The analysis—an avoidable war against a too-powerful Germany; Russia’s defeat; Russian elites heedlessly pressuring the autocracy only to be engulfed by extreme social revolution—was as hard-boiled as it was blunt. Nothing penned by Vladimir Lenin, not even his later celebrated polemic State and Revolution (August 1917), approached the clairvoyance of Durnovó. “Tsarism was victorious,” Lenin would write of the years prior to 1917. “All the revolutionary and opposition parties were smashed. Dejection, demoralization, schisms, discord, desertion, and pornography took the place of politics.”23 That was essentially correct as far as the revolutionaries went. But although the police had contained the revolutionary parties, the socialist militancy of the workers (revived during the Lena massacre of 1912) and especially the waves of peasant land-hunger unrest (which affected the army) constituted an ongoing, far greater threat. This was something the archconservative Durnovó saw better than the would-be professional revolutionaries. From 1900 through 1917, except for two years (1905–7), Lenin lived entirely outside Russia, mostly in Switzerland. Trotsky was in foreign exile from 1902 to 1903 and 1907 to 1917. Kamenev and Grigory Radomylsky (Zinoviev) each spent long stretches of the pre-1917 period in prison, Siberia, or Europe. The same was true of the diehard opponents of Lenin among the Social Democrats, such as Martov and Pavel Axelrod. Victor Chernov—the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Russia’s most populous party on the left—was in emigration without interruption from 1899 until 1917. Durnovó knew the tsarist system not from Geneva, Paris, or Berlin, but from the inside, and in particular from inside the interior ministry. He understood better than outsiders or even most insiders that the autocracy was hollowing out.24 Equally important, while members of Russia’s establishment dreaded a new “Pugachev-style” riot from below, Durnovó condemned Russia’s upper classes, especially the Constitutional Democrats, who pushed for political rights against the autocracy without realizing, as he saw it, that the militant masses would be incited to go much further and deluge them all.25
But what did the prescient Durnovó propose? Instead of autocratic Russia’s “unnatural alliance” with parliament-ruled Britain, he was urging a birds-of-a-feather alliance with Germany, a conservative monarchy, as part of an eventual continental bloc that would also include France (somehow reconciled to Germany) and Japan.26 But how was that to happen? The German kaiser was set on imposing German control over the Turkish Straits, through which passed up to 75 percent of Russian grain exports, the key to the empire’s prosperity.27 Moreover, domestically, Durnovó inclined toward a new state of emergency, which he had enforced in 1905, but at the time of his memorandum, some two fifths of the Russian empire’s 130 million subjects already lived under martial law or special regime (“reinforced protection”). True to his principles, Durnovó had refused the temptation of a rightist populism to win over the peasants with property redistributions, not because, like most members of the State Council or Duma, he owned generous land allotments (he did not), but because he feared the disorder.28 Nor would he condemn democracy outright, allowing that it might be appropriate for some countries. Still, he argued that democracy would bring disintegration to Russia, which needed “firm authority.”29 But his strategy of keeping a lid on—retaining as much centralized power as possible, refusing cooperation with the Duma, waiting for a real autocrat to take charge—was a policy of stasis.30 He himself grasped the core dilemma: The government needed repression to endure, yet repression alienated ever more people, further narrowing the social base of the regime, thereby requiring still more repression. “We are in a blind alley,” Durnovó had lamented in 1912. “I fear that we all, along with the tsar, will not succeed in getting out.”31
If it came to war against Germany, not even the tsarist regime’s greatest living policeman could rescue the autocracy a second time.32 Stolypin, too, not just Durnovó, had been warning that another major war would “prove fatal for Russia and for the dynasty.”33 Durnovó understood, still more fundamentally, that a downfall during a world war would shape everything that followed.34 Just as he prophesied, the new war, against Germany, did become a revolutionary war, which did redound to the socialists, and did produce anarchy. “However paradoxical it sounds,” recalled the Menshevik Social Democrat Fyodor Gurvich (aka Fyodor Dan), “the extreme reactionaries in the Tsarist bureaucracy grasped the movement of forces and the social content of this coming revolution far sooner and better than all the Russian ‘professional revolutionaries.’”35
• • •
NOSTALGIA FOR TSARIST RUSSIA, however understandable, is misplaced: “constitutional autocracy” was never viable and not evolving into something better, and the development of civic associations could never substitute for Russia’s missing liberal political institutions or overcome the illiberal ones.36 When a rush of political parties had suddenly sprung into being, illegally, the leftist ones had come first: the Revolutionary Armenian Federation (Dashnaks) (1890), the Polish Socialist Party (1892), the Jewish Bund (1897), the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (1898), which split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (1903), the Jewish Social Democratic Workers’ Party or Poale-Zion (1900), the Socialist Revolutionary Party (1901). In 1905 were born the Constitutional Democrats or Cadets (classic liberals) and the Union of the Russian People (proto-fascists), among others.37 All of these organized parties, even the anti-socialists, were anathema to the autocracy, and the autocracy’s intransigence stamped them all, including the constitutionalists. The wartime radicalization would further tilt Russia’s peculiar political spectrum further left, while furnishing a cornucopia of violent practices. “The Bolshevik Revolution,” one scholar shrewdly observed, “fixed the near-ubiquitous, but transitory practices of the trans-European 1914–21 catastrophe as a permanent feature of the Soviet state.” Of course, as that scholar adds, those violent practices, that state building, would be driven by ideas.38 And not just any ideas, but visions of remaking everything, from top to bottom, ushering in the socialist kingdom of heaven on earth. The transcendentally powerful ideas, in turn, were carried forward by new people thrust onto the political landscape by revolution, such as Stalin.
For a Georgian from small-town Gori—via Tiflis, Chiatura, Baku, and Siberian exile—to rise anywhere near the summit of power, and seek to implement Marxist ideas, the whole world had to be brought crashing down. And it was. Stalin had little role in those momentous events. Unlike the wild years of 1905–8, or the period after March 1917, his life story from 1909 through early 1917 contains few moments of note. Most accounts either embroider these years, rendering them more dramatic than they were, or skip them. But this long stretch of time, in which Stalin did little or nothing, was colossally significant for Russia, and indeed the world. To make sense of Stalin’s role in the sudden, stunning episode of 1917, and above all to understand his entire later regime, the momentous history in which he had little noteworthy part must be described and analyzed in depth. But once Stalin did get near power, he battled indefatigably, like a man with a sense of destiny, and demonstrated revolutionary talents that proved especially apt in the Eurasian setting.
Modern revolutions are spectacular events, awesome in the millions who rise up and stake a claim to control their destiny, exhilarating in their new solidarities and sense of unlimited possibility. But revolutions are also signs of decay and breakdown, the cracking of one ruling system and the untidy formation of another. Whatever does or does not happen in the streets, the barracks, the factories, the fields, it is in the corridors of power, centrally and provincially, where the revolution finds an outcome. One must therefore study the high politics and the nitty-gritty of institutional formation, the practices and procedures of governance, the ways of thinking and being that inform the exercise of power. High politics is, of course, shaped by social forces, by the actions and aspirations of the broad masses, but politics is not reducible to the social. Indeed, although born of the most popular revolution in history, the new regime
in the former Russian empire became unaccountable to the people, and even to itself. A mass participatory revolutionary process not only can, but frequently does, culminate in a narrow regime, and not because the revolution has “degenerated,” or because good intentions and a good beginning are ruined by malefactors or unlucky circumstances, but because the international situation impinges at every turn, institutions are formed out of the shards of the old as well as the maw of the new, and ideas matter. Dictatorship can be seen by revolutionaries as criminal or as an invaluable tool; human beings can be seen as citizens or chattel, convertible foes or congenital enemies; private property can be seen as the cornerstone of freedom or of enslavement. A profound, genuine upsurge for social justice can—depending on the overarching ideas and accompanying practices—institutionalize the gravest injustices. A successful revolution can be a tragedy. But tragedies can still be grand geopolitical projects. Russia’s revolution became inseparable from long-standing dilemmas and new visions of the country as a great power in the world. That, too, would bring out Stalin’s qualities.
CHAPTER 5
STUPIDITY OR TREASON?
What is it, stupidity or treason? (A voice from the left: “Treason!” [Someone else]: “Stupidity!” Laughter.)
Paul Miliukov, leader of the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), speech in the Duma, November 19161
As a rule, a regime perishes not because of the strength of its enemies but because of the uselessness of its defenders.
Lev Tikhomirov, Russian conservative theorist, 19112
IN 1910, AFTER THEODORE ROOSEVELT met Kaiser Wilhelm II, the former American president (1901–9) confided in his wife, “I’m absolutely certain now, we’re all in for it.”3 After the death of the kaiser’s predecessor and grandfather (at age ninety-one), the inexperienced Wilhelm II had dismissed the seventy-five-year-old chancellor Otto von Bismarck.4 The young kaiser, who proved to be both arrogant and insecure, proceeded to plot coups against Germany’s constitution and parliament, and to engage in a blustering foreign policy, exacerbating the paradox of Bismarck’s unification: namely, that Germany seemed to threaten its neighbors while itself being vulnerable to those neighbors on two fronts. Wilhelm II—known as All Highest Warlord—had declined to renew Bismarck’s so-called German-Russian Reinsurance Treaty, thereby unwittingly spurring Russian reconciliation with France, and raising the prospect for Germany of a two-front war.5 Wilhelm II’s belated attempt to correct this mistake, by manipulating Nicholas II into the Treaty of Bjorko, had failed. Then there was the kaiser’s naval program. As of 1913, Britain accounted for 15 percent of international trade, but Germany came in second at 13 percent, and in this increasingly interdependent world of global trade, especially of vital food imports, Germany had every right to build a navy.6 But Wilhelm II and his entourage had unleashed a sixty-battleship fantasy for the North Sea.7 This had spurred Britain’s reconciliation with France—despite a near Franco-British war in 1898 over colonies—and even with autocratic Russia. “The kaiser is like a balloon,” Bismarck had once remarked. “If you do not hold fast to the string, you never know where he will be off to.”8
It took two to tango, however, and the “sun-never-sets” global position that Great Britain sought to defend was itself aggressive. Britain had reluctantly ceded naval hegemony in the Western hemisphere to the rising United States and in the Far East to upstart Japan, at least temporarily. (Even then, spending on the Royal Navy consumed one quarter of state revenue.) At the same time, British foreign policy had been most immediately fixated on containing perceived Russian threats to its empire in Persia, Central Asia, and China. Many viewed Russia, because of its European, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern geography, as the only potential global rival to Britain’s global empire.9 Still, even before the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907, the ascent of German power was the more immediate and explosive circumstance as far as the British were concerned. Anglo-German economic and cultural ties were strong.10 But the clash of interests was strong as well, and unlike in the cases of the United States and Japan, Britain was not inclined to accommodate German power. “In my opinion,” Lord Curzon had written in a private letter on September 25, 1901, “the most marked feature in the international development of the next quarter of a century will be, not the advance of Russia—that is in any case inevitable—or the animosity of France—that is hereditary—but the aggrandizement of the German Empire at the expense of Great Britain; and I think that any English Foreign Minister who desires to serve his country well, should never lose sight of that consideration.”11 To manage the fundamental antagonism between the dominant status quo power and a Germany seeking to secure a place in the world order rising on Britain’s continental doorstep, exceptional statesmanship, on both sides, was required.12 Instead, the antagonism was allowed to spur an arms race and two hostile systems of alliance (or understanding): the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia, versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Alliances by themselves never cause war; calculation and miscalculation do.13 For Germany, the road to victory against Britain was judged to go through Russia. Just as British imperialists had been obsessed with Russia’s expansiveness in Asia, Germany’s top military had become fixated on a supposed Russian “threat” in Europe. Between the 1860s and 1914, Russia’s GDP had fallen further behind Germany’s: Russian steel production in 1914, for example, was no more than 25 percent of Germany’s. But in that same interval, Russia’s economy expanded fourfold.14 And German military planners—whose job it was to prepare for possible war—harped as well on Russia’s gigantic population (around 178 million versus Germany’s 65 million) and Russia’s recently announced Great Military Program for rearmament, intended to be completed by 1917.15 The German army brass argued that an industrializing Russia, along with Europe’s other land power—and Russia’s ally—France, should not be left to choose a propitious time to attack on two fronts, and that Russia was a near-future threat that had to be attacked preemptively. “To wait any longer,” German chief of staff Helmuth von Moltke the Younger (b. 1848) complained to the Austrian chief of staff in May 1914, would entail “a diminishing of our chances; it was impossible to compete with Russia as regards quantity.”16 Germany was eager for the conflict in supposed self-defense against a weak Russia that was deemed on the brink of becoming invincible.17
British miscalculations were of longer standing. Britain offered the promise of global order, a Pax Britannica, without the desire or wherewithal to enforce it, while Britain’s much envied imperialism inspired rival imperialisms, which, in turn, struck fear in the British geopolitical imaginary. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable,” the ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote. Back in the fifth century B.C., a clash among peripheral states, Corinth and Corcyra, sparked a showdown between the powers Athens and Sparta, a showdown that each had sought and that each would come to regret. Bismarck called such decisions rolling “the iron dice.” In the case of 1914, the British did not reckon fully with the consequences of the rivalry they had helped set up. But while the Anglo-German antagonism was the underlying cause of the Great War and Russia the critical complicating factor, the detonator was supplied not by rivalries over African colonies, where the leftists and others expected it, but in Eastern Europe, where Bismarck had warned in 1888 that war might happen over “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”18 Here, as the Ottoman empire contracted, the other big land empires—Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany—ground up against one another like tectonic plates, which is how the fault line of tiny Serbia precipitated a world war and, on the eastern front, a revolution in the Russian empire.
SARAJEVO AND STATE PRESTIGE
Serbia had emerged out of the Ottoman realm in the early nineteenth century, and a century later enlarged itself in two Balkan wars (1912–13), but neither Balkan war had resulted in a wider war. True, Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina (from t
he Ottoman empire) and thereby vastly increased its South Slav (Yugoslav) population of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. This 1908 annexation, which Russia failed to prevent, spurred numerous plots to advance the cause of South Slav independence by Young Bosnia, a terrorist group dedicated to the Yugoslav cause. In 1914 the latter resolved to murder the Austrian governor in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s capital. But then its members evidently read in the newspaper that the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would be visiting—exact day and location specified—and they decided to murder him instead. Happenstance had made the archduke, Kaiser Franz Josef’s nephew, Austria-Hungary’s next in line: the kaiser’s son had killed himself. Many observers hoped that the eighty-four-year-old Franz Josef—in power sixty-six years—would at some point give up the ghost and that the fifty-year-old Franz Ferdinand would have a go at reorganizing and stabilizing the realm’s internal politics. After all, in 1913, the archduke, who had a Slavic (Czech) wife, had criticized Austria’s top military commander for “a great Hurrah-Policy, to conquer the Serbs and God knows what.”
On Sunday, June 28, 1914—the couple’s wedding anniversary but also Serbia’s sacred St. Vitus’s Day—the royal pair, as announced, entered Sarajevo. The local Habsburg governor had deliberately selected the Serbian holy day for the visit. It commemorated 1389, when, in losing the Battle of Kosovo, ending the Serbian empire, a Serb had nonetheless managed to assassinate the Ottoman sultan in his tent (the guards then decapitated the assassin).19 As Franz Ferdinand made his publicly preannounced processional in an open motorcar, the first of the six Young Bosnia terrorists spaced out along the route failed to act. A second did hurl his small bomb at the archduke’s car, but it bounced off, and despite an explosion under the car that was behind, which wounded two officers, the heir was able to proceed on his way; the remaining conspirators were still in position but none acted. The Habsburg heir delivered his speech at Sarajevo’s Moorish town hall. The daring assassination plot had been botched.
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