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Stalin was a great admirer of Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny), whom he considered as his great historical role model. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, “[H]e regarded Ivan the Terrible as his true alter ego, his ‘teacher.’” (Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 177.) Montefiore described how Stalin, at the very moment that the German armies stood before Moscow, “kept reading history: it was now that he scribbled on a new biography of Ivan the Terrible: ‘teacher teacher’ and then: ‘We shall overcome!’” (Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 396). Stalin admired in Ivan not only his imperialist policies, but also—if not more—his ruthless killing of the boyars, the Russian nobility. (On Stalin’s self-identification with Ivan the Terrible, see also Benedict Anderson, Lineages, 160, and Vladimir Fédorovski, “Le Fantôme d’Ivan le Terrible,” in Le Fantôme de Staline (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2007), 175–181).

35.

An example of this imperial inequality was the fact that even when, in 1946, the Algerians obtained civil rights, they did not get the same voting rights as French colonists. They got these only in 1956 after the war of liberation had already started.

36.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Empire & Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World Scale (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 187.

37.

Nederveen Pieterse, Empire, ibid.

38.

Rousseau, “Considérations,” 1039.

39.

Rousseau, “Considérations,” 970.

40.

Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (London and New York: Penguin, 2004), 193.

41.

Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, reprint of the original, Edinburgh, 1767 (Milano: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2001), 417.

42.

Ferguson, An Essay, 418.

43.

Sir John Rober Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan & Co, 1914), 294.

44.

Seeley, Expansion of England, 347.

45.

Seeley, Expansion of England, 348.

46.

The young and democratic United States had an important flaw, which was the status of black slaves who were not considered citizens. However, in its territorial expansion the United States did not act as an empire (at least not until 1898, when it took the Philippines from Spain). Neither did it incorporate the native American tribes. Their land was “bought,” and they were driven from their lands, finally ending up in extraterritorial reservations. Alexis de Tocqueville, a profound admirer of American democracy, who, in December 1831, witnessed the deportation of the Chactas Indians, denounced the silent extermination that went on behind a juridical façade, writing that “the Americans of the United States, more humane, more moderate, more respectful of the law and legality [than the Spaniards in South America], never bloodthirsty, are more profoundly destructive of their race [Chactas tribe] and it is beyond doubt that in one hundred years there will remain in North America not one single tribe, nor even one single man, belonging to the most remarkable of the Indian races.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, “Contre le génocide des Indiens d’Amérique,” in Textes essentiels, Anthologie critique par J.-L. Benoît, (Paris: Havas, 2000), 305.)

Chapter 2

Comparing Western and Russian Legitimation Theories for Empire

Imperial rule needs legitimation. But it would be an exaggeration to state that imperialist rule always needs legitimation. In the first phases of modern imperialism territorial expansion just happened. Often it could not even be called imperialism, especially when expansion took place in empty territories where no native populations lived that could be subdued. However, it was a different matter when imperialist expansion implied wars of conquest, as in South America where the Spanish conquistadores conducted bloody wars against the indigenous Indian populations. It is, therefore, no coincidence that “Spain was the only conquering country . . . that asked itself questions about its capacity and the legality to exercise its rights and dominate other peoples.”^[1]

Imperialist Legitimation Theories: Christianity, a Superior Civilization, and the White Man’s Burden