In the London Review of Books, Dominic Lieven says that Geoffrey Hosking's book, Peasants in Arms, Russian Against Napoleon: The Battle For Europe 1807 to 1813, explains Russia's victory over France in the Napoleonic Wars in refreshingly Russian terms. France was not merely defeated by the Russian winter, or by Napoleon's hubris. Rather, Russia succeeded as a result of its officer corps and peasant army.
What did that army look like? It was, of course, enormous. It was built by recruitment, which happened once a year in the Russian villages. The serf communes regularly surrendered one in 100 or so villagers to the levy. Ordinarily, married serfs were exempt from the draft. But the Napoleonic Wars meant that even married serfs could expect to be inducted, although their wives could be expected to suffer terribly from the nearly permanent absence of their husbands, who could no longer help in the fields. When a serf was inducted, he served for a period of twenty-five years and was, therefore, severed from his kinfolk and the life of the commune in general. To signify the separation, villagers held a kind of a funeral for him.
The czar and aristocracy naturally encouraged a complete separation between soldiers and serfs. For it was a well-established historical fact that armed serfs were dangerous to the Russian political order. Serfs who took up arms for the czar were subject to severe discipline but technically earned their freedom, becoming citizens in a manner of speaking--but Geoffrey Hosking reminds us that this wasn't true in the Napoleonic Wars. Here, Alexander only very reluctantly created serf reserves to support the regular army, but insisted that these recruits would remain serfs.
The Napoleonic Army had a lot to recommend it. The former serfs bonded with one another and retained many of the traits of their communal life. In fact, they entered into military cooperatives, who pooled their salaries to pay for clothes, food, and other essentials. The collective life of the Russian army led to solidarity, good morale, and collective action. The Orthodox Church, and personal loyalty to the czar, supplied ideological reinforcement to Russian camaraderie. All this was observed by foreign experts as well as Russian ones. The peasant soldiers even had the opportunity to be promoted, but only to the level of NCOs. Coupled to the strength of its soldiers, the Russian army specialized in intelligence work.
Notwithstanding the strengths which helped the large Russian army to overwhelm Napoleon, the Russian army had flaws. The army was not, after all, built up by passionate volunteers. Moreover, its officer class was by ethnicity and affiliation to one of two major centers of political authority: Moscow and St. Petersburg. Aristocratic intrigue and unrest also weakened Alexander's hold over the direction of military policy. And again, the possibility that the serfs might rise up against the landowning class severely limited Alexander's willingness to create a large system of military reserves. And yet the Russians officer corps and peasant soldiers and Cossack cavalrymen did prevail.
Showing posts with label London Review of Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label London Review of Books. Show all posts
Sunday, February 20, 2011
"A Bacchanalia of (Russian) Indifference"
Tony Wood reviewed Anna Politkovskaya's Nothing but the Truth: Selected Dispatches in the 24 June 2010 issue of the London Review of Books. Politkovskaya was killed by an unknown assailant or assailants on 7 October 2006 but wrote over 500 articles or editorials in Novaya Gazeta and other journals between 1999 and her death. Most, but not all, of these articles focused on the Russian assault on Chechnya, which she believed had killed countless innocent civilians and poisoned the Russian state. As we know, Politkovskaya was a tenacious reporter whose brave criticism put her life in danger on more than one occasion. She regularly received death threats and was probably poisoned in 2004 according to Tony Wood. The book, Nothing But the Truth, is part of a much larger work that was published in Russia back in 2007. It was filled with tribute articles, reports, testimony, and lots and lots of pieces about Chechnya. In Politkovskaya's opinion, Chechnya was a national disgrace that dishonored the country "from top to bottom."
Who was Polikovskaya? Tony Wood briefly describes her life story. Born in New York in 1968 as a result of her Ukrainian father's translator assignment in the UN, Polikovskaya grew up comfortably in Moscow and eventually studied journalism at Moscow State University. But, in her own words, she became a woman "who observed the Soviet Union as its most disgraceful in the 1970s and 1980s."
Politkovskaya's first job was at Izvestia. Her husband, also a journalist, was another intrepid reporter and, as Wood tells us, was among the first journalists to arrive at the scene of Chernobyl. The two eventually divorced because, in her laconic telling of it, "he partied a lot. Then he left." Of course, Polikovskaya's incorruptible, humane approach to journalism soon brought her some measure of national and even international fame and indeed made her one of Putin's main opponents.
Politkovskaya's reputation as a writer was made by Chechnya. Her stories were profoundly humane, often focusing of the impact of the war on its most vulnerable victims. She was, said one observer quoted by Wood, "like a person without skin, receiving all the signals of misery from everyone." If this heroic woman had blind spots, Wood suggests these were related to Yeltin's grotesque flaws--he bombed the Duma, invaded Chechnya before Putin ever did, chanelled money into the hands of friends, and sold out the country to oligarchs for instance--and the first war in Chechnya, which she failed to condemn.
Of course, Russians as well as Chechnya were suffering mightily during the period in which Politkovskaya wrote. The country had a ruinous social welfare and healthcare system and Wood says that 40 percent of the population was living in poverty. The murder rate was many, many times higher than it was in Western countries such as France and Germany. Fifty-two journalists were killed since 1992 and 80 or 90 of them are assaulted each year. Their vulnerability stemmed from the country's runaway corruption and lack of any other checks to this corruption save independent journalism. So Politkovskaya, martyr of a more humane Russia, had a terrifying job but certainly no lack of materials to write about.
Who was Polikovskaya? Tony Wood briefly describes her life story. Born in New York in 1968 as a result of her Ukrainian father's translator assignment in the UN, Polikovskaya grew up comfortably in Moscow and eventually studied journalism at Moscow State University. But, in her own words, she became a woman "who observed the Soviet Union as its most disgraceful in the 1970s and 1980s."
Politkovskaya's first job was at Izvestia. Her husband, also a journalist, was another intrepid reporter and, as Wood tells us, was among the first journalists to arrive at the scene of Chernobyl. The two eventually divorced because, in her laconic telling of it, "he partied a lot. Then he left." Of course, Polikovskaya's incorruptible, humane approach to journalism soon brought her some measure of national and even international fame and indeed made her one of Putin's main opponents.
Politkovskaya's reputation as a writer was made by Chechnya. Her stories were profoundly humane, often focusing of the impact of the war on its most vulnerable victims. She was, said one observer quoted by Wood, "like a person without skin, receiving all the signals of misery from everyone." If this heroic woman had blind spots, Wood suggests these were related to Yeltin's grotesque flaws--he bombed the Duma, invaded Chechnya before Putin ever did, chanelled money into the hands of friends, and sold out the country to oligarchs for instance--and the first war in Chechnya, which she failed to condemn.
Of course, Russians as well as Chechnya were suffering mightily during the period in which Politkovskaya wrote. The country had a ruinous social welfare and healthcare system and Wood says that 40 percent of the population was living in poverty. The murder rate was many, many times higher than it was in Western countries such as France and Germany. Fifty-two journalists were killed since 1992 and 80 or 90 of them are assaulted each year. Their vulnerability stemmed from the country's runaway corruption and lack of any other checks to this corruption save independent journalism. So Politkovskaya, martyr of a more humane Russia, had a terrifying job but certainly no lack of materials to write about.
When Vampires Slept
In the July 22, 2010 issue of The London Review of Books, James Meek analyzed a bevy of Tolstoy books, including William Nickell's The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy (as translated by Cathy Porter), Leo Tolstoy's A Confession (as translated by Anthony Briggs), and Anniversary Essays on Tolstoy (as edited by Donna Tussing Orwin). According to Meek, Sofia married a significantly older Tolstoy at the tender age of eighteen, and then proceeded to have thirteen children with her famous husband, although five of them would never see age eleven.
Sofia was an intelligent woman who loved her husband, hand copied his many manuscripts, and may even have helped to edit them. Sofia was charged with running a complex household and acting as Tolstoy's business manager. Toward the end of her marriage with Tolstoy, Sofia became increasingly jealous and tormented by her husband's ethical precepts, religious admirers, and business partners. Sofia was a difficult woman to be around at the end of Tolstoy's life. She lied about taking an overdose of opium, said she couldn't go for a swim because she might drown herself, asserted that her husband was having a homosexual relationship with Chertkov, his protégée, lay down in the middle of the road to court death or at least draw attention to herself, went on freezing stakeouts to secretly monitor her husband's behavior, and nearly went catatonic.
At his death, Tolstoy was an international superstar, "as if Picasso at the height of his artistic fame had mutated into Gandhi and retained artistic talent and fame." On the other hand, James Meek seems to accept the view of some of Tolstoy's critics, that he was a "second-rate moral philosopher" who was "reinventing the philosophy wheel" with his endless tracts, treatises and novellas dealing with religious and philosophical matters. If the Kruetzer Sonata's long-winded sermonizing is any indication of the quality of Tolstoy's philosophical work, Meek has a point.
On the other hand, as Meek confesses, Tolstoy did very important work in helping a persecuted sect, providing famine relief, opposing the death penalty, and so on. And this Tolstoy's death, some important part of Russia--perhaps the best part--also died. Meek quotes Blok who wrote: "While Tolstoy is alive, and gong along the furrows behind a plough, behind his white horse. the morning is fresh and dewy, nonthreatening, the vampires sleep, and -- thank god."
Monday, December 13, 2010
Tycoon, Gangster, or Liberal?
What is it about Khodorkovsky that makes him so damned intriguing? Surely the fact that he was once Russia's richest man--whose personal wealth topped four billion dollars--but now languishes in a prison cell has something to do with the enduring appeal of his story. Is Khodorkovsky Russia's Al Capone or is he a modern day Herzen, crying out for the rebirth of liberal dissent against a monstrous autocracy? Perhaps he is both. In Keith Gessen's London Review of Books review of Richard Sakwa's book, The Quality of Freedom: Khodorkovsky, Putin, and the Yukos Affair, the erstwhile oligarch emerges as a complex man who has come to represent an ever more complex age, the age of Putin.
For Khodorkovsky is a former komsomol officer who exploited the wild instability of the Yeltsin years with an equal dash of brilliance and knavery to build a spectacularly successful bank and essentially (if not illegally) rob the citizenry of its state-owned oil company. Khodorkovsky's triumph is the story of capitalist Russia. Violence, one of the fundamental themes of early capitalist Russia, seemed to reinforce Yukos' ascendancy, although the correlation between oligarchy and low-level criminal battles seems hard if not impossible to prove.
Over time, Khodorkovsky's business empire became, like the business empires of many other oligarchs, a state within a state. Handsome and always outwardly polite and mild-mannered, Khodorkovsky gained enough stature to resist Putin's attempt to reassert the authority of the state. Eventually, Putin offered oligarchs a deal: stay out of politics, and the state will avoid asking difficult questions related to mega-businesses. Most oligarchs took the deal. A few fled Russia never to return. Khodorkovsky couldn't grasp the limits of his power. Soon, he was imprisoned and stripped of his vast wealth.
Today Khodorkovsky has become an emblem of resistance to Putin and his brand of government. He's a lucid, limpid champion of liberal dissent. Without the fear of losing either wealth or liberty, he seems free to voice his dissatisfaction ever more stridently, naively, and urgently.
For Khodorkovsky is a former komsomol officer who exploited the wild instability of the Yeltsin years with an equal dash of brilliance and knavery to build a spectacularly successful bank and essentially (if not illegally) rob the citizenry of its state-owned oil company. Khodorkovsky's triumph is the story of capitalist Russia. Violence, one of the fundamental themes of early capitalist Russia, seemed to reinforce Yukos' ascendancy, although the correlation between oligarchy and low-level criminal battles seems hard if not impossible to prove.
Over time, Khodorkovsky's business empire became, like the business empires of many other oligarchs, a state within a state. Handsome and always outwardly polite and mild-mannered, Khodorkovsky gained enough stature to resist Putin's attempt to reassert the authority of the state. Eventually, Putin offered oligarchs a deal: stay out of politics, and the state will avoid asking difficult questions related to mega-businesses. Most oligarchs took the deal. A few fled Russia never to return. Khodorkovsky couldn't grasp the limits of his power. Soon, he was imprisoned and stripped of his vast wealth.
Today Khodorkovsky has become an emblem of resistance to Putin and his brand of government. He's a lucid, limpid champion of liberal dissent. Without the fear of losing either wealth or liberty, he seems free to voice his dissatisfaction ever more stridently, naively, and urgently.
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