Another example of how human history turns yesterday's solution into tomorrow's problem. The true dark heart of Russia's absolutist statism that has enserfed its people was created by the Mongols' tributary empire and its princely tribute collectors' solution to Mongol rule: a hypercentralized state in which even the boyars are enserfed to the Tsar. The absolutist expanionist state that becomes the personalist rule plaything of its Tsar was a product of institutional weakness and the gap between the Tsars' imperial appetite and their state's military and fiscal capacity.
The only economic basis for these princes as Mongol tribute collectors, and then Tsars, to build a coherent state was to import western arms and technology to extract and export furs, timber and other commodities from North Eurasia's, and then Caucasus and Ukrainian, conquered indigenous peoples. For all the noise around Russia's southern and westward expansion into Ukraine, this business model dictated that Muscovy expand north and east first. Russia was built as a land-based colonial empire on the periphery of a Dutch, English, Hanseatic, Spanish and French global trading system whose demand for Eurasian commodities reinvented and exported serfdom that in the 14th and 15th centuries had been declining.
This absolutist militarized state, whether Tsarist, Bolshevik/Stalinist or Putinist, sells its serfs the psychic wages of mythologized imperial greatness, a grievance and inferiority complex driven messianic vision of Russia as a counter-western civilization, in return for submission to absolute state power. If you read Orlando Figes' The Whisperers' conversations with the Stalin purges' victims, many refused to blame Stalin and their torturers and blamed local functionaries' venality or themselves. Serfdom may have been officially abolished in 1860. But it was much easier to take the muzhiki out of serfdom than to take the serfdom out of the muzhiki. It's a phenomenon similar to it being much easier to physically demolish the Berlin Wall than to remove the East Germans' Mauer in den Kopf (the wall in the head) after reunification.
The contempt for individual human life in the gulag is a symptom. The fundamental problem, its stem cells, is the empire-driven serf in the head of each Russian. This is what creates this enormous power distance between themselves and their rulers above the rules who run their absolutist state, whatever that state's ruling ideology may be (Tsarist, Bolshevik, Putinist). That leads to the final question about how to break this legacy feedback loop of empire-building and neo-feudal serfdom. Can Russia be Russia without empire? Or is finishng the breakup of the empire that started in 1917 and left half finished in 1991, the only way to remove the mythologized nationalist enserfment in the head of each Russian. The most cursory look at the Russian version of the Jim Crow-style racial hierarchies in the Russian Federation tells us that membership for its conquered and subjugated non-Russian peoples has never been voluntary. Russia is an institutional transvestite; a neo-feudal mafia with a flag kleptocracy that's the most misnamed imperial political entity on the planet. In the 1991 dissolution of the USSR, the Soviet nomenklatura in Russia (Yeltsin), Ukraine and Belarus got together to sign a top-down breakup deal for the Soviet Union's official 15 republics because they knew the Tatars, and Bashkiris were about to declare a bottom-up independence. Currently Tatars, Bashkiris, Yakuts, Dagestanis, Karelians, Buryats, Komys, Kalmyks, Uralis, 2-3 million far east Ukrainians in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, Chechens not on Kadyrov's payroll of tik-tok warriors would be happy to lengthen the list of secessionist republics. Russia is a Slavo-Turkic imperial state whose Turkic lands have the commodities that Moscow extracts (steals). The solution to the mass murdering gulag is staring you in the face: empire demolition as happened to the Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians in 1918.
