Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  At the time of that first declaration of independence the United States was basking in the glory of its victory over Spain. Under the Treaty of Paris Puerto Rico, the Pacific island of Guam and the Philippines were ceded to the United States. It was agreed that Cuba would be granted independence, although under the 1902 Platt Amendment this independence was severely limited: the United States reserved the right to control Cuba’s foreign policy, the right to intervene whenever required to protect Cuba from foreign intervention (a wonderfully Orwellian concept) and the right to occupy the island’s best port at Guantanamo Bay. (Like its earlier ‘purchase’ of land from American natives, the United States insists that its ‘lease’ of the 45 square miles around Guantanamo Bay is entirely legal. Each year it ritually sends a cheque for $4,000, which the Cuban government ritually declines to cash.)

  Rudyard Kipling reflected popular sentiments when he gloried in America’s reinvigorated imperial ambitions, but one group had been firmly behind President McKinley in his attempts to avert war: corporate America. With the exception of those who stood to gain directly from the conflict, the business elite regarded war as a threat to their expanding commercial interests. Wall Street and the robber barons wanted an empire based on trade, in which they could expand in overseas markets and be protected by tariff walls at home. War would disrupt trade and so should be avoided at all costs, while at the same time as much as possible should be spent on defence as a way of promoting the manufacturing sector. After the war they were equally committed to avoiding the burdens of empire.

  One of the leading opponents of US imperialism was steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. In an article entitled ‘Americanism versus Imperialism’ he described his own vision of America’s future in which ‘Industrial supremacy of the world lies at our feet’. The United States, he claimed, had been ‘permitted’ to grab the Philippine islands by Britain, whose overwhelming naval power had stopped Russia, France and Germany grabbing a share. The US had then been required to allow Britain an ‘open door’ trading relationship with the Philippines. Only if Britain continued to provide protection could the US continue to expand its empire, which, said Carnegie, was quite impractical as it would mean Britain controlling US foreign policy. The US should continue along the path it had long followed of avoiding overseas entanglements. In one passage Carnegie explains how a proper empire works, and why the United States could not follow suit. The example he quotes is Russia:

  Take Russia for instance. Only last year leading statesmen were pushing Britain into a crusade against that country. They proposed to prevent its legitimate expansion toward the Pacific – legitimate, because it is over coterminous territory, which Russia can absorb and Russianize, keeping her empire solid. She knows better than to have outlying possessions open to attack. Russia has always been the friend of the United States. When Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of Great Britain, proposed to recognize the South, Russia sent her fleet to New York. Russia sold us Alaska; we have no opposing interests to those of Russia; the two nations are the only two great nations in the world, solid, compact, impregnable, because each has developed only coterminous territory, upon which its own race could grow. Even in the matter of trade with Russia, our exports are increasing with wonderful rapidity. Shiploads of American locomotives, American steel bridges and American electrical machinery for her leave our shores. Everything in which our country is either supreme or becoming supreme goes to Russia. Suppose Britain and Russia clash in the Far East and we have an alliance with Britain, we are at war against one of our best friends.

  Carnegie’s admiration for Russia’s imperial policies was not perhaps surprising as he shared another passion with Russia’s tsar – a determination to eradicate the cancers of radical politics and organised labour, which both men believed were in danger of destroying all that they stood for.

  The struggle for the souls of the two empires, which continued in parallel with the development of empire, unfolded in two phases. First there were the dilemmas that emerged from their agricultural pasts – the issues of slavery and serfdom. Then came the dilemmas associated with their industrial futures – the issues of capital and labour. In the first stage the two nations confronted the moral, economic and political issues that arose from the way Russia and the American south had been built on the backs of serfs and slaves toiling in the fields of what were largely agricultural societies. In the second stage the dynamics of manufacturing industry came to the fore. New radical forces emerged after the issues of slavery and serfdom were ‘solved’. In America the institutions of democracy would ensure that voices of dissent were either conscripted into the mainstream or left to wither on the fringes; in Russia the repressive apparatus of autocracy pushed dissent into ever more violent confrontation. The result was that a small group of very rich men, personified by Carnegie, would come to determine the course of American history, while in Russia a similarly small group would topple the Romanov dynasty in the name of a nascent industrial proletariat.

  CHAPTER 10

  SOUL SEARCHING

  History is not what is taught in the classroom or buried in academic journals. History is the random collection of pictures and phrases, stories and prejudices that accretes drop by drop in the mind. The images that make up the history of nineteenth-century America and Russia are more likely to be drawn from Gone with the Wind or The Cherry Orchard than from any school textbook. John Wayne and Leo Tolstoy are more authoritative than any teacher. Countless westerns and the countless pages of War and Peace have shaped the prisms through which we view the past, determining what passes on and what is left behind. The unrecorded becomes the unremembered and the invented becomes real.

  What passes into history is rarely what seems at the time to be of most consequence. Contemporary fame is no guide to historical longevity. In 1881 Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev defeated the Turkomans at the siege of Geok Tepe, bringing Turkmenistan into the Russian empire, and James Abram Garfield became the second US president to be assassinated – but who remembers Skobelev or Garfield today? Certainly far fewer than could name the participants in an obscure Arizona encounter in the same year which immortalised Wyatt Earp in the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

  Just as recollections of yesteryear’s actions mutate over time so recollections of yesteryear’s thoughts and values change almost beyond recognition. Motives are ascribed, values are assumed and opinions are attributed that often say more about the motives, values and opinions of today than of yesterday. The prism of ideology distorts all of history but distorts nothing more than the history of ideology itself. Proponents of ‘democracy’ see George Washington and George Bush bearing the same, unchanging banner; proponents of ‘free’ markets equate their cause with the ‘freedom’ snatched from George III. Opponents of racism imagine their struggle underlying the American Civil War; opponents of imperialism deny that it underlay American invasions of Canada and Mexico. They are all wrong, but not entirely wrong.

  There are ideological continuities in history, but not all ideologies demonstrate continuity. Some of the values that make up a nation’s soul pass down virtually unchanged from generation to generation; others move on just as history moves on. History reveals a grand enigma: the soul of a nation can change from decade to decade while remaining constant from century to century.

  Throughout the latter part of the eighteenth and the whole of the nineteenth century new interests clamoured for political power, new values demanded political recognition, new pressures forced political change. For eighty years ‘democracy’ provided America with a way of dealing with these changes and transitioning peacefully from one leader to another, but then the new nation collapsed into civil war. Democracy could not reconcile fundamentally different interests and values. Hereditary autocracy in Russia did not so much reconcile differences as suppress them. For centuries this suppression was highly effective, but in the end the same storm of competing interests and values exploded into civil war and in the Russian Revolution the Romano
vs were swept away. History was to demonstrate that the Russian Revolution merely replaced one autocracy with another, but no revolution since the French would have a greater impact on the wider world. The currents of controversy and conflict stirred up by the French Revolution would climax in the Russian before reforming, magnified and distorted, to surge through the twentieth century.

  Dissidents

  ‘Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities’ epigrams a character in Oscar Wilde’s first play. There must have been some who thought the words particularly apposite: because of the indifference of the ticket-buying public the play closed just a week after it premiered. It had the antiquely punctuated title Vera; or, the Nihilists and concerned a Russian peasant girl, Vera, who joins the nihilist revolutionaries determined to assassinate the Russian tsar. However, the tsar proves to be not only young and handsome but at heart a nihilist himself. The couple fall in love and in the end Vera kills herself to protect her love and her ideals.

  Wilde thought that his play would be seen as a fable about the contemporary struggle for Irish Home Rule, but he had picked the wrong year to produce a play about political assassination. Just a few months before the play was due to open in London both the Russian tsar, Alexander II, and the US president, James Garfield, were assassinated. The play’s production was called off and when it was staged in New York the next year, 1882, it flopped.

  The inspiration for Vera; or, the Nihilists was an event that had occurred just four years before the ill-fated premiere: the attempt by a Russian revolutionary, Vera Zasulich, to assassinate the Governor General of St Petersburg. The life of Vera Zasulich exemplifies the way the currents of opposition eddied to and fro in the last days of Romanov rule, and how those currents have been portrayed in such contrasting ways in the years since. Details of her life have been regularly rewritten. In much the same way that Andrew Jackson’s plantation upbringing has been relegated from history to make way for his log cabin birth, so her supporters have concentrated on her poverty-stricken parents without mentioning that her father died when she was three years old, whereupon she went to live with wealthy relatives and received a bourgeois education. What is indisputable is that she joined the radical group Land and Liberty, and in 1876 shot St Petersburg’s governor general. The story goes that a revolutionary named Alexei Bogoliubov refused to doff his cap to the governor general, who then had him beaten so badly that Bogoliubov went insane. Vera Zasulich was outraged, although – again depending on which version of history is to believed – this outrage was prompted either by revolutionary solidarity with a man she hardly knew or romantic loyalty to a man whose bed she shared. Zasulich was arrested and charged with attempted murder. The trial became a cause célèbre, with the defence producing evidence of massive police abuse. Zasulich became a heroine and she was acquitted by the jury (jury trials having been introduced to Russia just a few years before, during Alexander’s early flirtation with liberal reform). When the police tried to re-arrest her the crowd outside the court prevented them, and she went into hiding. Her fame did not last, any more than the fame of many modern celebrities lasts, and she was soon all but forgotten outside the arcane circles of the revolutionary left and the secret police who kept watch over them.

  Zasulich remained active in politics as a ‘moderate’ revolutionary who oppposed the terror tactics of the People’s Will and eventually became one of Russia’s first Marxists. After going into exile in Switzerland she emerged as a leading propagandist for the illegal SDLP, the Social Democratic Labour party, and translated Marx’s works into Russian. At the party congress in London in 1903 Lenin split the SDLP between the ‘moderate’ Mensheviks and ‘extreme’ Bolsheviks. Zasulich stayed with the Mensheviks but became increasingly disillusioned with the political squabbles that beset the revolutionary cause. She returned to Russia in 1905 and eventually dropped out of left-wing politics, supporting the tsar’s call to arms in the First World War and opposing the Bolshevik revolution. After she died in 1919 the victorious Bolsheviks wrote her out of history; to Soviet historians Vera Zasulich was merely a ‘social chauvinist’ – one of those meaningless expressions of disdain that the extreme left loved to fire at their fellow travellers. Stalin was characteristically blunter, describing Zasulich as ‘an old bitch’.

  The pressures for change in Russian society, exemplified by Zasulich’s attempt at assassination, came initially from a section of society that had hardly existed not long before. Alexander II may have bought off the peasantry, at least temporarily, but protests by another and much more modern political force challenged the Russian autocracy.

  In 1960s America and Europe there was much talk of a new political force: ‘student power’. Long haired, dirty, dissolute, free-loving, radical, anarchic, irreligious student rebels were for the first time cleaving society not along lines determined by class or religion or tribe but by age. A whole new generation seemed intent on sweeping away traditional values. Their protests were not as novel as many thought them to be. A century earlier there had also been sixties rebels. Russians were observing exactly the same phenomenon in the 1860s and describing it in exactly the same way – even down to complaints about boys wearing their hair as long as girls. Alexander II had introduced liberal reforms in tertiary education: student uniforms were abolished and students were allowed to travel abroad. The result was that students nibbling the first crumbs of freedom wanted more. Student demonstrators paralysed the University of St Petersburg. ‘Nihilists’, consisting primarily of students and intellectuals, propounded such dangerous dogmas as social equality. In the west they would have been labelled democrats; in Russia they became communists. Then in 1866 a mentally unstable student tried to assassinate the tsar. Alexander abandoned his liberalism and clamped down on all manifestations of dissent, even circumscribing the teaching of history in case it gave rise to treasonous theories. In 1874 the student protests culminated in a grand demonstration known as the ‘Going to the People’. Thousands of students and intellectuals streamed out of the cities into the countryside, determined to help the peasant masses in their struggle for liberation. Not surprisingly the average peasant did not welcome being patronised and their response to this unexpected visitation tended to be curt. At best students and serfs were left mutually bemused. In Going to the People the intelligentsia had gone nowhere, other than the eighty leaders of the demonstration whom Alexander exiled to Siberia.

  The various groups of earnest nihilists and populists achieved virtually nothing, just as many would argue their American counterparts a century later achieved little, and again like their successors their very impotence spawned fringe groups calling for more direct action. To some of those demanding dramatic change the message of the failed attempt at Going to the People was that if the peasants would not rise up and save themselves the intelligentsia should do it for them. A revolutionary vanguard would topple the imperial autocracy by destroying the imperial autocrat. There then began a macabre game of ‘Hunt the Tsar’ or ‘Pin the Bomb on the Emperor’. A group calling itself the People’s Will set out to assassinate Tsar Alexander. They tried to blow up the imperial train, but derailed another train by mistake. They smuggled a bomb into the kitchens of the Winter Palace, directly below the imperial dining room, but the tsar was late for dinner and missed the massive explosion.

  The assassins were not crazed anarchists recklessly hurling bombs around in an attempt to turn order into chaos. Part of the reason for the eventual success of the extreme left in Russia and the failure of even the moderate left in America lay in the nature of democracy and autocracy. Russian tsars were far more powerful than individual political leaders in America, so shooting a tsar would potentially achieve far more than shooting a president. In America power was diffuse. Not only were there powerful local leaders in the individual states but many of the centres of power were outside the political process altogether. Oligarchs like J. D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan controlled vast sections of the economy and often
exercised effective police power, calling on their private security forces and the forces of the state to suppress opposition. More importantly the people – or at least at that time white males – could make themselves heard: having the ballot Americans had no need of the bullet.

  The People’s Will may have had a coherent strategy based on a realistic analysis of the tsarist power structure, into which most of the revolutionaries had been born, but they had a totally unrealistic assessment of the power structure of the peasantry. In particular the People’s Will failed to understand that the peasants were incapable of spontaneously organising themselves to seize power. Not only had the numerous peasant rebellions shown that their protests were inevitably fragmented and localised, but the Going to the People demonstrations had shown that the Russian peasantry were deeply conservative.