Medieval Times

Yurev's vision of the Third Empire requires a complete reorganization of the planet along two guiding principles:  gigantism and medievalism.  Medievalism characterizes the Empire itself, while gigantism encompasses both the Empire and the rest of the world. Both principles reflect an imagination that is as limited as it is imperialist.

The Third Empire's medieval structure is the source of the book's fame (or notoriety, depending on one's political affiliations).   The book takes place in the future, but this is a future baed on a scientific and social speculation that can only be called impoverished. Scientific progress certainly exists, but it consists of  futuristic technology whose sole purpose is to dispel the obvious concerns about the Empire's feasibility. How does the Empire defeat the West?  It creates a super-weapon.  How does the State ensure that those responsible for maintaining order are trustworthy rather than corrupt?  Russian scientists invent a process called a "tech interrogation" that uses an infallible truth serum.  These inventions are brought into the narrative not as a result of extrapolation from scientific trends, but as convenient ways to dispense with two of the most common utopian conundrums:  How do we get from here to there (answer:  miraculous scientific weapons!), and, to paraphrase Juvenal and Alan Moore, "Who watches the watchmen?" (answer: drugs!). 

All technological innovations in the novel are in the service of making the Third Empire's New Medievalism possible. Yurev's future entails rejecting virtually every feature developed by liberal democracy since the Enlightenment; indeed, it rejects the Enlightenment itself. There can be no state institutions that are in any way based on regularly assessing the will of the people as a whole, because the polity itself is redefined. First Gavril convinces a willing Russian populace to abolish the presidency in favor of an imperial autocracy, somehow using this one last popular vote to set up an institution whose authority would no longer be beholden to the will of the people. This is not without precedent; the Romanov dynasty began with the election of the new tsar by a national assembly of nobles in 1613. Yurev, however, creates a polity that is not rooted in nobility.  Instead, the Third Empire is based on a very narrow slice of medieval Russian history: the oprichnina.

The oprichnina, which lasted for only seven years in the late sixteenth century, looms large over Russian history. Instituted by Ivan the Terrible at the height of his paranoia, the oprichnina was a response to his conviction that the aristocracy was plotting to overthrow him. The oprichnina was both a territory administrated under different rules from the rest of Russia and the system that made this territory possible. Ivan wanted to be free of what he felt were the onerous restrictions that prevented him from prosecuting the traitors he was sure surrounded him. The result was a reign of terror against nobles he accused of treason, conducted by a special guard unit that reported directly to him. Where liberals see the oprichnina as the earliest instantiation of the repressive forces that periodically dominate throughout Russian history, conservatives and traditionalists view the oprichnina as the kind of extralegal force for truth and justice that can only prosper in a harmonious, undemocratic system unconstrained by petty procedure. In the face of widespread corruption and self-interest, the oprichnina is a model for dispensing with the complexities of liberal institutions that promise fairness, but cannot deliver.

This is one of the main aspects of the oprichnina that Yurev develops in The Third Empire:  the new oprichnina is a set of anti-institutional institutions.  Nothing about the system Yurev describes would reassure the individual looking for procedural guarantees of justice and fairness.  Instead, the reintroduction of what is essentially an estate system treats people in their aggregates, according to the category in which they are  classified.  This is certainly the case with the nations the Third Empire eventually conquers:  everyone's status upon incorporation within the Empire depends on their national/ethnic classification, with little room for exceptions on an individual basis. The Third Empire even returns to Stalinist notions of collective justice, with entire peoples being exiled and resettled according to imperial policy.  In the case of the oprichniki, this is the class of people who are allowed to vote and take part in political life, but accept other restrictions to their personal liberty for the sake of the imperial good. The lack of consideration for the individual is precisely the sort of thing that one would expect from The Third Empire if it were a dystopia, but it is precisely the book's nature as an anti-liberal, anti-democratic utopia that renders individualism alien and undesirable.

This emphasis on the group over the individual is not simply a rejection of liberalism; it is something that replicates itself throughout The Third Empire on every scale.  In Yurev's utopia, size is everything.  The Empire has no patience for dealing with small political or national units.  This is where Yurev's Huntingtonism comes in: the entire world ends up divided into megastates, empires whose internal composition and political structure may differ vastly from those of the Third Empire, but share with it the aesthetic and ideology of gigantism that animates the book.  The Americas are reconstituted as a superanational state united by cultural and religious ties, while most of Europe becomes part of the Third Empire.  The Vatican moves to North America, which is now primarily Catholic thanks to the subsuming of Protestantism back into the Catholic. Protestantism, with its proliferation of squabbling churches and doctrinal differences, has no place in this new world order.  The Islamic Khalifat, the Indian Confederation, and the Celestial Republic (I.e., China) round out the rest of the globe.

Yurev's neomedieval vision is civilizational, categorical, and antithetical to the varieties of pluralism that are inimical to his vision of empire.  What The Third Empire offers is a simple world, where deviation from the principle that guides a given civilization is at best superfluous and at worst pernicious.  This is not a Soviet future; even if we consider the Soviet Union to be an empire, it was built on the careful curation of accepted categories of difference, such as nationality and language.  But it is consistent with the kind of nostalgia that sees the Soviet past as proof against corruption, and as a time when people were united by a common ideal.  As Marielle WIjermars explains, "The oprichnina  [according to its adherents], able to cleanse the political system in a way that the system itself cannot, can move the state from its current state of degradation and stagnation towards innovation." [1]

New medievalism, like Soviet nostalgia, is a rejection of politics as such, imagining a harmonious world governed by a shared understanding of the social good.  It is a huge gamble, sacrificing any possibility for individual recourse or institutional checks and balances in favor of a system that will somehow inherently foster justice.  Who needs politics when you can make a blind leap of faith?

Note

[1]  Mariëlle Wijermars. Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia Television, Cinema and the State. Routledge, 2019.