‘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”?