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Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
For a while before and during the First World War Williams was considered to be one of the pre-eminent experts on Russia and, together with such luminaries as Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace (my particular hero in that rather muddled story) and Sir Bernard Pares, he led the campaign for rapprochement and an alliance between Britain and Russia. Looking back on what it led to (the First World War and its various outcomes) one may feel doubtful about the policy and the campaign but with Germany becoming more powerful and the Great Game more or less coming to a standstill while becoming more and more expensive, it seemed like a good idea. (More of that in other postings. I promise.)
During the First World War Williams together with the novelist Hugh Walpole set up the British Propaganda Office in Petrograd, promoting Britain in Russia as opposed to Russia in Britain. Williams and his wife supported the February Revolution, not least because they, like so many other people, thought that this would stiffen the Russians' fighting ability as well as help the country develop into a democracy.
When the Civil War broke out both the Williamses went back and he became war correspondent with Denikin's army. As the Whites lost the war Williams's reputation declined. He may or may not have been reporting accurately or objectively (nobody was, as it happens) but he was involved with the losing side so he had to be wrong. That accounted for him finding it hard to get work in journalism when he eventually came back to Britain but that, too, changed when, in 1921, he became Foreign Editor of The Times. He died in 1928 and that may have contributed to him becoming less important in accounts of journalistic reporting from Russia. The fact that he was fiercely anti-Bolshevik did not help either.
In her recent biography of Harold Williams, slightly awkwardly entitled Russia's Greatest Enemy?: Harold Williams and the Russian Revolutions, the historian Charlotte Alston says in the Introduction that opinions of his journalism were mixed. She then proceeds to quote Maxim Litvinov, the first Soviet Plenipotentiary in Britain who called Williams Russia's greatest enemy but was hardly an objective witness; also Arthur Ransome who was as fiercely pro-Bolshevik as Williams was anti and who saw no need to help his friends the Williamses as they ran for their lives in late 1917; and Philip Knightley who, in his history of war correspondents, The First Casualty, that Williams's very personal involvement with the White movement made him the least reliable correspondent of the period and he ought never have been sent to cover the Russian Civil War. Presumably, Knightley does not think highly of Bernard Pares or Robert Wilton, who was seriously right-wing even by Russian standards, either. On the other hand, why should one think that Arthur Ransome, who was very personally involved with the Bolsheviks (close friend with Karl Radek and others, married eventually one of Trotsky;s secretary) was in any way reliable.
Harold Williams was also a remarkable linguist, picking up languages with ease from a very early age and writing grammar books for those who did not have one. He is said to have known fifty-eight languages but that may be just a myth. Possibly it was no more than fifty.
When his widow, Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams published his biography, Cheerful Giver, in 1935, reviews were mostly positive about the book and about the subject. However, Harold Nicolson decided to indulge in his usual waspishness when he wrote about it in the Daily Telegraph Christmas Supplement, published on November 29, 1935. According to Charlotte Alston:
Harold Nicolson, who also reviewed Tyrkova-Williams's biography, painted a picture of Williams lisping in Maori, speaking in Serbian with a slightly Croat intonation, Rumanian with a Bessarabian lilt and Swedish with 'a decidedly Norwegian accent'.One cannot help wondering how Nicolson, who knew none of these languages and did not think highly of the people in question could discern this. The likely explanation is that he considered both Williams and his wife to be "bedint", his and Vita Sackville-West's favourite term for people they did not think were quite - quite.
As last year's overwhelming and not always accurate memorials to the outbreak of the First World War slide away into memory, we can start discussing the subject a little more seriously and look at the conflict as well as its aftermath, the Versailles order, from other points of view. In January after watching Testament of Youth, I wrote a dissatisfied posting. I had hoped that the centenary would bring out more than just more stuff about the Western front, the mud, the barbed wire, the sensitive young men hardened by the horrors, etc etc. The film, as I said, was very much in that group and not a particularly good example of it, either. As it happens, the film did not garner particularly good reviews and disappeared from the cinema screens surprisingly quickly. Had everyone had enough of the whole subject by the beginning of this year? Or was the film simply not appealing enough?
There were, of course, a number of serious historical works published as well and, maybe, I should do a blog about some of them but the one that came out recently is of superlative interest to anyone who really wants to know about the causes of the war, its development and its aftermath.
The book is called Towards the Flame and subtitled Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia and is by the eminent historian, Professor Dominic Lieven (yes, he is of that family though not, I believe, a direct descendant of the Russian Ambassador of the early nineteenth century).
Professor Lieven chastises his colleagues, historians in the English-speaking world for concentrating too much on the Western European aspect of the war. In his Introduction he says:
This underlines a basic point about the First World War: contrary to the near-universal assumption in the English-speaking world, the war was first and foremost an eastern European conflict. Its immediate origins lat in the murder of the Austrian heir at Sarajevo in southeastern Europe. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, led to a confrontation between Austria and Russia, eastern Europe's two great empires. France and Britain were drawn into what started as a conflict in eastern Europe above all because of fears for their own security: the victory of the Austro-German alliance over Russia would tilt the European balance of power decisively towards Berlin and Vienna.The question before 1914 was who would be the dominant power in Central and Eastern Europe: Germany and Russia, with Austria-Hungary (as it was by then) naturally inclining to support Germany.
Germany, says Professor Lieven, did not really have to win in the West: a draw would have been sufficient as long as Russia was defeated, something that was confidently predicted by 1916. In the end, Russia's defeat did not help Germany as the war in the West ended with the Allies' victory, thanks to the American entry into the war and those Eastern gains had to be surrendered.
I must admit this all seems fairly obvious to me but, perhaps, not to a number of better known historians. (Much better known.)
The Versailles order, set up in the wake of the victory in the West could be put together only because the situation in the East was rather peculiar. A war that started as a bitter to-the-death contest between Russia and Germany ended with both countries defeated and destroyed. It was, therefore, possible to dismember the Austro-Hungarian Empire and set up a number of small states that could not defend themselves against a strong and aggressive Germany or Russia (or, perhaps, both as it happened in 1939 in Poland and the Baltic states). The assumption that this state of affairs could go on indefinitely was rather strange. Sooner or later and probably sooner rather than later Germany and/or Russia would become strong again and there would be another catastrophe for Europe. So it turned out. The Versailles order that had excluded both Germany and Russia was inherently unstable.
The two great Russian questions are: Who is at fault and What is to be done.
Кто виноват? is a novel by Alexander Herzen. Based on various personal experiences, it is his only foray into the writing of fiction (one has to assume that his various autobiographical volumes are more or less accurate) and not his best work. However, it is considerably better than Что делать? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky, a most appallingly boring novel with no fewer than four dreams by the heroine Vera Pavlovna and one that Dostyevsky mocked and attacked mercilessly. Astonishingly enough, given that it was written and read at a period when Russian literature produced one genius after another, this long and hectoring work was taken up and eagerly adopted as a secular bible by the Russian radical intelligentsia, particularly its younger members. This perverseness may well account for why things went so badly wrong in Russia.
The title was subsequently adopted by V. I. Lenin (the anniversary of whose death is coming soon) and the best one can say for his tract of the need for a revolutionary party to lead the populace to where they do not want to go is that it is shorter than Chernyshevsky's novel.
Both these questions were asked yesterday after a talk given by Luke Harding, the Guardian journalist who has had the distinction of being the first hack to be expelled from post-Soviet Russia for writing things that the authorities were not happy about, in London's Pushkin House. As it happens, he had no answer. Why Russia has gone the way it has in the last twenty years is a question that needs many hours of cogitation and discussion. Many people are at fault and by now it has become quite difficult to work out what can be done to start remedying the situation.
Mr Harding's talk was interesting and centred on his personal experience from which he drew a number of obvious conclusions about Russia and its governing elite. He also mentioned his predecessors as Guardian correspondents in the Soviet Union, Arthur Ransome and Malcolm Muggeridge. He did not go into details but, had he done so, he might have noted that while the first one of those swallowed the Bolshevik line completely, to the point of becoming an agent of the Cheka while the second one (and he did refer to this) famously went as a convinced supporter, became disillusioned and was one of the first writers to tell the truth about Stalin's monstrous regime.
Mr Harding, however, did not mention any journalists who had, like him, been expelled from Russia or the Soviet Union. It is, therefore, worth pointing out that the first of those was D. D. Braham of the Times, who was expelled in 1903 for writing unfavourably about the pogroms and the subversion of the Finnish constitution.
For various reasons to do with an article to be completed Tory Historian has been reading a fascinating book by Alison K. Smith, called Recipes for Russia, subtitled Food and Nationhood under the Tsars. It deals partly with attempts to discuss and reform agriculture in Russia in the nineteenth century and partly with the late development of cookery books from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, analyzing the links between agriculture or food and national identity.
Quoting others, Professor Smith describes the growth of Russian literature (also from the second half of the eighteenth century)
particularly the art of translating - became the source of a new image of the Russian nation as an imperializing and assimilating one. Incorporating foreign literary works into the Russian canon helped suggest the power of the Russian state, and its ability to borrow from abroad without losing its sense of self.She then draws a parallel with writing about food:
Something rather similar developed on the tables of Russia's elite. By choosing to eat foods labeled [sic] Russian, even the westernized elite could still think of themselves as tied to the land. Or, alternatively, the persistence of Russian foods even among those whose dress, carriages, and even language had shifted enormously displays a raeal connection between Russians of different social estates. Whether mere façade, the mixture of foreign and native foods struck many foreign visitors as deeply disturbing.For Russian authors, though, she adds, this was a source of pride as native Russian and foreign influences were combined to create a Russian cuisine beyond the old-fashioned, rather crude Russian cooking.
Tory Historian has read many accounts of Russia by foreign travellers and the number of things that disturbed these people is very high. One cannot really go by that, any more than by the fact that almost every national cuisine consists of many "native" dishes and others that became "native" at various times. However, Russian pride in ability to "borrow" and incorporate is real enough, especially at times when there is yet another drive to build up some kind of an official national identity.
Tory Historian has just finished another book that might be of interest to people who are interested in conservative history and its ramifications. The Third Marquess of Londonderry and his second wife, Frances Anne Emily Vane-Tempest, une femme formidable according to all including Disraeli, spent several months in Russia in the winter of 1836-7, visiting St Petersburg and Moscow as well as a few smaller places, attending many balls, dinners and receptions, being friendly with the Emperor Nicholas I and his family as well as a large number of Russian and foreign aristocrats and generally exploring many sights and events.
Lord Londonderry, the Lord Stewart mentioned in several of Georgette Heyer's novels, a distinguished soldier and diplomat who had, as an "uncompromising Tory", fallen foul of The Times by the early 1830s, published an account of the trip together with various thoughts and ideas about Russia and her Empire. Tory Historian has not read it yet but it is generally described as being rather dull and formal. Well, it would be, one supposes.
Lady Londonderry's diary, on the other hand, is delightfully informal and full of interesting information and rather catty comments as well as some realistic descriptions of roads, inns and Russian houses. Though it had been seen by various people and excerpts published here and there, the full volume was not in print till 1977. The Journal was edited by W. A. L. Seaman (Chief Archivist of Tyne and Wear Archives) and J. R. Sewell, who do not appear to like the lady or her husband. In the introduction, which is not as informative as one would like it to be (for instance, we never find out what possessed the Londonderrys to travel home through Poland, various parts of Germany and France in the worst part of the winter) they quote every disparaging reference they can find, though they also quote Disraeli's admiring one. In their anxiety to show up Lady Londonderry's ignorance or silliness they make several mistakes in the notes.
On the other hand, it is the Journal itself that is worth reading and marvelling over.
A delightful collection of colour photographs taken in Russia in the early twentieth century by the chemist and photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who had made numerous innovations in photography and started a systematic photographic documentary of the Russian Empire. About half of the photographs and plates were confiscated by the authorities when Prokudin-Gorsky left the Russia in 1918 to settle eventually in France where he continued his work. The remaining half is now in the Library of Congress. Here are some more of the images. There are so many and they are so fascinating that choosing one seems impossible.
Tory Historian is back from Mitteleuropa and has finished reading the recent biography of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers, entitled for a rather inadequate reason, The Last Englishman. The reference is to the period immediately after the Bolshevik coup when Ransome was writing somewhat misleading letters to his mother describing himself as the last Englishman left in Petrograd or Moscow. Actually, there were quite a few still and new ones, such as Robert Bruce-Lockhart arrived. The title is as misleading as the letters were.
The sub-title is The Double Life of Arthur Ransome. That is of greater interest. Ransome is known to most people as a superlative writer of children's adventure stories and books about sailing and fishing. A harmless old chap is the way somebody described him to TH.
He was not actually completely harmless. Far from it. In fact, the sub-heading ought to be The Triple Life of Arthur Ransome. Before Russia there was Ransome the Bohemian man of letters whose marriage was beginning to fray at the edges and who had become embroiled in an unfortunate court case with Lord Alfred Douglas. Then there was Russia whence he reported during the First World War and the 1917 Revolution, where he became very friendly with various Bolshevik leaders, particularly Karl Radek and where he, apparently, aided and abetted the Cheka in various ways. Finally, there was Ransome the writer of the Swallows and Amazons books, the countryman, the sailor and fisherman.
Which one was the real Ransome? As usual, the answer has to be all of them. Tory Historian had known about the triple strand before, in particular, about the friendship with the Bolsheviks and had often wondered how Ransome felt as his friends fell victim to Stalin. For he did not talk about it even if he did write a few obituaries of Old Bolsheviks who had died as "traitors".
This book, however, goes further and shows that Ransome had clearly helped the Cheka by trying to extract information, spreading propaganda and bringing out diamonds and money for various organizations in the West. There is some talk of him being recruited by MI5 as well but the evidence for him doing anything for them is scant to non-existent.
Questions remain. How did Ransome manage to miss or ignore the terrible cost that Lenin's great adventure as it appeared to him was imposing on the people of Russia en masse and individually? While many ignored what was happening in the cities and out in the countryside but paid attention to their friends' tribulations, Ransome did not even do that. When his great friends, the journalist Harold Williams and his Cadet politician wife Ariadne Tyrkova, were in danger Ransome seemed unaware of the fact or did not consider it important. Did he react the same way when, later on, his great friend Karl Radek abased himself at one of the show trials?
How did Ransome feel when he described the unfortunate shortages, blaming them on everything and everyone except the Bolsheviks, when he knew that the leaders had plenty of food and lived in luxury? Did he not think there might be something wrong about large sums of money (smuggled out first by him, later by his second wife) being sent abroad to set up Communist organizations when large parts of the country were starving?
Roland Chambers raises many of these questions but provides no answers because he can find none. For these reasons as much as Ransome's cantankerousness, he seems to end up disliking the subject of his biography with some intensity.
Well, that is all very well and possibly that is what happens to all biographers. But Tory Historian cannot help thinking about those wonderful children's books that have inspired and entertained generations. No matter what one knows about the author, they remain as good as ever.
A belated happy new year to all our readers and apologies for not pursuing the subject of historical dates. Fear not: it will be pursued.
In the meantime, Tory Historian is launching another idea, promised before. Books that would be of interest to those interested in conservative history but do not necessarily find space in the published journal.
The first of these is one that has been mentioned on the blog before (here and here), so little else is needed. Richard Pipes’s “Russian Conservatism and Its Critics” is an important contribution to our understanding both of Russian history and to the many varieties of conservative and conservative-liberal thought.
Professor Pipes analyzes the political reality and shows how various theories in different periods, since it is hard to see a real development of theory, supported that reality, which meant supporting autocracy either as a permanent institution or a more temporary one while Russians learn to deal with constitutionalism, liberalism and democracy.
The new Russian autocracy lacks legitimacy and has tried to invent one by producing a new autocratic ideology of “sovereign democracy”, a meaningless term but it avoids the old Russian one. There are many others, listed by Edward Lucas in “The New Cold War”.
There are two questions, one political and one theoretical. In the first place, will the new autocracy be able to create itself a legitimacy that will allow it to overcome bad times as well as good; and in the second place, will it be able to create a coherent theory to back that political legitimacy.
As promised in that editorial, the discussion about conservatism in other countries is about to start. Tory Historian is hoping for many learned contributions. There will be more said about Richard Pipes’s “Russian Conservatism and Its Critics” but this post concentrates on Professor Pipes’s chapter in which he defines and elucidates Russian autocracy and its historic development.
To the frequently asked question “why does it keep going wrong in Russia” there is a partial answer in that chapter.
Russian autocracy grew out of the understanding patrimony or votchina. Under the Tatar rule, the various appanage princes had to plead for the right to rule from the Tatar Khan but, once allowed, owned the realm in the same way as they owned their own private possessions and homes. The idea that even the most absolute ruler had limits to his power and that was private property simply did not exist in Russia. [It did develop subsequently but very slowly and imperfectly.]
There were other factors absent. On pp. 16 – 17 Professor Pipes says:
The Muscovite state administration evolved from the administration of the appanage, the principal task of which had been exploitation. The prikazy, Moscow’s principal executive offices, similarly evolved from the administration of the prince’s household.Out of it grew the idea that all in Russia were slaves (kholopy) of the prince, later the tsar. They owed him everything and he owed them nothing. Indeed, any suggestion that they had the right to ask for anything or suggest certain changes in public policy was met with righteous anger as late as the nineteenth century even from the most liberal and reformist of the tsars, Alexander II.
As indicated above, such a mentality had also existed in the early mediaeval Europe – for instance, among the Merovingian kings of France, who also treated their kingdom as property. But there an evolution occurred which superimposed the public on the private and produced a notion of the state as a partnership between rulers and ruled. In Russia such an evolution did not occur because of the absence of the factors that had moulded European political theory and practice, such as the influence of Roman law and Catholic theology, feudalism and the commercial culture of the cities.
Tory Historian has the temerity to add one more detail to Professor Pipes’s succinct analysis. Not only was the Russian Orthodox Church less helpful in the development of a society that was separate from the state, it was positively harmful in its insistence that nothing good could be done on earth, anyway. Therefore, there could be no such thing as a good commonwealth or such a person as a good ruler and the possibility of referring to theological ideas in support of certain rights and privileges was not there.One can compare Alexander Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov”, written in conscious imitation of Shakespeare’s histories, and the latter’s two plays about Henry IV. There are many parallels: both rulers came to their thrones by dubious means, having, at the very least, acquiesced in the murder of the rightful king or (in Godunov’s case) heir; both worry about their sons for different reasons; and both find that desired crown heavy to wear.
There the parallels stop. Even, Pushkin, the most westernized of all nineteenth century writer (though he was never allowed to leave Russia), could not encompass the idea of Tsar Boris Godunov attempting to assuage his conscience by good deeds on earth and by ruling well and wisely. Whether Henry IV succeeds in any of these aims is not as important as the fact that he sees the possibility of good deeds on earth and of being a good king (to quote “1066 And All That”).The absence of religious teaching about earthly goodness and achievements had a doleful influence on Russian history.
No, this is not Tory Historian reporting from abroad, at least not physically so, but Tory Historian writing about conservative thinking in other countries’ history. Among these, possibly the most interesting is the case of Russia and its conservative thinkers, who have ranged from extreme theocrats to liberal conservatives like the legislator Mikhail Speransky (1772 – 1839) or the historian Boris Chicherin (1828 – 1904).
Both these gentlemen advocated as kind of rechsstaat for Russia. Their view was, and they were almost a century apart, that western-style liberal democracy was not appropriate for that country but the existing autocracy was undesirable.
The aim was a structure that was not parliamentarian but in which the rulers were subject to the law of the land. As Professor Richard Pipes, the pre-eminent historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, said in a recent talk he gave at the GB-Russia Society, that structure has not yet been achieved in Russia and was still highly desirable. He did not think we would see it in the immediate future.
Professor Pipes has maintained for some time that the West has a skewed idea of Russian intellectual development because it has concentrated on the liberals and the radicals – possibly a more glamorous cohort and one that has managed to install its views into Western consciousness since the 1870s.
Most recently, this fascination turned up in Tom Stoppard’s brilliant and tragic trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia”.
Tory Historian’s own view that a good deal of trouble has come from Sir Isaiah Berlin, who first popularized Herzen and his successors in the West in the twentieth century. This was real popularization. No university course on Russian history managed to get by without studying Russian Radical Thought. And Sir Isaiah’s admiration prevailed. He ignored the nastier aspects of that thought and concentrated on what he saw as the nobility of the struggle. Our perceptions of Russian history are still coloured by that.
There is more, says Professor Pipes.
In the West it is thought that Russia is a radical country. When I was at Harvard in 1948 we heard Isaiah Berlin lecture on Russian intellectual history; in time, Isaiah Berlin became a good friend of mine. Of course, his principal hero was Alexander Herzen, but others were Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and people like that.The fruit of all that endeavour is a fascinating book called “Russian Conservatism and its Critics”, published in 2006 and strongly recommended to all those interested in varieties of conservative thinking. You don’t have to approve of it.
He never lectured on the conservatives, and now we have a new play by Tom Stoppard called “The Coast of Utopia” which deals entirely with these people. But these people had minimal influence on the course of Russian history; if they did, it was in a very negative way by frightening the government and causing it to repress.
The course of Russian history for hundreds of years was determined by conservatives and there is virtually no one who deals with that subject, which is why I have made it my job to study Russian conservative thought and see how it influenced Russian thinking.
