CHAPTER 32
“Are We the Same as the Russians?”
The nineteenth century of Europe left untouched only three great bulwarks of autocracy—Russia, Prussia, and Austria. These were, in the phrase of the time, the three eastern great powers, in which the pattern of postfeudal absolutism, serving an agrarian and military nobility, with a subservient church appended, still survived in the West. German royalty’s predilection for France and England—and its intermarriage with the latter’s ruling house—gave the world an easy impression of Western orientation, which was fortified by the spectacular industrialization of the new Reich under Bismarck. But the perennial preoccupation of German scholarship with Russia (and vice versa) might have been a better clue to the future of Europe than the didoes of court society.
Russia (whose history has been epitomized as the search for a warm-water port) and Germany are the two have-nots, subjectively, with a long history of like, and co-operative, behavior, beginning with their postmedieval continental colonization (including a half-dozen amiable partitions of Poland) and their failure (or inability) to colonize abroad. Bismarck’s support of Russia’s Black Sea ambitions; the German General Staff’s support of the October Revolution; Rapallo; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—all these are seen, quite rightly, as German policy in a perpetual pincers situation. But German-Russian relations have always been happier than the relations of either one with the other European great powers. Behind the events of the immediate past are five centuries of remarkably peaceful penetration of the western Slav world by German traders and agriculturists and the concomitant Slavic influence on the East Prussian and Silesian temperaments.
We are late in discovering the essential resemblance of Communism and Nazism, diverted perhaps by the “advanced” condition of the Germans, perhaps by the confusion of Soviet Communism with democratic socialism; perhaps by both. But the circulatory course of anti-Semitism—from fourteenth century Germany to Russia (via the partitioning of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century), from Russia to Austria in the nineteenth, and from Austria back to Germany in the twentieth—should itself have been a sign of the singular congeniality of the Pan-German and Pan-Russian nationalisms. But it was not until the 1930’s, when National Socialism overcame Germany, that we discovered, to our amazement, that the aboriginal “folk family,” the herd sense of the tribe, was as deeply set in the Germans as it was in the Russians.
Some of the Germans have not discovered it yet. In Hamburg I was meeting with a group of students, and the discussion turned to Russia. “You don’t know the Russians,” said one of the students, addressing, apparently, not just me but the group generally. “I say that you do not know the Russians. I do. They have no idea of freedom. They would not know how to use it if they had it. They are a primitive, animal-like people. They simply have no conception of humanity or of human rights. I had a friend who was in a Russian concentration camp. What they do there is hideous. You wouldn’t believe it.” Another student spoke up: “I had a friend who was in a German concentration camp. What they did there was hideous. You wouldn’t believe it” The first student was enraged. “Are you saying,” he shouted, “that we are the same as the Russians?”