Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The throne should then have passed to Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth, a twenty-one-year-old with a reputed passion for the delights of the bedchamber, but she was thought too difficult to control. Instead the privy council looked abroad to the two daughters of Ivan V (Ivan the Fool), nieces of Peter the Great. Both had married German princes. The eldest, Catherine, was Duchess of Mecklenburg. She was considered too Germanic and suffered the distinct disadvantage that her husband was still alive. The throne was therefore given to the younger, Anna, the widowed Duchess of Kurland. (Kurland was a duchy that existed for two centuries in what is now Latvia. Its main claim to fame was as the most obscure colonial power in the Americas, when a seventeenth-century duke established a colony on the Caribbean island of Tobago.)

  Anna proved less easy to control than had been expected and staged a coup of her own, overthrowing the council that had chosen her and replacing it with German advisers imported from Kurland. She followed the imperial traditions of her predecessors who had pushed out the boundaries in the west by grabbing Polish territory in the War of Polish Succession, and in the south she forced the Turks to allow Russian access to the Sea of Azov. When Anna died in 1740 she nominated the grandson of her sister Catherine to become Ivan VI. Ivan came to the throne at the age of two months. Power was supposed to remain with the former empress’s German favourites, but this arrangement only lasted for three weeks before a coup d’état gave the regency to Ivan’s mother. Her regency in turn lasted for twelve months before Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth, the lustful Grand Duchess passed over in 1730, mounted her own coup d’état. Ivan VI, by now fifteen months old, was thrown into the dungeons and stayed there as the Empress Elizabeth occupied his throne for the next twenty years.

  Elizabeth is mainly remembered now for her legendary and bizarre sex life, which included transvestite parties at which the empress in full male attire derided terrified male courtiers cowering in their ball gowns. Despite her indiscriminate carnal appetites (although she opposed France politically she numbered the French ambassador among her lovers), Elizabeth died childless. Much earlier she had chosen as her successor a German prince who in addition to being her cousin was related to the great love of her life, another, and much more dashing, German prince who had died of smallpox. The cousin, who would become Peter III, was found a suitable wife, and the couple was ensconced in St Petersburg to await his turn on the throne. Peter’s wife was a minor German princess named Sophia Von Anhalt-Zarbst, a name considered decidedly un-Russian, and so it was changed to Catherine.

  Despite her generally pro-German sympathies Elizabeth was a fierce opponent of the mighty Frederick the Great of Prussia – not surprising given Frederick’s views on Russia. In his tract Anti-Machiavel, which attacked Machiavelli’s theories of autocracy, Frederick disparagingly compared Russia’s vast territory populated by miserable people with tiny Holland’s economic and cultural preeminence. Elizabeth put Frederick right, as her armies for the first time marched westwards beyond the Baltic battlegrounds on which Peter the Great had achieved his victories and beyond the territories gained in the War of Polish Succession. In 1760, as British troops took Montreal, ending French dreams of a North American empire, the Russian army occupied Frederick the Great’s capital: Berlin. It was one of those events that could have changed the face of history; it did not, because Elizabeth’s dissolute lifestyle caught up with her. At the age of fifty she died, to be succeeded by her pro-Prussian cousin – who promptly ordered his troops to return home.

  Peter III ruled for six months, during which time he tried to turn Russia into his beloved Prussia. His reforms varied from designing Prussian uniforms for his troops to issuing a grandly entitled edict Concerning the Granting of Freedom and Liberty to the entire Russian Dvorianstvo, which recognised the increasing power of the nobility by abolishing their compulsory state service and allowing them to travel abroad. Peter’s retreat from Prussia had been deeply unpopular at the Russian court and his days were numbered when, to the court’s dismay, he started to openly flirt with the Lutheran religion and, to his wife’s dismay, even more openly flirt with his mistress Elizabeth Vorontsava. His wife Catherine was not herself blameless, and with her current lover Grigory Orlov she staged a coup in which her husband was murdered, and she mounted the throne herself.

  Not everyone was happy with Catherine’s assumption of the throne, and there was another claimant near at hand. The infant Ivan VI, deposed and imprisoned by the Empress Elizabeth, was now twenty-three. An attempt was made to rescue him, but once his gaolers realised what was happening they followed the orders given to them by Elizabeth more than twenty years before, orders recently reiterated by Catherine: they killed their charge. The thirty-four year reign of Catherine the Great had begun. The greatest female tsar of all time sat safely on her throne thanks to the murders of her two most recent male predecessors.

  CHAPTER 6

  AMERICA BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

  By the time Catherine the Great came to the throne Russia was a fully fledged empire. The Grand Duchy of Muscovy handed down by Ivan ‘Moneybags’ to Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible had been transformed. Whole new peoples had been conquered and incorporated to the north, west and south and the massive landmass of Siberia made the Russian empire the colossus of its day. The Russia of Catherine and the Russia of the Ivans had virtually nothing in common but their history; what gave them continuity was the incessant desire to grow – the urge to expand the power and prestige of the nation, the lust for resources and riches beyond their borders.

  America would grow in exactly the same way. Since the first English settlers arrived on the continent there had been the same urge to expand, the same insatiable demand for power and prestige. America too changed beyond recognition. The thirteen original colonies perched on the edge of the continent had as little in common with the lost pioneers on Roanoke as with the United States of today.

  Russia was cemented together by one central institution: the tsar. The ideology of autocracy carried the Russian nation forward into empire. The early American colonies had no such central institution; indeed they were not even a nation. First they had to throw off the cloak of the British empire, and to do that they needed an ideology that would bind together their disparate interests just as autocracy bound together the melting pot of Russia. They needed democracy.

  The Rule of Law

  There is a theory that the massive differences between the values of Americans and Russians are rooted not in history or religion or political development but in geography. The line that divides them is a very precise one, and it is not a line dividing east from west but the line of latitude running at 45° north. Most of America is south of that line; most of Russia is north. As a consequence most of the United States is blessed with a clement climate and with productive agricultural land; most of Russia is not. It is argued, therefore, that the colonisation of America followed the pattern set by the western Vikings along Europe’s Atlantic coast rather than the Varangians of Rus.

  The Vikings first came to western Europe as raiders looking for loot, just as the Spanish conquistadors and English pirates later came to the Americas. But, again like the early Europeans in America, they found a land more fertile and a climate more appealing than the one they had left behind. As a consequence they settled down, becoming the great feudal lords of Normandy and later England. In Marxist terms agriculture produced a surplus they were able to expropriate and exploit. The first Vikings travelling eastwards did so with the same desire for booty, but the wealth they discovered came not from agriculture but from trade. The original Viking leaders of Rus were merchant princes determined to control the trade routes with Byzantium and the east. Rather than seeing land that they could exploit they saw in the Slavs merely a source of tribute – fur, wax, honey and, above all, slaves. Unlike the Vikings of Normandy they were never interested in land itself, which was too poor to produce surplus value they could expropriate, and so they never had any
shared interest with the peasant farmers.

  That the Vikings of east and west developed different political cultures might be nothing more than a vaguely interesting historical footnote were it not for the fact that those differences, founded on a quirk of geography, led directly to the ideological divide that could have pushed the twentieth-century world into nuclear war.

  To its champions American democracy is about equality, fairness and justice; autocracy is about the opposite. The west, it is argued, puts justice above order;Russia has put order over justice. And yet it is one of the ironies of history that the two systems arose because their originators believed the precise opposite of what they are now perceived to represent. Western civil liberties arose because order was thought more important than equality. Autocracy arose because equality took precedence over order. The Vikings who exploded out of Scandinavia were organised perfectly for raiding and looting, but their successors found themselves ruling over vast territories that needed very different management styles. The successors of the western Vikings needed a political model that ensured effective management and protection of their landholdings. Their cousins in the east needed to maintain a model suited to war and ever-changing territorial boundaries.

  One group in the west developed a model that differed radically both from Viking tradition and from the traditions of Rome. In the twelfth and thirteenth century the Norman rulers of England, particularly Henry III, institutionalised primogeniture, the assertion that justice is served by passing on all of a family’s wealth to the first-born son. To the Vikings and their successors in Rus such a philosophy meant injustice. They considered themselves bands of brothers, often quite literally so, and to them the family meant the whole family. On the death of the head of the family the family’s wealth belonged to all the survivors (or at least all the males). The English kings understood that power and wealth deriving from land could only be preserved and enhanced if they remained undivided. If that meant disenfranchising the younger siblings so be it. The Rus also understood the dangers of dividing their patrimonies into weak and competing parts, but if that was the price of equity so be it. (Interestingly one of the first laws most American states enacted during or after the American Revolution was to abolish primogeniture.)

  Primogeniture slowly spread east from England, reaching Italy for example in the sixteenth century, but never arrived in Russia. The practical consequence in western Europe was that although junior royals could accumulate power and riches it was always under the overlordship of their senior, the first-born. Princes might fight each other for the crown but nobody challenged the need for a state to have a single monarch. A nobility emerged that was determined to grab and hold on to its share of the nation’s wealth, but was always vulnerable to the all-powerful monarch with whom they had to reach some sort of arrangement in order to be able to pass their estates on to their heirs. For the nobles it became essential to find ways to limit the power of the king. Thus arose the concept of mutual rights and obligations between king and subject, and with it the whole panoply of law and eventually parliament. Over time this exercise in power politics acquired the trappings of philosophical debate. The English barons displayed their military might at Runnymede to force King John to accede to their crude demands but did so in the language of Magna Carta, confirming their supposedly ‘ancient’ rights. The foundation stones of western democracy – the primacy of law, the rights of the individual, the concept of private property, the principle of representational government – were put in place to allow the oligarchs to consolidate their power vis-à-vis the monarch.

  In Russia, on the other hand, thrones were not passed on to the oldest child; they simply ceased to exist. Nobles established their power base not vis-à-vis a king but vis-à-vis each other. Warlords and princes competed not for a crown but for territory. The winners incorporated land they had bought or conquered into their own. Possession was not just nine-tenths of the law, it was the law. Within a territory the prince’s power was absolute; there was no competing authority with which power had to be shared. Even during the Mongol period the Russian princes did not unite with each other; unity was achieved when the more powerful, in particular Muscovy, dispossessed the less powerful. As there was no mutuality of interest between king and subject concepts like the rule of law, developed to protect the oligarchs in the west, simply did not exist. The prince owned his territory and its inhabitants by right of conquest; the vanquished had no rights. Each prince had property and that property included people. To talk of those people having rights was as meaningless as suggesting that the prince’s horses had rights. The inhabitants of Muscovy were no more citizens than the occupants of a zoo are citizens. When all property belongs to the tsar there is no need for such niceties as contract law.

  By the time the first Europeans arrived in America the concepts of the Magna Carta had become enshrined not only in the laws and institutions they brought with them but also in the language and psyche of the immigrants. Yet in some ways the circumstances in which they found themselves were similar to the early Rus, who had developed as a consequence a very different set of values. Among themselves the settlers needed an acceptance of the rights that by now were truly traditional, but with respect to the natives the situation was very different: there was no commonality of interest; the settlers were as determined to dispossess the natives as the princes of Muscovy had been to usurp their neighbours. The response of the immigrants to this novel situation was to become an integral feature of the American character: they maintained the processes and practices they had brought with them even when the underlying realities were fundamentally different. Thus, for example, they drew up elaborate contracts with native tribes that they knew full well were merely legalising theft; nobody was more aware than Peter Minuit that the price he was paying for Manhattan bore no relationship to its real value, but as far as he was concerned his expropriation was perfectly legal. Time after time treaties and contracts were signed that the Europeans knew were being interpreted by the native signatories as meaning something entirely different to the interpretation that the immigrants intended to enforce.

  Treaties were always a temporary expedient, which the settlers recognised would be overtaken by events. As they pushed into new territory they knew that the natives would be pushed aside irrespective of any treaty obligations. It is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that the American approach to treaty-making, which started in treaties with the natives and was honed during the American rebellion, when the new nation’s first international treaty with France was promptly ignored, would eventually be extended globally. The early approach to treaty-making had three characteristics: agreements with heathen savages were by definition less sacred than agreements between the settlers themselves; by extension such agreements must reflect the balance of power between the parties rather than any concept of ‘fairness’; and as the balance of power was changing agreements would always be temporary. Americans were always aware that they represented progress, so circumstances were destined to change, and thus treaties that were appropriate today could be inappropriate tomorrow. For the United States a treaty is almost always something that resolves in its favour an immediate issue without implying any obligation on those who come after.

  The 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was a classic example. It guaranteed that neither Britain nor America would try to exercise exclusive control over any future Panama canal, but by the time the canal was built the United States felt strong enough not to worry about British influence in the region. Just as treaties with the natives were ignored, as soon as circumstances allowed President Grant demanded ‘an American canal on American soil’, by which he meant not moving the canal north but moving the American border south. In the words of a later US president, the canal should be ‘virtually a part of the coastline of the United States’. The Clayton-Bulwer treaty – like countless American treaties before and after – was consigned to the bin.

  The apparent contradiction betwee
n the principles of justice and fair play espoused by the early settlers and the reality that was enacted was resolved by a developing belief among the immigrants that if just rules were being followed then by definition just outcomes were being achieved. If a contract is properly drawn up and properly executed then by definition it is a just contract. The central question of western European philosophy, ‘when is an action just?’, became in America, ‘when is an action legal?’ That difference in emphasis remains to this day. After the Enron financial scandal in 2002, when company executives amassed millions of dollars by creating fictitious ‘off balance sheet’ entities, British accountants insisted that it could not have happened in the UK because of the fundamental principle of British accounting, ‘substance over form’. In Britain all the rules can be complied with but the substance of the transaction can still be deemed illegal. In America an action must comply with all the rules to be legal, and if all the rules are complied with the action is legal.