Liberal professionals and industrialists did more than applaud Russian terrorists, Gary Saul Morson notes:
They offered their apartments for concealing weapons and contributed substantial sums of money. Lenin supposedly said “when we are ready to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope,” but he might better have said “buy us the rope.” Liberals proudly defended terrorists in court, in the press, and in the Duma. Paul Miliukov, the leader of the liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party, affirmed that “all means are legitimate… and all means should be tried.” The Kadets rejected the government offer of amnesty for political prisoners unless it included terrorists, who would, they well knew, promptly resume killing government officials. “Condemn terror?” exclaimed Kadet leader Ivan Petrunkevich. “Never! That would mean moral ruin for the party!”
If the strategy was to demoralize the government, it worked. Wearing a uniform made one a target for a bullet — or sulfuric acid in the face, another favorite form of attack. In Petersburg the head of the security police faced insubordination from agents afraid of revolutionaries. My favorite story concerns the reporter who asked his editor whether to run the biography of the newly appointed governor-general. Don’t bother, came the reply. Save it for the obituary.
Only while the government kept avoiding taking any effectual measures, perhaps from fear of appearing despotic before foreign opinion and proving true the worst foreign prejudices about Russia, perhaps partly from a disinclination to go against local public (i.e. mostly intelligentsia) opinion. Stolypin said in his speech to the II. Duma of March 13th 1907 (my translation; my comments are in brackets):
“There are fateful times in the life of states when state necessity stands higher than law and one must choose between the integrity of one’s theories and the integrity of the nation.”
“During a time of war all laws may be set aside, execept for murder and apostacy.” — Rabbi Akiva, around 120 A.D.
The good Rabbi has too much faith in the good intentions of the ruling class.
Me, I’m for rule of law. Let the nation earn its integrity.
That said, any system of laws that prevents a just regime from surviving needs to be modified. Not ignored or subverted. Just fix the laws. Attack the problem at the right level.
There is something to be said for the idea that the Russian state was dealing with fundamentally irrational people–And,to us, that certainly seems to be so, from our perspective today. Throwing acid in the face of policemen, or other government officials? Insane. Yet…
What had the despotic government of the Tsars done before all that, which convinced the Russian people that such behavior was a rational choice?
In order to understand the entire situation, you need to examine everything; insane behavior from revolutionaries and the general public supporting them does not come out of the clear blue sky, else the public would not support having acid thrown in the faces of policemen who were drawn from the public in the first place.
No, there was more wrong with the Russian polis than some crazy revolutionaries; the public trust had been broken long before by despotic Tsars and their boyars. You treat your citizenry like the Russian state habitually did (and, still does…), and you are going to get the reaction to that being that they are going to throw up men like Stolypin, and support them.
To a degree, it is a vicious spiralling circle of national dysfunction, and overcoming it…? May not be doable, to be quite honest.
Even if the best-case scenario of no WWI, and a liberalizing of policy under Nicholas II, we might have still gotten the totalitarian outcome of Soviet governance that we got, only under a different name and schedule. Russia may not ever be a rational, normal state. The inmates, after all, are the ones running the asylum, and have been since 1917.
“…the public trust had been broken long before by despotic Tsars and their boyars. You treat your citizenry like the Russian state habitually did (and, still does…)…”
Nah. If this is so why not mass terrorism in the USSR, Lenin, Stalin?? Much worse by orders of magnitude.
“…Veronika succumbs, but it is not love of the people that convinces her. Rather, she cannot resist the “precariousness and poignancy of life in the underground, a life that was really a succession of thrilling experiences.” Solzhenitsyn got it right: what is most remarkable in the memoirs of terrorists is how rarely they express concern for the unfortunate. “Sympathy for the suffering of the people did not move me to join those who perished,” Vera Zasulich explains. “I had never heard of the horrors of serfdom [when growing up] at Biakolovo—and I don’t think there were any.”…”
LOL… Did you miss that the terrorists were the government, after Lenin took over?
Not to mention that the interregnum between the Tsars like Ivan the Terrible and Communists was filled with men who were cruel and tyrannical, but who still had some cavils against the measures of Ivan and Lenin, who managed to nearly totally suppress non-state terrorists by the simple measure of co-opting them into state service.
Russia is a tragedy; I’m not sure that the conventional wisdom that it’s all due to the government is entirely correct–There’s a strong thread of self-fulfilling prophecy and desire among the public for “strong leaders”. A humane man like Alexander II or Kerensky was doomed, on principle. Men like Ivan the Terrible or Lenin? They’re the ideal Russian strong-man leader, in popular imagination and choice.
It’s notable that the syndrome of the revolution only coming once the boot comes off the neck holds true, when examining Russian history. Alexander wanted to be a decent man and govern well; his reward? The madness of the populace. Likewise, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, replaced by Putin.
The whole country and culture is a tragedy, given the potential. Russia should be a world leader in technology and engineering, but is doomed to never realize that potential because of corruption and a general lack of attention to detail in execution. Their design and engineering is marvelous; production work? LOL… Just good enough to get out of the plant, and seemingly the workers still think they’re factory serfs, instead of professional craftsmen.
In Russia, as with a lot of other cultures, one of the root problems is that there’s a lot that’s imposed on the people, instead of rising up from within. You go to Germany or Japan, and compare the factory floor culture with that of the rest of the world–The average worker is prideful, and has the initiative to fix things. In the UK, and Russia? Not so much–The UK factory worker is one of the major problems for UK industry, although I think you can make a good case that the real problem is middle-management. Same set of workers do wonders under Japanese management, so perhaps it is the mid-level management culture, there. British Leyland and a bunch of other UK companies I’ve dealt with do things that I’ve never seen anywhere else, ever–Stupid simple things like logistics and packaging seemingly sabotaged on the shipping docks, and through sheer animalistic I-don’t-give-a-damn. The Russians have similar issues, and I think there’s a common thread of top-down imposed power and control by the management.
The thing that all too many people running things seem to miss is that you really cannot impose a moral or cultural system; if you want things to work without heroic, constant, and inevitably futile intervention by management or other “authority”, then the order and pride-in-work must well up from within the individual. You can threaten, beat, murder the individual into submission to your goals, but eventually, unless they’ve bought into it and internalized it all, you’re going to lose.
That’s Russia’s major issue: Civilization is imposed from the top down, in a lot of respects, and the basic message has been resentfully denied and thrown off at every opportunity. For ever Stakhanovite, there are a dozen wreckers who make believe they are working, because “…the government makes believe they pay us…”.
The dysfunction is disturbing to witness, not least because there’s a lot of that same dysfunction creeping into daily life, here in the US. We very badly need a Renaissance, a Reformation, where the wreckers of society are at the least, condemned and set aside. Instead, more and more of them are taking part in governance and management, like a viral cancer, destroying the body politic as they make their way through life.
It’s not accidental that Communism did so well in Russia; that philosophy of life, with its petty resentments, theft, and cruelties…? Well, it resonates with the Russian worldview and attitude towards life, which is deeply cynical and paranoid.
A paranoia which has often been justified, but which has also been very self-fulfilling. It’s an irony of history that Nicholas II died due to a war that his out-of-control intelligence apparatus likely fomented in Serbia, the Black Hand being a creature of the Okhrana, or at least, one of its agents. In the end, Nicholas II bore a responsibility for the death of the Archduke, and paid the karmic price for it with the death of his entire immediate family. Sad, but entirely just, in a historical sense.
Of course, war might have come without that provocation, but if WWI hadn’t have happened at that precise moment in history, with the specific technologies and cultural features of that specific moment, it would have been a very different war–Perhaps less destructive of human life, or perhaps even more so. It’s an unknowable thing, that, but one still gets the sense that we are living in the aftermath of a “worst possible case” scenario for how that era played out. A war fought in the mid-1920s, with better motorization and communications would have been over far more quickly, and a war fought earlier would have ended quickly due to a lack of munitions stocks without the Haber-Bosch process. Germany’s inept management of resources would have seen to that one–It was only a stroke of luck that they captured extensive stocks of nitrates on the docks in Belgium, that tided them over until the the artificial process could be ramped up to produce enough substitute nitrates to fight a war with.
“What had the despotic government of the Tsars done before all that, which convinced the Russian people that such behavior was a rational choice?”
Answer: little to nothing.
All ‘insurgencies’ that succeed succeed because they are getting support from a greater power; a greater power forments and supports things like ‘insurgencies’ because it wishes to see a rival power destroyed.
“LOL… Did you miss that the terrorists were the government, after Lenin took over?
Not to mention that the interregnum between the Tsars like Ivan the Terrible and Communists was filled with men who were cruel and tyrannical, but who still had some cavils against the measures of Ivan and Lenin, who managed to nearly totally suppress non-state terrorists by the simple measure of co-opting them into state service.”
You understand the lemma then: states that support and validate their own powers of terror succeed in defeating terror and succeed in surviving; states that fail to do so fail against terror and fail to survive.