When Russia Shakes the World

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Russia would have crossed many minds this year, even if the Kremlin’s current occupant hadn’t stoked the tinder of populism in America and across the west. A century ago, Russia’s ruler, Czar Nicholas II, abdicated, and his democratically minded successor, Alexander Kerensky, was forced to flee in a U.S. embassy car. The Bolsheviks gained control of the empire after a transcontinental civil war and if they never achieved their goal of global revolution, the ripple effect of red flags over the Kremlin shook the world.

With the centennial year of the Russian Revolution came a flurry of publications. One of the most interesting, The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917 (PublicAffairs), is the work of dissident journalist Mikhail Zygar, an independent voice in Russia where media has largely fallen back under state influence. Unsurprisingly, he finds points of comparison between then and now, including officially sanctioned cynicism over democracy, asserting it will never work, not in Russia or anywhere.

However, as 2017 ends, Putin’s regime stands firm while in 1917, the existing order fell. In curt journalistic prose, Zygar recounts the assassinations, upheavals and disenchantment directed at an autocracy whose rulers could not hold on without significant reform—a development blocked by the imperial family’s blindness to reality. By contrast, Putin understands poll numbers and public opinion. Nicholas II was oblivious.

In keeping with recent scholarship, Zygar finds that the most notorious figure in the count down to revolution, Rasputin, wasn’t the ogre of legend but was almost a prophet. As jingoism gripped liberals, conservatives and socialists alike when World War I began, the hedonistic holy man was alone in counseling Nicholas not to follow his cousin monarchs into war. Rasputin proved remarkably astute; his forecasts were almost always fulfilled and despite his enormous sway over the Empress Alexandra, the vacillating Nicholas listened instead to the wrong people. The czar paid first with his throne and then with his life.

Provisional Government that followed his abdication offered hope for a new era; it abolished capital punishment and granted women the right to vote (three years ahead of the U.S.). “Almost overnight, the legally and politically backward Russian Empire turns into the most human and democratic country in the world,” Zygar writes. But when the regime’s head, Kerensky, insisted on remaining in a bloody war supported by no one, the Bolsheviks preyed on popular resentment. Zygar on the Bolsheviks’ triumph: “I do not consider it much an exaggeration to describe it as the biggest catastrophe in human history.”

Millions would die or flee as Lenin imposed his utopia. More would follow under his even more brutal successor, Josef Stalin. The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990a and the publication of new memoirs has allowed biographers to build a more complete picture of a dictator who often appeared as a cypher in contrast to his more flamboyant (and better documented) peer, Adolf Hitler. In Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Penguin Press), Princeton University history professor Stephen Kotkin unpacks the evidence and finds the dictator was far from the ignorant bumpkin painted by his rival, Leon Trotsky. Turns out Stalin was well read with a good appreciation for (if deficient opinions on) arts and culture. “He was a cynic about everyone’s supposed base motives; he lived and breathed ideals.”

Unfortunately, his ideal of a workers utopia was predicated on a willingness to achieve it through mass murder. The paranoid seeds of his suspicious nature came to lurid bloom given the anxiety of building his Communist society in the face of enemies foreign and domestic, real and imagined.

As in other recent biographies, the man inside the monster emerges, and the monster was fed on a diet of Leninist Marxism, an ideology in a hurry to push history to its final phase regardless of cost. Stalin could be a gregarious companion but was a fearful man who ruled by fear. So terrified were his underlings that they waffled in reports on the unmistakable German military build-up on the Soviet border. They told Stalin what he wanted to hear—that there would be no German attack until after Britain was knocked out of the war. The despot once remarked to a naval officer about the numerous sentries guarding his Kremlin office. “Each time I take this corridor, I think, ‘Which one? If this one, he will shoot me in the back, and if it is the one around the corner, he will shoot me in the front.’”

In 1937 and ’38, Stalin’s regime arrested over 1.5 million people accused of conspiring against the Soviet state. Conviction rates were close to 100 percent. Confessions were extracted through what the NKVD, predecessors to then KGB, called “physical measures.” Then, abruptly, Stalin ordered an investigation of the secret police, leading to the arrest, trial and conviction of some of the agents who had recently terrorized the citizens. This “purge of the purgers” is the subject of Lynne Viola’s fascinating Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford University Press).

The University of Toronto history professor examined transcripts from the trials of NKVD agents for abuse of authority and “violations of socialist legality.” Presented is a set of microhistories that shed light on the larger story of repression. Viola theorizes, plausibly, that Stalin was scapegoating the police in the face of pushback from the Communist Party. As for the NKVD agents, they were an ugly lot, trading sexual favors with prisoners’ wives and vying with each other to exceed arrest quotas.

Stalin was so concerned with artists (“the engineers of the human soul,” he called them) that he interrupted conferences on armaments, industrial output and clampdowns on suspected counterrevolutionaries for phone calls to favorite novelists. He was raised in a culture where great novels were second only to scripture and great writers wielded powers inferior only to the czar.

Oxford University Press recently added three of the most acclaimed czarist era novels to its Classics Hardback Collection: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Each is a new translation prefaced lucidly by an acclaimed scholar in the field. Both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, though in increasingly different yet overlapping ways, stirred profound debates on pressing philosophical and spiritual questions, essentially, how to live, especially in a world of accelerating change. And yet, their great novels weren’t dressed-up polemical tracts (Tolstoy would be guilty of that late in life); their rich webs of symbolism and extraordinary moral scopes were wrapped in a crime novel (Crime and Punishment), a tempestuous love story (Anna Karenina) and a historical epic (War and Peace). In her introduction to Crime and Punishment, Sarah J. Young notes that the novel’s deceptively naïve detective was a forerunner to Columbo. This was popular culture at its most meaningful.

The problems of a society emerging from serfdom and stumbling into the industrial age—under the often-capricious rule of absolute monarchs—spurred the authors. As Rosamund Bartlett writes in her intro to Anna Karenina: “artists in Russia inevitably practiced their craft with a greater seriousness of purpose than elsewhere in Europe.” Their novels were not the product of an overfed, ironically complacent society. Adds Amy Mandelker in her intro to War and Peace: “It was essential to have something of urgent importance to say.”