Quote:
Originally Posted by Sigaba
Prior to 1917, did Russia ever place itself in the vanguard of a global revolution?
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To play devil's advocate, because I am not fully in the school that the Communist era was just a phase in Russia's long geopolitical game, or even fully in the Mackinder/Mahan school that geography is destiny.
If defense of the motherland means expansion of the motherland, you probably need an appeal greater than just patriotism. You need an ideological justification for conquering and converting the heathens. Prior to 1917, Russia mainly found this in messianic Orthodoxy.
Within months of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, Russian authors were calling Muscovy the "Third Rome"/"Second Constantinople", and Tsar Ivan III embraced the concept.
The Russian Orthodox Church became self-ruling (autocephalous) in 1589 during the reign of Boris Godunov, and the other major patriarchates (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, All Bulgaria, All Georgia, Serbia) were weak and/or under Muslim rule (Georgia was nominally independent but divided in Ottoman and Persian spheres of influence). So Russia's rulers became de facto leaders of the Orthodox world. With the Church in Rome weakened and divided by the Protestant Reformation in the same period, Russia could see itself as the principal and strongest defender of Christianity.
Ottoman power peaked in the late 16th century, just as Europe was falling into the wars of religion. So from Russia's perspective, leadership fell upon it in the then-global revolution (or counterrevolution, depending on where you stood) against Muslim expansion. This pretty much ignores the roles played by the Austrians, Hungarians and Poles in halting and beginning to turn the tide against the Ottomans during the 17th century, but Russians have a pretty good history of ignoring the contributions of their allies (and, to be fair, Russians also take great offense at their allies' ignorance of Russia's contributions in various conflicts). This also pretty much glosses over how many of Russia's wars were against Christian neighbors, but if you are the new Rome, then you are obligated to run over anyone who gets in your way.
The rise of nationalism in the late 18th and 19th centuries didn't supplant religion completely. Russia gradually moved to pan-Slavism, but since this involved liberating Orthodox Bulgarians and Serbs from the Ottoman yoke, Pan-Slavism wasn't entirely independent of religion. Unfortunately, Pan-Slavism, combined with the increasing weakness of the Ottoman and the rest of Muslim world and the growth of the rest of Europe, led to the Russia's conflict with Austria-Hungary culminating in World War I and the end of the Tsarist Empire.
The end of the Russian Empire didn't mean the end of the Russian empire, and the Soviet Union emerged from the Russian Civil War and other conflicts with its neighbors as leader of a global ideological movement, but also of a Eurasian empire, still surrounded by potential enemies and lacking defensible borders. Even while fomenting revolutionary movements worldwide, the Soviets' main focus still appeared to be on its own periphery, regaining control or influence over portions of its empire lost after 1917 such as Finland, the Baltic states and Poland.
German troops at the gates of Moscow probably really brought home just how weak Russia potentially was, even with its vast territory, especially as technology marched on and the US emerged as the leader of the free world. From our perspective, containment of the USSR was at best defensive, and until the Reagan years rollback was at best a fantasy, but from Moscow's perspective, containment put American power and American allies along almost every border. From the Soviet perspective, then, much of its global revolutionary efforts, at least in the post-World War Two era, were more about breaking the containment of Soviet Russia by aggressively putting the free world on the defensive than about advancing the Communist revolution for its own sake. They would support a Castro, for example, not out of solidarity with the oppressed proletariat of Cuba, but because it put the US on the defensive in its own hemisphere.
I don't want to give the impression that I am dismissing ideology entirely and making it merely a tool of geopolitics. Soviet post-World War Two expansion was not simply a reaction to the growth of US power. Especially by the 1960s and 1970s, Communist indoctrination had created several generations of Soviet citizens who were true believers, and many true believers had moved their way into the vanguard of the state, alongside cynics for whom Communism was just a tool for power. Communist Party ideologue Boris Ponomaryov, for example, always struck me as a true believer, and his International Department was staffed with them. For him, fomenting the global revolution from Africa to Southeast Asia to the Americas was an end unto itself. But when he found allies in the corridors of power for actions like the Soviet switch from propping up the opportunistic socialist Mohammed Siad Barre in Somalia to supporting the properly communist Derg movement in Ethiopia, his allies in the Soviet Army and Navy seemed less motivated by the greater ideological purity of Mengistu Haile Mariam than by Ethiopia's greater geostrategic potential.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 put Russia in a similar position to 1917, with the loss of both an ideology underpinning the state and the loss of significant territories along its periphery, what the Russians call the "near abroad". One problem Putin and the current Russian leadership have, besides the demographic and aging infrastructure ones, is the lack of a "pan-" anything ideology to justify and motivate Russians the way Pan-Orthodoxy, Pan-Slavism and the World Communist Revolution served previous regimes. So Russian attempts to re-establish hegemony over the "near abroad" seem nakedly motivated by geopolitics, combined with a big inferiority complex over Russia's loss of its global status, and seem all the more cynical and bullying for it.