Modernization and its Discontent. In Narratives, Nations, and Other World Products in the Making of Global History
Résumé
Since the eighteenth century, Russia had the unique privilege of being constantly associated to a double dilemma in terms of mdernity (temporalities) and its spatial limits: Is Russia like Europe or Asia? Is it modern or backward? In every instance, answers to these questions reflected a response to structural transformations in states, societies and economies: The global transformations of the world gave birth to attempts of a narrative which led in turn to a quest for universalism, or, at the opposite, to the identification of ‘national’ culture and ‘specificities’ to explain peculiarities or deviances from the universal plot – the last being evetually accommodated into a universal path, based upon ‘Russian’, not Western, ‘values’ and ‘categories’. This paper will not seek to study all the multiple relevant fields in which these tensions between the Russian specificity versus commonality with Europe were expressed; I will mostly focus on the notion of backwardness in history writing, in general history and economic history in particular. In fact, since the eighteenth century onwards, the notion of backwardness stood at the very core of debates concerning Russian ‘modernization’ and, therefore, its confrontation with global trends. The identification of what ‘Russia’ and ‘Russian’ means took place in connection with multiple processes: empire and state building in Russia itself since the fifteenth century onwards, which took a new dimension in the eighteenth century when the idea of modernization, progress and civilization become widespread with the cultural and economic expansion of Western Europe. In this case, Russia and Europe more or less idealized and mirrored each other in the definition of progress and backwardness, not only in ‘cultural’ development but also in economic dynamics. Scales of narratives became central: Russian as well as European authors were obliged to fix both time and space scales – on the one hand, they had to decide whether Russia included Asiatic areas or also new southern regions seized from the Ottomans. They also had to decide whether ‘Europe’ meant England, France or something larger. On the other hand, discussions focused on the question of knowing whether one had to start from ‘the origins’; for example, a more or less mythical foundation of Rus’, of the ‘Kingdom of England’, or rather from the advent of the ‘modern’, in turn starting with the ‘great discoveries’, Peter the Gret, the Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution, capitalism (after feudalism), and so on and so forth. 288 I will start with the eighteenth century, when the universal ambition of the Enlightenment confronted Russian ‘specificities’ in economic life and politics, then move to the nineteenth century and Marxism, before moving to the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath, as each stage revisited the backwardness problem in the narrative of Russia and the world. The last part of this chapter will discuss the Russian ‘national’ economy and history during the Cold War and its aftermath. Over the longue durée, Russia served as a necessary counterpoint to Enlightenment, Marxist and liberal narratives about global economic history and the conditions of modernization; Russia served as a fictional constant, an idealized mirror, on a feudal or traditional past for the modernizers to elegize. At the same time, Russian intellectuals flipped the mirror back on Russian readers themselves to offer a script of Russian exceptionalism to justify models of what would later become called ‘development’ or the necessary – tough peculiar – road for catching up and industrializing.