Lynne and I are planning a trip to Russia. More precisely we are going on a cruise through the Baltic Sea. The most important stops will be in Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Copenhagen. We’ve talked some very dear friends into going with us, or rather I have. Of the four of us I think I am probably the most excited. It will be expensive, more than we normally spend on vacations so I hope I haven’t oversold the trip. I don’t think I have. This cruise gets uniformly rave reviews, we have chosen a ship that has a wonderful reputation, the Baltic is a part of the world none of us have ever seen and the idea of enjoying seven days of luxury while we tour several really beautiful cities appeals to us all.
It’s the stop in St. Petersburg that has most captured my imagination. In preparation I have been reading up on things Russian. I know a lot of the names: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin; Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak and Dostoyevsky. I’ve even thought I knew a little about them, but these past few months have been an opportunity to find out how little I knew. It’s been enlightening. It’s also been depressing. Russia has been an unhappy place for many of its people for much of its history. It’s a dark and somber story and in reading one gets a sense of foreboding as the twentieth century approaches. It’s a justified foreboding. It was a hard century for Russians. Still, the story of the Czars helps explain the great political drama of my lifetime, the Cold War. I think the Russian Revolution holds some lessons for us in the conflicts of the current day too. Muslim radicals aren’t the first of the world’s ideological zealots, or necessarily the worst.
Russian writers are indisputably among the world’s best.
War and Peace is commonly regarded the greatest novel ever written. I wouldn’t go that far but I count it among the ones I’m really glad I read. Dostoyevsky has made me think about criminals and society in ways I might never have. For Christmas Lynne gave me a copy of the DVD
Dr. Zhivago. I had forgotten what a wonderful love story that is, and how beautiful Julie Christie is.
In what follows I’ve attempted to capture a glimpse of Russia and her most important or most interesting figures, or at least those I think are the most interesting. I’m not an historian. I won’t even try to cover everything. If I’ve missed crucial characters or events it’s because I’m trying to keep this short and sweet, or maybe because I just missed them. Lynne and I will only be there a few days. We will try to hit the high points.
We won’t do everything we would like. We won’t go to Moscow. With only three days in St. Petersburg we don’t want to take the travel time for a side trip. Maybe someday we’ll go back. I would like to retrace Catherine II’s famous winter trip by sleigh to Kiev, and her river excursion the following spring down the Dnepr to Sevastopol. Fat chance; we’re lucky to be doing this much. That isn’t a complaint. This will be a trip to remember. We’ll be retracing the routes the Vikings took on their raids, without the danger of course. We’ll see cities that prospered under the Hanseatic League while we read our guidebooks to remember what the Hanseatic League was. We’ll see the great hall in Stockholm where Albert Einstein got his Nobel Prize for Physics and the statue of the little mermaid in Copenhagen’s harbor in honor of Hans Christian Andersen. I’ll buy illustrated copies of his work for my grandchildren.
Most of all though; I’ll be thinking about the Russians
Potemkin’s TriumphPrince Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin is remembered for the term that will forever bear his name. A Potemkin village is
“a pretentiously showy or imposing façade intended to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.” It dates from Catherine II’s 1787 tour down the Dnepr and Potemkin’s alleged construction of cardboard villages along the banks to impress her. It was a lie, a malicious slander told by an otherwise insignificant German diplomat envious of his betters. The villages were real.
Potemkin spruced them up true enough. There was fresh paint everywhere in honor of the event. Village idiots were kept from view. Peasant girls and boys in holiday costume lined the banks and waved to the Czarina. Russian cavalry in spiffy new uniforms drilled on the plains. It was one of the grandest river processions the world has ever seen, surpassing even Cleopatra’s trip up the Nile aboard her royal barge to show Egypt off to her new lover, and Julius Caesar to Egypt. Of course it was grand. It was no ordinary inspection tour. They were celebrating the fulfillment of a dream that consumed Russia’s two most important Czars for the better part of a century.
Peter I established a toehold on the Black Sea early in his reign but was unable to hold it. He turned north to found St. Petersburg, replace Swedish hegemony in the Baltic region with Russian, and make his country a naval power. But that was only half the dream. His ultimate goal was to reopen trade routes from the Baltic to the Caspian and Black Seas that had been lost to Russia for a half millennium. Catherine’s ambition went even further. She wanted nothing less than to drive Turks completely out of Southern Europe, recapture Constantinople, and install her second grandson on the Byzantine throne as Roman Emperor. In preparation she named the boy Constantine, surrounded him with friends, tutors, and things Greek and tasked Potemkin to complete the project.
Potemkin failed in the final part of his mission. He commanded what may have been the finest army of its day but his navy was second behind the British. His most important admirals were themselves British. Constantinople could not be taken without a commanding naval presence in the Dardanelles so when Britain let it be known she would go to war rather than allow Russia to control the Bosporus that part of the dream was blocked, though some Russians maintain it today. The prince accomplished enough to secure Russia’s position as a great power in the 19th century however, and a super power in the 20th. His crowning achievements were annexing the Crimea and founding the Russian Black Sea fleet. That’s what Catherine’s trip was all about. For the first time since Batu Khan annihilated the population of Russia’s ancient capital at Kiev and established the rule of the Golden Horde it was possible to travel safely through a single political dominion by river, with a short portage or two, all the way from the Baltic to the Caspian and Black Seas, a voyage several thousand miles shorter and a great deal less dangerous than the same trip by sea. Most important, Russia had a long sought warm water port at Sevastopol.
Other Czars added to Russian territory. One even triumphed over Napoleon but only Peter and Catherine are remembered as “the Great.” Peter defeated Sweden’s Charles XII in the Great Northern War and transformed Russia into a European power. Catherine went on to make her a world power and owes no small part of her place in history to Grigori Potemkin. Cardboard villages indeed!
The RusLynne and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary with our first cruise, through the Greek Isles from Athens to Istanbul. On return I commented to an acquaintance that I thought the former capital of the Byzantine Empire might be the most beautiful city I had ever seen. She said she had never heard of Byzantium. I insisted she had; she just didn’t remember. The city’s old name was Constantinople and its most important legacy is the Orthodox Church. I could have added that Byzantium played an important role in the birth of Russia.
We Americans think of ourselves as heirs to Greeks and Romans, and of Western Europeans as cousins in that regard. There is a branch of the family we sometimes forget. Russians may have missed a reunion or two but they can trace their lineage to similar roots. Russia began much as modern America did, as a trading outpost. It was a time when the most profitable trade to be had was with Byzantium, the surviving half of the Roman Empire. The earliest Russians were Varangian Vikings who sailed up the Neva, found a suitable site and settled at Novgorod early in the 9th century A.D. They were among the hardiest sailors of their day but the trip by sea around the great European peninsula to Constantinople was difficult even for them. Being Vikings they explored the rivers and found an alternate route. A manageable portage took them to the Volga from where they could float down to the Caspian and find ready markets for honey, furs, and slaves. An even better route was down the Dnepr to the Black Sea. The Rus, as Byzantines called them, soon moved their capital to Kiev, a natural redoubt overlooking the Dnepr.
Kiev served as the principal trading center in Russia for almost four hundred years. In 988 the entire population was baptized in the river en masse. By the 13th century it was a thriving city of 50,000 people and 400 churches. London was less than half its size. Then the Mongols came. Batu Khan destroyed Kiev in 1240 and exterminated its people. Russian rulers were banished to gloomy Moscow and forced to pay tribute to the Golden Horde. The country was left all but land locked with its only port at icy Archangel on the Arctic Ocean. Russians entered their own dark ages in near total isolation. The old trade routes were closed for the next five centuries.
They weren’t forgotten. Peter I and Catherine II both thought of them as Russia’s heritage and her ticket to glory. As a young Czar Peter tried to enlist support from Austria and France to reopen them but the great power maneuvering that would lead to two twentieth century world wars was already in full sway and Peter was a novice in that arena. He would have to make Russia a force to be reckoned with before he could expect to be taken seriously. He did that and brought Russia back half circle in taking Baltic hegemony from Swedish successors to the Vikings. Catherine set out to complete the task and took her entire court, including the diplomatic corps, by sleigh from St. Petersburg to spend the winter of 1787 in Kiev. That spring she went on her triumphant river flotilla down the Dnepr to the fortress Potemkin had prepared for her at Sevastopol.
Together the two autocrats took Russia from backwater to center stage in a single century. They were following a path blazed for them nearly a millennium earlier by their Viking forebears searching for easy routes to trade with Greeks who called themselves Romans.
Peter I
The most important Romanov probably wasn’t Romanov at all. He bore no filial resemblance to his legal father and there was no height to speak of in the line. Peter stood nearly seven feet tall in his boots but before that became apparent Alexei was dead and Peter was Czar. It was not an easy transition but not because of questionable parentage. He had a demented older half brother and an ambitious half sister with plans of her own for the throne. Had the Czarevna Sophia been just a little more ruthless Peter might never have become “the Great.”
She did manage to install the dim witted Ivan (no, not the Terrible, that was his ancestor) as “co-Czar” and supplant Peter’s mother, Nataliya Naryshkina, as Regent but in the event she was neither quite ruthless enough nor ultimately smart enough to make it stick. Peter was only ten years old and three weeks into his reign when Sophia’s allies in the palace guard staged a bloody rampage through the Kremlin. That was 1682. Nataliya had no choice but to accept new arrangements and retire with her son into effective house arrest. Big mistake, when you overthrow a king you don’t make him a prince. You cut off his head.
Peter spent most of his adolescence playing soldier, harmless enough in Sophia’s view, and in the process recruited live troops for his games. By the time his sister realized the danger Peter had built a well trained regiment loyal to himself. Sophia arranged to have him assassinated but Peter got wind of it and fled in a panic. His “toy” regiment came to his rescue and helped him stage a counter coup, seven years after the original. This time it was Sophia and the hapless Ivan who were exiled to the hinterlands, permanently. Nataliya returned to power. The young Czar would not enjoy complete autonomy until her death in 1696.
Peter’s claim to greatness rests with the establishment of Russia as a dominant power in Northern Europe, the construction of St. Petersburg as his capital city, Russia’s “window on Europe,” the founding of the Russian navy, and reforms in society that would transform the nation. Like many personages who might be called “great,” there is a dark side to his character. Peter was often crude and cruel in his personal relationships. He had the sexual discretion of a goat and could be positively bestial in his revenge on those who crossed him, even having his son and heir tortured to death. The Czarevitch Alexis never shared his father’s vision for a new Russia and plotted against him. Some historians think Peter took a direct hand in tormenting Alexis but it was his treatment of Russia’s serfs that really taints his legacy. It sowed seeds that would produce a terrible harvest two centuries later.
At a time when the rest of Europe was slowly emerging from feudalism, Peter’s reforms only made the plight of Russia’s peasants worse, and they were 85% of the population. In order to find new sources of revenue Peter removed the serfs’ bonds from the land and tied them directly to the landlord. He then taxed the gentry on the number of souls they possessed. Serfs became slaves in all but name. They could be and commonly were bought and sold as family units. St. Petersburg is said to have been built on the bones of forced laborers. Precious few Russians would ever see much benefit from Peter’s reforms or from Russia’s enhanced place in the world. Tolstoy relates a story of a hunting party a hundred years after Peter. A prize hound had been purchased in exchange for a family of serfs. The tale resonated among the grandchildren of serfs in 1917.
Catherine II
Catherine the Great wasn’t a Romanov either. She married into the family. A minor German princess who happened to attract the attention of the Empress Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Peter the Great, she was never supposed to be in charge, just provide the dynasty with an heir. Her name wasn’t even Catherine. It was Sophie.. Elizabeth was concerned with her father’s legacy and had chosen one of his grandsons, Peter III, to be her own successor. Her nephew needed a wife, enter Sophie. Over her Lutheran father’s objections, Sophie accepted the betrothal, changed her name (Sophia had been the first Peter’s half sister and rival) and joined the Russian Orthodox Church
There were problems. Peter III was impotent when he married, or nearly so, and a mental juvenile for all his life. It was several years before the marriage was consummated, much to Elizabeth’s chagrin not to mention Catherine’s. The young husband eventually had surgery to correct his sexual dysfunction and the couple did produce an heir, though there is some question about parentage. Peter and Catherine were increasingly estranged and they both took lovers, in Catherine’s case a lifelong succession of lovers that would become the scandal of Europe and probably the most remembered feature of her legacy.
Though they were both raised as Germans, the two could not have been more different. Catherine immersed herself in Russian history, language, religion, and culture. When Peter became Czar he tried to make over both the court and the military in the German style. Worse, at the time of his accession Russia was at war with Prussia and on the brink of a hard won victory. Russians had occupied Berlin and Frederick II (who was not yet the Great) was on the ropes, barely holding on to a tiny remnant of his army. Peter immediately called a halt to hostilities and returned to Frederick all the gains the Russian army had won at fearful cost. He did not make a lot of friends in his own capital. It soon became clear that Peter was planning to have his wife killed so he could marry his mistress. Catherine had no trouble finding allies and it was Peter who forfeited his life.
If any Russian ruler was an intellectual it was Catherine. She was quite well read and from the time she was a young bride carried on a voluminous correspondence with the leading thinkers of the day. She became veritable pen pals with Voltaire, the encyclopedist Diderot, and even Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson recommended the naval hero John Paul Jones to her when the American Revolution ended and Jones found himself out of work. (It didn’t work out. With a number of English admirals in the Russian fleet there was little room for an American. It was sad chapter for Jones.) She was also a prodigious builder and art collector. She made St. Petersburg into one of the world’s most beautiful cities and her principle residence, the Hermitage, is today probably second only to the Louvre in prestige among the world’s art museums.
As with her predecessor, Peter I, the plight of Russia’s serfs represents a major blot on Catherine’s legacy. It didn’t start out like that. She began her reign as probably the most liberal monarch in Europe. Voltaire’s influence did have its effect. But early on she was shocked at the brutality of a peasant revolt and put it down with a ruthlessness that would have made Ivan the Terrible proud. Toward the end of her life the excesses of the French Revolution ended any thought of reform in Russia. Even emancipation in 1861 didn’t really set serfs free. When revolution came in 1917 Russian peasants were if anything more oppressed than descendents of slaves in the American south.
The Last Czar
Nicholas II was a fool. So was Alexandra, his wife. Historians often treat them sympathetically as a genteel and decent couple. They can also be painted as modern Neros, fiddling while Russia burned. On Bloody Sunday in 1906 the Czar prohibited a planned march to the Winter Palace where demonstrators wanted to present a petition. Nicholas went hunting while troops fired into an unarmed and peaceful crowd. His diary that day noted who came to tea. Some call it the beginning of the Russian Revolution. Eleven years later he would abdicate, but adjourn for lunch before signing the document.
Nicholas had not the intelligence, the political skill, nor the temperament to lead an empire in crisis, but saw it as his God given right and duty to rule as an autocrat, swearing at his coronation to do just that. Alexandra encouraged her husband to govern personally, in the style of Ivan the Terrible. He didn’t even think he needed a competent bureaucracy to administer one of the largest nations on earth. On the contrary he thought his constant meddling in governmental minutia strengthened his role as a monarch. He was easily manipulated with flattery. The joke was that the most powerful man in Russia was the last man to have spoken with the Czar.
It is often said that a war’s losers learn the most; not so Nicholas. Russia’s shocking defeat at the hands of upstart Japan in 1905 occasioned only greater emphasis on cavalry, the glamorous kind with galloping horses and flashing sabers. What should have been a wake up call to prepare for the horrific war to come was met with a slap at the snooze button. Russia entered WWI nine years later with no armaments industry to speak of and few competent planners or technicians. These were not new issues in military circles. Cyrus the Great captured Babylon by diverting the Euphrates. Russians in 1914 couldn’t build trenches. They quickly became deathtraps. Napoleon canned sardines for his troops. Nicholas could not even manufacture leather; the necessary chemicals were mostly imported from Germany. The newly mobilized army went to the front without boots. Transport was so primitive as to cede a huge advantage to the Central Powers. Military strategists have a wonderful phrase for it, “interior lines.” It meant Germans could quickly move troops and supplies to critical points. Russians could not.
Russian Generals were among the most inept of the war. Nicholas went to the front as Commander-in-Chief and proved the most inept of all, unable to judge a state of morale so low as to bring his army to the point of collapse. Of all the horrors of the Great War, Russian troops may have seen the worst. But Nicholas’ presence at the front may have been less important than his absence at home. He effectively left the government in the hands of Alexandra, an even worse administrator and herself under the thrall of the bizarre Rasputin. Things at home weren’t going much better than at the front. The diversion of transport to support the army was producing shortages in the cities, shortages added grist to an already rampant rumor mill, and unrest built on unrest. In the end a bread riot in St. Petersburg brought down the government and with it the monarchy.
That was February, 1917. A year and a half later Nicholas, Alexandra and all their children were dead. Nicholas never saw it coming. He thought to the end the Russian people loved him. They didn’t. The revolt quickly spread to the countryside where the peasantry joined in with a vengeance not seen even in France over a century before. Like most of the Romanovs Nicholas II was an unconscionable despot. Unlike some of them he was an incompetent despot. Genteel and decent my foot, the peasants hated him.
Grigorii RasputinOf all the characters in Russian history he was among the strangest and most improbable. That he is there at all owes to the Czarina’s belief that he was a faith healer, able to miraculously cause her hemophiliac son to recover from his periodic bouts of uncontrollable bleeding. During a particularly bad episode in 1905 doctors told the family to prepare for the worst, the Czarevitch was dying. Alexandra wired Rasputin in desperation. Rasputin wired back not to worry. He had a vision. The boy would recover. Alexis did recover and the hook was set. Alexandra could refuse Rasputin nothing and, since the Czar could refuse his wife nothing, neither could Nicholas. Low born Orthodox priest Rasputin became the most powerful man in Russia save the Czar himself.
He is usually described has having greasy black hair and beard, piercing black eyes, often wearing a dirty cassock. The hypnotic effect of his eyes may have accounted for his early reputation as a faith healer. Photographs show an unkempt man of small stature with a wild look in his eye that reminds me of Charles Manson. Tales of his lechery are exaggerated but the truth is wild enough. Modern historians say he was likely a mediocre lover and almost certainly bisexual. He apparently had a taste for group sex and flagellation. His assassin was a young homosexual noble who may have been motivated in part by Rasputin’s attempts to seduce him. Rumors that he had bedded the Czarina are usually discounted. Alexandra was a straight laced prude (she was raised in England by her grandmother Queen Victoria) who saw sex as a reproductive necessity and a not particularly pleasant wifely duty.
Until his death in 1916 Rasputin enjoyed the best society had to offer in St. Petersburg. Hostesses sought him out for parties. Women flocked around him. Powerful men were all too ready to grant him favors and ask for favors in return. At his whim he could and did get bureaucrats and government ministers appointed and dismissed. The same was true for teachers, army officers, even operatic divas and prima ballerinas.
Rasputin’s direct contribution to the Czar’s downfall probably wasn’t that great, though his meddling in the state machinery certainly didn’t make it any more efficient. The Czar himself had twenty years of his own meddling to undermine it and it had never been strong to begin with. As wartime conditions worsened in the capital there was no effective government to deal with crises. At a time when there was food in the countryside people in the city were going hungry. There was no fuel for heating in winter. Police were poorly organized and their loyalty had been on the wane since 1906. Banking was a shambles. The institutions to control a vast empire just weren’t there. When revolution finally came the regime wasn’t really toppled. It fell apart.
In that environment Rasputin did the most damage as a lightening rod for the rumor mill. Conspiracy theories were rampant and the priest’s escapades fueled the flames. He and the Czarina (the “German woman”) were thought to be sabotaging the war effort. They were blamed for food shortages. Tales of orgies were so widely believed they became a major source of revulsion even among the well to do. When Bolsheviks came to power after October 1917, they conducted extensive investigations into Rasputin’s behavior. When the wildest stories turned out not to be true they suppressed the news. Rasputin remained an invaluable propaganda tool as civil war raged long after the Czar had been shot.
Revolution and Civil War
Like the French, the Russian revolution was un-planned and largely unexpected. There was no coup, no rebel army marching triumphantly into the capital, not even a takeover of the telephone exchange at first. Vladimir Lenin was in exile. Bolsheviks weren’t prepared for it. Neither were Mensheviks or any of the other underground political parties. It began with a food riot in St. Petersburg. The government fell in a matter of days. Police didn’t even try to maintain order. Soldiers and sailors from local garrisons sided with demonstrators. Troops sent from outside the city to regain control refused to obey orders. That was February 1917. What followed in St. Petersburg was eight months of near chaos. A provisional government formed but had little authority or popular support. Socialist parties did have broad appeal, at least in the city, but were not prepared to govern and stayed to one side.
Socialist ideals had been gaining ground in Russia since the 1870s. Bolshevik and Menshevik parties had formed at an early Marxist party congress held in exile in Brussels in 1903. They split over membership credentials. Lenin led the faction that carried the vote, hence the term Bolshevik. It means the majority. After that the two groups slowly diverged over doctrine with Mensheviks, the minority, holding the dogmatic view that Russia’s agrarian peasantry was not ready for Marxism. A period of adjustment would be required. Bolsheviks agreed about the peasants but were more willing to impose Marxism by force. When the revolution came none of them were ready. They didn’t have the party organization in place, didn’t even fully understand what had happened. Lenin rushed back and argued for Bolshevik advocacy of two principles that would ultimately sweep them into power; an immediate end to the war, and redistribution of the gentry’s land to peasants in the countryside. He never intended to actually carry through with either policy. The pretense would be enough. None of the other parties would go that far.
The provisional government proved unable to maintain order. Conditions in the capital went from bad to worse. So did the situation at the front. Factory workers and military garrisons quickly organized themselves into democratic soviets and elected spokesmen. So did towns and villages across Russia and even armies at the front though the war ground on. Village soviets took advantage of a power vacuum and confiscated land from their former masters. Factory soviets ousted their managers and voted themselves large pay raises. Military soviets shot their commanders and refused to fight. Mensheviks temporized, still insisting on their doctrinaire need for a period of capitalism to prepare for a Marxist state.
Lenin began to call for a Bolshevik takeover. By October he was ready. This time you could call it a coup. The cruiser Aurora moved up the Neva and shelled government offices in the Winter Palace. The few remaining guards melted away. Bolsheviks occupied the telephone exchange and took over what there was of a government, not to be ousted until 1989. The revolution was over. The Civil War hadn’t yet begun.
The German army began to advance against little resistance. Only the winter restrained them, that and the urgent need to transfer troops to the Western front. By February of 1918 they looked ready to occupy St. Petersburg. Lenin evacuated his fledgling government to Moscow and sued for peace, finally settling for humiliating terms, ceding much of Russia’s European Empire to Germany, or to independence, much of it short lived. Gone were Poland, Finland, and for a time the Ukraine and the Baltic states. But Lenin shared with his Czarist predecessors a vision of a greater Russia, and in those days the even larger ambition of a world workers revolution to impose a global Marxist state with Russia at his head. “Workers of the world unite!” The man could dream. He was only bowing to the exigencies of the moment in yielding to Germans. He would soon regain most of the old Czarist Empire. Only Poland and Finland were lost for very long. The rest would be regained in the bloody Civil War that came next.
And bloody it was. Reds and Whites alike brutalized village after village, town after town. Both armies alienated the populations under their control by heavy handed conscription, forced food requisitions that left people to starve, outright rape and pillage, and terror campaigns to eliminate any hint of opposition. In the end it may have been the symbols that made the difference, that and propaganda. The Bolsheviks adopted red, the color of the revolution. The implication was that Whites were the counter revolution. Bad as Reds were, to peasants the thought of returning land to the gentry, and the retribution that would surely follow, was enough to rally them to Reds when the chips were down. Whites denied that was their intent but halfheartedly, and with their leadership ranks filled with the son’s of disenfranchised landlords their protestations weren’t believable. Whites wouldn’t even pay lip service to nationalist aspirations of their natural allies in the non-Russian provinces of the empire. In the end their loyalty went to the Reds too, in the naïve belief that Reds could be trusted.
The bloodshed was never the sort characterized by the American Civil War, with disciplined armies slugging it out over set battlefields. Both Reds and Whites were prone to rout when serious opposition appeared. Pitched battles were a rarity. It was the hapless citizenry that suffered most under ruthless commissars, poorly disciplined troops, and brutal police units. Heaven help the sick and wounded often left behind to be captured and tortured. One motive for many of the troops to fight at all was the knowledge of what would happen if they were taken alive. The Czar and his family were lucky. They were merely shot. A favorite execution in winter was to strip a victim naked and pour water over him until the poor devil became a human ice sickle. Others methods were worse.
The sheer scale of Russian misery during and immediately after the civil war was about as bad as history has to offer. St. Petersburg’s population declined by three quarters. Those who were left spent almost all their time and energy searching for food. Horses, dogs, and even vermin disappeared. People dropped dead in the streets from typhus. Their bodies were left there for lack of means to carry them off. The smell of death hung over the city. Vacant buildings were torn down for firewood. Conditions were even worse in parts of the countryside. Army requisitions of horses left farmers with no means to plow. Food confiscations left not enough grain for seed in any case. Starvation became rampant. Cannibals even posed for gruesome photographs with their victims.
Not everyone suffered of course. Bolshevik party members fared pretty well. A Red Army soldier’s daily ration was an effective recruiting tool. Some regions were far enough from the fighting to escape the worst of the effects.
Through all of this the Bolsheviks slowly gained firm control. Lenin established the Cheka, the secret police which would be the principle instrument of the Red Terror and ultimately become the MKVD. Arbitrary arrest and execution became standard fare. No one was safe. Even Trotsky worried about his personal security. So did everyone else save maybe Lenin himself. By the time the Civil War was over in 1921 there was only one political party in Russia, the Communist, nee Bolshevik.
The Communists
Lenin, even from exile the intellectual leader of the Bolsheviks, ultimately became undisputed dictator. Leon Trotsky, originally a Menshevik, was second in influence until Joseph Stalin surpassed him in about 1921. Trotsky was a better public speaker than Lenin and was more effective at rousing popular support. Stalin, a Georgian, proved the most adept at getting his own loyalists installed in key posts. He succeeded Lenin on his death in 1924 and forced Trotsky into exile in 1929. Trotsky went on to write several scathing critiques including The Revolution Betrayed and History of the Russian Revolution. He was assassinated in Mexico in 1945. Stalin proved even more ruthless than Lenin, remaining in power through a famous series of purges, show trials, and mass deportations spanning three decades, and the staggering calamity of WWII.
For centuries under the Czars Russia was a desperate place to live for all but a privileged few. From 1914 until Stalin’s death in 1953 it was an absolute hell hole. Nobody knows how many died but it was millions in WWI, more millions in the Civil War, even more millions under Stalin and an estimated twenty million in WWII. The Czars were bad but life in Russia was far worse under communists. One of today’s more enduring mysteries is that so many well educated and idealistic Americans held up the Stalinist model as a workers paradise and wanted to copy it in the United States. Some still do. To them the arch villain of the early 1950s wasn’t Stalin. It was Joe McCarthy, who never sent anybody to jail let alone had them shot.
Maybe it’s because in the beginning the Russian communists were utopian idealists too. Their vision was summed up in the credo “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” Who can argue with that? The problem of course is that given a choice, human nature dictates the pursuit of personal goals, sometimes in conflict with the perceived interest of the group. So the communists set out to change human nature. The tried to wipe out religion, branded it “the opiate of the masses,” closed churches, looted them of precious icons, and arrested priests.
Many were shot. They tried to change the family relationship, required parents to dedicate their children to the state. They indoctrinated children to set aside personal ambition in favor of the common good. They liberalized divorce laws and encouraged women to free themselves from their traditional roles. The state would raise the children. When people resisted many more were arrested, exiled to Siberia, or shot. When nationalism got in the way Stalin tried to stamp it out too. He prohibited the use of local languages and moved whole populations around in an attempt to create a homogeneous ethnic mix. Those were the infamous mass deportations. More people starved, more were arrested, exiled, and shot. Lenin reneged on the promise of land redistribution that brought Bolsheviks to power, claimed state ownership of all land and instituted the large scale farming commune. Most of them were run by party favorites who knew nothing about agriculture. They were a colossal failure.
All these things and more were justified under the mantra “the end justifies the means.” The early communists genuinely believed in their vision of humanity. They thought they really were building a workers’ paradise. They were convinced that it was only the backwardness of the Russian people that kept them from seeing it too. The people would just have to be led or dragged along. They were wrong. Nothing justified the immense suffering inflicted on the Russian people.
End of Empire
It is ironic that of the world’s great empires the last to fall was Russian. That it fell with so little violence is astonishing. In the end, like its Czarist predecessor, the USSR wasn’t really toppled. It disintegrated. I doubt there will ever be another empire. Those days are over, snide accusations of American imperialism notwithstanding.
It’s been sixteen years since Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank in Moscow and made the speech that symbolized the Soviet Union’s collapse. The red flag with the gold star, hammer and cycle, so familiar for much of my life, was nowhere to be seen. In its place was a red white and blue tricolor in horizontal stripes most of us would still not recognize. We don’t know for sure what sorts of nations have emerged. Most of the European members of the old Warsaw Pact have been admitted or at least applied for membership to NATO and the European Union. Even some of the old Soviet Socialist Republics have followed suit. Russia has objected but not all that strenuously. One is left to wonder why she objects at all; why she doesn’t apply for membership herself.
She may yet. The communists got one reform right that Peter I and his successors all missed. They taught everybody to read. Russia is no longer the backward peasant society it was when Bolsheviks took over. I suspect most Russians today are driven by the same concerns that drive their neighbors to the west, the same concerns that have always driven most of them. They are principally economic and personal or family oriented. The difference is that a literate society better understands what those concerns are, can articulate them better, and has a better idea how to satisfy them. Now that they are former communists Russians may finally be ready to look west again, as Peter did, to see what actually works.
The Cold War effectively ended when Russia replaced the USSR at the UN Security Council in 1991. The next year Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous essay
The End of History and the Last Man. He argued that man’s search for a governing ideology was over and liberal democracy had won. All the other systems had failed. What remained of them were last vestiges. Gone were monarchy, fascism, communism, and empire. The first man tried to subdue his fellow in order to satisfy his own desires. He could not win unless his competitor lost. The last man could cooperate with others to mutual benefit. Only liberal democracy with its property rights, minority protections, and rule of law offered that possibility. Samuel Huntington argued a year later in
A Clash of Civilizations? that the post Cold War world was settling out along cultural fault lines with distinct religious orientations. Fukuyama was premature.
I think Fukuyama got it right. The only remaining religious fault line that seriously threatens world order is that between Muslim radicals and their neighbors. It may be true that many Muslims find the idea of a new caliphate attractive but as a system of government that failed centuries ago. The caliphate was essentially an empire, actually a series of empires for all their history in a constant state of war. Like all the other empires they ultimately proved incapable of satisfying the needs of their people. That isn’t a failure of religion. It’s a failure of government. In order to prosper and be truly happy neighbors must be free to disagree without coming to blows, all of the neighbors. That’s what the communists discovered and it’s what thinking Muslims already know. The days of totalitarianism and subjugation are over. So are the days of empire.
