"The Story of Russia"

[fiefoe]

I didn't really mean to learn Russian history in such a straightforward fashion, (more color and less what the ruling class were doing would have been better,) but it's precisely what Orlando Figes's book is about.

• Kiev and Moscow had been fighting over Volodymyr/Vladimir for several years. The monument in Moscow had been made a metre taller than the one in Kiev, as if to assert the primacy of Russia’s claim to the grand prince. While Putin had enlisted Vladimir as the founder of the modern Russian state, the Ukrainians claimed Volodymyr as their own,
• ‘Who controls the past …  controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,’ George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four.5 The maxim is more true for Russia than for any other country in the world. In Soviet times, when Communism was its certain destiny and history was adjusted to reflect that end, there was a joke, which perhaps Orwell had in mind: ‘Russia is a country with a certain future; it is only its past that is unpredictable.’
• In Putin’s system, where there are no left–right party divisions, no competing ideologies to frame debate, and no publicly agreed meanings for key concepts like ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’, the discourse of politics is defined by ideas of the country’s past.
• Many writers have observed the Russian people’s need for transcendental myths promising a better version of Russia. In Dostoevsky’s novels, where suffering and salvation are such frequent themes, it appears as the essence of the Russian character. The endurance of these myths explains much in Russia’s history: the lasting force of Orthodox beliefs; the people’s search for a holy tsar, the embodiment of their ideals, to deliver them from injustice; their dreams of building heaven on this earth, a revolutionary utopia, even when this dream turned out to be the nightmare of the Stalinist regime.
• Vladimir was one of many princes to be made a saint in the medieval period. But it was only later, from the sixteenth century, that his cult assumed a more important status, when Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) promoted it as the basis of his bogus claim, as Moscow’s tsar, to be the sole legitimate successor to the Kievan rulers and the emperors of Byzantium.
• Russia developed on a flat and open territory without natural boundaries. Its position made it vulnerable to foreign invasion but also open to the influence of the surrounding powers – Khazars, Mongols, Byzantines, Europeans and Ottomans – with which its relations were defined by trade. As the Russian state grew stronger, a process we should date from the sixteenth century, its main focus was the defence of its frontiers... It entailed the subordination of society to the state and its military needs. Social classes were created and legally defined to benefit the state as taxpayers and military servitors. It also meant a policy of territorial aggrandisement to secure Russia’s frontiers... Russia tends to advance its security by keeping neighbouring countries weak, and by fighting wars beyond its borders to keep hostile powers at arm’s length.
• the Russian state was not like them. It had evolved as a patrimonial or personal autocracy, in which the concept of the state (gosudarstvo) was embodied in the person of the tsar (gosudar) as the sovereign lord or owner of the Russian lands. In medieval Europe the legal separation of the ‘king’s two bodies’ – his mortal person and the sacred office of the monarchy – allowed for the development of an abstract and impersonal conception of the state.11 But that did not happen in Russia.
• Similar ideas of truth and justice would underpin the Russian Revolution of 1917. The myth of the holy tsar would also give way to the leader cults of Lenin and Stalin,
• The Celts, the Franks, the Gauls, the Goths, the Huns and the Serbs – all have served as the ur-people of a modern nationhood, although in truth they were complex social groups, formed over centuries of great migrations across the European continent.
• Primary Chronicle: the warring Slavic tribes of north-west Russia agreed jointly to invite the Rus, a branch of the Vikings, to rule over them: ‘Our land is vast and abundant, but there is no order in it. Come and reign as princes and have authority over us!’... It is a typical foundation myth – composed to establish the political legitimacy of the Riurikids, the Kievan ruling dynasty, as God’s chosen agents for the Christianisation of the Rus lands.
• St Petersburg Academy, where German-born historians were dominant. They propagated the theory that Riurik had belonged to a Germanic tribe of Scandinavia and that Russia as a state and culture had thus been founded by Germans. Catherine the Great (herself German-born) supported their position, because it suggested that the Russians were of European stock,
• The fortunes of the anti-Normanists rose in line with the influence of nationalism on the Russian state. They peaked in Stalin’s time, particularly after 1945, when a Great Russian chauvinism, boosted by the victory over Nazi Germany, was placed at the heart of Soviet ideology. The ethno-archaeology of early Slavic settlements became heavily politicised.
• The Vikings came to Russia, not to loot, as they did in England (Russia was too poor for that), but to use its many waterways for long-distance trade between Europe and Asia.
• They told a story of the nation’s beginnings as an epic struggle by the agriculturalists of the northern forest lands against the horsemen of the Asiatic steppe. This national myth became so fundamental to the Russians’ European self-identity that even to suggest that their ancestors had been influenced by the Asiatic cultures of the steppe was to invite accusations of treason. In fact raids by the steppeland tribes were infrequent, and there were long periods of peaceful coexistence, trade, cooperation, social intermingling and even intermarriage.. We need to think of early Rus, not as a story of hostile confrontation between the forest settlers and steppe nomads, but as one of largely peaceful interaction between all the peoples of Eurasia. We should think of it, perhaps, not in terms of ethnic groups at all, but as a trading union of diverse groups
• The story goes that he was visited by representatives of the neighbouring states, each one seeking to convert him to their religion... The existence of a readily translated Church Slavonic literature – enabling the dissemination of its teachings over a large area – gave the Orthodox Christians a clear advantage over other religions whose scriptures were not yet in Slavonic. The key factor here was the work of the brothers Cyril and Methodius, the ninth-century missionaries sent by the Byzantine emperor to spread Christianity among the Slavs.
• Instead of the act of self-determination celebrated by the modern Russian and Ukrainian states, Vladimir’s conversion to the Eastern Church may have been a declaration of his kingdom’s subjugation to the Byzantine Empire.
• Seeing is believing for the Orthodox. Russians pray with their eyes open – their gaze fixed on an icon, which serves as a window on the divine sphere.22 The icon is the focal point of the believers’ spiritual emotions
• It was only from the thirteenth century that a more distinctive Russian style appeared. This native mode was distinguished by a simple harmony of line and colour, graceful movements and a skilful use of inverse perspective (where lines seem to converge on a point in front of the picture) to draw the viewer in and guide him in his prayers by symbolising how the icon’s sacred action takes place in a sphere beyond the normal laws of existence.
• At the core of the Russian faith is a distinctive stress on motherhood which never really took root in the Latin West. Where the Catholic tradition placed its emphasis on the Madonna’s purity, the Russian emphasised her divine motherhood (bogoroditsa).
• Normally the throne of the grand prince would pass, not from father to son, but from the elder brother to the younger one (usually until the fourth brother). Only then would it pass down to the next generation. When the eldest brother took the throne in Kiev, all the others moved up to the principality on the next step of the ladder. It was a system of collateral succession not found elsewhere in Europe.
• (they called them the ‘Tartars’, with an extra ‘r’, to associate them with Tartarus, the Greek name for ‘hell’).
• One of Batu’s first moves was to summon the Russian princes to Sarai to swear an oath of allegiance to the Mongol khan. These trips became a regular phenomenon, for no prince could rule without a patent (yarlyk) from the khan. The prince was forced to dress in Mongol clothes and undergo a ritual that involved passing between flames and kneeling at the feet of his sovereign to beg for his patent... To fix the tax and number of recruits from each region the Mongols instituted censuses – a practice they had learned from the Chinese – which the baskaki and their military units oversaw. The general Mongol practice was to take one-tenth of everything,
• That style reached its supreme heights in Andrei Rublev’s icons of the early fifteenth century. No other icon painter could match their poetic qualities – their graceful harmony and sense of movement, their transparency of colour that makes their sacred figures appear illuminated from within. A notable example is the Trinity he painted for the Holy Trinity Church in Sergiev-Posad between 1408 and 1425.
• The weakening of the Horde, however, was due less to outside military threats than to the Black Death, which began on the Central Asian steppe in the mid-fourteenth century. The pandemic turned trade routes into plague routes, devastating the economy and killing perhaps half the population of the Golden Horde, which over the next century broke up into three khanates (Kazan, Crimea, Astrakhan)... The Mongols stayed in Russia for more than three centuries.
• But the true figure was probably higher because many Tatars Russified their names when they entered the nobility. Among these were some of the most famous names in Russian history: writers (Karamzin, Chaadaev, Turgenev, Bulgakov), composers (Rimsky-Korsakov), tsars (Boris Godunov) and revolutionaries (Bukharin).
• The Russians had learned from the Mongols that the barbed tip of an arrow does not pierce through silk on entering the body. This meant it could be removed without worsening the wound.
• The Russian autocratic tradition had many roots, but the Mongol legacy did more than most to fix the basic nature of its politics. From the sixteenth century, the first tsars of Muscovy drew upon the Mongol imperial tradition, adapting it to their own purposes.
• The kormlenie system was formally abolished in 1556, but the corrupt practice which it legitimised would long be carried on by local officials through other means (taking bribes, extorting money from the population, pocketing state revenues, and so on). Here was the root of the corruption that has plagued the Russian state for centuries. Here indeed was the origin of the oligarchic system that operates today, in which the only way to become rich is to be a member of the highest ruling circles or enjoy their protection.
• The Kremlin was a symbol of Moscow’s power and arrival on the European scene. Its vast complex of palaces and churches was constructed largely by Italians... The Kremlin’s walls enclosed the city’s most important churches, whereas the cathedrals of northern Italy were always built outside the castle walls. It was a symbolic difference.
• The Kremlin was a symbol of Moscow’s power and arrival on the European scene. Its vast complex of palaces and churches was constructed largely by Italians.
• One result of the pomeste system was the creation of a landowning service class with only weak ties to a particular community. The pomeshchiki were creatures of the state. Despatched from one place to another in the tsar’s empire, they had neither time nor inclination to put down roots in one locality.
• The reign of Ivan the Terrible marked the start of Russia’s growth as an imperial power. Between 1500 and the revolution of 1917, the Russian Empire grew at an astonishing rate, 130 square kilometres on average every day.
• The Cossacks’ name derived from the Turkic word qazaqi, meaning ‘adventurers’ or ‘vagrant soldiers’ who lived in freedom as bandits on the steppe. Many of the Cossacks were remnants of the Mongol army
• It was a triumphant proclamation of the country’s liberation from the Tatar culture that had dominated it since the thirteenth century. With its showy colours, its playful ornament and outrageous onion domes, St Basil’s was intended as a joyful celebration of the Byzantine traditions to which Russia now returned
• It was only a century later, once historians began to look more closely at the terror he unleashed, that the words ‘Ivan the Terrible’ became synonymous with executions, tortures, grisly massacres and a mad and monstrous tyranny that reason struggles to explain.
• oprichniki, a new class of loyal servitors, numbering perhaps 5,000 men, who formed his private army, charged with fighting internal sedition: They dressed in long black cloaks like a monk’s habit and rode around the country on black horses with dogs’ heads and brooms attached to their bridles – symbols of their mission to hunt out the tsar’s enemies and sweep them from the land.
• l instability of the Russian monarchy. The tsar’s authority was founded on the myth of his divine status as an agent of God’s rule in Holy Russia, the last surviving seat of the true Orthodox faith in the Third Rome ideology... The crucial factor in the tsar’s authority – his godlike personality projected through the myth of the holy tsar – could thus be turned against him if his actions did not meet the people’s expectations of his sacred cult.
• a new Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649: The code’s twenty-nine thematic chapters, covering every aspect of society, would remain the fundamental law until 1833. The fact that it survived so long did not ‘testify to its merits’, according to Kliuchevsky, but rather showed ‘how long we Russians can survive without satisfactory law’. The Ulozhenie marks a shift towards the notion of a law-based state.
• The social mobility that made Western societies so dynamic in the early modern age was basically absent in Russia. The town population in Russia was permanently fixed. Migration in and out of towns became a criminal offence. Urban taxpayers were obliged to live where they were registered in the tax census.
• These kabala contracts, as they were called (another word of Mongol origin), stipulated how many days each week they would work for the landowner, and how many years they would remain in his employ. Few peasants managed to repay the interest on the loan, let alone the principal. In effect they sold themselves into indentured servitude.
• The mother of the nineteenth-century writer Ivan Turgenev, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, was a good example of the old-style Russian landowner, combining as she did a sense of charity with arbitrary acts of cruelty against her 5,000 serfs on various estates south of Moscow. Once she sent two household serfs into penal exile in Siberia for the sole reason that they had failed to remove their caps and bow to her in the appropriate manner.
• In 1686, Russia signed a Treaty of Eternal Peace with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth... The four powers agreed to coordinate their campaigns against the Turks: the Russians pledged to fight them in Crimea, the Poles in Moldavia, the Austrians in Transylvania and the Venetians in Dalmatia. Russia, for the first time in its history, had entered an alliance as an equal power with Europe.
• Secular portraits had only just begun to appear (Tsar Alexei is the first Russian ruler for whom we have a likeness). Known as parsuny, they had a flat iconic style. Landscapes, history and genre painting remained unknown in Russia. Instrumental music (as opposed to sacred singing) was stamped out by the Church wherever it appeared,
• Nikon’s reforms of the service books and rituals of the Church included making the sign of the cross in the Greek manner, with three fingers (a symbol of the Trinity), instead of the ancient Russian way with two fingers (symbolising the dual nature of Christ). This was the cause of a major schism in the Russian Church that also split the nation into two. Religious rituals were at the heart of the Russian faith and national consciousness.
• Peter in 1698 rebellion: appeared in Western dress, sporting a moustache, but without a beard, seen as a symbol of holiness in Russia, where beards had been worn by all the previous tsars. In a declaration of his war against the archaic Russian rituals, Peter ordered all the boyars who had arrived to welcome him to shave their beards...To torture her, Peter had a hundred rebels hanged against the walls outside her window and left there to rot. The young Tsar Peter, then aged twenty-six,
• In Holland Peter Mikhailov (as the tsar called himself) worked as a shipwright. In London he visited the Greenwich observatory, the Woolwich arsenal, the Royal Mint and the Royal Society. In Königsberg he studied the artillery.
• Like the magic city of a Russian fairy tale, St Petersburg grew with such fantastic speed, and everything about it was so brilliant and new, that it soon became enshrined in myth... ‘Here shall be a town!’8 His words echoed the divine command, ‘Let there be light!’, suggesting that St Petersburg had been created, like the world itself, ex nihilo.
• The government depended on these manufacturers to meet its needs for uniforms. So it created a new class of factory serfs for them, allowing the industrialists to buy entire villages whose peasants were then bound as indentured labour to these textile factories. Peter had intended to create a dynamic entrepreneurial society. But his statist methods reinforced the country’s backwardness, rooted in the culture of serfdom.
• Again, the problem was a lack of Russian words for the sort of thoughts and feelings that made up salon conversation: ‘gesture’, ‘sympathy’, ‘privacy’, ‘impulsion’ and ‘imagination’ – none could be expressed without the use of French... This was the language of social pretension that Tolstoy satirised in the opening passages of War and Peace: ‘Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe;
• But Peter’s methods of compulsion had in many ways the opposite effect to those he had intended. Rather than modernising the country, they reinforced the statist tyranny and servile customs of serfdom that had kept Russia – and would go on keeping Russia – in a relatively backward state compared to the West, where societies had more freedom. Here was the paradox of not only his but all the later reform projects led by Westernising Russian governments. Without a free society or active public sphere for enterprise, the state itself became the only motor of reform.
• Peter left it to himself to name his heir (a clear statement that he stood above the law). His choice fell on his second wife, a woman of lowly Polish origins, whom he crowned as Empress Catherine I in the Dormition Cathedral in 1724.
• Given how divisive Peter’s reign had been, it is perhaps surprising that his death did not give rise to a civil war, as there had been after Ivan the Terrible had died.15 The fact that Russia would be ruled by women for most of the remainder of the century – Catherine I (1725–7), Anna (1730–40), Elizabeth I (1741–62) and Catherine the Great (1762–96)... Female rulers were regarded as ‘humane’ and ‘wise’, softer and more yielding than the domineering Peter, which allowed for more court politics, stabilising the system... The problem of establishing monarchical authority had less to do with gender than with nationality.
• The second anti-foreign coup was carried out by Catherine the Great (herself a foreigner) against Peter III, her own husband, in 1762. Born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a minor German state, Catherine came to Russia at the age of seventeen... Catherine donned the green Preobrazhensky uniform and rode out from St Petersburg at the head of her troops to arrest her husband at his palace in Oranienbaum on 28 June. Peter meekly surrendered (on hearing of his overthrow, Frederick the Great said that he had ‘let himself be driven from the throne as a child is sent to bed’).
• the Urals served not so much as a physical divide but rather as a cultural or conceptual marker separating ‘Europe’ from ‘Asia’. To root this division in geography, the Russians embarked on a whole range of scientific studies in a fruitless effort to prove that the flora, fauna and tribes on the Asiatic side of the Urals differed from their equivalents over on the European side. They called Siberia ‘our India’, or ‘our Peru’, to equate the Russian Empire with the European overseas empires.
• Catherine’s aim was not to conquer the ailing Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth but to keep it weak and divided as a buffer state she could control – a foreign policy since pursued by all Russian governments towards neighbouring states.
• Catherine’s commitment to Enlightenment ideas was broken irrevocably by the French Revolution of 1789.
• Appalled by his tyranny, a small group of drunken officers broke into the Mikhailovsky Palace and strangled Paul to death on the night of 23–24 March 1801. The officers were acting on the orders of a court conspiracy with close links to Alexander, son of Paul and heir to the throne, who had set the date for the killing. ‘In Russia the government is autocracy tempered by assassination,’ Madame de Staël remarked.
• In the fictions of Nikolai Gogol (and the later Dostoevsky) Slavophile ideas gave rise to a mystical conception of the Russian soul – a universal spirit of Christian love and brotherhood innate only in the Russian people, whose providential mission was to save the world from egotism, greed and all the other Western sins. Here, in this myth of the Russian soul, was a messianic concept of Russia as an empire of the Orthodox without territorial boundaries, a spiritual empire linking Moscow, the Third Rome, with Constantinople and Jerusalem.
• The results were often farcical. One censor banned a new edition of Shakespeare’s Richard III because it dealt with themes that were ‘dangerous in a moral sense’. Another disallowed a reprint of Catherine the Great’s letters to Voltaire. On this basis, as a censor noted, ‘even the Lord’s Prayer could be interpreted as a Jacobin speech’. <> One book that slipped through the censors was to have a powerful effect in changing attitudes towards serfdom, the most crucial and explosive issue of the day. Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (1852)... By simple observation of the way that serfdom shaped their lives, Turgenev had aroused the moral indignation of his readers more effectively than any socialist manifesto could have done. Published in the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Sketches had as big an impact in swaying Russian views against serfdom as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book had on the anti-slavery movement in America.
• Russia’s grievances against the West: France takes Algeria from Turkey, and almost every year England annexes another Indian principality: none of this disturbs the balance of power; but when Russia occupies Moldavia and Wallachia, albeit only temporarily, that disturbs the balance of power … The English declare war on the Chinese [the Opium Wars] who have, it seems, offended them: no one has a right to intervene; but Russia is obliged to ask Europe for permission if it quarrels with its neighbour.
• the Paris Treaty (1856): No compulsory disarmament had ever been imposed on a defeated great power... The way Russia was treated was unprecedented for the Concert of Europe,... But the allies did not really think that they were dealing with a European power in Russia. They equated it with China, on which they had imposed similar humiliating conditions after the First Opium War.
• the Crimean War: As the Russian troops advanced towards Constantinople... the invasion stirred the British to action... The defenders of Sevastopol had fought with courage and tenacity, as Tolstoy had revealed in Sevastopol Sketches (1854–5), written when he was an army officer. These stories made his name as a writer. A quarter of a million Russians gave their lives,
• For every 1,000 inhabitants of the Russian Empire there were only four state officials at the turn of the twentieth century, compared with 7.3 in England and Wales,... The average constable was responsible for policing 50,000 people in dozens of settlements scattered across 5,000 square kilometres.
• During the ‘mad summer’ of 1874, thousands of students left their lecture halls and arrived in the countryside hoping to convert the peasants to their revolutionary struggle... The students were met with suspicion by the villagers. ‘Socialism’, one of the Populists later wrote, ‘bounced off the peasants like peas from a wall. They listened to our people as they do to the priest – respectfully but without the slightest effect on their thinking or actions.’
• Alexander’s assassination: It is hard to think of a more momentous turning-point in Russian history. On the day the tsar was killed, 1 March, he had agreed to a reform that would include elected representatives from the zemstvos and town councils in a new consultative assembly. Although it was a limited reform, by no means implying the creation of a constitutional monarchy, it showed that Alexander was prepared to involve the public in the work of government. On 8 March, the proposal was rejected by his son and heir, Alexander III,
• During the 1907 cholera epidemic in the Kiev area, doctors were forbidden to publish warnings not to drink the water in Ukrainian. But the peasants could not read the Russian signs, and many died as a result.
• Lenin: his personality, which was angry, fiery and dogmatic, hardened by a hatred for the tsarist system and anyone who went along with it (this was a man who once admitted after a performance of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata that he could not listen to music too often because ‘it makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy’).
• He injected a distinctly Russian dose of conspiratorial politics into a Marxist dialectic that might have remained passive otherwise, tied down by a willingness to wait for the revolution to develop socially rather than bringing it about through political action. It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary.
• 1905 revolution: The army was deployed to put down the rebellions, but the best troops were in Manchuria, fighting a disastrous war against Japan which had begun in 1904 over the two powers’ rival claims in Manchuria and Korea.
• Stolypin had misunderstood the peasantry’s attachment to the mir. He had assumed that they were poor because of it. But in fact it was the other way around: the commune served to share the burden of their poverty, and as long as they were poor they had no reason to leave it. <> Stolypin was assassinated on 1 September 1911. A student revolutionary shot him at close range in the Kiev Opera. On hearing of his death, the tsar is alleged to have said, ‘Now there will be no more talk about reform.’
• 1914. The murder of the heir to the Habsburg throne prompted Austria to declare war on Serbia. Under pressure Nicholas agreed to the partial mobilisation of his troops. He appealed to his cousin, the Kaiser, to restrain the Austrians. But Germany was backing Austria. It was preparing for a war with Russia which it needed to fight quickly, if at all. The Germans were hoping to knock out France in a lightning war (Blitzkrieg) before the Russian army could be mobilised
• Nicholas's brother: But nobody could guarantee the grand duke’s personal safety if he became tsar – and that made up Mikhail’s mind. The abdication manifesto, which brought to an end 300 years of Romanov rule, was drawn up by two jurists at a school desk in the study of Putiatina’s daughter and then copied out in one of her school notebooks.
• The war was the most divisive issue for the Provisional Government. The politics of 1917 were a battle between those on the left who saw the revolution as a means of ending the war and those on the right who saw the war as a way to stop the revolution and restore order.
• The failed uprising sparked a reaction from the right. Leaflets were released by the Ministry of Justice claiming that the Bolsheviks were German agents – an idea based on concrete evidence (the Bolsheviks undoubtedly received German money and logistical support in 1917) but giving rise to the dangerous myth that Soviet power was imposed on Russia by the Germans, Jews and other foreign enemies of the country. In April Lenin had arrived on a ‘sealed’ or uninspected train from Switzerland supplied by Germany to foment opposition to the war
• The 670 delegates – mostly workers and soldiers in their tunics and greatcoats – had unanimously passed a resolution proposed by the Menshevik Martov to form a socialist government based on all the parties in the Soviet. When the seizure of power was reported, most of the Menshevik and SR delegates denounced this ‘criminal venture’ and walked out in protest. Lenin’s plan had worked. The seizure of power was a provocation against the SRs and the Mensheviks as much as a coup against the Provisional Government. By walking out of the Congress, the Mensheviks and SRs had surrendered the Soviet to the Bolsheviks... The effect of their action was to give a Soviet stamp of approval for a Bolshevik dictatorship.
• Because of these divisions, the Bolshevik negotiators, led by Trotsky, played for time at Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky ran rings around the German diplomats and generals, subjecting every sentence in the draft treaty to lengthy abstract discussions. Finally the Germans lost patience and signed a separate treaty with Ukraine, whose nationalist leaders in the parliament in Kiev declared Ukraine’s independence on 22 January and sought at once the Germans’ help in their war against the Red Guards based in east Ukraine where the ethnic Russians were in the majority.
• All in all, the Soviet Republic lost 34 per cent of its population (55 million people), 32 per cent of its agricultural land, 54 per cent of its industrial capacity and 89 per cent of its coalmines (peat and wood now became its biggest source of fuel).20 As a European power, Russia was reduced to a status on a par with seventeenth-century Muscovy.
• A vicious circle thus developed where mass conscription led to supply shortages and mass desertion. It locked the Soviet economy into a system – War Communism, as it became known – whose purpose was to channel all production towards the demands of the army. <> War Communism was the first attempt by the Bolsheviks at a command economy. Some believed it would lead directly to a Communist society. The system began with a grain monopoly in May 1918,
• Under the grain monopoly all the peasants’ surplus became the state’s property. Armed brigades were organised by the Bolsheviks in factories and sent into the countryside to requisition grain by force. Where they found none, they assumed that it was being hidden by the ‘kulaks’ – the phantom class of ‘capitalist’ peasants invented by the Bolsheviks – and an unequal ‘battle for grain’ began.
• Party purges: How could they stop it being swamped by careerists, motivated only by the perks of membership (better jobs, higher food and fuel rations, access to special shops, and so on)? How could they know who they really were if they hid behind a Party mask? They called them ‘radishes’ (Red on the outside, White inside). Annual purges of the membership were carried out. But this fear remained a source of insecurity until at least the 1930s, when it fuelled the Stalinist purges.
• Even the Red Star had religious connotations deeply rooted in folklore. A Red Army leaflet explained to the soldiers why the Red Star appeared on their caps and uniforms. It was a symbol of the goddess Pravda, who had a burning red star on her forehead which lit up the whole world and brought it truth and justice, the dual meaning of her name. One day the red star was stolen by Krivda (meaning falsehood) whose rule brought darkness and evil to the world. At last the people, called upon by Pravda, rose up against Krivda to retrieve the star.
• But at this vital moment, when the fight for Tula was finely balanced, a quarter of a million peasant soldiers from that area, all deserters from the Red Army, willingly returned to fight the Whites.24 However much the peasants might have detested the Bolshevik regime, with its food brigades and commissars, they would side with it against the Whites to defend their revolution on the land.
• Nikolai Sukhanov famously described Stalin as a ‘grey blur, which flickered obscurely and left no trace’.1 Stalin had appeared in Petrograd that March after many years of underground activity in his native Georgia and the Caucasus, ending in arrest and exile in Siberia. During the Civil War he took on many jobs that others had considered too mundane.
• As the chairman of the Secretariat, and the only Politburo member in the Orgburo, he could promote his supporters to the key regional Party posts, thus securing a majority in the Party Congress and the Central Committee. During 1922 alone, more than a thousand senior Party officials, including forty-two provincial Party bosses, were appointed by the Orgburo.2 This was the core of the nomenklatura, a listing of positions filled by the Central Committee and ranked in a hierarchy of status, privilege and patronage, not unlike the system of mestnichestvo by which the princes and the boyar clans were ordered in the closed and minutely graded service class of medieval Muscovy. These appointees became Stalin’s loyal supporters in his struggles for the leadership.
• Workers accused their managers of ‘sabotage’ or ‘wrecking’. They did not realise that the shortages were caused by the fantastic targets that had led to the hoarding of supplies and bottlenecks in the system... It was the only way the regime could explain the chaos brought about by its planning. <> The rates of growth that Stalin had demanded in the Five-Year Plan could not have been achieved without the use of forced labour, particularly in the cold and remote regions of the Far North and Siberia,... Their labour made an incalculable contribution to the country’s economic growth – far more valuable than any figures can communicate because of its added benefit of colonising these inhospitable regions with their precious resources.
• With the capitalist world in depression, these signs of progress led huge numbers of people to invest unbounded faith in the Soviet system. But would they have thought the same if they had known that the canal was built on bones? <> The speed of change in the early 1930s was intoxicating.
• particularly their belief in the possibility of building a utopia on Russian soil. The creation of belief in the Soviet system required the replacement of religious ends with secular objectives tangible enough to motivate the people but meaningful in ways to satisfy the eschatological endeavour of the Russian collective psyche.
• propaganda images: They pictured present-day realities, recognisable to the masses, but in a mythical and ideal form to symbolise the signs of the coming Communist utopia. They were pictures of the present in the process of becoming the future. Like the icons of the Russian Church, which had let believers sense the sacred in the material world, they were meant to let their viewers sense the presence of the paradise towards which they were progressing under Stalin’s leadership. The acceptance of this vision was the starting-point of Communist belief. But that belief had deep roots in the Orthodox religious consciousness
• Stalin’s wife’s suicide: Stalin had proposed a toast to the destruction of the ‘enemies of the state’. Nadezhda did not raise her glass. Stalin goaded her, demanding to be told why she was not drinking. He threw orange peel and flicked cigarette butts at her across the table. Then she shouted at him to ‘Shut up!’ and stormed out. She went to her room and shot herself with a pistol. Among her things they found a note to Stalin in which she had written that she was opposed to everything he was doing.
• The duty to inform was a long-established principle in Russian governance, dating back to the sixteenth century, as we have seen. It was connected to the obligations of krugovaya poruka, the medieval principle of collective responsibility, which we have observed as a recurrent feature in the country’s history. During the Great Terror, as the mass arrests of 1937–8 have become known, this tradition was reflected in the almost universal compliance of public institutions with the NKVD’s instructions to rid themselves of ‘enemies’ within their midst.
• In January 1938, Stalin warned the NKVD not to carry on arresting people solely on the basis of denunciations without checking their veracity. Yezhov’s power was gradually reduced... Yezhov himself was exposed as an ‘enemy of the people’. It was said that he had tried to undermine the government by spreading discontent through false arrests. He was later shot in a basement near the Lubianka, the NKVD headquarters. The effect of Beria’s review was to stabilise belief in the justice of the purge.
• Pokrovsky had pioneered the Marxist school of history. But following his death in 1932, he was attacked for over-emphasising social forces at the expense of patriotic heroes like Nevsky. History was to teach devotion to the motherland. <> Stalin realised that patriotic pride was a more solid base of popular belief than Marxist ideology.
• Stalin’s leadership the Bolsheviks continued with their atheist campaigns against the Church, but they adopted new ‘pro-family policies’ (for example, the outlawing of abortion, more state child support, the prosecution of homosexuals)... Like Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia needed more young people for its military.
• Stalin had been fooled. Convinced that Hitler would not attack the Soviet Union until he had beaten the British, he ignored intelligence reports of German preparations in the east, discounting them as a British ploy to lure the Soviet Union into war. ‘You can send your “source” from German aviation headquarters back to his fucking mother. This is disinformation, not a “source”,’
• Hitler had three basic aims in this ‘race war’: to destroy the ‘Jewish Bolshevik regime’; to turn the Soviet Union into a free supplier of raw materials for the Third Reich; and, once all the Jews and 30 million other Soviet people had been killed or starved to death, to turn the surviving population into slaves. Hitler wanted the destruction of Russia. He viewed the Russians, like the Slavs, as ‘sub-humans’,
• A million Leningraders – one-third of the city’s population – died from cold, starvation and disease before the siege was lifted in January 1944.
• The cult of sacrifice was a more important factor than terror. It was the Soviet system’s main advantage over Western liberal societies where the loss of human life was given greater weight in the reckonings of the command... Only 3 per cent of the eighteen-year-olds mobilised in 1941 would still be alive in 1945... the shocking losses of the Red Army – around 12 million soldiers killed between 1941 and 1945 – three times the number of German military losses between 1939 and 1945.
• They went on fighting for three months, from August to November 1942, when the Red Army under Zhukov launched its counter-offensive and forced the Germans to retreat towards the Don. These weeks of fighting were the turning-point of the whole war. From the Don, the Soviet army pushed on towards Kursk,... As the Red Army drove the Germans back towards the western borderlands, it carried out a second war against Ukrainian nationalists, many of them followers of Stepan Bandera, whose guerrilla bands had been employed by the Nazis to fight behind the Soviet lines.
• reported rapes by Red Army soldiers in Yugoslavia, Stalin interrupted him: ‘Yes, you have, of course, read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul, man’s psyche? Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade – over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones! How can such a man react normally?
• Timofei Lysenko, the director of the Soviet Institute of Genetics, even claimed to have developed a new strain of wheat that would grow in the Arctic – a bogus claim that was responsible for millions of deaths in Maoist China where the pseudoscience was adopted during the 1950s.
• In July 1947, the Central Committee published an attack on two Soviet scientists, Nina Kliueva and her husband, Grigory Roskin, for sharing information about their cancer research on a US tour. Accused of ‘servility’ towards the West, they were dragged before an ‘honour court’, a new institution to examine ‘anti-patriotic’ acts, where they were made to answer hostile questions before 800 spectators... Hundreds of doctors and officials were arrested and tortured into making false confessions of belonging to a huge international conspiracy linking Soviet Jews to Israel and the USA.
• Stalin had suffered a stroke and lay unconscious for five days before he died on 5 March 1953. He might have been saved if medical assistance had been called in time. But in the panic of the Doctors’ Plot none of Stalin’s inner circle dared take the initiative. He became the final victim of his system of terror.
• According to the poet Joseph Brodsky, the Tarzan films ‘did more for de-Stalinization than all of Khrushchev’s speeches at the Twentieth Party Congress and after’.