Mikhail Zygar's The Empire Must Die

Mikhail Zygar's The Empire Must Die:  Russia's Revolutionary Collapse, 1900- 1917 is an astounding book.  Zygar's prose is extraordinarily dynamic, and his use of the present tense to describe the run up to revolution helps to create a climate of drama, uncertainty, and suspense. We experience The Empire Must Die as contemporaries must have experienced the turn of the century, a period of time filled with possibility but fraught with danger.  In some ways, Zygar's time frame help to explain the book's narrative force.  If we don't read history backward, and don't expect revolutionary fervor to degenerate into Stalinist totalitarianism, we are left free to experience all of the vertiginous chaos of Nicholas II's tumultuous reign.  Zygar's plethora of presentist footnotes also lend urgency to the tale of Russia's authoritarian plunge into modernity.  Drawing frequent analogies between Nicholas II's reign and Putin's era might sometimes seem misplaced or even misleading.  Clearly, neither Witte nor Stolypin operated in the same context as Putin. However, the anti-Putin footnotes help readers to understand the contemporary relevance of this particularly important period in Russia's modern history. 

To read The Empire Must Die, is to be persistently surprised.  Page by page, one discovers or rediscovers the sturm und drang of the period and revisits some of the most important events in the shaping of the modern world.  This was an era of dynastic intrigue, political innovation, colonial conflict, diplomatic realignment, war, violent anti-semitism, revolution, terrorism, unrivaled aesthetic creativity, and labor unrest.  It was an era of class conflict, ideological warfare, resurgent nationalism, and religious uncertainty.  It was a time of emperors, empresses, and grand-dukes, as well as by strikers, playwrights, and rabble-rousers.  It was a time of political and aesthetic experimentation. 

The personalities of pre-revolutionary Russia (and Zygar includes the diaspora in his definition of Russia) are as dynamic as revolutionary Russia, and included Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Witte, Stolypin, Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov, Lvov, Benois, Chernov, Azef, Gotz, Gapon, Struve, Martov, Yusopev, Tsereteli, Stravinsky, Gippius, Kerensky, Milyukov, and Rasputin.

Overall, The Empire Must Die argues that Russia on the eve of the First World War was even more fragile than one might imagine based on the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.  While perhaps nothing is ever foreordained, Russia's politics were perhaps as unstable as they could have been. They were a strange and deadly mix of dilettante authoritarianism and democratic aspiration.  As Zygar portrays matters, Nicholas II, the royal family, and the secret policy, were all dangerously disconnected from Russian civil society.  Hunted by terrorists, the royal family made some overtures to ultra-orthodox, anti-Semitic nationalist sentiment, but never really forged robust relationships with any particular class in society.  Indeed, Nicholas II's own relatives were not always entirely reliable, and certainly he was never able to demonstrate political loyalty to any particular proactive minster or group of engaged politicians.  The moral and political confusion of the time are perhaps best illustrated by the complicated relations between the tsar's secret police and their alleged enemies, the Social Revolutionaries and other terrorist groups.  According to Zygar, it was often difficult to tell the two groups apart.  In  part, the confusion stemmed from the regime's interest in sponsoring double agents or creating loyalist labor unions.  Thus, Gapon was simultaneously both ally and enemies of Nicholas II's government. In part, the confusion stemmed from the moral equivalency of the two groups, each committed to using violence to promote its own fundamentally antidemocratic aims. 

Smele's Long View of the Revolution

Now that my wedding is over, and my in-laws from Tunisia are settling in to life in America by enjoying Arabic Internet radio and at least one Arabic cable t.v. channel, I have the opportunity to return to Russian history.  I'm doing this gradually, by reading a few of Lenin's speeches and listening to audio books of Jonathon Smele's The Russian Revolution:  From Tsarism to Bolshevism.  Smele's examination of the Russian Revolution takes a long view of the causes of the Russian Revolution.  In fact, Smele's exploration of the roots of revolution is so rooted in the nineteenth century that one cannot help but reflect upon the arbitrary decisions historians routinely make whenever the attempt to explain a major event or global phenomenon.  When did the Russian Revolution become inevitable?  When did it become likely?  When did it become possible?

Some historians scarcely admit that radical revolution succeeded in Russian in 1917 by anything other than extraordinary bad luck couple with a long series of tragic missteps by Russia's liberal bourgeois and aristocrats. Smele sees things differently:  he argues that Russia's October Revolution cannot be assessed without reference to the profound economic backwardness of the Russian Empire.  Smele's tale begins as early at the mid 19th century, when the Russian state failed so spectacularly to deliver the goods in the Crimean War.  In this war, the Russian intelligentsia realized that serfdom had done nothing to produce a modern society that could compete on any level with its Western European counterparts such as Britain and France.  Russian trains didn't work efficiently;  Russian conscripts were uneducated and ill-equipped;  Russia's factories, insofar as they had any, weren't producing reliable supplies.

Over time, Russia's backwardness vis-a-vis the West was only slightly remedied by Nicholas I's success, Alexander II, who instituted a series of sweeping judicial and government reforms and "freed the serfs." For Russia remained an absolutist state in which the church and gentry exercised inordinate authority over the peasantry.  Moreover, despite some economic activity in St. Petersburg, the Baltic areas, Moscow, and the Southern Ukraine, at the end of the nineteenth century, the peasants continued to lack educational opportunities and, more importantly, adequate land to feed themselves.  Indeed, the peasant commune continued to act as a conservative social and economic force in Russian society right into the twentieth century.

In the end, Smele's main point is that Russia possessed an extremely dysfunctional social system when it declared war against Germany and Austria in 1914.  The 1905 Revolution had revealed as much.  So, notwithstanding the best efforts of Witte and Stolypin in the years leading up to the Great War, the uneducated, dissatisfied, impoverished Russian peasantry remained the dominant social factor in pre-revolutionary Russia. And, despite the long cherished beliefs of Nicholas II and his aristocratic sycophants, the peasants were politically radical.  They proved this when they confiscated land from landowners in 1905 and 1917, and also when they voted for Social Revolutionary or other socialist representatives to the Dumas or the Constituent Assembly.

The Proletariat were another radical force in Russian society, although Smele seems to recognize that this radical social force has been given quite enough attention by Marxist and Western historians alike.  To sum up, Smele's exploration of the revolutionary victory of 1917 rightly places the emphasis squarely on the fragility of Russian society.  Even before the Russian state's catastrophic failures of the Great War, the Russian ancien regime was teetering.  The tsar, Nicholas II, was unintelligent, stubborn, and politically out of touch with his nation.  The proletariat class was angry and alienated.  The peasantry were underfed and uninterested in the political fortunes of either the tsar or the liberal intelligentsia.  Russian intellectuals were dangerously enamored with all-or-nothing political philosophies:  according to Smele, reform held out few attractions for most Russian political theorists.

Peasants, Reality T.V., and Russian Folklore

No conscientious Russian blogger can fail to mention Russian folklore. Up until the October Revolution of 1917, at least 85 percent of the Russian people were peasants. Most lived in small villages cut off from contact with much of the world as a result of low literacy rates, rudimentary schools, communal taboos, and an underdeveloped system of roads and railroads. Most also lived on the edge of real deprivation, with the possibility of famine looming over them.

At this time, the peasant population was only one or two generations away from serfdom, a state of un-freedom that discouraged initiative and self-improvement. The level of literacy in the Russian peasantry was so low, that mobilization for World War I relied on the placement of colorful flags rather than printed pronouncements, according to historian Bruce Lincoln. In the years leading up to the First World War, the Czar’s energetic prime mininer, Stolypin, made some modest gains in raising the productivity of the Russian peasants by allowing enterprising peasants to break away from collective farming--where village elders would allot land according to the size of families, distribute any given family’s plowing strips across a large area to encourage uniformity in the overall quality of every family’s land, and redistribute land from time to time, thus discouraging any incentive for improving the land from one year to the next.

When Stolypin was assassinated, he had helped a small group of prosperous peasants to opt out of the commune altogether. In the absence of the written word, religion structured peasant lives. And in the absence of an educated and effective Orthodox clergy, this religion could be surprisingly vibrant, diverse, and complex. In fact, Russian peasant maintained a strong, self-conscious, Christian identity, even as their theology remained hopelessly entwined in superstition, pagan belief, and folklore. With this in mind, the student or Russian history and literature must turn to the mythology for a better glimpse of what Russians was really like.

Fortunately, these oral tales were collected by a few determined ethnologists. Alexander Afanas’ev’s Russian Fairy Tales is one such compendium. Here you have almost 700 pages of short, two or three pages fairy tales, which gives you some idea of just how rich this mythology could be. Of course, without some critical analysis of the overall topic of Russian mythology—and this book provides almost none—it’s hard to determine just exactly what these fairy tells tell us about Russians or about human beings in general.

Probably a Jungian analysis of archetypes is in order. At any rate, the fairy tales celebrate cleverness, cunning, and competition. They denigrate foolishness and, sometimes, women. They accept magic as a fact of life. The overall effect, though I hope to discuss some specific fairy tales in future posts, is one in which life is a game. It’s a colorful and exciting game, in which almost anything can happen. But one has to play it well, and play to win against other peasants, against mysterious forces which include animals and sprites and gnomes.

In the world of the Russian fairy tale, it’s your job to outwit, outsmart, and outlast your opponents, to quite from the popular television show, Survivor. And, as in Survivor, one of your principle goals is to get rich. At the heart of many of these stories, is the desire—which seems to transcend the modern age if we assume that these fairy tales have been passed down over many generations—to become wealthy, especially through cleverness rather than work. Not much has changed if our reality television shows may be taken as an example of contemporary fairy tales.