Prof. Stephen Kotkin’s analysis of potential Russian futures, particularly the “Russia as France” scenario, offers a compelling comparison rooted in statist and monarchical traditions, revolutionary memory, and imperial heritage. However, the article, though rich in political, institutional, and geopolitical factors (as published in Foreign Affairs), appears to understate a crucial cultural dimension that fundamentally shapes national identity, collective memory, and future trajectory—a dimension that makes a French-style evolution for Russia highly improbable.
It is important to start with an acknowledgment of the historian whose work I’m extending. Prof. Stephen Kotkin is unequivocally one of my favorite historians, and perhaps the world’s leading scholar on authoritarianism, given his deep study of figures like Stalin. What I particularly admire is Prof. Kotkin’s incredible discipline—a true commitment to the historian’s craft, which means resisting the urge to draw premature conclusions based on scant evidence or short timelines. I often wish his colleagues at Hoover Institution would embrace this same historian’s discipline. Therefore, I write this minor extension to his excellent analysis in all humility and with great admiration, hoping only to add a dimension—the cultural one—that is essential for fully understanding Russia’s trajectory.
Prof. Kotkin focuses heavily on institutional parallels (centralized power in Moscow/Paris, absolutist/revolutionary pasts) and geopolitical constraints (Eurasian landmass, “ingrained strategic culture”). While these are vital, the missing cultural layer is key to understanding why Russia lacks the “impartial, professional institutions” and the “free and open public sphere” that, as Prof. Kotkin notes, were generational achievements in France.
The Cultural Bedrock of France
The path to contemporary France was not merely about political cycles of monarchy and republic; it was defined by a specific, enduring cultural evolution that is largely absent in Russia.
The Enlightenment and Intellectual Universalism: France’s political journey was deeply informed by the Age of Enlightenment. Ideas of liberalism, human rights, secularism (laïcité), and rational governance became deeply embedded in the national consciousness and educational institutions. This provided a common philosophical ground—a civil religion—that allowed different political systems to eventually converge on the rule of law.
Decentralized Civil Society: Though Paris is centralized, the French system saw the gradual emergence of independent intellectual, artistic, and judicial centers that could challenge state authority. This created a space for open critique and the development of impartial professional institutions from below and alongside the state.
Absence of an Orthodox/Messianic Identity: French republicanism, even in its most chauvinistic forms, is fundamentally secular and rooted in a universalist ideal of man and citizen.
The Power of the Pen: Zola’s J’Accuse!
The Dreyfus Affair, though fueled by intense nationalism and anti-Semitism, ultimately became a crucible for the core Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, universal justice, and the sovereignty of individual rights over state authority. When Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was falsely convicted of treason, it was Émile Zola’s open letter, J’Accuse!, that leveraged the newly powerful free press—a key element of the Enlightenment’s “public sphere”—to demand the truth. Zola did not appeal to spiritual unity or the moral authority of the Tsar-like state; instead, he appealed directly to reason and the principle of law, challenging the military and governmental cover-up by making the case transparently public. This national trauma—which pitted the anti-Dreyfusard forces of institutional authority and religious prejudice against the Dreyfusard forces of intellectual conscience and Republican justice—demonstrates that France had established the intellectual and institutional mechanisms (the concept of an autonomous “intellectual,” the power of the press, and the eventual reassertion of the civil judiciary) necessary to recognize a miscarriage of justice and force the state to submit to the rule of law.
The Dreyfus Affair demonstrated that France, thanks to generations of Enlightenment and Republican development, had a robust, autonomous public sphere (newspapers, universities, intellectual circles) capable of waging a civil war of ideas. When Zola published J’Accuse!, he knew the consequences, but he also knew his action would split the country into Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, forcing the Republic to resolve its identity crisis under the gaze of the law.
In Russia, no such autonomous public sphere has existed.
One might be tempted to argue that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was Russia’s Zola, but this comparison is a false analogy—a conclusion that fundamentally misunderstands the different institutional landscapes they operated within.
Solzhenitsyn’s works were published in the West and circulated domestically only through clandestine Samizdat. His truth could not challenge the regime through legal or public institutional channels; it could only work through individual moral subversion and by shocking the international community.
Solzhenitsyn was a prophet revealing a spiritual abyss; Zola was an intellectual utilizing the political machinery of an open society to secure the rule of law. The former’s necessary exile and the state’s eventual collapse (partially accelerated by his work) speak to the totalitarian context; the latter’s successful use of his own libel trial to reopen the case speaks to the enduring, if temporarily strained, liberal-legal backbone of France.
Ubiquity of Enlightenment Ideas and Russia’s Selective Reception
The core ideas of the Enlightenment—rationalism, skepticism, individual rights, natural law, and the social contract—were indeed universally available across the entire Euro-Atlantic world and beyond. The movement was not bound by national borders; it found fertile ground in England and Scotland, where thinkers like Hume and Smith used its principles for empirical science and political economy, and was famously codified in the United States Constitution, establishing a legal system explicitly founded on checks, balances, and inalienable rights. This demonstrates that Enlightenment thought was readily consumable and institutionally translatable wherever the local culture was prepared to accept its authority.
In 18th and 19th-century Russia, the educated nobility and court elite were undeniably fluent consumers of this intellectual product. Russian elites spoke fluent French and were avid readers of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Smith, celebrating the principles of liberty and reason in their libraries and drawing rooms. Crucially, however, this intellectual consumption failed to translate into corresponding institutional or political reform. While the ideas were adopted in theory, the practice of the state remained one of autocracy and serfdom; the “rights of man” were celebrated in Paris but ignored on Russian estates. The Enlightenment in Russia became an intellectual ghetto—a set of foreign ideas used for elite conversation, rather than a universal moral code enforced by an impartial judiciary.
This disconnect is precisely what later Russian writers keenly observed and mocked. Anton Chekhov’s characters—often educated, French-speaking, but ineffectual landowners and professionals—quote philosophical maxims while being utterly incapable of applying rational thought to their lives or solving their nation’s problems. They are paralyzed by idealism, illustrating that for an Enlightenment to truly succeed and transform a society into something resembling France or the United States, the ideas must not just be available, but they must become culturally authoritative—superseding the traditional authority of the Tsar, the Church, or the collective. Russia failed to make this necessary leap, preserving its unique cultural autocracy.
Anton Chekhov’s short story “Na Chuzhbine” (In a Foreign Land) provides a perfect, darkly humorous illustration of this Russian cultural resistance to Enlightenment values, even among those who claim to embody them.
In this story, the Russian landowner Kamyshev is housing an elderly French émigré Monsieur Shampoo, a former tutor who has remained with the family even though his duties are long over. Monsieur Shampoo represents a caricature of French formality and philosophical rationalism.
The humor, and the cultural critique, emerges from the clash between:
Shampoo’s rigid adherence to French Enlightenment principles: Monsieur Shampoo is obsessed with his honor, proper conduct, and following abstract rules. He views life through a rational, codified, and somewhat sterile philosophical lens. He represents the French tradition that believes society can be organized and perfected through reason and adherence to a defined legal and social contract.
Kamyshev’s deeply ingrained Russian arbitrariness and emotionalism: Kamyshev, though educated, refuses to submit his life to any rational Western system. He constantly violates Shampoo’s sense of order—eating too much, drinking too much, singing loudly, and disrupting the polite routine. His behavior is driven by impulse and a kind of willful chaos that mocks Shampoo’s adherence to “reason.”
The story brilliantly highlights the Russian elite’s ability to intellectually consume the Enlightenment (Shampoo’s philosophy and French manners are present) while the Russian psyche (represented by Kamyshev) utterly rejects the constraint and formality required to live those values institutionally. Kamyshev embodies the freedom of the Russian autocracy’s culture, where the only true rule is the caprice of the superior figure, an attitude which destroys the very idea of an impartial, rule-of-law-based society that is the foundation of the French system. It shows the Enlightenment to be a brittle, foreign veneer easily shattered by the robust, chaotic nature of the Russian character, thus confirming the argument for cultural inertia.
Conclusion: The Missing Link
Prof. Kotkin’s analysis excels at outlining five potential political/geopolitical scenarios. However, the cultural inertia embedded in Russia’s historical consciousness acts as a powerful brake on the “Russia as France” trajectory. France’s path was paved by Enlightenment rationalism and a gradual institutionalization of the rights of the individual over the state’s moral authority.
Russia’s path is continually constrained by its cultural inertia, which systematically delegitimizes impartial law and rational institutions. The dominant cultural expectation favors personalistic leadership (Tsar) as the moral guarantor and prioritizes collective spiritual unity over individual rights. This continuously undermines the prerequisites for a “France” transition.
And unfortunately never the twain shall meet!