If there were only a few more Ruskies

So here's a new segment.

Grand historical question time.

So all you history buffs out there, let me give you a thinker...

Now Russia in the first World War lost more people than any other combatant. Moreover, many of these were Russia's best and brightest. Some historians (including I believe, Orlando Figes) have cited Russia's lack of a strong middle position party between the militarist White Russians and the Bolshevik-led Reds in the Russian Civil War as the cause of the Bolshevik victory. Many of those historians have assumed this was then due to Russia's incomplete industrial revolution (often using a progress/stages version of history which I'm always suspicious of).

But what if there was the potential for a middle position party? What if there were dynamic youths who could have led a new faction of Russians who could overcome the Reds and charm/defeat the Whites... that is if they hadn't been killed in the early years of the first World War.

The early years of the first World War gutted the Russian officer class, and the military was often the best route for advancement for upwardly-mobile Russians. If it hadn't been for all that slaughter, perhaps the even greater slaughters to follow might have been avoided.

If the idea is true, it adds another layer of tragedy to early 20th century history, but perhaps it also gives us a new way to interpret the Russian Revolution. And then the lessons derived from the birth of the Soviet Union might need some rethinking as well...

Perhaps...
Perhaps...
Perhaps...

Soviet History: More enigma than you can shake a stick at

If I might make a generalization of Soviet History, and bear in mind that I am a man who hates generalizations unless they are poetic or get at the essence of the human experience.

Soviet history is an enigma, an enigma wrapped in a cipher, and smothered in secret sauce.

However, we are still invited from time to time to contemplate it in a manner which defies Mr. James' assertion.

And so I did some time ago in an essay about Soviet foreign policy between the end of the Russian Civil War and the beginning of World War II. However in the brutal process of editing (it is a brutal, brutal business, editing is), I had to shave off a very elegant block of text. However, I have this alternate forum just for such elegant blocks of text and so I thought I might share it with you:

In the Preface to his book, The Soviet Tragedy, Martin Malia writes “With the collapse of 1989-1991, the world that Lenin and Stalin build was no longer even a secret. The intimate record of seventy-four years of utopian experimentation is an open book for all to read.”1 Given that many records have been destroyed and many eye-witnesses killed without note, Malia's assesment is questionable, but it is undeniable that the fall of the Soviet Union unleased a tidal wave of new historical material for Western scholars to page through. However even if we are to assume that the new material constitutes the whole of the “intimate record” of the Soviet Union, understanding the history of the Soviet Union is still a challenging task. Soviet history might now be an “open book” but it is a book written in the language of opaque personas, official and unofficial lies, self-deception and hidden truths, and above all else the intense relationship between the state and the Communist ideology. This language is not translatable by mortals, even if we can see the lines that make up its symbols.
Thus even if the history of the foreign affairs of the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1939 is mostly known, and even if the history of the domestic policies of the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1939 is mostly known, deciphering the relationship between the two is a matter of speculation rather than fact. Still speculation can be made. What need not be speculated is that the Soviet Union was built on the idea of war between capitalism and communism. The USSR was designed to be the first in the world revolution. This precept can be found publicly in all the ideologies of the Soviet leaders, and more privately in their planning and geopolitical thought. However, what is less certain is whether this war was a matter of immenent conflict or far away victory for the Soviet leaders.

A nice little paragraph or two non?

Istanbul once Constantinople

Now as that song goes Istanbul was once Constantinople, but although many suppose this happened just when Constantinople was taken by the Ottoman Empire, but no, it was only after the Ottoman Empire fell did Istanbul become Constantinople. Why?

Nobody knows but the Turks.

Actually it was probably just a matter of nationalism. Afterall if one force was driving the end of the Ottoman Empire it was an explosion of conflicting nationalist impulses. If there was an inherent difference between the revolutions which doomed the German Empire and Russian Empire and the revolutions that doomed the Chinese Empire and the Ottoman Empire is that G and R rev.s were driven by socialists, while C and O rev.s were primarily nationalist driven. One could say that as a matter of development. But that's far, far too simplistic.

First of all, the socialists in the G and R rev.s were often somewhat nationalistic, even if they hid it. Part of the appeal of socialism is its promise of making your nation the forefront of development and that was very much in the mind of those revolutionaries. Also, there was a far left presence in the Chinese and Ottoman revolutions, especially in the Chinese case. But a good counter-example to the claim that the differences were due to development or perhaps due to geography was the example of the Austro-Hungarian revolutions, which while sometimes Communist (notably in Hungry) were often first and foremost nationalist.

The key point the Chinese, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires shared was their multi-national composition, and unlike the Russian Empire, their diversity was to the point where the ruling ethnicity was far from the majority. This was particularly acute in the case of the Chinese who were ruled by a thin layer of Manchus. This made it easy to direct the revolutionary impulse into a nationalist one, because the struggle to modernize which often drove much of the dissatisfaction in these governments could be portrayed as a struggle between an oppressed nation and a foreign ruler. It is notable that in the Russian rev., the Tsarina was often emphasized as German for a similar effect.

But the difference between the Chinese rev. and all the others is that the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German and Russian empires all collapsed in World War I. Three of the four, minus the Germans, struggled deeply and largely unsuccessfully with modernization. The Germans on the other hand were successful. Yet all had to deal with restive minorities, although the Germans less than most. The fates of the revolutions were different though. Turkey's revolution led to a moderately authoritarian but stable modernizing government, Russia's revolution broke off sections into independent states but most become the USSR, the Austro-Hungarian revolution shattered the empire into small states, each with an unstable mix of nationalism and socialism. And the Germans...

The Germans were left with an unstable democracy which under better circumstances might have stabilized (after all, France had a chronically unstable democracy since 1870, but it remained democratic), but instead spiraled into the hell which was Nazism.