Isegoria

The myth-busting of Douglas Smith’s Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs begins in Siberia, where Rasputin was born:

He was a wild youth, but not — police reports unearthed by the author show — the hardened criminal portrayed by his adversaries in St. Petersburg 40 years later. He was self-educated, late in life, but not illiterate. He developed a penchant for pilgrimages: They offered a way out of Siberian obscurity. His religious belief deepened, as did his pastoral touch: He had a knack for connecting with people of all stations in life.

Unfortunately for Russia, the bored and credulous members of the aristocracy were ripe for distraction. Rasputin was not the first mystic to thrill the drawing rooms of St. Petersburg, but he was the one whose attraction proved the most enduring and far-reaching. He clearly had some remarkable gifts — “powers” would be putting it too strongly. His hypnotic stare is well-attested. He had a disconcerting but engaging (and, one suspects, well-practiced) conversational style.

Crucially, he also had a knack for seeming to treat the hemophilia that afflicted the czarevitch Alexei, an illness that drove his already neurotic mother to the brink of madness. Rasputin’s faith-healing abilities may, in truth, have consisted of sparing the poor child the attentions of meddling doctors, but they earned him the fierce loyalty and affection of both Nicholas and Alexandra.

And possibly more. The Russian public became convinced that the mad monk’s intimacy with the royal family included carnal knowledge of the czar’s wife and daughters. Though that claim is unproved, and some of the most lurid stories of his orgies are clearly false, Rasputin undoubtedly enjoyed unabashed, abundant and mostly consensual sexual relations with more than a few high-born women — not to mention prostitutes — in a way that scarcely befitted his trademark asceticism. The common accusation against Rasputin is thus that he corrupted Russian high society. It would be fairer, Mr. Smith argues, to say that it was the fleshpots of St. Petersburg that corrupted Rasputin, originally a humble and holy visitor.

Mr. Smith also refutes the theory that the blame for Russia’s downfall lies with Rasputin. He quotes a czarist deputy minister saying that Rasputin’s advice could be “simplistic and naïve” but that it was not “remotely harmful.” Rasputin was at worst a distracting influence, on some issues a positive one. He strongly opposed Russia’s entry into World War I. He decried prejudice against poor people — for example, a characteristically mean-minded ban on humble enlisted soldiers using public transportation in St. Petersburg. By the standards of the time he was remarkably tolerant towards gays, Jews and Muslims. He preferred plain food, was not notably unhygienic in his personal habits, did many unsung good deeds and genuinely loved his country.

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The machinations against Rasputin would have done little to avert catastrophe, but his murder may have prompted it. The plotters believed that, without Rasputin, Alexandra would be so broken-hearted that she would go mad (or at least withdraw from politics), paving the way for a constitutional monarchy. Those hopes were as exaggerated as the story of the assassination itself. The poison, it turns out, was a plot detail invented later: Rasputin was simply lured to a dinner with a promise of an aristocrat’s wife, shot in the head and dumped in a canal. For many hard-pressed Russians, the murder of the only peasant ever to make it to the Romanovs’ court exemplified all that was rotten and unfair about the system. Within weeks, the Romanovs were toppled. The next year they were dead. When the Bolshevik murderers looted the bodies, they found sewn into the hems the topaz stones given to them by the family’s fascinating, wayward and beloved spiritual guide.

The biggest mystery of the American Revolution is, Why couldn’t both sides arrive at a peaceful compromise?

The prosperous American colonies were a jewel of the British Empire. If the Americans were so incensed at their lack of representation, there seemed to be an obvious solution — just bring the colonists into Parliament.

Economists Sebastian Galiani and Gustavo Torrens think they understand why that never happened. In a new working paper, they analyze the American Revolution through the lens of game theory, the mathematical study of strategy and conflict.

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For the British, the main headache was that the colonies weren’t pulling their own weight. In the 1750s and 1760s, the British spent millions of pounds raising armies to defend the North American colonies against the French in the Seven Years’ War. Parliament subsequently demanded that the lightly-taxed Americans should contribute more to the costs of their own defense.

This was a reasonable idea, Smith argued. And the new taxes were still a pittance compared to what people paid in England. Parliament had never demanded of the colonists anything “which even approached to a just proportion to what was paid by their fellow subjects at home,” Smith noted in his book, which was published in 1776, not quite a year into the American Revolution.

Still, Smith was an advocate for harmony and economic efficiency. If the Americans would not pay taxes without political representation, he argued that the most practical solution was to acquiesce. He recommended that Britain should grant the colonies some number of seats in Parliament, depending on how much they contributed in taxes.

He wasn’t the only one to come up with this idea. In the run-up to the Revolution, several similar proposals had circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. The British politician Thomas Pownall dreamed of a merged Parliament, a “Grand Marine Dominion, consisting of our possessions in the Atlantic, and in America, united into a one Empire.” In 1754, Benjamin Franklin wrote that “such a union would be very acceptable to the colonies, provided they had a reasonable number of representatives allowed them.”

So why didn’t any of these plans come through?

Galiani and Torrens argue that political considerations in Britain wrecked any chance of Americans gaining seats in Parliament. “It was not that such a deal was impossible to reach, or that it was completely crazy,” Torrens said in an interview. “Part of the problem is that this would have consequences for the internal politics of the British empire.”

As they discuss in their paper, the British Parliament at the time was dominated by wealthy landowners, who feared that the nation’s growing democratic movement would diminish their power. The common folk, who made up most of the country, were agitating for more say and more representation in Parliament.

“The landed gentry, who controlled the incumbent government, feared that making concessions to the American colonies would intensify the pressure for democratic reforms, thus jeopardizing their economic and political position,” the economists argue.

“There was this slippery-slope argument,” Torrens said. “How could they give representation to the Americans, while many common people in London did not have proper representation?”

In fact, there were populist factions in the British government who welcomed the colonists — in part, it seems, because they thought the Americans would make good allies. It was a volatile period. According to Galiani and Torrens, the ruling class in Britain believed it was better to risk a war and the loss of some colonies than to risk losing control of the entire empire to a political coalition of the lowborn and landless. Their paper’s contribution is to illustrate the strategic logic behind this decision.