Das Lied von der russischen Erde by Michael Thumann

Any book about current events eventually becomes a book about history, and a bit of a historical object itself. If it’s a good one, its insights will transcend the immediate period of its writing, illuminating its subject over a longer period, showing readers how the long term looked at a particular time. Michael Thumann’s Das Lied von der russischen Erde — Song of the Russian Soil — was finished in late 2001, when Vladimir Putin was still Russia’s new president, when questions of that country’s future seemed far more open than they do today. More than 20 years later, the book is still well worth reading, both for comparing now and then, and for seeing how much is unchanged.

Thumann, whom I have not met but with whom I share friends and acquaintances, gave this book the subtitle “Moskaus ringen um Einheit und Grösse” — “Moscow wrestles with unity and size,” though it could just as easily be “Moscow wrestles with unity and greatness.” The book, which is admirably manageable at 250 pages, delves into how Russia’s rulers have struggled to actually rule the lands that their armies and explorers conquered. The volume is historically informed, but it is mostly about post-Soviet Russia, with four-fifths of it devoted to the years from 1991 to 2001.

Even in 2001, Thumann saw a touchstone of Vladimir Putin’s time in the Kremlin. He writes, “Today Vladimir Putin embodies this new gathering of the Russian lands. He is strengthening central power and is attempting to gain the greatest control possible over Russia’s regions.” (p. 8) More than 20 years later, it is clear that Thumann was more correct than he knew. Not only has Putin effectively controlled the regions and bent local rulers to his will, he has tried to take up the mantle of earlier conquerors. By waging a war of aggression against Ukraine he is attempting to put into practice his view of “gathering the Russian lands.”

There is a Russian proverb that says that the country is vast and the Tsar is far away. What is decreed in Moscow is often not what is practiced in the far corners of the country. This was truer in the days of slow travel and communications, but even today size and a rickety state apparatus mean that there is room for many local customs — not least corruption — to prevail, especially in areas that do not command the ruler’s particular attention. Thumann writes that this has led to two important streams in Russian history. First, the rulers have long worried about holding the country together. The present generation of rulers grew up in the Soviet Union, a much larger country than the Russian Federation, although even after shedding the ninth-largest country in the world (Kazakhstan) and a country the size of France (Ukraine), Russia is still bigger than the second-largest (Canada) by roughly a factor of Australia. The experience of imperial dissolution certainly made Putin determined to stop it from going any further.

Second, Russia’s rulers have over time pursued opposing strategies for keeping the periphery attached for the center. One course is to work out accommodations that recognize local conditions, local relations, and local traditions. In the early 1990s Boris Yeltsin famously told the regions that they should take as much sovereignty as they could handle. Thumann details how, faced with the collapse of the USSR’s state institutions after 1991, Yeltsin needed as many allies as he could find, people who could ensure that basic public functions were fulfilled. If regional governors could do that, and declarations of sovereignty were the price, Yeltsin was more than willing to pay. The advantage of this approach is that it responds to real needs in the regions, and it was followed by both Tsars and Soviet commissars at various periods. The disadvantage from the perspective of a ruler in the Kremlin is that it builds up power centers that are independent of the center.

The other approach — which has roughly alternated with accommodation — is centralization. The most positive spin to put on this approach is that it aims for equality throughout the realm. The same laws should apply in all parts of the country; there should be one set of regulations for all places. The key problem is that rules may not be appropriate in every place. The lands ruled from Moscow were hardly tabula rasa, and ignoring history in favor of uniformity is a way to perpetuate injustice. Thumann writes, for example, about Tatars in Kazan asking why they should celebrate the national holiday proclaimed by Putin that commemorates Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of their city. Tatarstan is also the focus of a section that shows links between cultural, economic and power relations. In the Yeltsin years, the region’s leaders introduced the Roman alphabet for the Tatar language, arguing that Cyrillic was poorly suited to the language and that it kept them from building stronger ties with the wider world. Local patriotism was also the language of the region’s leader, whose extended family not coincidentally held high positions throughout Tatarstan’s most important and profitable companies. It was a patriarchal system that promised independence from Moscow but also kept a tight rein on the wealth and power within the region. Thumann argues that picking a fight over the alphabet was unnecessary. He writes, “In the end, mistrust of every deviation from the federal norm hurts the Federation itself. If the central government insists on one set of laws for all of Russia, it can count on the sympathy of of many people in the regions. By contrast, in the fight over symbols there is little to gain and much to lose.” (p. 223)

Some conflicts have a longer history than most books about current events are willing to explore. As a long-time correspondent for one of Germany’s leading newspapers, Thumann knows Russia and its surroundings very well. Well enough that long before Russia’s seizure of the Crimea and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was writing about Russian politicians’ unwillingness to believe that Ukraine is actually a different place. In his discussion of a time of accommodation in the Russian Empire’s later years, he writes:

The Tsar and his advisers at first reacted with compromises. In Russia’s first parliament, the Duma, out of 524 representatives only 265 were Russians; the rest of the seats were divided among the empire’s nationalities. In the second Duma of July 1906 pressure from the Poles led the parties that favored national autonomy to form a “Union of the Autonomists.” This was bad news enough for the central state’s bureaucrats. The real shock for the Great Russian politicians however came from the activities of the Ukrainian parliamentarians. They vowed to fight for freedom and independent development in their territories. That the Poles would make that kind of demand was something they had gotten used to. [There had been major Polish rebellions against the Russian Empire in 1830 and 1863.] But when the Ukrainian “brothers” strove to emancipate themselves from Russia, that was a sign for the highest level of alert among Russian officials. (p. 39)

Das Lied von der Russischen Erde may have moved from current events to history, but passages like the one above, along with Thumann’s first-hand reporting that ranges from the Caucasus to the Mongolian border and from Moscow to Yakutia, show that the book has lost none of its relevance. At a time when Russia looks like a one-man show, it’s also a handy reminder of the deeper currents that move through the country, and of the things that may occupy the ruler’s attention that are not obvious to outsiders. Unfortunately, the book is not (to my knowledge) available in English. Another book of Thumann’s — Revenge: How Putin Created the Most Menacing Regime in the World — does have an English edition, and I expect that it’s very good, too.