World Order (7 page)

When the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon ended, Russian troops were occupying Paris in a stunning display of history’s reversals. A half century earlier, Russia had for the first time entered the balance of power in Western Europe by participating in the Seven Years’ War and demonstrated the arbitrary nature of czarist rule when it suddenly declared its neutrality and withdrew from the war because of a newly crowned Czar’s admiration for Frederick the Great. At the end of the Napoleonic period, another Czar, Alexander, proceeded to prescribe Europe’s future. The liberties of Europe and its concomitant system of order required the participation of an empire far larger than the rest of Europe together and autocratic to a degree without precedent in European history.

Since then, Russia has played a unique role in international affairs: part of the balance of power in both Europe and Asia but contributing to the equilibrium of the international order only fitfully. It has started more wars than any other contemporary major power, but it has also
thwarted dominion of Europe by a single power, holding fast against Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, and Hitler when key continental elements of the balance had been overrun. Its policy has pursued a special rhythm of its own over the centuries, expanding over a landmass spanning nearly every climate and civilization, interrupted occasionally for a time by the need to adjust its domestic structure to the vastness of the enterprise—only to return again, like a tide crossing a beach. From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, circumstances have changed, but the rhythm has remained extraordinarily consistent.

Western Europeans emerging from the Napoleonic upheavals viewed with awe and apprehension a country whose territory and military forces dwarfed those of the rest of the Continent combined and whose elites’ polished manners seemed barely able to conceal a primitive force from before and beyond Western civilization. Russia, the French traveler the Marquis de Custine claimed in 1843—from the perspective of a France restrained and a Europe reshaped by Russian power—was a hybrid bringing the vitality of the steppe to the heart of Europe:

A monstrous compound of the petty refinements
of Byzantium, and the ferocity of the desert horde, a struggle between the etiquette of the Lower [Byzantine] Empire, and the savage virtues of Asia, have produced the mighty state which Europe now beholds, and the influence of which she will probably feel hereafter, without being able to understand its operation.

Everything about Russia—its absolutism, its size, its globe-spanning ambitions and insecurities—stood as an implicit challenge to the traditional European concept of international order built on equilibrium and restraint.

Russia’s position in and toward Europe had long been ambiguous. As Charlemagne’s empire had fractured in the ninth century into
what would become the modern nations of France and Germany, Slavic tribes more than a thousand miles to their east had coalesced in a confederation based around the city of Kiev (now the capital and geographic center of the state of Ukraine, though perceived almost universally by Russians as simultaneously an inextricable part of their own patrimony). This “land of the Rus” stood at the fraught intersections of civilizations and trade routes. With Vikings to its north, the expanding Arab empire to its south, and raiding Turkic tribes to its east, Russia was permanently in the grip of conflating temptations and fears. Too far to the east to have experienced the Roman Empire (though “czars” claimed the “Caesars” as their political and etymological forebears), Christian but looking to the Orthodox Church in Constantinople rather than Rome for spiritual authority, Russia was close enough to Europe to share a common cultural vocabulary yet perpetually out of phase with the Continent’s historical trends. The experience would leave Russia a uniquely “Eurasian” power, sprawling across two continents but never entirely at home in either.

The most profound disjunction had come with the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, which subdued a politically divided Russia and razed Kiev. Two and a half centuries of Mongol suzerainty (1237–1480) and the subsequent struggle to restore a coherent state based around the Duchy of Moscow imposed on Russia an eastward orientation just as Western Europe was charting the new technological and intellectual vistas that would create the modern era. During Europe’s era of seaborne discovery, Russia was laboring to reconstitute itself as an independent nation and shore up its borders against threats from all directions. As the Protestant Reformation impelled political and religious diversity in Europe, Russia translated the fall of its own religious lodestar, Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, to Muslim invaders in 1453 into an almost mystical conviction that Russia’s Czar was now (as the monk Filofei wrote to Ivan III around 1500) “
the sole Emperor of all the Christians
in the whole
universe,” with a messianic calling to regain the fallen Byzantine capital for Christendom.

Europe was coming to embrace its multipolarity as a mechanism tending toward balance, but Russia was learning its sense of geopolitics from the hard school of the steppe, where an array of nomadic hordes contended for resources on an open terrain with few fixed borders. There raids for plunder and the enslavement of foreign civilians were regular occurrences, for some a way of life; independence was coterminous with the territory a people could physically defend. Russia affirmed its tie to Western culture but—even as it grew exponentially in size—came to see itself as a beleaguered outpost of civilization for which security could be found only through exerting its absolute will over its neighbors.

In the Westphalian concept of order, European statesmen came to identify security with a balance of power and with restraints on its exercise. In Russia’s experience of history, restraints on power spelled catastrophe: Russia’s failure to dominate its surroundings, in this view, had exposed it to the Mongol invasions and plunged it into its nightmarish “Time of Troubles” (a fifteen-year dynastic interregnum before the founding of the Romanov Dynasty in 1613, in which invasions, civil wars, and famine claimed a third of Russia’s population). The Peace of Westphalia saw international order as an intricate balancing mechanism; the Russian view cast it as a perpetual contest of wills, with Russia extending its domain at each phase to the absolute limit of its material resources. Thus, when asked to define Russia’s foreign policy, the mid-seventeenth-century Czar Alexei’s minister Nashchokin offered a straightforward description: “
expanding the state in every direction
, and this is the business of the Department of Foreign Affairs.”

This process developed
into a national outlook and propelled the onetime Duchy of Moscow across the Eurasian landmass to become the world’s territorially largest empire, in a slow, seemingly irresistible
expansionist urge that would remain unabated until 1917. Thus the American man of letters Henry Adams recorded the outlook of the Russian ambassador in Washington in 1903 (by which point Russia had reached Korea):

His political philosophy, like that of all Russians
, seemed fixed on the single idea that Russia must roll—must, by her irresistible inertia, crush whatever stood in her way … When Russia rolled over a neighboring people, she absorbed their energies in her own movement of custom and race which neither Czar nor peasant could convert, or wished to convert, into any Western equivalent.

With no natural borders save the Arctic and Pacific oceans, Russia was in a position to gratify this impulse for several centuries—marching alternately into Central Asia, then the Caucasus, then the Balkans, then Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea, to the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese and Japanese frontiers (and for a time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Pacific into Alaskan and Californian settlements).
It expanded each year
by an amount larger than the entire territory of many European states (on average, 100,000 square kilometers annually from 1552 to 1917).

When it was strong, Russia conducted itself with the domineering certainty of a superior power and insisted on formal shows of deference to its status. When it was weak, it masked its vulnerability through brooding invocations of vast inner reserves of strength. In either case, it was a special challenge for Western capitals used to dealing with a somewhat more genteel style.

At the same time, Russia’s awesome feats of expansion took place from a demographic and economic base that, by Western standards, was not advanced—with many regions thinly populated and seemingly untouched by modern culture and technology. Thus the world-
conquering imperialism remained paired with a paradoxical sense of vulnerability—as if marching halfway across the world had generated more potential foes than additional security.
From that perspective
, the Czar’s empire can be said to have expanded because it proved easier to keep going than to stop.

In this context, a distinctive Russian concept of political legitimacy took hold. While Renaissance Europe rediscovered its classical humanist past and refined new concepts of individualism and freedom, Russia sought its resurgence in its undiluted faith and in the coherence of a single, divinely sanctioned authority overpowering all divisions—the Czar as “the living icon of God,” whose commands were irresistible and inherently just. A common Christian faith and a shared elite language (French) underscored a commonality of perspective with the West.
Yet early European visitors
to czarist Russia found themselves in a land of almost surreal extremes and thought they saw, beneath the veneer of a modern Western monarchy, a despotism modeled on Mongol and Tartar practices—“European discipline supporting the tyranny of Asia,” in the uncharitable phrase of the Marquis de Custine.

Russia had joined the modern European state system under Czar Peter the Great in a manner unlike any other society. On both sides, it proved a wary embrace. Peter had been born in 1672 into a still essentially medieval Russia. By then, Western Europe had evolved through the age of discovery, the Renaissance, and the Reformation; it stood at the threshold of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. A gigantic (at six feet eight inches), intensely energetic figure, the young Czar set out to transform his empire in a reign that expressed the extremes of Russia’s many traits and aspirations.

Determined to explore the fruits of modernity
and measure Russia’s achievements against them, Peter was a frequent visitor in the shops and factories of Moscow’s émigré German quarter. As a young ruler, he toured Western capitals, where he tested modern techniques
and professional disciplines personally. Having found Russia backward compared with the West, Peter announced his aim: “
to sever the people from their former Asiatic customs
and instruct them how all Christian peoples in Europe comport themselves.”

A series of ukases issued forth
: Russia would adopt Western manners and hairstyles, seek out foreign technological expertise, build a modern army and navy, round out its borders with wars against nearly every neighboring state, break through to the Baltic Sea, and construct a new capital city of St. Petersburg. The last, Russia’s “window to the West,” was built by hand, by a casualty-wracked conscripted labor force, on a marshy wilderness chosen at Peter’s personal command, when he put his sword into the ground and announced: “Here shall be a town.” When traditionalists rebelled, Peter crushed them and, at least according to the accounts that reached the West, took personal charge of the torture and decapitation of the uprising’s leaders.

Peter’s tour de force transformed Russian society and vaulted his empire into the first rank of Western great powers. Yet the suddenness of the transformation left Russia with the insecurities of a parvenu. In no other empire would the absolute ruler have felt it necessary to remind her subjects in writing, as Peter’s successor Catherine the Great did half a century later, that “
Russia is a European State
. This is clearly demonstrated by the following Observations.”

Russia’s reforms were invariably carried out by ruthless autocrats on a population docile in its desire to overcome its past rather than energized by confidence in its future. Nevertheless, like his successor reformers and revolutionaries, when his reign was over, his subjects and their descendants credited him for having driven them, however mercilessly, to achievements they had shown little evidence of seeking. (According to recent polls,
Stalin too has acquired
some of this recognition in contemporary Russian thinking.)

Catherine the Great, Russia’s autocratic reformist ruler from 1762
to 1796 and overseer of a historic period of cultural achievement and territorial expansion (including Russia’s conquest of the Khanate of Crimea and its laying low of the Zaporizhian Host, the onetime autonomous Cossack realm in what is today central Ukraine), justified Russia’s extreme autocracy as the only system of government that could hold together such a gigantic territory:

The Extent of the Dominion requires
an absolute Power to be vested in that Person who rules over it. It is expedient so to be that the quick Dispatch of Affairs, sent from distant Parts, might make ample Amends for the Delay occasioned by the great Distance of the Places.

Every other Form of Government whatsoever would not only have been prejudicial to Russia, but would even have proved its entire Ruin.

 

Thus what in the West was regarded as arbitrary authoritarianism was presented in Russia as an elemental necessity, the precondition for functioning governance.