World Order Page 6

  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.

  The Czar, like the Chinese Emperor, was an absolute ruler endowed by tradition with mystical powers and overseeing a territory of continental expanse. Yet the position of the Czar differed from that of his Chinese counterpart in one important respect. In the Chinese view, the Emperor ruled wherever possible through the serenity of his conduct; in the Russian view, the leadership of the Czar prevailed through his ability to impose his will by unchallengeable assertions of authority and to impress on all onlookers the Russian state’s overwhelmingly vast power. The Chinese Emperor was conceived of as the embodiment of the superiority of Chinese civilization, inspiring other peoples to “come and be transformed.” The Czar was seen as the embodiment of the defense of Russia against enemies surrounding it on all sides. Thus while the emperors were lauded for their impartial, aloof benevolence, the nineteenth-century historian Nikolai Karamzin saw in a Czar’s harshness a sign that he was fulfilling his true calling:

  In Russia, the sovereign is the living law. He favors the good and punishes the bad … [A] soft heart in a monarch is counted as a virtue only when it is tempered with the sense of duty to use sensible severity.

  Not unlike the United States in its own drive westward, Russia had imbued its conquests with the moral justification that it was spreading order and enlightenment into heathen lands (with a lucrative trade in furs and minerals an incidental benefit). Yet where the American vision inspired boundless optimism, the Russian experience ultimately based itself on stoic endurance. Stranded “at the interface of two vast and irreconcilable worlds,” Russia saw itself as endowed with a special mission to bridge them but exposed on all sides to threatening forces that failed to comprehend its calling. The great Russian novelist and passionate nationalist Fyodor Dostoevsky cited “this ceaseless longing, which has always been inherent in the Russian people, for a great universal church on earth.” The exaltation over Russia’s world-spanning synthesis of civilizations evoked a corresponding despair over Russia’s status as (in the words of an influential nineteenth-century critique) an “orphan cut off from the human family … For people to notice us, we have had to stretch from the Bering Straits to the Oder.”

  A conviction lingered in the expansive, brooding “Russian soul” (as Russian thinkers would come to call it) that someday all of Russia’s vast exertions and contradictions would come to fruition: its journey would be vindicated; its achievements would be lauded, and the disdain of the West would transform into awe and admiration; Russia would combine the power and vastness of the East with the refinements of the West and the moral force of true religion; and Moscow, the “Third Rome” inheriting fallen Byzantium’s mantle, with its Czar “the successor of the caesars of Eastern Rome, of the organizers of the church and of its councils which established the very creed of the Christian faith,” would play the decisive role in ushering in a new era of global justice and fraternity.

  It was this Russia, in Europe but not quite of it, that had tempted Napoleon with its expanse and mystique; it was his ruin (just as it was Hitler’s a century and a half later) when Russia’s people, steeled to great feats of endurance, proved capable of weathering deeper privation than Napoleon’s Grande Armée (or Hitler’s legions). When Russians burned down four-fifths of Moscow to deny Napoleon the conquest and his troops’ sustenance, Napoleon, his epic strategy thus doomed, is said to have exclaimed, “What a people! They are Scythians! What resoluteness! The barbarians!” Now with Cossack horsemen drinking champagne in Paris, this massive autocratic entity loomed over a Europe that struggled to comprehend its ambitions and its method of operation.

  By the time the Congress of Vienna took place, Russia was arguably the most powerful country on the Continent. Its Czar Alexander, representing Russia personally at the Vienna peace conference, was unquestionably its most absolute ruler. A man of deep, if changing, convictions, he had recently renewed his religious faith with a course of intensive Bible readings and spiritual consultations. He was convinced, as he wrote to a confidante in 1812, that triumph over Napoleon would usher in a new and harmonious world based on religious principles, and he pledged: “It is to the cause of hastening the true reign of Jesus Christ that I devote all my earthly glory.” Conceiving of himself as an instrument of divine will, the Czar arrived in Vienna in 1814 with a design for a new world order in some ways even more radical than Napoleon’s in its universality: a “Holy Alliance” of princes sublimating their national interests into a common search for peace and justice, forswearing the balance of power fo
r Christian principles of brotherhood. As Alexander told Chateaubriand, the French royalist intellectual and diplomat, “There no longer exists an English policy, a French, Russian, Prussian, or Austrian policy; there is now only one common policy, which, for the welfare of all, ought to be adopted in common by all states and all peoples.” It was a forerunner of the American Wilsonian conception of the nature of world order, albeit on behalf of principles dramatically the opposite of the Wilsonian vision.

  Needless to say, such a design, advanced by a victorious military power whose divisions now bestrode the Continent, posed a challenge to Europe’s concept of a Westphalian equilibrium of sovereign states. For on behalf of its new vision of legitimacy, Russia brought a surfeit of power. Czar Alexander ended the Napoleonic Wars by marching to Paris at the head of his armies, and in celebration of victory he oversaw an unprecedented review of 160,000 Russian troops on the plains outside the French capital—a demonstration that could not fail to disquiet even allied nations. After consultation with his spiritual advisor, Alexander proposed a draft joint declaration in which the victorious sovereigns would proclaim their agreement that “the course, formerly adopted by the powers in their mutual relations, had to be fundamentally changed and that it was urgent to replace it with an order of things based on the exalted truths of the eternal religion of our Savior.”