Early in the nineteenth century the ideals of the French Revolution penetrated Russia as Napoleon’s army marched to Moscow and the Russian army pursued it back to Paris. Western ideas stirred the Russian soul, bringing a flowering of culture and an era of enlightenment to this hitherto sullen land. A liberation of the mind occurred, leading to outstanding accomplishments in science, literature, the arts, and industry. Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov took their place among the greatest writers in the world. One student of the era wrote that “long-mute Russia found her voice,” and “suddenly full-throated, it astonished the world.”
In politics far-reaching changes began ushering in a new era. Tsar Alexander II, the Liberator Tsar, abolished serfdom in 1861. Censorship was eased, trial by jury was introduced, and representative self-government at the local level was begun. The term of duty in the army was shortened from twenty-five years—a virtual life sentence—to six. The seeds of a new society had been planted in Russia. The first spring shoots of a new order began to crop up, but tragically, they were soon plowed under.
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The first breaths of freedom are the most exhilarating—and the most intoxicating. As liberalization began in Russia, so did revolution. Along with those who wanted to build a new society were those whose only thought was to destroy the old one. In the process the revolutionaries destroyed the budding new one as well.
In 1881 Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a group calling itself Narodnaya Volya—the People’s Will. Then, in 1887, several young dissidents plotted the assassination of the new Tsar. They were discovered and one of them nobly stepped forward at their trial and attempted to take the blame for all. He was a twenty-one-year-old named Alexander Ulyanov. Officials were impressed by his courage and suggested that he petition the Tsar for mercy. Alexander refused, and was hanged; his family was shamed and thereafter shunned by the liberal society of the day. Alexander Ulyanov had a sixteen-year-old brother who was seared by these events and especially stunned by his family’s sudden ostracism by respectable society. That younger brother was named Vladimir—Vladimir Ulyanov. Years later he took another name: Lenin.
The experience, Bertram Wolfe writes, opened “an unbridgeable gulf between [Lenin] and the regime that had taken his brother’s life. And it inoculated him with a profound contempt for the ‘liberal society’ which had abandoned the Ulyanov family in its time of trouble.” When Lenin came to power, all the impressive gains that the liberalizing forces had made in the final days of tsarism—a parliament, land reform and extensive individual land ownership, the economic and political building blocks of a new society—were swept away.
Lenin’s Bolsheviks abandoned what was best in Russia and embraced the worst. Russia’s liberalization, its frail new democracy, its brilliant new culture, and its willingness to learn from the world were all jettisoned. The communist rulers reached back to the terrorism of Ivan the Terrible, the despotism of Peter, and the ruthless expansionism of Catherine to create their new society. They uprooted all the liberal changes that had taken hold in the century between Napoleon’s invasion and World War I, turning the clock back a hundred years or more for the Russian people.
The Spanish painter Goya once said, “The dream of reason produces monsters.” So it was with the dream of Marxism. The monsters it produced did things the old Tsars would never have dreamed of doing, and the techniques they adopted have been copied by every Communist party that has come to power since.
The New Tsars
The suffering the Russian people have undergone under communist rule is staggering. Citing an official document published in 1920 by the Cheka, the forerunner of today’s KGB, Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimates that the communists executed more than 1,000 people per month in 1918-1919—before Stalin came to power. Twenty years later, at the height of the terror in 1937 and 1938, Stalin executed 40,000 people per month—over 1,000 a day for two full years. Robert Conquest, a renowned expert, estimates that executions during the first fifty years of Soviet rule—under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev—“were at least fifty times as numerous as over the last half century of Tsarist rule.”
These figures tell only part of the story. There were many more deaths in the forced-labor camps, which held an average 8 million people during the 1930s, and between 12 million and 15 million after World War II. In addition, during the artificially created famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, 3 million to 5 million people are believed to have died, perhaps more. While millions starved, the communist leaders shipped grain abroad to pay for their industrial trade with the West.
In one personal account a former Communist Party official recalls entering a village where people were cooking horse manure and weeds to survive, where the bark had been stripped from the trees for food, and where all the cats, dogs, birds, and field mice had been eaten. In this town he found a state butter plant in which milk was hoarded so that butter stamped “U.S.S.R. Butter Export” could be shipped overseas. In the same town the Soviet official discovered a granary of “State reserves” stocked with thousands of pounds of grain from the previous year’s harvest—all in a village where in the mornings the wagons rolled to pick up the dead.
A man who heard V. M. Molotov, later Stalin’s Foreign Minister, explain the reasons for initiating the “collectivization” drive that created the famine recalled:
Comrade Molotov called the activists together and he talked plainly, sharply. The job must be done, no matter how many lives it cost, he told us. As long as there were millions of small land-owners in the country, he said, the revolution was in danger. There would always be the chance that in case of war they might side with the enemy in order to defend their property.
During the 1930s, 70 percent of the senior officers in the Russian Army were executed. No one was exempt from Stalin’s terror, not even those on the highest levels of the Communist Party; 98 out of 139 Central Committee members in 1934 were later killed. After World War II millions of former POWs were sent directly to forced-labor camps because they had seen the West. Stalin, the student of Russian history, was taking no unnecessary chances. He knew his two greatest enemies were the same enemies the Tsars had fought—Western armies and Western ideas—and he was as determined to shut out the latter as he was to defeat the former. It is conservatively estimated that he killed 20 million Russians, and the killing did not start or stop with him.
In addition to the destruction wrought by their communist leaders, the Russian people have also suffered two great German invasions in the twentieth century. In World War I the Russians lost half their men under arms—1,650,000 were killed, 3,850,000 wounded, and 2,410,000 captured. In World War II half were lost again—this time 5 million were killed and 11.5 million wounded. Total Russian deaths in World War II are estimated at 20 million.
The combat on the Eastern Front in World War I, and again in World War II, was cataclysmic. Winston Churchill wrote of the first war:
In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertion of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, [the struggle on the Eastern Front] far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes. . . . Here all Central Europe tore itself to pieces and expired in agony, to rise again, unrecognizable. . . .
Both in war and in peace merciless slaughter has been an ever-present part of the Russian experience. Together, the capacity to endure slaughter and the capacity to endure suffering can make a nation both ambitious and formidable. The Marquis de Custine visited Russia in the 1830s and remarked, “An inordinate, a boundless ambition, the kind of ambition that can take root only in the soul of an oppressed people and be nourished only on the misery of an entire nation is astir in the hearts of the Russians. . . . To cleanse himself of his impious sacrifice of all public and personal liberty, the kneeling slave dreams of world domination.” And he went on to prophesy, “The Russian people will surely become incapable of anything except the conquest of the world. I always return to this expression, because it i
s the only one that can explain the excessive sacrifices imposed here upon the individual by society.”
In his book Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote:
The triumphant assertions that the Soviet leaders are abandoning their Marxism or Communism, voiced in the West with such monotonous regularity and persistent ignorance, might possibly be dismissed more quickly if the usual image of an abstract and arid Marxist dogma were to give way to a better appreciation of the inextricably close linkage between the Soviet social environment and the Soviet ideology. It is precisely because the ideology is both a set of conscious assumptions and purposes and part of the total historical, social, and personal background of the Soviet leaders that it is so pervading and so important.
What threatens the world is not theoretical “communism,” not philosophical “Marxism,” but rather an aggressive, expansionist totalitarian force that has adopted those names for an ideological fervor it has grafted onto the roots of tsarist expansionism and tsarist despotism. Karl Marx died in 1883, thirty-four years before “Marxism” became the official religion of the Russian state. The authors of the The Communist Manifesto never saw their teachings “interpreted” into a rationale for Soviet conquest: Marx and Engels had no idea that the red flag would fly over the Kremlin, or that the armies of the Russian empire would march into battle under its colors.
The doctrines of Marx are to today’s communist regimes what Christianity was to the secular rulers of the Holy Roman Empire: convenient as a banner, but irrelevant as a guide. Marx would not recognize “Marxism” today, but Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great would be at home with it. And it was from Lenin’s and Stalin’s Kremlin fortress, not from Karl Marx’s London garret, that communism spread across the world. The tightly controlled Communist parties of other nations answered to the living Stalin, not to the ghost of Marx: they served the interests of the twentieth-century Soviet empire, not the teachings of a nineteenth-century German philosopher.
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If the spiritual heritage of today’s communism derives less from Marx than from the Tsars, the reverse of that coin is that the new Russian empire differs from the old in the intense missionary zeal, the ideological fervor, of Marxism as reinterpreted by Lenin and his heirs. These provide a rationale for tyranny, a banner under which to rally the desperate and the discontented.
The ideological fervor and framework with which Soviet leaders approach the world provides a historical rationale, a dialectic, that is a mandate for change. According to it, “stability” or “normalization” of relations is a contradiction. It combines with a totalitarian political regime to make “forward progress” of socialism mandatory; for socialism to succeed, and to be compatible with the security of the Soviet Communist Party and state, it must be advanced and controlled by the Kremlin. All of this tends toward a preoccupation with change in the world.
Communism has created a new alliance between Russian imperialism and “revolutionary” movements worldwide. It disguises despotism in the language of radical idealism, thus entrancing idealists. The banner of revolution gives despotism a new semblance of legitimacy, and despotism gives the “revolutionary” movement arms, money, membership in a global club, and a full array of modern techniques of conquest and control.
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After 1917 the techniques of the tsarist secret police were taken over by the communist revolutionaries and a vastly more powerful entity, the KGB, was created. The Russian tradition of militarism was wedded to communist techniques of subversion and the marriage produced a new danger to sovereign states—unscrupulous Communist parties controlled by Moscow. The traditional Russian fear of invasion was redoubled as the entire world automatically became Moscow’s ideological enemy. Finally, the Russian habits of expansion and conquest were given a new lease on life when Moscow proclaimed that it was Russia’s holy duty under Marxism to liberate the doomed “capitalist” world. Tsarist imperialism was fused with communist revolution and a terrible new force entered on the world’s scene: the “imperialist revolutionaries.”
Lenin ruled the Soviet Union for barely six years before his death in January 1924; Stalin ruled for more than a quarter century before his death in March 1953. Lenin set the course, but Stalin established the iron rule. Stalin massacred the small landholders, collectivized the farms, built the secret police, conducted the purges of the thirties, and spread the terror of the Gulag Archipelago.
The post-Stalin leaders have moderated some of the earlier brutalities, introduced some individual freedoms—which would not be recognized as freedoms in the West, but that by contrast with what prevailed before are a step forward—and become a more polished, more sophisticated, at times more mannerly force in the world. But the power structure remains. The absolute dictatorship remains. The totalitarian state remains, because this is the essence of the neo-tsarism on which the whole authority of the Soviet state is built. The relentless drive toward expansion remains. The Soviet leaders have a military machine beyond the dreams of the Tsars, and they have spread their power beyond the farthest reach of tsarist ambition.
Russia Encounters America
At the start of the twentieth century the relentless outward thrust of Russian expansion was blocked chiefly by five great containing powers. The gates were guarded by Germany and Austria-Hungary in Europe, by the Ottoman Empire to the south, and by Japan in the Far East. Throughout the heartland of Asia, in Persia, Afghanistan, India, Tibet, and the rest, the British played what Kipling called the “Great Game” with Russia, strengthening local powers so that they could stand up to the Russians, stepping into the breach themselves when necessary. These powers managed to keep the restless Russian giant confined; they kept it a continental rather than a global power, extending its rule to the edges of the Eurasian continent only in its forbidding northern and eastern reaches.
World Wars I and II destroyed the European-made world order. They brought the communists to power in Russia and China. They destroyed the five great containing powers that had kept Russia penned in. They catapulted the United States to the center of world politics before it was ready.
For the United States the twentieth century has meant the end of innocence. For Europe it has meant the end of empire. For the peoples of Russia, China, and more than a dozen other countries it has meant the horrors of communist rule. For the rulers of the Soviet Union it has meant the end of the great power constraints that had previously kept Russian expansion in check.
In World War I Germany was struck down and its empire reduced. Austria-Hungary was split apart, vanishing from the map. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated. Britain and France, although nominally victors, were gravely weakened.
What World War I began, World War II completed. As Charles de Gaulle told me in 1969, “In the Second World War all the nations of Europe lost, two were defeated.” Germany was partitioned, Japan was disarmed, and Britain was so weakened that the dissolution of its empire began almost immediately. In thirty years’ time the powers that had contained Russia in the nineteenth century either had been crippled or had vanished from the world scene.
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Americans paid little attention. True to our isolationist past and to the naïve idealism that infused our approach to world affairs, we approached World War II as if it were a sporting match with no other goal but victory. Churchill and Stalin, by contrast, were aware of the cataclysmic changes taking place and had their eyes less on the immediate military task than on the political aftermath. On the Western side, Churchill was overruled. Stalin was able to make a clean sweep through Eastern Europe, getting his armies in place to begin the new conquests that would follow the defeat of Nazi Germany. We soon had to pay for our carelessness. The failure of the United States to block Soviet expansionism during the war led to a situation in which we had to scramble to do so after the war, when much territory had already been lost.
In Greece and Turkey, where the power of the Ottoman Empire
and then Great Britain had previously held Russia in check, a power vacuum emerged in 1947 that the Soviets were eager to fill. We were obliged to respond with the Truman Doctrine. In Europe, where Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the other great European powers had once stood, there was now chaos. We came up with the Marshall Plan and NATO to replace the former containing powers there. In the Far East we replaced the former containing power of Japan when we stopped the Korean invasion in 1950 in concert with the U.N.
Finally, with the worldwide retreat from empire by Britain and France and the other European powers, we picked up many of their former obligations in the Middle East, in South and Southeast Asia, in Africa, and in the Persian Gulf. At the same time, we continued to play our traditional protective role in Latin America. We had become the world’s gyroscope, single-handedly maintaining the balance of power all across the globe, taking over the responsibilities that five great empires had previously borne both in containing Russia and maintaining world order.
This unprecedented burden would not have been easy even if the United States had been well prepared to assume its new responsibilities. As it was, Americans were unfamiliar with many of the subtleties of dealing with the various peoples of the world and unaccustomed to power on a global scale. The end of innocence has been a long, confused, and sometimes difficult process for us.
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For all the vigor of its frontier spirit, and for all the harsh obstacles it had to overcome in taming a continent, in international terms the United States grew up in a protected environment. As the modern world’s first democracy, America was nurtured on the faith that, in the words of one observer, “the United States was not merely to be a beacon of a superior democratic domestic way of life. It was also to be an example of a morally superior democratic pattern of international behavior. The United States would voluntarily reject power politics as unfit for the conduct of its foreign policy.”
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