s lost empire wasn’t right on its doorstep.

The Russian elite still tends to interpret all international relations as a giant zero sum game played between great powers, so one power’s gain is necessarily another great power’s loss. They don’t readily subscribe to the view that nations of the world can sometimes work productively together, in a win-win situation.

- How does the ‘imperial hangover’ you spoke of manifest itself today?

- If one looks at the recent gas crisis with the Ukraine, it seems to me that Russia had a perfectly reasonable case, that it should charge Ukraine at world prices. But it made that demand at short notice, and tried to introduce a four-fold increase overnight, rather than via a gradual raise, like a good commercial partner would do. It was acting like a great power rather than one nation among other nations.

And that harmed its case in the eyes of international opinion. It’s often the way – it tends to back up quite reasonable demands in an overbearing way, so it’s seen as unreasonable.

- The deputy prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, said in an interview last year that Russia could disintegrate if the elite didn’t rally behind the Kremlin and its ‘managed democracy’. Others have likewise said that an Orange-style revolution in Russia would end in a Balkan-style bloodbath. Do you think that’s true – that Russia can only stay together if it’s not a Western-style democracy?

- No I don’t. I think Russia would be stronger if it was more of a constitutional democracy. But Medvedev’s comments were quite characteristic of the Russian ruling elite, most of which believes that if genuine opposition parties were allowed to flourish, it would cause Russia to break up.

We see this phobia of disintegration particularly in the Caucasus, where Russia could at one point have concluded an agreement and allowed Chechnya to be independent. But it chose to reassert its imperial status in a very brutal manner. I think if there was a genuine constitutional democracy in Russia, it could lose some small non-Russian states in the Caucasus. And those states could become genuine security threats. But I don’t see the threat of any wider disintegration – Russian culture and national identity is too strong.

- Many of the Russians I know in Moscow tend to think of Russia as really belonging to, and being represented by, ethnic Russians, with other ethnicities as something like guests on their territory.

- Ordinary Russians do now think of themselves as ethnic Russians. They tend to regard other ethnic groups – Tatars, Buryat, Chuvash and so on – as somehow strangers. They never used to do so in the Soviet Union, when they regarded them as honorary Russians.

- I suppose in some sense the USSR was a solution to the problem of how to create a supra-ethnic identity and ideology for a multi-ethnic empire.

- Absolutely. The Soviet dissident Andrey Amalrik once said that Marxism provided another seventy years of life for the Russian Empire.

- When we look at the break-up of other multi-ethnic empires in the past, like the Ottoman Empire or Yugoslavia, they have gone through a period of violent ethnic nationalism – of purges – before becoming nation-states. Is there still a danger of that happening in Russia, or has it already gone through that phase in the 1990s?

- It could still happen, and it could be quite dangerous. Emerging nation-states are always quite dangerous, and Russia as an emerging nation-state could be really dangerous. One sees how extreme right-wing groups flourished in the 1990s, how Dmitri Rogozin set up the Congress of Russian Peoples to defend the rights of Russians living outside of Russia. Now, Russians in Latvia are genuinely treated badly. But again, because Russia sometimes reacts to this in an overbearing way, its neighbours think it’s using this as an excuse for imperial aggrandisement.

- Rather like Milosevic used the oppression of ethnic Serbs in Kosovo as an excuse for the creation of a Greater Serbia.

- Rogozin’s language is very much the language of Milosevic. On the whole, Putin has taken a more responsible stance. And we notice that ethnic Russians in Latvia aren’t coming home – they’d rather be oppressed there, because it’s more prosperous.

- In terms of Russia’s awkward emergence into a constitutional democracy, could you give us a historical perspective on Putin’s clamp-down on civil society, via the new NGO law? Has the Russian state always been suspicious of civil society?

- There’s been very little in the way of civil society at any time, under the Tsars or the Soviet Union. It flourished in quite a chaotic manner in the 1990s, which the government is trying to control now.

Historically speaking, Russia always had a very strong state, very strong local communities, and very little in between. I’ve been studying the idea of ‘joint responsibility’, an ancient institution that existed in Russia, whereby a whole community was held liable for the actions of its individual members. So if one person didn’t pay his taxes, his neighbour would have to. On the other hand, if your house burnt down, your neighbours would rally round and re-build it for you.

Looking at the strength of this idea in Russia, it seems to me that Russia has a very weak sense of individual liberty. It likes to deal with people as members a community, and communities themselves support that, because it’s reassuring.

- Russian politics reminds me quite often of Rousseau’s philosophy– the idea that the state should be an almost mystically united whole, everyone working together for the glory of the state, and if you’re not doing that, if you’re following your private, non-state interests, then you’re immediately something to be suspected and investigated, because you could be working against the state, even for other countries.

- Rousseau’s idea of the General Will is the idea behind most modern authoritarian states – the idea that the whole people have one will, embodied in one leader.

- With dissenting middle-class liberals a sort of unnatural excrescence on the body politic.

- The opposing view, the one associated with Montesquieu, is that one should celebrate diversity, so individuals can naturally find their own political parties, clubs or associations to suit their own interests, and that this process is healthy for the state, because it acts as a check on despotism. But that idea never did well in Russia. If clubs or associations were set up, the state tried to control them – as the Soviet government did with writers’ clubs, for example.

- UES CEO Anatoly Chubais has talked of trying to channel Russia’s imperial hankerings in a liberal direction, by setting up a sort of ‘liberal empire’ of Russian big business, dominating its surroundings.

- Well, he’s talking about a corporate economy, made up of very large companies in which the state often has a considerable holding, which is not what is generally understood as liberal economics. A truly liberal economy would see the greater growth of small and medium sized businesses, but banks don’t seem to be lending to this sector at the moment. If we saw the growth of an SME sector, it would make a real difference to Russia. At the moment, Russian companies are either very big or very small.

- Sodo you think Russia will eventually develop into a constitutional democracy?

- No, not for the foreseeable future. It’s likely to remain a corporate and authoritarian state, and will probably develop more in that direction. That’s what ordinary Russians seem to want, because they were so dismayed by the anarchy of the 1990s. They want a state that provides better for ordinary people, that pays pensions, raises teachers’ salaries and so on. That’s why Putin is so popular.

Geoffrey Hosking’s new book, Rulers and Victims, on the position of ethnic Russians in the Soviet Union, is out in April, published by Harvard University Press.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow

January 13, 2006