The 1971 film, Nicholas and Alexandra, depicted the plight of a simple and unimaginative ruler who sought to follow in his father's footsteps, naively keeping faith with traditional ideals. Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate after his policies had sunk the Russian navy, made hamburger of the Russian army, brought hunger to the poor and bankruptcy to the economy. Taken into custody by the Provisional Government, afterwards held by the Bolsheviks, he and his family were pitilessly murdered. According to Winston Churchill, this final outcome was almost avoided: "In March [1917] the Czar was on his throne; the Russian Empire and people stood, the front was safe, and victory certain." Why did Russia collapse so suddenly, at the very moment its army had begun to smash the enemy under a new system of organization? According to Churchill, the czar "was only a true, simple man of average ability, of merciful disposition, upheld in all his daily life by his faith in God. But the brunt of supreme decisions centered upon him. At the summit where all problems are reduced to Yea and Nay, where events transcend the faculties of men and where all is inscrutable, he had to give the answers. His was the function of a compass-needle. War or no war? Advance or retreat? Right or left? Democratize or hold firm? Quit or persevere? These were the battlefields of Nicholas II." As Alexander Solzhenitsyn painstakingly dramatized in his book, August 1914, the misbegotten first offensive of the Russian armies in World War I saved France from the Kaiser's armies. If we blame the czar for losing the hearts of the Russian people we must nonetheless thank him for saving the West. It's as if Czar Nicholas II learned from his mistakes and profited from this. He held the army together after disaster, and picked the generals who would make victory possible again. In 1917 Russia was on the brink of total victory. According to Churchill, "With victory in her grasp [Russia] fell upon the earth, devoured alive, like Herod of old, by worms." There is something haunting in this story. Seemingly innocent misconceptions can lead to millions of dead. A country on the brink of victory collapses into revolution and civil war. Economic collapse, moral exhaustion, internal disarray prevented victory. There are sequences in the 1971 film that are worth viewing, especially the lines put into the mouth of Count Witte on the eve of World War I.
For the sake of edification, we ought to review the bitter words of Count Sergei Witte. "This insane regime," he wrote, "this tangle of cowardice, blindness, craftiness, and stupidity." But also consider the words of Churchill: "It is the shallow fashion of these times to dismiss the Czarist regime as a purblind, corrupt, incompetent tyranny. But a survey of its thirty months' war with Germany and Austria should correct these loose impressions and expose the dominant facts." It is easy to judge by hindsight. It is very difficult to understand reality in the midst of complex events. Czar Nicholas II stumbled into World War I without intending to initiate such a wholesale massacre. He blundered because his understanding was mired in rigid ideas. The Tsar's regime was, according to historian Barbara Tuchman, "half nonchalance, half inefficiency." But the czar was learning. He was determined to do better. And if Churchill was right, the czar almost triumphed. But for Rasputin in St. Petersburg, and the resulting unpopularity of the czarina, things might have been different.
Imperial Russia on the eve of the Great War was like every great nation on the eve destruction. There was a pattern of complaisance, corruption, vanity and a preference for pleasant fabrications above unpleasant facts. Every fall is prepared inwardly, by a process of hollowing out. The cycles of war and peace, boom and bust, are due to the degeneration of memory and comprehension under conditions of peace and prosperity. Peace activists and left-leaning critics may soon liken George W. Bush to Nicholas II. They are already calling the U.S. president an autocrat. They already make much of his mistakes.
A leader may be overwhelmed by events, or escape danger. Barbara Tuchman's book on the outbreak of World War I, The Guns of August, persuaded President Kennedy to tread gently during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy learned from Czar Nicholas's mistakes. Avoid unnecessary provocations, attempt a dialogue and remain cool. States can be broken, especially when violence gets out of hand. A big war can grow very from a small conflict. It can swallow men, governments and whole nations. Wars arise because men are tribal. We think this is not so, but history teaches this lesson again and again. In his book on the Great War, Winston Churchill wrote: "It is customary for thoughtless people to jeer at the old diplomacy and to pretend that wars arise out of its secret machinations. When one looks at the petty subjects which have led to wars between great countries and to so many disputes, it is easy to be misled in this way." Churchill wrote that countries succumb to a "dangerous disease." It is a disease born of "the interests, the passions and the destiny of mighty races of men." Long antagonisms, noted Churchill, "express themselves in trifles." If great commotions arise out of small things, one should not be deceived. Great commotions erupt out of deep antagonisms that lie beneath the surface.
Take the example, in our own time, of a petty series of disagreements between Russia and the United States. There are ongoing disagreements over Iran and Iraq, over Ukraine and the extension of NATO into the Baltic States and former Warsaw Pact countries. On April 29, the London Daily Telegraph carried a story with the headline, "Ex-Soviet dissident warns of U.S. plot against Russia." The old anti-communist dissident himself, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, has accused the United States of "launching a military campaign to encircle Russia and turn it into a NATO chattel." Endorsing the policies of KGB President Vladimir Putin, the former gulag prisoner and renowned author stated that American military operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq posed a threat to Russia. According to Solzehnitsyn, "NATO is methodically and persistently expanding its military apparatus in the east of Europe and is implementing an encirclement of Russia from the south."
Solzhenitsyn has committed a grave error. NATO has no designs on Russia except to see Russia become a prosperous democracy. The attempt at encirclement is an attempt to keep Russia in the democratic fold. The policy itself is an error, misread by the Russian people and cynically used by the Russian government. There is no danger is prosperity. There is no threat in joining the West as a free nation. The threat that exists is only a threat to Russia's criminal KGB oligarchy.
On May 5, Vice President Dick Cheney publicly stated that Russia was using gas and oil as a weapon of blackmail and, to the bargain, was violating the rights of its citizens. The Bush administration no longer believes that Russia is on the road to democracy. The official Russian press fired back at the American leadership, saying that Cheney's remarks herald the commencement of a new Cold War. Russian editorial writers compared Cheney's words to Winston Churchill's 1946 Fulton Speech, in which Churchill stated that Europe was divided by an "iron curtain."
Russia is not a free country today, any more than it was a free country in 1946. Stalin is dead, of course, and mass executions are a thing of the past (we hope); but the Russian press is muzzled, the country's elections are rigged, the secret police maintain their files and the agencies of repression continue under new names and streamlined methods. The old conflict between America and Russia flares anew. But did it ever entirely subside?
On May 9 the Wall Street Journal printed an editorial by Andrew C. Kuchins titled "Look who's Back." According to Kuchins, "Russia is back in the game." (That is, the Great Game.) "Rapidly accumulated oil and gas wealth is fueling a new assertiveness in Russian foreign policy," explained Kuchins. "Russia is more confidently defending its interests ... than two years ago, or even six months ago." The KGB has regained lost ground in Ukraine and Central Asia. Russia's financial situation is steadily improving. According to Itar-Tass, Russia's gold and foreign currency reserves reached $236.7 billion by mid May. One must also consider Moscow's strategic partnership with China.
In an article titled "Pentagon Finds China Fortifying Its Long-Range Military Arsenal," Ann Scott Tyson of the Washington Post stated: "The annual report to Congress on China's military power also highlighted Beijing's purchases of Russian weapons, its positioning of as many as 790 short-range ballistic missiles opposite Taiwan and its nuclear weapons modernization." Tyson noted that China is "buying Russian aircraft, such as the IL-76 transport and IL-78 tanker aircraft, and has shown interest in the Su-33 maritime strike aircraft."
The fact that China and Russia continue to build their forces while supporting "rogue regimes" in North Korea and Iran, indicates that the ultimate aim of their policy isn't world peace but masked hostility to the United States. Only now the mask is gradually being removed. Meanwhile, an apparent malaise is overtaking the U.S. government with mid-term elections coming in the fall. Like Czar Nicholas in 1917, President Bush believes himself to be on the brink of victory in the Middle East. But economic storms threaten. On May 21 the London Sunday Times published a column by Economics Editor David Smith titled, "Markets 'are like 1987 crash.'" According to leading city analysts, wrote Smith, "Conditions in the financial markets are eerily similar to those that precipitated the 'Black Monday' stock market crash of October 1987." Negative indicators include a widening U.S. current-account deficit, a weak dollar, inflation fears, and a new Fed chairman.
The weakening of the United States is a reality, whether we choose to acknowledge that reality or not. The weakening began in the moral and intellectual spheres many years ago. This enervation communicates its bankruptcy to the financial sphere. In the end, the disruptions envisioned may lead to a revolution, a civil war or international strife. The world waits as the crisis unfolds.
