Helen Rappaport's The Romanov Sisters

Like her other excellent books on modern Russian history, Helen Rappaport's book, The Romanov Sisters:  The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra, is extremely well-written and well-researched.  In fact, Rapport is clearly right at home in the pre-revolutionary Russia, and has no trouble tracking the lives of the five young women whose died so tragically at the hands of their Bolshevik executioners. If there can be any criticism of this book, it is only that the semi-private lives of these innocent young ladies does not reveal all that much about either Russian society or the revolutionary trends that were soon to engulf the ancien regime. 

To be sure, Rappaport's book covers the entire reign of Nicholas and Alexandra, and gives readers a reasonable treatment of the autocracy's slide toward disaster.  It also discusses dynastic relationships, World War I, Rasputin, and the tsarevich's physical vulnerability.  But the young ladies don't really play all that significant a part in the political life of Russia.  They were symbols of the autocracy, and their beauty was sometimes exploited to shore up the image of their often unpopular father and mother.  However, they rarely made decisions of note, so their story is largely a story of symbolism or mythology.  Certainly, readers will always be curious about how such a wealthy and powerful family could wind up dead in a cellar.  But the ordinary lives of these young ladies isn't really the story we must follow. 

Douglass Smith's biography of Rasputin actually offers a better way to write biographies like these.  According to Smith, the story of Rasputin is as much about the lies or gossip people told about the man as it is about his actual story-line.   What did Rasputin represent to different classes in Russia, either before or during the First World War?  And why was a man like Rasputin allowed into the inner chambers of power?  These questions are worth investigating, even if Rasputin's personal antics weren't so enthralling.  The same may be true of the Romanov sisters.  They may deserve this well-written biography, but history also deserves an extended treatment on what the women represented to others, however poorly this representation reflected their real lives.  Mikhail Zygar's book, The Empire Must Die, offers one a sense of how absolutely dreadful Nicholas II and Alexandra were, both in terms of their decision-making, and in terms of what they represented to the Russian intelligentsia, as well as the Russian peasants and Russian ethnic minorities.  Nicholas and Alexandra were living symbols of oppression, anti-antisemitism, bureaucracy, stultified thinking, violence, incompetence, inequality, etc.  Thus, if one really wants to know more about Russia's imperial family, one might start with a book like The Empire Must Die.  While Rappaport is right to assert that Nicholas II was a great family man, it's probably more important to note that he was a criminally naive, criminally incompetent, and criminally indecisive.  After all, it was Nicholas and Alexandra's folly, and the folly the autocracy represented, that at least partly led to the Revolution that Rapport's documented so well in her next book, Caught in the Whirlwind, reviewed recently by Soviet Roulette.

Helen Rappaport's Caught in the Revolution

Helen Raaport's new book, Caught in the Revolution, is an excellent compendium of foreigner eye-witness accounts of both the February and October revolutions in Russia.  It is exhaustively researched, and well-written.  The book also helps readers to get a vivid sense of how events seem to have unfolded at the time.  In other words, it miraculously gives the reader a general sense of chronology even as it teaches us that the revolutionary events felt disordered or unpredictable at the time.  Perhaps the book's greatest strength is that it gives us a sense of the paradoxes of revolution. On the one hand, St. Petersburg was extraordinarily violent and dangerous as the Romanovs disappeared from the scene.  On the other hand, people continued to go about their ordinary business in many respects, even attending theatrical performances in some of the most hectic moments of political chaos.  And while Rappaport shows us that the revolution continuously surprised people, she also demonstrates that many observers already sensed that Russia was headed toward some form of catastrophe.

Rappaport's foreigners may not have understood everything that they witnessed, but they certainly add something to our understanding of what a revolution looks or feels like.  Rappaport relies heavily on the accounts of British, French, and American diplomats and journalists, but captures a number of other different perspectives as well.  Generally speaking, these eye witnesses are biases against the Bolshevik takeover, with the notable exception of Reed and Bryant.  Again, it's the paradoxes of the book that struck me most. For Rappaport reveals that Lenin and Trotsky and their ilk were marginal players in the much wider drama of a society in collapse.  But her sources also show that in such a descent into disorder only a group such as Lenin's would have made any sense to many Russians, who no doubt couldn't believe that the country was still at war when it could no longer feed itself or make its factories run.

I read Rappaport's book directly after finishing Smith's excellent investigation of Rasputin.  The two books work well with one another.  Reading Smith's book one gets a clear sense that the Russian political order was incredibly fragile as it entered the first world war.  Ironically, Smith shows us that Rasputin was not exactly Russia's problem.  In fact, he was a much more sympathetic character than is often portrayed.  Yet the fact that both Nicholas II and Alexandra were so heavily dependent on a a man like Rasputin reminds us that autocracy was no longer viable as Russia moved forward into the twentieth century.  This dependence had serious political consequences, but is also symptomatic of the old regime's brittle nature.  Even the monarch's relatives and fellow aristocrats became critics. Rapapport revisits the final days of the Romanov dynasty, but then suggests that the Provisional Government inherited at least some of the problems of the Romanovs, and never really stood much of a chance of securing legitimacy in such chaotic conditions.  Continuing the war was certainly the government's worst mistake of course.  One would like to see a closer investigation of why the Provisional Government was unable to consider leaving that war.

Teffi's Subtly Worded

Some quotations from Pushkin Press's new book by Teffi, Subtly Worded.

"His wife had the hurt and confused look of someone who is constantly being scolded."

"His daughter's large nose slanted slightly to the right, dragging along with it a squinting left eye that peered at the world with suspicion."

"I don't think I've sniffed five kopeks from you since Christmas."

"He's ambitious--even excessively ambitious.  He wants to become a provocateur, but he doesn't know a single revolutionary song."

"The poet was someone very interesting.  He has not yet written any poems--he was still trying to come with a pen name..."

"Oh!  What a woman can get away with when she's wearing a hat like this!  Things that a woman wearing any old hat wouldn't even dare to dream of."

"Varenka felt rich and important, and modestly pursed her lips sot that the passers-by she had splashed with mud would not be too jealous."

"The web was obviously a hammock for flies."

"A fat May-bug, drunk on sunshine, had crashed into Lisa's forehead and fallen to the ground."

"Nanny, I'll never die, will I?  I'll eat lots of soup, and drinks lots of milk, and I'll never die.  That's right, isn't it?"

"They live righteously.  They speak little, and because both are hard of hearing, they both have their say."

"Yes, peasants are peasants.  Is a peasant going to try to eat less?"

"The bee may be a simple, humble creature--but all the same, on her name day she doesn't buzz."

"There once was a life.  It was lived out and it finished."

"She thought about her husband--who was handsome and no good."

"At least we'll still be alive.  Not everyone today can boast of having living relatives."

"That's pretty rich, too. He accredited himself as ambassador to Japan."  "Who appointed him?" "Know one knows."

"You must know waht Tyutchev said all those years ago:  'You cannot understand Russia with your mind." And since the human body has no other organ of understanding all we can do is throw up our hands in despair."

"We--les russes, as they call us--live the strangest of lives here, nothing like other people's.  We stick together, for example, not like planets, by mutual attraction, but by a force quite contrary to the laws of physics--mutual repulsion."

"Rasputin seemed to me to lack the steadiness needed to manage any kind of strategy. He was too twitchy, too easily distracted, too confused in every way."

"I don't know what [Rasputin] was like at the beginning of his trajectory, but by the time I met him, he was already adrift."

"It was like looking through a microscope at some species of beetle.  I could see the monstrous hairy legs, the giant maw--but I knew it was really just a little insect."

"It's Rasputin's doing," People were saying, "Who else?"  "What's he got to do with it?"  "He profits from everything black, evil, and incomprehensible."

"Raputin was now leaping about like a goat.  Mouth hanging open, skin drawn tight over his cheekbones, locks of hair whipping across the sunken sockets of his eyes, he was dreadful to behold."

"The fools don't understand who I am.  A sorcerer?  Maybe I am.  They burn sorcerers, so let them burn me.  But there's one thing they don't understand:  if they kill me, it will be the end of Russia.  Remember my clever girl:  if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.  They'll bury us together."

The Triumph of Atheism

One of the Revolution’s crowing achievements was atheism.  After centuries of cruel economic and ideological exploitation by the Orthodox clergy and its political allies, Russians finally liberated themselves from an outmoded belief in God.  This liberation was at the heart of the Revolution’s appeal to the liberal-minded, urban intelligentsia.  How free must men and women have felt to be able to escape centuries of magical thinking and religious mumbo-jumbo in one spontaneous moment of rational action?  How joyous an epoch:  to overthrown a god as well as a tsar in one tumultuous year?  Rasputin, the tangible link between God and tsar in the last days of the old regime, was the living embodiment of everything that had been eating away at Russia for so many centuries.  For many educated Russians, Rasputin’s mysticism and magical thinking were inextricably tied up with his depravity and amorality, which, in turn, were firmly linked to the charismatic but bizarre man’s autocratic, reactionary politics.  Religious Russia meant Grigory Rasputin, or worse. 

I remember the moment in time when I first realized there was no God.  Strangely, my religious education occurred in public school during my freshman year of high school.  Assigned two essays about the existence of God—one theist, the other atheist—I was immediately and totally convinced of the truth of the atheist document.   I was shocked and upset by my conversion to godlessness.  Until that time, I had been a believer from a relatively liberal Protestant sect, Methodism.   Looking back, it’s clear that the collapse of my faith had very little to do with the essayist’s arguments, and everything to do with my mother’s recent death.  Reading the essay, I was left with that simple question everyone must ask himself in the wake of a personal tragedy:  if there is a God, how could he have taken away my mother?  My answer was as simple as the question:  there cannot be a God. 

Looking back, I am struck by the oddness of losing one’s religion as a response to death.  For religion is nothing if not an elaborate attempt to give people solace in the face of death, or mortality in general.  Yet my mother’s death opened up a curtain on existence and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that God was no longer a factor in my mortal life.  The irony perhaps is that my mother went into the final weeks of her life as a Christian, even calling for a minster to visit her sickbed to sing Christian songs with her.  That’s my memory anyhow--forgive the distortions that have accumulated over the course of twenty-five years.

One doesn’t really lose one’s faith in a single instance.  There are no “road to Damascus” experiences, as it were.  When I learned from my grandmother than my mother had died, I went to seek solace from my father, asking whether it was true that Mom was actually much better off being in heaven.  My father’s look, filled with pity and a certain incredulity at my naivete, said something different than his hesitant words:  “Yes, Derek.  She must be in heaven.  Yes, she must be better off.”  He probably never meant to deliver such a condescending message.  He may not even have meant anything at all.   Although he was a half-hearted believer at best, attending Church for his wife’s sake, his answer couldn’t have really turned my mind away from  the depressing fact of my growing distrust of the Christian response to tragedy.  The truth was this:  I didn’t really trust in God’s existence.  The bible picture book Mom kept downstairs seemed as relevant to my life as my book of Greek mythology or any Dungeons and Dragons book. 

Being freed from religion was an awesome responsibility, and one I couldn’t handle for many years.  At first, I wondered whether I even needed to bother about morality and ethics if God wasn’t around to punish or reward me.  Of course,  leaving religion had its upside:  I had a confident, independent, open-minded, and even creative approach to my surroundings and toward men and women from other religious traditions .  I also eventually started to think more deeply about right and wrong:  since the bible wasn’t inherently right or wrong, one had to think very deeply about what separated the good from the bad.  And of course I soon realized that Christians, and religious folks in general, were often capable of doing very bad things at the behest of their god.  As Kurt Vonnegut said, and I can only paraphrase him:  sooner or later gods have got to be held accountable for the actions of their followers.

In Russia, state-sponsored atheism led to ideological coercion, anticlerical cruelty, and anti-religions brutality on a scale not even the pogrom-tolerant autocracy could have imagined.  Godless Russia, it turned out, was even worse than Godly Russia.  In my own life, atheism didn’t make things better.  In some ways, atheism merely became the mirror image of my earlier Christianity:  I became as intolerant of different religious viewpoints as Christians generally seemed to be.  To me, Christianity itself—a religion I was born to—seemed as strange as the cult of Santaclaus, if people had continued to believe in Santa after entering adulthood.  At times, I barely understood how people ever maintained their faith in the supernatural in the face of overwhelming scientific and physical evidence.  

Just recently, an erudite Catholic friend came to visit and attested that there simply was no evidence that Jesus had NOT risen from the dead, or even evidence that he or his disciples had intended to perpetuate some kind of hoax that he had done so.  The absurdity of this line of reasoning even now overwhelms me.  If this friend, one of the smartest people I know, is able to frame a problem in such an illogical way, how much less thought do other Christians use when thinking about the existence of God?

Notwithstanding my occasional incredulity, over time I have mellowed.  I’ve come to think that atheism and theism are two sides of the same coin;  and that the quest for ultimate, metaphysical truth, must necessarily involve both a belief in transcendent reality and some kind of paradoxical belief in the physical sameness (and therefore anti-religious structure) of the universe.  Little by little I’ve made room in my life for a little religion.  I’ve lit a votive candle or two, spoken to my dead mother from time to time, and fallen for the Hindu god, Ganesha, whose small statue stands on my bookshelf as a reminder of how little I know or will be able to know about life and the cosmos.  Somehow an elephant-headed God, rather than an historical man-god, seems like a better indicator of the inner truth of religious sentiment. 

I guess I’ve come to understand that atheism will not make him a happier person.  It didn’t transform Russia into a utopia, nor did it lead me to inner bliss.  To the extent that I remain an atheist, I do so because atheism is a true doctrine and not because it leads to paradise on earth.   Where my son is concerned, I hope to teach him something that is neither theist nor atheist, or is perhaps both.  This is a complicated task.  I guess if I have my way my son will be something akin to the characters in an Isabel Allende novel, rational people who believe in ghosts and spirits and operate in a world of magical reality.  

Reading a book by Abram Tertz on Russian folklore, I see the kind of person I’d like my son to become.  Tertz was a deeply analytical man who applied the tools of anthropology and literary criticism to collect and objectively assess the religious traditions of the Russian folk,  a people who believed in all manner of major and minor religious, mythological, and spiritual activity.  Tertz did not merely respect the Russian peasants’ ability to incorporate the sacred into his daily life.  Rather, he crossed that threshold on occasion and saw life through their pantheistic gaze.  In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James said that men and women were either religious or irreligious;  that is, they either lived in an enchanted world or they lived in a rational one, but never both.  But Tertz showed that it’s possible to live in both worlds at the same time, which is all that anyone should hope for.  

The Last Holy Fool

Soviet Roulette recently described the rise and fall of Gregory Rasputin, as seen through the lens of a documentary film, Land of the Tsars. Today we revisit the theme by describing the creative film, The Agony, finished in 1975 but released much later due to its politically charged themes. Here, in Klimov's excellent film, Rasputin is seen as the mirror image of Nicholas II and his wife. Rasputin, oily and grotesque but simultaneously charismatic and sensual, is a malevolent force who inevitably seeps into the moral and political vacuum of the monarchy in 1916.

This Rasputin is self-serving but slick--labeled a thief by the wise peasants who remember him upon his triumphal return to the countryside--charlatan. As bad as he is, the film makes his appearance and influence seem almost inevitable. The tsar, portrayed at least a few strokes of sympathy, is utterly lost. Striken by his ill son, and weighed down by the memory of the blood he has shed by earlier decisions related to the Lena Strike, the Russo-Japanese War, Father Gapon's march to the czar's palace, the 1905 Revolution, and the especially the First World War, Nicholas II is clearly lost.

God is everywhere in this film, and no where. The royal family prays, church fathers bless soldiers at the front, and holy icons abound--but God's silence is palpable. What is Nicholas II to do? With his army bloodied and his authority in the duma under attack on all sides of the political spectrum, Nicholas increasingly needs a miracle, the kind of miracle that only a strange and disgusting monk, who speaks in tongues and wallows in the mud, seems capable of delivering. Alas--Rasputin takes a bribe that leads him to deliver bad military advice that leads to catastrophe, and the way is clear for an aristocratic coup that leaves Rasputin murdered. The miracle comes--Rasputin survives poisoning and an initial gunshot before being gunned down once more in a grand courtyard--but it's not what the tsar and his wife had in mind.

As an aside, the film comes with a documentary about the director, Klimov, who is responsible for films such as Farewell and Go and See. Klimov, who grew up in the ashes of Stalingrad, eventually rose to become Gorbachev's man to reform the entire Soviet film industry in the age of Glasnost and Perestroika. His official position under Gorbachev was First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Film Makers. In this short biographical sketch, one sees the complexity of the end of communism in Russia. On the one hand, Klimov supports reform; on the other, he's clearly the man in charge, or at least the man who will deliver Gorbachev's message about the limits of freedom in the new age of aesthetic experimentation. One interesting note that the Klimov film makes is that it's the first time Nicholas II or Rasputin were actually depicted in Soviet film. It's also at least the seventh time in non-Soviet film history that a film about Russia's last Holy Fool was made.

Russia's Greatest Love Machine..

Grigori Rasputin seems to belong to another age, and a medieval age at that. And yet Rasputin was one of the figures who did the most--albeit unintentionally--to usher in the Russian Revolution. In the documentary series Land of the Tsars an entire episode is devoted Rasputin's fascinating rise to power and ignominious demise.

Rasputin was a Siberian peasant with captivating eyes and boundless sexual energy whose charisma charmed local women and eventually led to his angry expulsion at the hands of unsympathetic townsmen. Although Rasputin married, and remained devoted to his wife throughout the rest of his life, he never stopped courting other women, and his wife seemed to accept her husband's infidelities as inevitable. After his expulsion from his native village, Rasputin took a trip to a famous monastery where he experienced a profound religious epiphany. After that, the film relates, Rasputin wandered the length and breadth of Russia for many years, gaining an ability to deal with people from every walk of Russian life in the process.

At the end of his travels, Rasputin arrived in St. Petersburg, where his charisma immediately won him an audience with the Tsar and Tsarina. At their first meeting, the holy monk used startlingly familiar language to address the country's ruler, calling him "papa." Rasputin was a strange sort of holy man, one who developed a theory that one had to sin brazenly in order to earn true forgiveness from God. Rasputin sometimes asked women to strip with him in order to practice their powers of sin-resistance: sometimes they successfully resisted sin, other times they failed. Rasputin's unusual behavior did not stop him from winning the hearts of the tsar and his wife. He did so, in part, by conforming to a long Russian tolerance for the role of a "holy fool" who, notwithstanding his personal eccentricities, or perhaps because of them, had special access to God's will.

Most importantly, Rasputin soon demonstrated an ability to heal the tsarevich, whose hemophilia saddened his parents and threatened to undermine the line of succession. In effect, Rasputin's healing powers seemed to protect the heir to the thrown for the better part of a decade, and even seemed to work at a distance, when the monk was far from the capital. Rasputin was a regular presence at the royal court, but he wasn't unduly influential until the advent of World War, which Rasputin warned the tsar against.

During the war, the royal family's fortunes declined precipitously. When the tsar left to lead the troops at the front, the tsarina assumed a great deal of authority in domestic affairs, and listened attentively to all of her holy favorite's advice. To her, Rasputin spoke for God. On the other hand, Rasputin's disastrous advice carefully mirrored the empress' own political philosophy, so it's impossible to say whether or not Rasputin directly undermined the authority of his peers. Yet Rasputin's deleterious effect on popular opinion is impossible to gainsay. He was seen as sexual profligate, a mad monk, a German spy, and an ally of the devil himself.

When one of his lovers nearly assassinated him, Rasputin made matters worse. In pain, he turned to alcohol and his behavior became still more erratic. Bragging about his influence at court, drinking heavily, chasing women, and even at one point exposing himself in public, Rasputin became the symbol of autocratic immorality and incompetence. Deeply unpopular even within the aristocracy, one leading member of society and a group of supporters eventually conspired to kill Rasputin to save Russia. Famously, Rasputin survived a poisoning, and then two volleys of shots, and then apparently remained alive as he was sent into a frozen river. The tsarina fell into deep mourning, but recovered in a month; the tsar was at least partly relieved to be free of the negative publicity that surrounded Rasputin's nefarious activities. The film ends with Rasputin's strange prophesy, delivered shortly before his death: that if he were to be killed by friends of the tsar, the country would disintegrate the tsar's own family would be dead within the space of two years, which was in fact what happened.

Top Gun, Rocky, and Little Einsteins

One of my favorite things about Russia is the way it lingers in the popular imagination. Everybody has a story about Russia. I’m watching Top Gun right now, where Tom Cruise’s erotic power stems, at least in part, from his ability to do battle with a Soviet MIG fighter. If you can go head to head with Russian airpower, you’re a natural born hero. And what would Rocky be if he hadn’t survived long enough to defeat a Soviet boxer in Red Russia, the ultimate feat of masculinity? Russia also finds its way into the thoughts of ordinary Americans.

Everybody has a Russian story. For me, maybe it’s the made-for-television movie, The Day After, which probably horrified and titillating children all across America, giving us the impression that we’d be responsible for making do without homes, cars, grocery stores, and even parents, in the event of a nuclear conflict with the Soviets. Or perhaps it’s just the awe I felt every time I walked by the Soviet embassy when I went to college in Washington, D.C.

Some stories are more light-hearted. One chemist in my division tells his students about how Rasputin survived a poisoning (he was eventually killed by other means) because the sugar in his wine is a natural antidote to arsenic. (He also smilingly recalls the disco song, Rasputin, with some fondness). My four year old talks about visiting Russia—the land of the mythical firebird—because a cartoon called Little Einsteins shows four children flying their spaceship past the Kremlin and a series of mad Russian (matryoska) nesting dolls in search of this bird. Another friend says I should mention how cold it gets in Russia, because that’s what has always fascinated her. A colleague on a trip mentions that he took a theatre trip to perform a play in Omsk, Siberia, staying there for a month and drinking lots of Vodka (because the water was dirty and there wasn’t anything else to drink in any case). He took an Aeroflot plane in and out of Omsk, which, he added, always landed at a sharp vertical angle with a thud.

So what’s your memory of Russia or the Soviet Union?

Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Social Revolutionaries

One of the many things I like about Bruce Lincoln’s treatment of the Revolution, is that it explains the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the other political parties or factions. This isn’t really easy to do. Politics in the period between the February and October revolutions was utterly chaotic and political processes and institutions were themselves ill-defined. Via Lincoln, one can see how the Bolsheviks could slowly gain control of the Soviet in Petrograd.

Despite its minority status, it was courting an extremely targeted audience, radicalized workers in a radicalized city. Thus one can understand why this very narrow stratum of the Russian public could move slowly away from the other socialist alternatives, especially that of the Mensheviks. Lincoln also shows how the Kronsdadt naval base and certain other narrow segments of the Soviet military were won over to the Soviet cause. The sailors were poorly fed and poorly trained, as were all of Russia’s military forces after three years of massive warfare in which officers usually led the charge.

We know already that Lenin promised Land, Bread, and Peace. It was Lenin’s genius that kept him from compromise, even when many of his lieutenant’s advocated for collaboration with other socialist parties. At most times and places, compromise works, it allows you to leverage support for your own point of view. Not in Russia in the year 1917. At this time, collaboration and cooperation themselves became suspect.

It began with autocracy. While it’s true that the Civil War demonstrated that tsarist ideals still had advocates as late as 1921, the vast majority of workers and soldiers, the people who mattered most when a war effort was required, had utterly abandoned anything related to the Old Regime. Actually, Lincoln’s explanation of the Bolshevik takeover is strengthened by his lengthy treatment of Nicholas II and his bride. As Lincoln shows at great length, the royal couple were utterly incompetent. They weren’t just naive or unimaginative, they were criminally negligent or worse.

It’s strange that one needs to be reminded of this, but when one looks at Alexandra’s letters to her husband, and her successful advocacy of some of the worst ideas available to Russia, one cann’t have sympathy for the couple, except in terms of the awful fate they both eventually met. Really, one need look no further than Rasputin, and see his all-pervasive influence on conservative politics, to know that autocracy—and by extension tradition or moderation—would come to seem the very definition of insanity to many people throughout Petrograd society.

But if autocracy was rejected out of hand, the Duma, and its liberal leaders, were tarnished by their association with the tsar. By itself, the war may well have led to radical revolution; but combine horrific war with a disgustingly atavistic institution like autocracy, and moderation begins to look ridiculous. As things in the war got worse, socialism became the only sensible alternative to many important components of society. The conservatives lost influence; the moderate Cadets declined as well.

Lincoln’s description of the cauldron of revolutionary Russia wouldn’t be complete without treatment of the peasants. Quite simply, the peasants—who made up at least 85 percent of the country—wanted to own their own land. By itself this factor would ave led to some form of insurrection and some form of socialist political influence. But the peasants’ chief party, the Social Revolutionaries, couldn’t be a serious contender for power. They weren’t organized in the only places that mattered: Moscow and Petrograd. Russia’s lack of technology and roads and railways made the isolation of the countryside worse.

Lincoln shows that the Social Revolutionaries would indeed have been a real power if the Constituent Assembly had mattered, or if the electoral system in pre-Soviet Russia had mattered. But they didn’t. The Bolsheviks allowed the Constituent Assembly to take place, because it didn’t hurt them to do so, and would have cost them some unfavorable press if they had not. But they were able to disband the Assembly because real power had nothing to do with elections. Real power was won in the Petrograd Soviet and in the armed forces.

Lincoln does show that the Bolsheviks did reasonable well with the large peasantry for a couple of reasons. First, contact between the working class and the peasantry was great during the War, when labor or food shortages were sometimes acute. And second, because the armed forces were made up of peasants. Lincoln’s book doesn’t neglect the concrete steps Lenin took to win power. He makes special mention of propaganda work in the armed forces, and the armed revolutionary action committees (if I have the right term here). But after all is said and done, one is left with the impression that Lenin’s drive to power worked because his failure to compromise seemed logical in view of the situation Russia found itself.

Lenin’s genius, but also the bizarre situation in which Russia found itself, is revealed again by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Here, a majority of even the Bolsheviks, once again advocated a form of compromise with Russian tradition. They wanted to continue the war on some level unless a non-penalizing treaty could be signed with Germany. It’s instructive to see Lenin in the minority within his own conquering party on this important issue. For even after winning power, many or most Russian Bolsheviks were willing to risk the Revolution itself. Why were they willing to do so?

One could say, as Bukharin said, that they wanted to wage a revolutionary war with Germany against the bourgeoisie in Europe as a whole. This may be, but since even Bukharin was willing to settle for a just peace with Germany, it seems likely that many Bolsheviks were still tied to Russia’s past, especially her traditional political boundaries. Yet here again, Lenin’s radicalism—which robbed Old Russia of one third of her territory and a considerable economic power and population---still seemed reasonable to most Russians, including the peasants who wanted no more than immediate peace, immediate access to land, and bread.