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Despotic rulers are sometimes poisoned, sometimes deposed. However, as a rule, they tend to have longer reigns than those of their democratic counterparts, who, at regular intervals, have to expose themselves to elections. Their long reigns enable despots to initiate long-term projects, such as territorial conquests, and bring them to fruition. Russia’s kings and tsars were often blessed with long lives, which led to extraordinarily long reigns. This was the case for the first three rulers, who may be considered the founders of the Russian imperial project. Ivan III (the Great) reigned for forty-three years, his successor Vassily III, for twenty-eight years, and Ivan IV (the Terrible), who was the first to call himself tsar, for thirty-seven years. Between 1462 and 1584 these three rulers reigned for 108 years altogether, a period that was only interrupted for fourteen years when Ivan IV was a minor. It is, therefore, no surprise that under this long and stable rule the foundations for Russia’s continuous expansion were laid.

Of course long reigns of monarchs were not a privilege of Russia alone. Absolutist monarchs in Western Europe equally could reign for long periods during which they were able to undertake ambitious expansionist projects. Louis XIV, the French roi soleil, is a good example of this. But with the end of absolutism in Western Europe and the advent of parliamentary democracy, Russia’s autocratic government gained an advantage. This advantage remained when tsarist autocracy made way for communist dictatorship. Stalin, who ruled for almost thirty years, was as staunch an empire builder as Ivan the Terrible, whom—in fact—he surpassed by creating the greatest Russian empire ever.^[34] Vladimir Putin’s attempt to rule possibly for twenty-four years must be seen within this perspective. Putin considers this long personal rule as a necessary precondition for his supreme geopolitical goal: the restoration of the lost empire.

There exists, furthermore, a fundamental mismatch between democratic rule and imperial rule. Democracies are based on the principle of the fundamental equality of their citizens. Imperial rule is based on a basic inequality between the rulers and the ruled.^[35] Imperial rule, exercised by a despotic ruler, is, therefore, more logical and consistent, because no distinction is made between the inhabitants of the imperial mother country and the inhabitants of the imperial possession: in fact no one is a citizen. All are, in the most literal sense, subjects. Jan Nederveen Pieterse stressed the

direct connection, a military nexus, between the exercise of imperialist force overseas and the application of force to repress domestic unrest; time and again we find that not only the same methods and equipment were deployed but also the same personnel.^[36] . . . In Russia, with tsarist generals, the great Suvorov among them, stamping on rebels at home and other peoples in Asia were always twin employments. This gives a concrete significance to the saying that a people that oppresses another nation cannot itself be free.^[37]

The last, and fifth, point is that the vastness of an empire strengthens despotic rule. This was an argument that was already being used by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers. Their argument was that huge countries with large populations could be neither prosperous nor democratic. This argument was used especially by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom the ideal state was a city-state, the size of Geneva. “Size of states!” he wrote, “first and most important source of human misery, and especially of the many disasters that undermine and ruin the civilized peoples. Almost all small states, whether republics or monarchies, prosper only by the fact of being small.”^[38] And he added: “All large states, crushed by their own mass, are suffering.”^[39] Rousseau’s aversion to big states was shared by Voltaire, who wrote: “Men seldom deserve to govern themselves. This happiness seems to be the lot only of small nations hidden in islands, or between mountains, like rabbits who hide from the carnivorous animals; but in the end they are found and devoured.”^[40] Adam Ferguson, their contemporary, and one of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, wrote, in a similar vein, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767):