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Empires Apart

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by Brian Landers




  EMPIRES APART

  EMPIRES APART

  A HISTORY OF AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM

  BRIAN LANDERS

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  ‘There are now two great nations in the world which, starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Americans. Both have grown in obscurity, and while the world’s attention was occupied elsewhere, they have suddenly taken their place among the leading nations, making the world take note of their birth and of their greatness almost at the same instant. All other peoples seem to have nearly reached their natural limits and to need nothing but to preserve them; but these two are growing.… Their point of departure is different and their paths diverse; nevertheless, each seems called by some secret desire of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.’

  Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique (1835–40)

  ‘The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it’.

  Oscar Wilde, Intentions (1891)

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FOREWORD BY ANDREAS WHITTAM SMITH

  CHAPTER 1: RURIK’S LAND

  The Influence of Champagne

  West and East Divide

  The Coming of Christ

  Russian History: True or False?

  CHAPTER 2: AMERIGO’S LAND

  Spanish Exploration and Conquest

  Before Columbus

  The Scramble for America

  The English and Civilisation

  Slavery

  CHAPTER 3: LEGACY OF THE MONGOL TERROR

  The Mongols

  From Novgorod to Kulikovo

  Ivan the Terrible

  Russia after Ivan

  CHAPTER 4: LEGACY OF THE MYSTIC MASSACRE

  Frying Natives

  Thanksgiving

  Pilgrims and Puritans

  Between God and Slave

  CHAPTER 5: RUSSIA BETWEEN WEST AND EAST

  Yermak Timofeyevich: King of the Wild Frontier

  The Eastern Frontier

  Life in the Wild East

  Empire

  The First Romanovs

  CHAPTER 6: AMERICA BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

  The Rule of Law

  French America

  Prelude to Revolution

  The American Rebellion

  Thomas Paine and Tadeusz Kosciuszko

  CHAPTER 7: THE EMPIRES GET GOING

  Enlightenment: Russian and American Style

  Territorial Aggrandisement

  Tadeusz Kosciuszko and the Polish Question

  Napoleon and Alexander

  The 1812 Overtures

  CHAPTER 8: DETERMINED OPPORTUNISM AND CONQUEST

  King Andrew

  A Time for Guns

  Manifest Destiny: Chechnya to Cuba

  The Road to Civil War

  CHAPTER 9: MORE CONQUEST

  The War Between the States

  Slaves and Serfs

  To the Little Bighorn and Anadyrsk

  Empire Marches On

  CHAPTER 10: SOUL SEARCHING

  Dissidents

  The Soul of Industry

  New Model Empires

  Territory Belonging to the United States

  CHAPTER 11: COMMUNISM AND CORPORATISM

  Bolshevism Arrives

  Come the Revolution

  Communism Arrives

  Corporatism: A Digression

  Ideologies in Transition

  CHAPTER 12: EMPIRES OLD AND NEW

  The New Tsars: Lenin and Stalin the Terrible

  The Bolshevik Empire

  The Red Menace

  Corporatism v. Communism

  The Invisibilisation of Empire

  CHAPTER 13: HOT AND COLD RUNNING WAR

  Allies Apart

  Empires Re-Emerge

  Bipolarity

  Regime Change

  Russian Regime Change – The Death of the Ultimate Tsar

  CHAPTER 14: WINNING THE WAR THAT WASN’T

  Hot War, Cold War, Phoney War

  Monroe Marches On

  The Use of Force

  More Dissidents

  The End of the Russian Empire?

  CHAPTER 15: PAX AMERICANA

  American Democracy

  American Justice

  American Efficiency

  America Delivers

  From Invisible Empires to the Neo-Empire

  The Lessons of History

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It may seem perverse to start by thanking a rival publisher but this book would never have seen the light of day without the support, advice and practical assistance of my colleagues at Penguin. So many of them have contributed in so many ways that I cannot begin to thank each of them by name - thank you all.

  Despite the numerous introductions my colleagues provided I have no agent to thank. With the exception of the one who considered this book ‘approaching the wild borders of Chomskystan’ all the agents who read my manuscript came out with the same response: love the book but as you’re not a celebrity, politician or academic the big bookselling chains won’t stock it. I hope they are wrong and feel incredibly lucky to have stumbled across a publisher, Corinne Souza at Picnic Publishing, who responded so eagerly to my manuscript. Corinne has patiently guided me through the intricacies of an industry I quite erroneously thought I knew. My editor Simon Fletcher was equally patient in making me completely rewrite the middle third of the book to produce a far more coherent narrative as well as stripping away the distracting footnotes and obsessive capitalisations with which I had littered my original text. John Schwartz produced a cover I love and Judith Antell and Alex Hippisley-Cox helped ensure that once produced the book hopefully will have an audience.

  My greatest debt must be to all those writers whose works I have devoured and regurgitated in forms that they may or may not recognise. I have listed all the sources at the back of the book and comment on some of the most influential texts on the website www.empiresapart.com. I especially appreciate permission to quote from the following verbatim: Niall Ferguson, Empire (Penguin Books Limited, copyright © Niall Ferguson, 2003); Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (Oxford University Press, 1965, by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.); Peter Neville, Russia, the USSR, the CIS and the Independent States (published in the UK by the Windrush Press, a division of the Orion Publishing Group and in the US as A Traveller’s History of Russia by Interlink Books, an imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.; text copyright © Peter Neville, 2001); and Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of The Orion Publishing Group).

  Finally for far too long my wife and family have put up with me spending weekends and holidays buried in my notes. My thanks to my wife Sarah, son Joseph and daughters Catherine and especially Alex, who obliterated my own feeble attempt at a website and substituted her own creative flair.

  Writing is a thoroughly selfish pursuit, I hope that some readers feel as challenged as I have been by the prospect of encountering new ways to interpret the past, understand the present and prepare for the future.

  FOREWORD

  BY ANDREAS WHITTAM SMITH

  Brian Landers has written a piercing account of American history from its colonial beginnings to its present role as an unacknowledged empire that bestrides the world. Concerned as he is to expose the myths that nations create about themselves, he bases his analysis upon a revealing comparison of American and Russian expansion through the centuries. This technique forces the observer to recognise similarities, identify differences and question why both similarities and differences exist. In a sens
e, then, the reader gets two books for the price of one, Russian history as well as American.

  The parallels are striking. In the very same decade, the 1860s, Russia emancipated its serfs and the US freed its slaves. The ideology of corporate capitalism emerged at the same time as Marxism. Both nations marched towards the Pacific from their ancestral lands, from the Thirteen Colonies in the one case and from Muscovy in the other. Both reached the ocean by conquest of nomadic tribes – or as Americans like to say, by ‘settlement’ or ‘colonisation’ or, occasionally, by ‘annexation’. And finally, to take a question, was there really any difference between the Monroe Doctrine that America used to justify its interventions in Latin America and in the Caribbean and the concept of ‘Pan-Slavism’ that Russia prayed in aid when exercising its designs on the Balkans?

  This approach leads to a major theme of Mr Landers’ work, that the US is and always has been an imperialist power. Americans act like imperialists, he writes, but don’t talk like imperialists. It isn’t even an established ‘fact’ that there is or ever has been an American Empire. What is a fact, however, is that since the US marines invaded Libya in 1805, American troops on average have intervened somewhere abroad more than once a year.

  Mr Landers is not a conventional historian. His skills are derived from a business career as well as from the academy. This unusual combination produces rare insight. He also has a way with aphorisms. ‘Russia is an inferiority complex trying to find itself. America is a superiority complex trying to sell itself.’ That is what Empires Apart seeks to demonstrate.

  CHAPTER 1

  RURIK’S LAND

  History is portrayed as a science. Remains are located through geophysics, their age is determined by radio carbon dating and they are analysed through DNA testing. The results are served up on TV history channels dedicated to revealing the truth about the past. And yet popular history remains as much subject to emotion as to reason. Centuries-old battles are refought in the cities of Northern Ireland or the mountains of Kosovo. Lawyers make money trying to redress the evils of slavery or the Holocaust. Russians deny the crimes of Stalin, and Americans forget that they once owned an empire stretching from the Caribbean to the Philippines.

  History may be consciously rewritten; much more often it simply evolves. Each generation reworks the tales handed down to it. The experiences and values of today colour the stories of yesterday. The history of all nations is modified, but the embellishments of Russian history are in a class of their own.

  The Influence of Champagne

  The English invented champagne in the seventeenth century. Each autumn barrels of sharp white wine were imported from north-eastern France, where the wine would normally have rested in the barrel until fermentation was complete. But in England it was bottled and stored away. In spring the wine warmed up and started to ferment again. Soon the corks started to pop. The world’s most famous sparkling wine had arrived, not in the vineyards of rural France but in the vaults of urban London.

  Champagne only exists because of a geographical quirk, the absence of vineyards in seventeenth-century England, yet champagne is quintessentially French. No French man or woman asked to identify the originator of champagne would suggest an Englishman. They might pick Dom Perignon, the late seventeenth-century cellar master of the Abbey of Hautvillers who perfected the blends that make champagne what it is today, or perhaps Madame Clicquot, the nineteenth-century businesswoman who introduced mass production to the champagne houses. History disregards the reality that what the English were doing with their wine initially horrified French purists. Dom Perignon spent many years searching in vain for ways of stopping his precious wine being polluted by bubbles. But it doesn’t really matter whether the English played an important part in its history or whether the whole tale is an invention. Champagne is a French tradition; the English are not part of the story. The present is the consequence of the past, but the past is an invention of the present.

  The trivial example of champagne is mirrored in the story of nations. For if nations are formed by their histories, as they surely are, it is equally true that history is written by nations.

  The history of many nations starts in the fields where the champagne grapes now grow. In particular Russia and America owe their character to an event that took place there more than a millennium and a half ago, an event that is almost completely missing from their popular histories. Each year thousands of tourists descend on the region of Epernay, Reims and Châlons, to soak in the heritage of Dom Perignon and Madame Clicquot. What they rarely come to commemorate is another heritage, infinitely more influential, infinitely more savage. Brutal not Brut. Here two great armies faced each other in one of the bloodiest battles ever fought. When the gory hand-to-hand fighting was over it is said that 160,000 lay dead, more lives lost in a single day than the United States lost in Europe in the whole of the Second World War. Had the battle gone the other way America and Russia would not be the societies they are today. It could be said that the battle of Châlons, fought in AD 451, determined the future of western European culture and the values that would be carried to the New World. It certainly determined that the future of eastern Europe would be very different.

  By the middle of the fifth century the Roman empire was near its final collapse. The ‘barbarians’ were not merely at the door but inside. At Châlons Roman legions fought alongside Germanic tribes like the Franks and Burgundians, who not long before they had been fighting against. It is often said that victors write histories, but in this case it is the loser whose name is remembered. The Christian forces were led by the long-forgotten Roman general Aetius Flavius and the Visigoth king Theodoric. Their opponent was Attila the Hun.

  The Huns emerged out of the vast central Asian wilderness to storm into Europe in AD 375. The pagan tribes and Roman armies that stood in their way were destroyed. The ferocity and scale of the Hunnish forces carried all before them, and they had soon conquered much of what is now eastern Europe. In 445 Attila sealed his authority by founding a new capital on the Danube, Buda, and murdering the only serious competitor for overlordship of the Huns, his own brother.

  It was inevitable that Attila would look further west, to Rome, and not everyone viewed the prospect with terror. Honoria, the sister of the Roman emperor Valentinian III, wanted to share imperial power and wrote to Attila offering herself – and half an imperial throne – in marriage. Valentinian found out and Honoria was thrown into prison. Attila now had an excuse to invade on behalf of his potential bride, but he realised that rushing straight to Rome was not the easiest way to grab the riches of the Roman empire. Instead he crossed the Rhine into Gaul with an army of 700,000 and set about destroying as much of the area that is now France as he could. Like the English centuries later he laid siege to Orleans, but, without the help of a Joan of Arc, the inhabitants held Attila off long enough for Aetius Flavius and Theodoric to march to the rescue. Attila turned to face them, and both armies raced for the summit of a long sloping hill at Châlons; the Romans got there first. Attila launched charge after charge on the hill but Aetius held him off. Meanwhile Theodoric and his Visigoths stormed into the Attila’s Ostrogoth allies. Theodoric himself was hit by a javelin, thrown from his horse and trampled to death by his own cavalry, but his son Thorismund grabbed his father’s crown and wheeled round to smash into the Huns’ flank. Attila, now under attack from all sides, pulled back into his camp. As night fell Attila built a huge pyre in the middle of his camp, including the wooden saddles of his cavalry and the loot he had taken on his campaigns. When the attack came next morning he planned to sit at the top of the pyre and perish in the flames, surrounded by the spoils of war – and those wives unlucky enough not to have been left at home in Buda.

  What happened next is open to dispute. When dawn broke the carnage must have been clear to all. The number of dead is impossible to know and may well have been exaggerated. Attila’s losses were enormous, but the Christians too must have been stunned by their losse
s. America lost 47,000 in the war in Vietnam and the nation was traumatised; Aetius and Thorismund may have lost as many in just a few hours. Few will have wanted another day like that. Attila and his forces were allowed to return to the lands we now know as Hungary. Christendom was saved.

  The battle of Châlons determined that western Europe would develop with the trappings of Roman Christianity, not Hunnish paganism. Had Attila won, western Europeans would act differently now, they would probably speak different languages, they would even have looked different, as more Asiatic DNA filtered into the gene pool. Châlons has been hailed as the triumph of ‘civilisation’ over ‘barbarism’. It allows the values, creeds and political structures of the western world to be traced back in an unbroken line to ancient Greece and Rome. It was Greco-Roman civilisation that triumphed on the plains of Châlons, it is argued. The values of Greek democracy and Christian charity, from which eastern Europe never benefited, survived to shape the world we now live in.

  Some historians have written about the battle in terms little short of racist. The victory of the Christian Visigoths, wrote the Hon. Rev. William Herbert in 1838, ‘preserved for centuries of power and glory the Germanic element in the civilisation of modern Europe’, giving us two traits unknown to the Slavic nations, ‘personal freedom and regard for the rights of men’, and ‘the respect paid by them to the female sex, and the chastity for which the latter were celebrated among the people of the north. These were the foundations of that probity of character, self-respect, and purity of manners which may be traced among the Germans and the Goths even during pagan times, and which, when their sentiments were enlightened by Christianity, brought out those traits of character which distinguish the age of chivalry and romance.’

  The reality is quite different. Neither side had any concept of the ‘rights of man’ and even less the rights of women. Nobody was fighting to protect (or destroy) the heritage of Aristotle and Justinian. Châlons was a battle between two sets of barbarians, one of which called itself Christian.

 

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