When trying to understand political and military events, there is always the risk of imagining that they are governed by rational and understandable reasons. In fact, foolishness is a powerful force in human history. Axel Oxenstierna once said: “My son, you would be amazed if you knew with how little wisdom the world is governed.” We need to understand this, in order to be aware and able to foresee, and the ability to foresee is a necessary condition for successful politics. The alternative is failure. Stefan Löfven once said with disarming honesty: “We didn’t see it coming.” He was referring to gang crime. A successful politician must have something of what is called political imagination, the ability to form an image of what is not yet visible, of what does not exist but may come to exist. In that sense, Churchill was a successful politician, while Neville Chamberlain was unsuccessful. Churchill saw the Third Reich's direction towards a major war before it was even clear. In a similar way, the Swedish politicians behind the 1925 defense decision were unsuccessful, and Sweden at that time had no one with Churchill's ability to political imagination, which meant that they laid the foundation for the less than honorable neutrality policy of 1939-1945.
There is another factor, besides stupidity, that makes political and military events not logically understandable but well observed and predicted. It is the internal dynamics of the events. When such an event gets underway, it governs itself and does not allow itself to be governed. No statesman wanted the outbreak of the First World War, but an event got underway that took control of the situation and caused everyone involved to be drawn into something that none of them wanted. Clausewitz's observation about battle also applies to politics. He had noticed that once a battle gets underway, an interplay of unpredictable events and combinations occurs, which means that it can no longer really be governed. The battle governs itself, while the generals look on. The famous painting of Napoleon at Borodino is a telling symbol. The emperor sleeps in front of his staff, while the generals follow the battle through binoculars. In a similar way, political events can also develop in an unpredictable way.
There is a third non-rational factor that influences political events, and that is the story. Every great nation and every great political movement has a fundamental story that influences the mentality and self-image of the nation or movement. Thus it also gives direction to its decisions and actions. The classic example is Virgil The Aeneid. It was the founding story of the Roman Empire. It is the story of how Aeneas flees from the burning Troy to Italy and there founds the city of Rome, the cradle of the empire. Out of fallen Troy he carries his aged father on his back, thus embodying what would become the foundation of Roman morality, feet – reverence for the fathers. Not all nations have their fundamental story as a great work of poetry, but the story can also be found in other forms. The United States has this story in one event, the exodus of revivalist Christians to the new land – the pilgrimages. The new land became land of the free. That story then continues in the migration westward, towards the great plains, in the company of the hero, the lone rider. England's great story is the empire, Rule Britannia. The completely irrational withdrawal from the EU – Brexit – can only be understood against the background of the notion of England as a sovereign world power, which can in no way be included in a community of equal nations. Brexit is a clear example of how the power of narrative can lead to irrational decisions. Brexit also shows how narrative works counterproductively in the interactions of states with each other. The narrative only works for internal use. For France, the grand narrative is connected to the notion of the nation’s glory, glory. This notion is as irrational as it is powerful. It has its bright spots in the great century, The time of Louis XIV and Versailles, but also in the 1789 revolution and Napoleon.
The stories are often depicted in symbolic places and symbolic buildings, preferably in museums. England has Trafalgar Square with the Nelson Monument, the USA has the Statue of Liberty, France has the Arc de Triomphe. Other nations have more dramatic and traumatic histories and therefore have more difficulty depicting the story. Denmark has a history of a thousand years of struggle for its own identity on the border with a powerful German culture and world of people. Dybbøl's redoubts are a symbolic place for that struggle. Polish heroism also has its symbolic places and stories – the miracle at the Vistula in 1920, Westerplatte in 1939, Warsaw in 1944. Sweden does not have anything like that. Is there then any fundamental story at all? If there were one, it should have resonated in poetry and art. A frequently recurring story is the path from poverty to prosperity through struggle. Poverty has been described in detail by labor writers, such as Ivar Lo-Johansson and Vilhelm Moberg. It has been depicted in film by Jan Troell. In this story, two positive forces often recur – the labor movement and the industrial hero. The latter is the inventor and entrepreneur, e.g. LM Ericson. The story of the path from poverty to prosperity is eloquently portrayed by public art, e.g. Axel Ebbes The glory of work in Malmö, but also from school textbooks. The story leads to the idea of a unique and successful social experiment, “a moral superpower”, “the most modern country in the world”. This story shares some important characteristics with other similar stories. It is selective, it is based on certain selected facts and excludes others. It contains no elements of self-criticism or reflection. And finally, it is counterproductive in relation to other nations and cultures. It only works when used internally.
So far, our considerations have only moved in a westerly direction. Now we will turn our gaze eastward. What could be Finland's fundamental story? "High among the moors of Saarijärvi" is a good fit, the story of the farmer Paavo who never gives up despite a bleak environment, with perseverance and trust in God and his own work overcomes all adversity. It is the story of sisu and faith - perhaps the last has faded somewhat in today's Finland. The fact that the story has taken shape in a grand poem gives it an effect that the Swedish story hardly has. The theme itself has also been given shape in song and dance. If you want to understand Finland, it is good advice to start in Saarijärvi's moar. This also applies to Finland in its relations with other nations.
And what is the big story in Russia? Bertil Jangfeldt has in his book Russia as an idea (2017) have shown some important features. The first is the awareness of being different. We are not like you, that is the first thing the Russian consciousness wants to say to the West. The vast country itself provides completely different starting points than Europe's densely populated, centuries-old landscapes. Added to this is the enormous people, in front of which the largest Western European nations are like dwarfs. And in this gigantic context, the Christian faith as Orthodoxy is mysteriously integrated and supporting.
It has not always been so. From 1918 to 1990, the main narrative in Russia was quite different. It was the myth of the people freeing themselves from oppression and now marching together towards the socialist paradise, a narrative that was paradoxically merged with the story of the Great Patriotic War during the heroic Big man, Stalin. The myth of the people liberating themselves was punctured by Alexander Solzhenitsyn with the enormous series of novels The red wheel. The myth of the Great Stalin became impossible after The Gulag Archipelago. The entire Soviet myth collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. From the ruins, a new Russia began to take shape. The old story was gone, now a new one had to be formulated. Associate Professor Johanna Wassholm at Åbo Akademi University has traced the main lines of this new story in an essay (Nya Argus 6/22). Its foundation is the insight into being unique, especially in relation to the West: “We are not like you!” On this foundation is then built the idea of a constantly threatened Russia. The threat is twofold. First of all, it is an external threat, primarily from the West. Furthermore, it is an internal threat, namely from disintegration. Faced with this twofold threat, Russia needs the Great Man, and it is a great man with a task so great that it demands and justifies complete ruthlessness. That is why Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin are heroes, side by side, in this new story. Stalin is not the communist revolutionary in this context, but the great, ruthless and necessary leader. The center of the new story is what has been called the Great Patriotic War. Stalin was, as is well known, a military amateur who, with his complete ignorance of the reality of the battle, sacrificed the lives and health of millions of Russians, from the first day of the war to its last. Alexander Solzhenitsyn experienced this as a young officer. In a letter to a comrade, he recounted some of his observations. The letter ended up with the censors, and it cost him years of imprisonment and exile. But the new story is – like other stories of the same kind – selective, and Stalin's catastrophic amateurism is a reality that is not included.
The new story has its own liturgy, and the parade is a central element. Solzhenitsyn has created a new word for parading in Tsarist Russia – parade mania. This paradomania developed further in Soviet society and has taken on a central place in the new Russia. Paradomania is – like other manias – an obsession, and its purpose is to express power. The basic story was the story of a Russia that is threatened by external and internal enemies but saved by the Great Man, and thus it also becomes of central importance that the Great Man shows power. The idea of the “internal enemy” is an effective barrier against all criticism of Vladimir Putin. The very idea of the constantly threatened nation creates a siege atmosphere, where any deviation from the leadership’s line is an attack on the entire people. People usually speak of the “Great Russian Quarrel”, the tension between the Western-oriented and the Slavophiles. The new Russian story is a powerful step towards the Slavophile position. The two capitals – Moscow and St. Petersburg – are an architectural embodiment of this tension. In the new Russian story, Moscow is the one that matters. At the same time, the rejection of Western influence means a captivity in backwardness and inferiority, a painful experience that is deepened by the effective, modern weapons that many Western states are now supplying Ukraine with. In the great Russian narrative, the encounter with the West is the encounter with a superior culture and thus an experience of inferiority. Solzhenitsyn has expressed this in his poetry Prussian Nights (English translation 1977). It was written during the invasion of East Prussia and was kept in memory throughout his captivity in Siberia. It was not published until 1974. In it he describes how, as a young looter, he enters an abandoned German post office and finds pens and paper of a quality he never imagined.
The great Russian story has received many artistic interpretations, including by film director Sergei Eisenstein. In Storm over Russia (1938) he depicts the victory over the German Crusaders in the 1200th century, and in Ivan the Terrible (1944-1946) he portrays the image of the Great, necessary – and absurd – man. In the world of poetry, Tolstoy is War and Peace part of this story, like its later counterpart, Vasily Grosmann's These people are immortal (1942).
It is part of the mentality of the Russian story that the Great Man does not only show power by organizing parades, he also shows power by breaking all the rules. He is the man who does whatever comes to his mind, because no one can stop him. That is why Khrushchev could bang his shoe in the UN General Assembly, while Harold Macmillan stood at the rostrum. A Westerner might think that Khrushchev had made a fool of himself. To a Russian observer, he showed power. The absurd Great Man can also be the cruel one, but that only enhances his greatness. He is also unbound by decency and humanity, Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin are telling examples. The more the image of a threatened Russia is reinforced, the more important all signs of the Great Man's power become. Perhaps we can even dare to assume that the Russian soldier's cruelty and violations of the laws of war are a way of demonstrating power, not the power of the conqueror but the power of the constantly threatened Russia, which in its fight for survival does not allow itself to be hindered by any rules.
The story of the threatened Russia, which is saved by the Great Man, is also found in Solzhenitsyn. In the first part of The red wheel Augunlucky 14 – the author has burst into a long, documentary section about Pyotr Stolypin, Russia's Prime Minister from 1906 to 1911. When he took office, Russia was shaken by widespread revolts as a result of the failed war against Japan in 1904-1905. Radical terrorism was so widespread that everyone in the leading circles had to be prepared to be assassinated at any time. With powerful and partly illegal measures – including estates – Stolypin managed to stabilize the situation. He then began a reform effort aimed at creating an independent peasant population. In constant struggle with reactionary and radical forces, constantly threatened by assassination attempts, supported by a weak and wavering Tsar, he tirelessly pursued his plans until he was shot down by a terrorist in 1911. The internal enemy is therefore not the Western-oriented circles but the radical terrorism, anarchist and socialist, the same groups that Dostoevsky describes in Evil spirits. What was Stolypin's driving force? Solzhenitsyn answers: "He felt sorry for Russia." Russia is for Solzhenitsyn more than a territory, a history, a language, a population. Russia is a personality, a collective person. Only in this way can one understand Stolypin and the Russia that Solzhenitsyn knew how to speak for and to. Here too, it applies: "We are not like you."
The story of Stolypin highlights another important aspect. The great Russian horror scenario is not the invasion from the West – all such invasions have failed. The real horror scenario is the internal disintegration, the “great disorder”, which is total chaos – a reality that is constantly close to the surface. It is the fight against this chaos that makes Stolypin Solzhenitsyn’s hero. The proximity to this vision of horror makes Russian submission understandable.
How would Solzhenitsyn view today's Russia? The answer is in his essay Repentance and limitation in the life of nations (1974). It is available in Swedish translation in the essay collection Reast out of the ruins (1978). He starts from the idea of nations as collective entities and asks the question whether one can transfer values and patterns that apply to individuals to them. If one does so, something surprising happens. For example, the most human thing is to be able to repent. A nation that cannot repent thus becomes collectively inhuman and thereby excludes itself from human community. Thus, the verdict falls on all nationalism. Its basic tenet is Right or wrong – my country. The fundamental narratives we have stopped here before also have the fundamental feature that they are selective. The very thing that could and should have been undone and which would thus have made the nation human, is not included. And in that it is not included, the nation loses in humanity and the ability for community with other nations.
What Solzhenitsyn aims for is not a denial of the basic narrative. It contains, as it is, great elements of truth. This applies to the basic narratives of all peoples. It does not advance anything to “vault temples for others / but throw stones at one’s own gate”. (Heidenstam). But the national narrative needs to be expanded to the whole truth in order to function as a basis for genuine self-awareness and self-limitation. This applies to Russia as well as to Sweden. What would such an expansion of the narrative look like for Russia? It can only be clarified within Russia. And for Sweden? Then it would mean an awareness that after the last sentence of the success story, there is a sense of a peripeteia, a reversal, which turns the narrative into a tragedy. It is enough to mention Harry Martinson’s Aniara and Tage Lindboms Sancho Panza's windmills. An awareness of that perspective would give birth to humility and then to strengthened cooperation with other nations. The first step of humility is an awareness of deficiency and of responsibility. This is what Solzhenitsyn calls repentance. It is repentance that has opened the door for Germany to become Europe's leading nation again after two lost world wars and the continent's greatest moral catastrophe – the Holocaust.
We have reflected on three non-rational factors: folly, the inherent and uncontrollable dynamics of conflicts, and the underlying narrative. If we look at the history of Russia, there are many signs that these factors have a stronger position than economics and rationality. The factor we have focused on here is narrative. Is there any sign that a broadening of the national narrative is gaining ground in Russia? Western politicians, who are now deliberating on the relationship with Russia, could ask that question of the knowledgeable Russia experts, who are found in many contexts in the West. In this way, they could get help to political imagination.