Enough: Justice takes on Gun Safety

By Bill Doughty––

What did a former Supreme Court justice –– a Navy veteran of World War II –– have to say about gun safety regulations and mass shootings? In “The Making of a Justice,” published in 2019, just before he died at age 99, Justice John Paul Stevens noted that “Throughout most of our history there was no federal objection to laws regulating the civilian use of firearms.”

Ens. Stevens, circa 1942-1945.

Stevens was not a stranger to guns. He served in the Navy and as an ensign was stationed in Washington D.C. (on Constitution Avenue), where he carried a .45 caliber handgun and guarded intelligence traffic in the aftermath of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Dec. 7. He was later stationed in Pearl Harbor, near Adm. Nimitz's Makalapa headquarters, and he was serving as an intelligence officer during the Battle of Midway and when Adm. Yamamoto was killed. Navy Reads reviewed Stevens's memoir three years ago: “Justice: Battle of Midway and the Constitution.”

After the Navy, Justice Stevens served in various positions in the private sector and in government service. President Gerald Ford, another World War II Navy veteran, nominated Stevens to the Supreme Court when Justice William O. Douglas stepped down in November, 1975.

Stevens said that when he joined the Court, “both state and federal judges accepted the Court’s unanimous decision in United States v. Miller as having established that the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to bear arms was possessed only by members of the militia and applied only to weapons used by the militia.” In the Miller case, the Court upheld an indictment restricting a man from owning a short-barreled shotgun.

The common sense of Miller, was replaced with a Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2007.

Heller opened the floodgates for the proliferation of firearms, including weapons of war with large-capacity magazines. These weapons can be sold to people in many states with few or no background checks or other regulations.

“Heller is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my tenure on the bench,” Stevens wrote. “The text of the Second Amendment unambiguously explains its purpose: ‘A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’”

Stevens examined original context and founders’ intent, including Madison’s draft, as well as an established history of some gun control in the United States.

After presenting colleague Justice Breyer’s dissent in Heller –– in which Breyer discusses early colonial history of firearms regulations in the three largest cities at the time: Boston, Philadelphia, and New York –– Stevens expounded on the history of gun safety laws in the past hundred years.

“For most of our history, the invalidity of Second Amendment-based objections to firearms regulations had been well settled and uncontroversial. The first two federal laws directly restricting the civilian use and possession of firearms –– the 1927 act prohibiting mail delivery of handguns and the 1934 act prohibiting the possession of sawed-iff shotguns and machine guns –– were enacted over minor Second Amendment objections that were dismissed by the vast majority of legislators participating in the debates. After reviewing many of the same sources that are discussed at greater length by [Justice] Nino Scalia in his majority opinion in Heller, the Miller Court unanimously concluded that the Second Amendment did not apply to the possession of a firearm that did not have ‘some relationship to the preservation or efficiency a well regulated militia.’ ‘ So well settled was the issue that, speaking on the PBS NewsHour in 1991, the retired Chief Justice Warren Burger described the National Rifle Association’s lobbying in support of an interpretation of the Second Amendment as a limitation regulation of the civilian uses of firearms in these terms: ‘One of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.’”

Stevens SCOTUS portrait, 2006

Stevens called for an amendment to the Constitution to overrule Heller “to prevent tragedies such as the massacre of twenty grammar schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, from ever happening again." Stevens added, "Yet, in the course of writing this chapter, on October 1, 2017, a gunman fired from the thirty-second floor of a hotel in Las Vegas, killing at least fifty-eight people and injuring over five hundred more who were attending an outdoor concert.”

In “Making” Stevens recounted the NRA’s seeming concession in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, agreeing to a prohibition of bump stocks, which allowed shooters to convert semi-automatic rifles into machine guns.

However, the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action denied their support for a prohibition of bump stocks: “Some have used our October 2017 statement to claim that NRA supports ATF’s final rule, but as NRA-ILA’s Executive Director Chris Cox noted only days after our statement was issued, “‘We don’t believe that bans have ever worked on anything.’” Against any “bans … on anything,” the NRA, like many gun manufacturers and some politicians, wants more guns in people’s hands, including in schools.

But In the United States there are already 120 guns for every 100 citizens, more guns than automobiles. And, New England Journal of Medicine notes that the leading cause of death of American children is no longer car accidents –– it is death by firearms.

While seatbelts, airbags, carseats, and many other features and regulations save countless children’s lives, some politicians won’t pass laws to restrict weapons of war, huge magazines, or the proliferation of handguns. Some don’t want background checks,“red flag” laws, age restrictions until 21, storage requirement laws, or similar common sense safety protections.

Stevens lamented the lack of progress in making schools, concerts, churches, and even guns themselves safer, especially semiautomatic military-style weapons, such as those used in Las Vegas (and last week in Buffalo, NY, and this week in Uvalde, TX). In “Making” he wrote:

“Devices that make such deadly weapons even deadlier should be banned. But prohibiting bump stocks alone will do little to curtail the scourge of gun violence plaguing this country. (Indeed, I could not even finish writing this chapter before another mass shooting occurred, this one involving the the death of twenty-six people –– including three generations of a single family –– at a church on November 5, 2017.)”

Stevens saw the Heller case’s negative consequences arising from what he considered “a radical change in the law that would greatly tie the hands of state and national lawmakers endeavoring to find solutions to the gun problem in America."

He said it was a twin failure: first, the misreading of the Second Amendment and, second, the failure to respect settled precedent (stare decisis) in Miller, relaxing in “the worst self-inflicted wound in the Court’s history.”

The Supreme Court’s handling of the right to an abortion is another contentious issue that might be a significant self-inflicted wound.

But both explosive issues of gun safety and abortion can be framed in the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Whose liberty and freedom takes precedent: The angry young man with an AR-15 or dozens of school children? The self-righteous individual or the family of a raped pregnant teenager? The self-serving politician or voters in a rules-based society?

With some similarity to the gun safety controversy, Stevens saw the issue of abortion as one framed in “liberty” rather than “privacy.” He looked at Roe v. Wade and related cases, including Griswold v. Connecticut (which protects the right of married couples to use contraceptives) beginning on page 149 of “The Making of a Justice.” Highly recommended reading.

By the way, here’s a relevant Found Haiku, from a twitter post this week by actor George Takei, Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu:

“Ban assault rifles,

not books. Regulate firearms,

not women’s bodies.”

“The Making of a Justice” continues to be a source of wisdom and historical context for some of the most controversial issues of our time.

Stevens closes his memoir by sharing a personal letter from 2014 on White House stationery from President Barack Obama, sending warm wishes for Stevens’s 94th birthday. Obama wrote: “With unwavering integrity, you have stood as an impartial guardian of the law and protected the principles enshrined in our founding documents. Your steadfast commitment to justice and your understanding of how the law affects the lives of ordinary Americans have set a proud example and built a legacy worthy of celebration.”

Pres.-elect Barack Obama and VP-elect Joe Biden with Justices during a visit to the U.S. Supreme Court, Jan. 14, 2009: Obama, Chief Justice John Roberts, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clarence Thomas, David Souter, and Biden. (Pete Souza) 

Gen. Smedley D. Butler, Coup Fighter

Review by Bill Doughty––

Ninety years ago this month –– May 1932 –– thousands of military veterans marched on Washington D.C. and set up a tent city near the Capitol and within sight of the USS Constitution (pictured above).

Victims of the Great Depression, they were hungry, unemployed, and desperate. The “Bonus Marchers” demanded the right to cash in their bonuses, in the form of bonds due to be payable in 1945.

In Congress, the House of Representatives passed a bill authorizing pay to the veterans, but Republicans in the Senate declined to pass it. President Herbert Hoover had vowed to veto the bill anyway.

Hoover would soon order Army Generals Douglas MacArthur and George C. Patton to move against the marchers and get them out of Washington.

Running out of food by July, the Bonus Marchers threatened to storm the Capitol.

Butler

Enter Marine Corps General Smedley Darlington Butler, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, a respected and renowned veteran of several wars and conflicts. Butler met with the veterans in their tent city. He offered his support and advice: “If you don’t hang together, you aren’t worth a damn!”

He also suggested a different tactic instead of marching on the Capitol: “When you get home, go to the polls in November… Now go to it!” 

Butler warned the marchers against violence against the government, according to author Jules Archer, author of “The Plot to Seize the White House” (Hawthorn Books, 1973).

“You’re all right so long as you keep your sense of humor,” Butler said in is raspy hoarse voice, according to Archer.“ If you slip over into lawlessness of any kind, you will lose the sympathy of a hundred twenty million people in the nation,”

But it was Hoover’s administration that initiated the violence. MacArthur and Patton directed tanks, cavalry, infantry with bayonets, and a chemical weapon (adamsite, an arsenic vomiting-inducing tear gas) against the protesters, dispersing them and then burning down their tents and shacks.

FDR with Marines aboard USS Houston.

People did go to the polls in November. They elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, who righted the floundering economy, addressed greed and wealth inequality, and transformed the country with the New Deal, giving more power and protections to the people.

Butler explains how this New Deal did not sit well with bankers, industrialists, and rightwing groups (DuPonts, Remington, Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, American Liberty League). And big media, under the control of big business, took on FDR and his progressive initiatives.

During his times in the Marines, as Smedley Butler rose in the ranks, he increasingly saw the influence of industrialists in the military and even in veterans’ ranks.

Some wealthy people, including bankers, funded the American Legion and used veterans to bust workers’ unions.

“The average veteran who joined the Legion in the 1920s had been unaware that big-business men were backing it to use it as a strikebreaking agency. When workers struck against wage cuts, Legion posts were informed that the strikers were communists trying to create national chaos so that the Reds could take over. Legionnaires were given baseball bats to break up strikes and civil rights demonstrations.”

Members of American Liberty League, implicated in a coup plot.

But those opposed to Roosevelt did not rely solely on violent means to change the government. Some of them reportedly conspired to set up a Fascist government modeled on Italy’s Mussolini. In 1935, the American Legion pinned a button on Mussolini to make him an “honorary member.” (On the other hand, Butler had been courtmartialed earlier in his career under orders by President Hoover for Butler’s criticism of Mussolini and the “Italian corporatist state.”)

Ironically, the conspiracy against FDR fell on Smedley Butler’s doorstep, when a representative of the American Legion, linked to the American Liberty League and funded by powerful businessmen, asked him to be part of a coup plot.

They planned to form a powerful paramilitary group modeled after France’s rightwing Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire); then, they would establish an “assistant president” as Secretary of General Affairs. The president would become a figurehead. According to the plan, veterans would rally around Butler as the de facto president of an authoritarian autocracy.

(J.P. Morgan reportedly preferred General MacArthur for the role, but MacArthur’s actions against the Bonus Marchers made him too unpopular with a wide swath of veterans.)

Fortunately, Butler, whose loyalty was to the Constitution, was the absolutely wrong man for the job.

Spivak

He took his evidence of the coup plot to Congress and worked with investigative reporters to tell the story, including in the Philadelphia Record. According to reporter John Spivak, the millionaires behind the plot were woefully wrong in thinking money could buy any thing. Those involved in the plot, Spivak said, “lacked an elementary understanding of people and the moral forces that activate them.”

Archer’s “The Plot to Seize the White House” is dedicated to reporters George Seldes and John L. Spivak “for their courageous dedication to the truth, wherever it led.”

The book is about the plot, but it’s also a fascinating biography of the great, complicated Marine general, an icon in United States Marine Corps history.

Smedley Butler served in the Spanish-American War, Philippines Campaign, Boxer Rebellion, Caribbean Intervention, Chinese Intervention of 1927-8, and World War I.

Archer describes him as “one of the most colorful generals who had ever led troops into battle.” He writes, “Smedley Butler was a wiry bantam of a man, shoulders hunched forward as though braced against the pull of a heavy knapsack, his hawk nose prominent in the leathery face of an adventurer.”

When he commanded Quantico he built a football stadium with and for Marines. He promoted health, fitness, and wellness for wounded warriors.

“He was even more famous and popular among rank-and-file leathernecks, doughboys, and bluejackets for the fierce battles he had fought against the American military hierarchy on behalf of the enlisted man. He was also admired, respected, and trusted because of his one-man fight to compel Americans to remember their tragic war casualties hidden away in isolated  veterans’ hospitals.”

Popular for his skill as an “enormously persuasive speaker” –– Butler toured VFW posts. He saw growing divisions and right-wingers willing to believe in conspiracies.

“Continuing his tour for the VFW, Butler observed more and more storm signals flying in the United States as he traveled around the country. The nation was rapidly becoming polarized between the forces of Left and Right. Demagogues with apparently inexhaustible funds for propaganda and agitation led ‘patriotic’ crusades against Communists, Jews, and ‘Jewish bankers,’ who were alleged to be behind the New Deal.”

Butler was called before the House of Representatives to testify about the attempt by industrialists via the American Legion to subvert democracy and “seize the White House,” according to Archer.

The first “House Un-American Activities Committee” was “equally oriented against Fascist and Communist activities, according to Archer. “Under Representative John W. McCormack, later Speaker of the House, it spent considerable time and energy unmasking Fascist agents in America.”

Though written nearly fifty years ago, Archer’s book is invaluable for its perspective. He interviewed Butler’s immediate family members as well as contemporary reporters, witnesses, and researchers. And, Archer interviewed HUAC’s McCormack. 

Archer writes: “I asked him, ‘Then in your opinion America could definitely have become a Fascist power had it not been for General Butler’s patriotism in exploding the plot?’”

McCormack acknowledged, “It certainly could have.” Coming out of the upheaval of the Great Depression and World War I, “The people were in a confused state of mind, making the nation weak and ripe for some drastic kind of extremist reaction,” McCormack told Archer. “Mass frustration could bring about anything.”

Archer’s book led me to find “War is a Racket,” by Brig. Gen. Smedley Butler. It’s a short book published in 1935 based on Butler’s speech against war for profit and against big business’s influence in the military. 

Butler was for a strong national defense but against using the military to fight wars to help commercial companies make profits.

Guarding Spanish POWs at Portsmouth Navy Base, New Hampshire, 1894; 1st Lt. Smedley Butler is standing, third from right.

Butler said:

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 … I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”

Butler expounds on what, a generation later, President Eisenhower would call the Military-Industrial Complex in a warning to the nation as he left office. Butler said the only way to stop the “racket” of war was by “taking the profit out of war.”

Archer’s insightful biography includes Butler’s antiwar beliefs and how those beliefs may have gone too far. According to Archer, “Butler’s raging hatred of war led him into the same errors of judgment that ensnared the isolationists of America.” Butler agreed with Neville Chamberlain’s strategy of appeasing Hitler, confident (but wrong) that the Nazis couldn’t successfully invade France.

On June 21, 1940, just hours before France was to surrender to Adolf Hitler, Maj. Gen. Butler died in U.S. Naval Hospital Philadelphia.

Gleaves-class destroyer USS Butler (DD-636)

Butler’s death came eighteen months before the attack on Oahu. Eighteen months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy commissioned the destroyer USS Smedley Butler to serve in WWII. “Converted to a high-speed minesweeper, it saw distinguished service during the war.”

Marine Corps Base Camp Butler on Okinawa is another namesake of the great Marine warrior who came to hate war fought for what he considered the wrong reasons.

Butler believed war should only be conducted to defend the United States or the Constitution and Bill of Rights. He would have absolutely been against misadventures in Vietnam and Iraq. He would have also taken a stand against the insurrection at the Capitol and coup attempt of January 6, 2021.

Marine Corps Base Camp Butler, Okinawa.

[One hundred years ago, 1922, Smedley Butler introduced the first English bulldog into the Marine Barracks, Quantico. Bulldogs have become the mascot of the Marines ever since, with Chesty, namesake of famous Marine Lieutenant General Chesty B. Puller, in residence at Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C.]

‘American Buffalo’ by Steven Rinella

Review by Bill Doughty––

America’s most famous living hunter-conservationist is Steven Rinella. He is the brain and heart of the MeatEater Netflix show, podcast, and franchise. Rinella believes in respect for nature, conservation, and the environment. And he sees a deep connection between us and our food.

On one of his shows Rinella takes former Navy SEAL and Navy Reservist Cmdr. Rorke Denver, for a hunt in Alaska for black bear.* Denver is a fellow author who starred in “Act of Valor.” They eventually find a bear, and when he looks through the rifle’s scope at the bear now coming closer, Denver pauses to appreciate the beauty and power of the life he is about to take.

Rinella has a similar moment when he sights a buffalo, as described in gripping detail in “American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon” (Spiegel & Grau, Doubleday, Random House; 2008).

A North American buffalo.

Lucky to have won a lottery for a hunting permit for wild buffalo, Rinella is luckier still to be one of a few who actually finds and shoots one. His journey in Alaska, eluding bears and other predators, battling the elements, and navigating dangerous waterways, is compelling. So is his moment of truth as he prepares to shoot. His careful butchering of the animal is presented in precise detail. Though written fourteen years ago –– before Rinella became a world-renowned figure –– this book reveals the talents of a gifted writer and outdoorsman.

But what makes “American Buffalo” truly great and lasting is the author’s panoramic view of time and a philosophical connection to nature and life. He looks unblinkingly at the devastating destruction and near extinction of bison and other species in North America, lamenting the wanton greed and shortsightedness of people who killed only for profit and trophy. Rinella eats what he kills.

In this photo from 1892, men stand next to and atop a pile of American bison skulls waiting to be ground up for fertilizer.

Like other hunters, he sees the animal’s skull as a kind of connection to life’s mysteries.

“Buffalo skulls were put to various uses by Indians, most of a spiritual or metaphysical nature. The buffalo skull was an especially potent symbol to many Plains Indians tribes, but not because it equaled death. Rather, a skull represented a form of rebirth to many tribes. To reduce a buffalo to its skeleton was like ushering the animal back to a sort of primordial starting line, or beginning. The clean skull allowed for continuity, like a blank canvas upon which future buffalo could be created…

“I’m not a particularly religious person, though I do sense an inkling of the spiritual when I look at this buffalo skull. Many people have tried to explain to me what they feel when they look at a crucifix of Torah scroll; it’s an emotion often described as a mixture of gratitude, devotion, continuity, and awe. Looking at a buffalo skull is probably the closest I’ll ever come to experiencing those feelings, however faintly, and I’m glad to have a taste of that…”

Rinella describes how he embraces the privilege of being alive for the relatively short time we have.

Alaska's Copper River Valley

He searches for meaning and symbols. He calls the landscape he hunts in a "trophy."

And he questions the connection between his reverence for the animal he hunts and his commitment to killing and eating it.

“In a historical sense, I suppose that my confused and convoluted relationship to the buffalo is nothing new. For the entirety of man’s existence in North America, we’ve struggled with the meaning of this animal, with the ways in which its life is intertwined with our own. I think of the first hunters who walked through some long-ago gap between glaciers and stumbled onto a landscape populated with strange and massive creatures. The buffalo was just one of many then, a giant among a host of other giants, but over time these many animals were whittled away by the forces of man and nature. Eventually the buffalo stood alone, like the winning contestant in a game show.

“The prize was humanity’s never-ending attention, which was ultimately a bittersweet award. For thousands of years, the first people of North America fed on the buffalo’s meat and wore the buffalo’s skin, and then made a deity of the animal as a way of reconciling their need to slaughter the thing that granted them life. My own European ancestors came to the New World and scoffed at the heathen nature of the Indians’ ideas, then stood by as the buffalo nearly vanished from the earth beneath their notion that the animal was an expendable gift of their own God, a commodity meant to get them started before stepping aside and letting ‘civilization’ bloom in the wilderness.”

Throughout this book, Rinella blends spirituality with superstition, history with mystery, and his own life’s experiences within the context of our shared science and reality.

“American Buffalo” opens with an extended soliloquy about Neil Young and his early band Buffalo Springfield.

In a fun and mind-bending “association game,” he links “For What It’s Worth," a song against the Vietnam War ; Dances with Wolves, filmed in Canada; Hernando Cortéz of Spain; Crazy Horse of the Oglala Sioux; Springfield rifles; the Civil War; Black Diamond, the buffalo on the American nickel coin; President Theodore Roosevelt, hunter and conservationist; and the city of Buffalo, New York.

"Buffalo," is the name of cities in eighteen states. But, Rinella notes, no wild buffalo lived near Buffalo, New York.

On Saturday, Buffalo was the site of another race-based mass shooting by a white supremacist with an AR-15 "assault-style" rifle. Today, President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden visited Buffalo. Biden, a lifelong supporter of the Second Amendment, has asked Congress to pass legislation to require new background checks for gun buyers, and ban military-style "weapons of war" and large-capacity ammunition magazines.

Steven Rinella

Rinella does not hunt with AR-15s. He uses bolt-action rifles, pump shotguns, and bows and arrows for hunting. Rinella is an ethical hunter who calls himself “an evironmentalist with a gun.”

He became interested in environmental issues, according to a profile earlier this year in The New York Times by Malia Wollan, when one of his big brothers gave him a paperback of Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac.”According to Wollan, “Most people read Leopold as belonging to the pantheon of American environmental writers, with the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson and John Muir. Rinella reads Leopold as a fellow hunter.” (Marjory Stoneman Douglas is another great environmentalist in that pantheon.)

On his latest podcast, Rinella discusses hunting, fishing, and books. He talks to Cameron Hanes about Hanes’s new book, “Endure: How to Work Hard, Outlast, and Keep Hammering,” with a foreword by Joe Rogan and afterword by David Goggins. Hanes says, “If you wish you could run farther and shoot straighter, this book is for you.”

Rinella, himself, is the author of a half-dozen books, with more planned for release in coming months and years, including books for children, outdoor cooking, and an “atlas for the outdoors.”

Steven Rinella, the “environmentalist with a gun,” is also a philosopher with a pen and a voice.

Some people, especially vegans and those who prefer not to think about where their super market food comes from, will be turned off by the whole MeatEater oeuvre. But that’s the beauty of American freedom, diversity, and the right to choose.

In the MeatEater episode with former Navy SEAL Rorke Denver, after Denver bags his bear, and just before he and Rinella skin and butcher it, Rinella expresses his appreciation for the service and sacrifice of Denver and other veterans who serve in the nation’s defense.

In “American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon” readers can discover an ethos of honor, courage, and commitment.

*(Top photo: Denver and Rinella trek their bear meat and fur out of the Alaskan wilderness in a scene from MeatEater, YouTube.)

‘A Short [Bloody] History of Russia’ – Part II

Review by Bill Doughty––

Over the centuries, the Russian people turned to autocrats and tyrants when faced with seemingly endless invasions and conquests: Scandinavians, Normans, Mongols, Golden Horde, Khanates, Ottomans, French, Germans, and others. And authoritarian Russian leaders waged war over centuries to capture territory, subjugate neighbors, or put down revolts.

This is the second of a two-part review of Mark Galeotti’s short-but-deep “A Short History of Russia: How the World’s Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin.” We continue to see how the shadow of Russian history frames Putin’s actions and how Russia sees itself compared with the West. [Top photo: Russia's President Vladimir Putin speaks at the St. Vladimir Monument in Moscow.]

In 1831, Russia's Tsar Nicholas took away constitutional rights of people in Poland. The Poles revolted, and Nicholas's army crushed the revolution.

Facing other revolutions in Europe in 1848, “even though Russia was suffering from famine caused by unusually poor harvests and a cholera epidemic, Nicholas’s troops would again march in the name of the status quo.” They moved against free thinkers in Hungary, Krakow, and the Moldavian movement and fought Persians, Turks, Brits, and French armies.

“Again, the double-headed eagle looked both ways. Nicholas was at once committed to –– as he saw it –– saving Europe from its own ungodly and illegitimate dalliance with liberalism, as well as protecting Russia from European ideas. Aware of the advances in West from European ideas. Aware of the advances in Western science and technology, he wanted to adopt the elements of the West that looked useful, while ignoring the social, political and legal contexts from which they sprang. Without a thriving mercantile class to generate investment capital, without free and open debate in universities and educated circles to generate ideas, and without greater social mobility to generate new cohorts of innovators and skeptics, Russia would always remain backward, desperately trying to adopt and adapt the inventions of others.”

Tsar Alexander II, Alexander II, Empress Maria, 1870

Differences in the interpretation of orthodox Christianity and a desire to keep and control Crimea continued to fuel conflict between Russia and the West.

Despite the skill of some tsarist generals and the bravery of Russia’s serf army, they were outgunned and out-modernized by British and French forces in Crimea. But the war was a catalyst for “arguably the most ambitious social engineering project Russia had yet to see” under Nicholas’s son, Alexander II –– in effect moving out of feudalism. Reforms, however, triggered protests for more freedoms, leading to the state’s response: more repression.

Alexander’s son and heir, Alexander III, proved to be “that most terrible of leaders, both foolish and dutiful” with no answers to new challenges facing Russia in the modern age with growing imperial powers, including in Asia.

“Russia’s eastward expansion had brought it into conflict over Manchuria and Korea with a rising and aggressive Japan.”

A surprise attack by Japan at Port Arthur ignited the Russo-Japanese war that the Russians thought, wrongly, they could win quickly, bringing a sense of victory home to reunite the country. “It soon became clear that this would be anything but (quick). Japan had, after all, been modernizing rapidly and was fighting closer to home.”

Imperial Russian cruiser Jemchug (Zemstchug), interned by the Imperial Japanese Navy in Manila, Philippines, 1905, following Battle of Tsushima. (NHHC)

Galeotti describes the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, which marked the end of the war, as “an expensive and humiliating defeat.” The tsar was still considered “God’s chosen representative” by the people, but 150,000 protesters turned out for a peaceful demonstration, singing hymns and holding religious icons.

But Imperial Guards fired at them and killed hundreds, triggering the 1905 Revolution and leading inexorably to the revolutions of 1917 and Russian Civil War, 1918-22 and the rise of Communism.

World War I is described as a cataclysm that finally ended Russia’s “zombie regime’s existence.” 

Stalin and Lenin busts

Lenin killed off his rivals to rise to power. After he died, his body was mummified and put on display to be deified by the public. The Communist Party continued a form of imperialism, expanding its borders, promoting authoritarianism, and (ironically) establishing a hierarchy of rapacious aristocrats –– now oligarchs.

Stalin took Lenin’s viciousness to a new level. Stalin was “willing to think own a scale which none of his predecessors had the callous coldheartedness to dream.” Land was confiscated and nationalized. Stalin's collectivization of farmlands brought devastation to Ukraine, where three million people died of famine in 1932-3.

Socialism at any cost was another form of “the age-old Russian dilemma,” Galeotti says, which “after all, had been how to modernize while maintaining state power.”

Stalin turned to terror –– even against his own Communist Party. He purged three quarters of representatives to the Party Congress, ninety percent of military generals, and three of the five Red Army marshals. “He understood power at a visceral level, and kept firm control of the political police.” And he understood the power of propaganda, playing to myths, misinformation, and the Big Lie of the father-like “Good Tsar” to justify autocracy.

“As fascism rose in Europe (in the 1930s), Stalin had first hoped to use it to reach some common cause with Britain and France, then opportunistically made his own deals with Hitler’s Germany, leading to their joint partition of Poland in 1939 … Stalin had hoped to postpone war against Germany to give him as much time as possible to prepare.

“When in June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, it came as a devastating strategic surprise.”

Russia became a superpower as the "USSR" on the crucible of World War II, subsuming Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, with East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania becoming its vassal states.

Brave Russians, Ukranians, and others fought for their survival and not only turned the Nazis away, as they’d done to Napoleon, but also marched from the east into Germany and Berlin itself.

“No wonder the Russians still call this the Great Patriotic War,” Galeotti observes. “It is impossible to underestimate its importance. More than 20 million died in the war, and everybody suffered.”

After Germany’s signing of surrender, while the rest of the Allies recognized May 8 as VE (Victory in Europe Day), Russia chose May 9 as their own exclusive Victory Day to commemorate their role in defeating the Nazis.

Russian soldiers celebrate the defeat of the Nazis in Berlin in May 1945.

But, “the Great Patriotic War represented the apotheosis of a long-standing Russian messianism,” Galeotti writes. Was Russia really a unique entity? Shrouded in a cloak of Sovietism, was it a true defender of orthodoxy and the West, as it seemed to be in helping defeat Nazism? “The irony is that the savior of Europe then became the occupier of half the continent and the threat to the rest, and the Iron Curtain not only locked Russia away from Europe, it made it more ‘other’ than ever.”

The truth hurt. “Horrific details of Stalinist terror challenged the heroic narrative of Soviet industrialization, and even the triumph of the Second World War was undermined by accounts of bad generalship and a callous disregard for the lives of soldiers,” Galeotti observes.

History was not on the side of the Communist Party or of Russia in the 20th century. So, for the most part, Soviet and Russian leaders have tried to erase or rewrite parts of their history they don’t like.

Afghan resistance fighters observe damage to a village caused by Soviet bombing. (DoD)

Despite some blips to the contrary, Khrushchev and Brezhnev maintained a coexistent detente with the West, but by the time of Brezhnev’s death in 1982, “The Soviet Union was mired in a vicious conflict in Afghanistan in which boys were coming home in zinc coffins while the official media still claimed there was no war there.”

Gorbachev was the reformer who brought about the end of the Soviet Union. “His ambition was to save the soviet system. Instead he was to kill it.”

Gorbachev questioned the tsarist system and dogmatic central planning through “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness). As a result, he helped burn down the house of cards and end the Soviet Union. Fifteen new nations arose from the ashes, including the Russian Federation.

Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, proved to be a poor leader, overcome by alcohol, health issues, painkillers, and self-indulgence, according to Galeotti. Under Yeltsin, Russia saw a rise in oligarchs, corruption, and organized crime. But with military failures in Chechnya, the Kremlin looked for a new authoritarian leader as a successor to Yeltsin.

KGB agent Putin

“They settled on a relatively unknown figure, a certain Vladimir Putin.” Putin, the “new tsar” and “henchman of choice” promised a return to orthodoxy and order, a “dictatorship of the law. Putin had been a KGB officer before becoming a politician, Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff, and head of the Federal Security Service (successor to the KGB).

Galeotti says Putin’s vision for his country had three points: (1) Russia is prey when divided, strong when united; (2) Russia is (supposedly) not an aggressor but won’t be a victim of the West; and (3) Neither Asiatic nor Eurasian, Russia “it is European but proper European.” “Its orthodox faith is the genuine form of Christianity.”

“A Short History of Russia” includes some good photos and some great maps by Helen Stirling. One of the maps is labeled “Putin’s Wars” and shows locations for the Second Chechen War, 1999-2009; Cyberattack on Estonia, 2007; Invasion of Georgia, 2008; Annexation of Crimea, 2014; Intervention of Donbas, 2014-; Covert ‘political war’ against West, 2014-; and Intervention into Syria, 2015-.

The Kremlin’s effort to convince the world that the Russians are exceptional and better than the West is belied by Putin’s actions in 2022. The attempt to “persuade Russians that they are a special people, apart from Europe and embattled by its malign cultural and geopolitical forces, demonstrates that they are swimming against the tide,” Galeotti concludes.

“This has become a country in which reimagining history has become not just a national pastime but an industry.”

Galeotti evaluates Putin compared with other Russian leaders of the past, including Ivan the Terrible, Stalin (“the much more terrible”), Peter the Great, Lenin, Catherine the Great, and others. And he concludes, perhaps incorrectly, that Putin is largely just a transitional figure.

He also concludes (albeit from a 2020 perspective) that Russia is moving closer to Europe.

Goya's Saturn (Cronus)

Not under Putin. Not in 2022.

Since Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine beginning February 24, Professor Galeotti has provided invaluable assessments, including in The Spectator last month where he observes how Putin is floundering and “seems determined to turn against those he was once closest to –– out of fear, anger and hubris. In the process, he is only further weakening his regime.”

Galeotti compares Putin to the bloodthirsty Greek titan Cronos, which is appropriate considering Russia’s early history of patricide, fratricide, siblicide, filicide and various other -cides.

“Cronos thought that by devouring his children he would be safe. He actually drove the last [his sixth offspring], Zeus, to slay him. We are a long way from any such potential parricide, but it seems fitting that the very agency which did the most to encourage and benefit from Putin's increasing paranoia and isolation is also the first to suffer from it.”

The Cronos comparison brings us back to the beginning of Russia’s long and bloody history –– starting with pagans and ancient, discredited, and messianic wars of aggression.

Add “genocide” to Putin’s record of homicidal mania. Are we also witnessing Russia’s suicide at the hand of a “weak strongman”?