Authors: Henry Kissinger
“
The French nation declares
”: “Decree for Proclaiming the Liberty and Sovereignty of All Peoples” (December 15, 1792), in ibid., 132–33.
“
I saw the Emperor—this world-soul
”: Hegel to Friedrich Niethammer, October 13, 1806, in
Hegel: The Letters,
trans. Clark Butler and Christine Seiler with commentary by Clark Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
“
A monstrous compound of the petty refinements
”: Marquis de Custine,
Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
(1843; New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 69.
“
the sole Emperor of all the Christians
”: Epistle of Filofei of Pskov, 1500 or 1501, as quoted in Geoffrey Hosking,
Russia: People and Empire
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 5–6. Ivan’s successors would give this philosophical conviction a geopolitical thrust. Catherine the Great conceived of a “Greek Project,” which was to culminate in the conquest of Constantinople and the crowning of Catherine’s fittingly named grandson Constantine as its ruler. Her courtier Potemkin even placed (in addition to fake villages) a sign along his patroness’s Crimean route that read, “This way to Byzantium.” For Russia, the reattachment of the lost capital of Orthodox Christendom became an objective of profound spiritual and (for an empire lacking warm-water ports) strategic significance. The nineteenth-century Pan-Slavist intellectual Nikolai Danilevskii summed up a long tradition of thought with his ringing assessment: “[Constantinople has been] the aim of the aspirations of the Russian people from the dawn of our statehood, the ideal of our enlightenment; the glory, splendor and greatness of our ancestors, the center of Orthodoxy, and the bone of contention between Europe and ourselves. What historical significance Constantinople would have for us if we could wrest her away from the Turks regardless of Europe! What delight would our hearts feel from the radiance of the cross that we would raise atop the dome of St.
Sophia! Add to this all the other advantages of Constantinople …, her world significance, her commercial significance, her exquisite location, and all the charms of the south.” Nikolai Danilevskii,
Russia and Europe: A View on Cultural and Political Relations Between the Slavic and German-Roman Worlds
(St. Petersburg, 1871), as translated and excerpted in
Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700–1917,
ed. Basil Dmytryshyn (Gulf Breeze, Fla: Academic International Press, 1999), 373.
“
expanding the state in every direction
”: Vasili O. Kliuchevsky,
A Course in Russian History: The Seventeenth Century
(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 366. See also Hosking,
Russia,
4.
This process developed
: John P. LeDonne,
The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 348.
“
His political philosophy, like that of all Russians
”: Henry Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams
(1907; New York: Modern Library, 1931), 439.
It expanded each year
: Orlando Figes,
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
(New York: Picador, 2002), 376–77.
From that perspective
: As Russian troops marched in 1864 into the territory now known as Uzbekistan, Chancellor Aleksandr Gorchakov defined Russia’s expansion in terms of a permanent obligation to pacify its periphery driven forward by sheer momentum:
The state [Russia] therefore must make a choice: either to give up this continuous effort and doom its borders to constant unrest which would make prosperity, safety, and cultural progress impossible here; or else to advance farther and farther into the heart of the savage lands, where the vast distances, with every step forward, increase the difficulties and hardships it incurs … not so much from ambition as from dire necessity, where the greatest difficulty lies in being able to stop.
George Verdansky, ed.,
A Source Book for Russian History: From Early Times to 1917
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 3:610.
Yet early European visitors
: Marquis de Custine,
Empire of the Czar,
230. Modern scholars continued to wonder. See, for example, Charles J. Halperin,
Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985); Paul Harrison Silfen,
The Influence of the Mongols on Russia: A Dimensional History
(Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1974).
Determined to explore the fruits of modernity
: With a domineering hands-on approach that prompted amazement in Western European nations, Peter enrolled as a carpenter on the docks of Holland, deconstructed and repaired watches in London, and unsettled his retinue by trying his hand at new innovations in dentistry and anatomical dissection. See Virginia Cowles,
The Romanovs
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 33–37; Robert K. Massie,
Peter the Great
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 188–89, 208.
“
to sever the people from their former Asiatic customs
”: B. H. Sumner,
Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia
(New York: Collier Books, 1962), 45.
A series of ukases issued forth
: Cowles,
Romanovs,
26–28; Sumner,
Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia,
27; Figes,
Natasha’s Dance,
4–6.
“
Russia is a European State
”: Catherine II,
Nakaz
(Instruction) to the Legislative Commission of 1767–68, in Dmytryshyn,
Imperial Russia,
80.
Stalin too has acquired
: Maria Lipman, Lev Gudkov, Lasha Bakradze, and Thomas de Waal,
The Stalin Puzzle: Deciphering Post-Soviet Public Opinion
(Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2013) (reporting polls of contemporary Russians showing 47 percent agreement with the statement “Stalin was a wise
leader who brought the Soviet Union to might and prosperity” and 30 percent agreement with the statement “Our people will always have need of a leader like Stalin, who will come and restore order”).
“
The Extent of the Dominion requires
”: Catherine II,
Nakaz
(Instruction) to the Legislative Commission of 1767–68, 80.
“
In Russia, the sovereign is the living law
”: Nikolai Karamzin on Czar Alexander I, as quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln,
The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias
(New York: Anchor Books, 1981), 489.
“
at the interface of two vast and irreconcilable worlds
”: Halperin,
Russia and the Golden Horde,
126.
“
this ceaseless longing
”: Fyodor Dostoevsky,
A Writer’s Diary
(1881), as quoted in Figes,
Natasha’s Dance,
308.
“
orphan cut off from the human family
”: Pyotr Chaadaev, “Philosophical Letter” (1829, published 1836), as quoted in Figes,
Natasha’s Dance,
132, and Dmytryshyn,
Imperial Russia,
251. Chaadaev’s commentary struck a nerve and circulated widely, even though the publication was immediately suppressed and the author was declared insane and placed under police supervision.
“
Third Rome
”: Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, May 24, 1882, editorial in
Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News),
as excerpted in Verdansky,
A Source Book for Russian History,
3:676.
“
What a people! They are Scythians!
”: Figes,
Natasha’s Dance,
150.
“
It is to the cause of hastening the true reign
”: Lincoln,
The Romanovs,
404–5.
“
There no longer exists an English policy
”: Ibid., 405.
“
the course, formerly adopted by the powers
”: Wilhelm Schwarz,
Die Heilige Allianz
(Stuttgart, 1935), 52.
The vanquished enemy would become
: It was analogous to the decision in 1954 of (West) Germany to join the Atlantic Alliance, less than a decade after its unconditional surrender at the end of a murderous war against its newfound partners.
“
too weak for true ambition
”: Klemens von Metternich,
Aus Metternich’s nachgelassenen Papieren,
ed. Alfons v. Klinkowstroem (Vienna, 1881), 1:316.
“
the contingency of an attack by France
”: Palmerston’s dispatch no. 6 to the Marquess of Clanricarde (ambassador in St. Petersburg), January 11, 1841, in
The Foreign Policy of Victorian England,
ed. Kenneth Bourne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 252–53.
The German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder
: See Isaiah Berlin,
Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas
(New York: Viking, 1976), 158, 204.
“
Underlying the theory was fact
”: Jacques Barzun,
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life
(New York: Perennial, 2000), 482.
Linguistic nationalisms made traditional empires
: Sir Lewis Namier,
Vanished Supremacies: Essays on European History, 1812–1918
(New York: Penguin Books, 1958), 203.
“
powerful, decisive and wise regents
”: Otto von Bismarck,
Die gesammelten Werke,
3rd ed. (Berlin, 1924), 1: 375.
The war received its name
: The battle was memorialized in classic literature on both sides, including Alfred Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” and Leo Tolstoy’s
Tales of Sevastopol
. See Nicholas V. Riasanovsky,
A History of Russia
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 336–39.
“
We will astonish the world by the magnitude of our ingratitude
”:
Allgemeine deutsche Biographie 33
(Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1891), 266. Metternich left office in 1848.
“
Where everything is tottering
”: Heinrich Sbrik,
Metternich, der Staatsmann und der Mensch,
2 vols. (Munich, 1925), 1:354, as cited in Henry A. Kissinger, “The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political
Thought of Metternich,”
American Political Science Review
48, no. 4 (December 1954): 1027.
“
invention is the enemy of history
”: Metternich,
Aus Metternich’s nachgelassenen Papieren,
1:33, 8:184.
For Metternich, the national interest of Austria
: Algernon Cecil,
Metternich, 1773–1859
(London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1947), 52.
“
The great axioms of political science
”: Metternich,
Aus Metternich’s nachgelassenen Papieren,
1:334.
“
A sentimental policy knows no reciprocity
”:
Briefwechsel des Generals Leopold von Gerlach mit dem Bundestags-Gesandten Otto von Bismarck
(Berlin, 1893), 334.
“
For heaven’s sake no sentimental alliances
”: Ibid. (February 20, 1854), 130.
“
The only healthy basis of policy
”: Horst Kohl,
Die politischen Reden des Fursten Bismarck
(Stuttgart, 1892), 264.
“
Gratitude and confidence will not bring
”: Bismarck,
Die gesammelten Werke
(November 14, 1833), vol. 14, nos. 1, 3.
“
Policy is the art of the possible
”: Ibid. (September 29, 1851), 1:62.
“
a greater political event than the French Revolution
”: Speech of February 9, 1871, in Hansard,
Parliamentary Debates,
ser. 3, vol. 204 (February–March 1871), 82.
German strategy
: By contrast, Moltke, the architect of Prussian victories in the wars that led to unification, had in his day planned a defense on both fronts.
World War I broke out
: For stimulating accounts of these developments, see Christopher Clark,
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
(New York: HarperCollins, 2013) and Margaret MacMillan,
The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914
(New York: Random House, 2013).
In the 1920s, the Germany of the Weimar Republic
: See John Maynard Keynes,
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
(New York: Macmillan, 1920), Chapter 5.
Their residue would continue
: See
Chapters 6
and
7
.
“
the first deliberate attempt
”: Adda B. Bozeman, “Iran: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Tradition of Persian Statecraft,”
Orbis
23, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 397.