Real War (9 page)

As this first step toward democracy was being taken in England, the grandsons of Genghis Khan were sweeping westward across the vast Eurasian plain, which stretches nearly halfway around the world from the eastern parts of Siberia to the shores of the English Channel. The Mongol hordes were stopped short of the heart of Europe, but they laid waste to Russia. They sacked its major towns and reduced Russian civilization to a barbarous level. For almost 250 years the Mongols imposed their rule and impressed their harsh brand upon the Russian soul, exacting a crippling tribute—the “Tartar yoke”—that kept the Russians impoverished and in bondage.

These two events, the signing of the Magna Carta and the subjugation of Russia by the pillaging Mongols, marked the starting points of two drastically different chains of historical development. The Bill of Rights traces its lineage to the Magna Carta. The Soviet police state traces its lineage to the Tartar
yoke. The contrast is aptly summed up by an ancient Russian saying: “Despotism tempered by assassination—there is our Magna Carta.”

The Mongols ruled by ruthless terror, a complex bureaucracy, and adroit manipulation of local rivalries; they imposed a crushing tax as tribute. With what one
nineteenth-century writer called the “Machiavellism of the usurping slave,” the native rulers of Moscow began to adopt the Mongol techniques, first by taking on the role of local tax collectors for the Mongols. Gradually they brought more and more lands under their own control, even while slavishly kowtowing to the Mongol Khans. Finally, after almost 250 years of bondage and humiliation, in 1480 Ivan the Great threw off the Tartar yoke and ended the Mongol rule. But its imprint remained. In the words of that same nineteenth-century writer:

The bloody mire of Mongol slavery . . . forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy. . . . It is in the terrible and abject school of Mongolian slavery that Muscovy was nursed and grew up. It gathered strength only by becoming a virtuoso in the craft of serfdom. Even when emancipated, Muscovy continued to perform its traditional part of the slave as master.

•  •  •

The author of those words was Karl Marx.

Even after the Tartar yoke was thrown off, the Mongol terror continued. With the defensible frontier often not more than one hundred miles from Moscow, waves of Tartar cavalry swept in from the steppes every year, leaving devastation. They came to seize slaves. The word “Slav” is itself related to the word “slave.”

To fight off the Tartar slavers, Russian men were called up every spring to take their battle places on the frontier, and were kept there until fall, when the steppes became impassable. This was repeated each year for a man's entire lifetime. Russia's struggle with the Tartars, historian Tibor Szamuely argues, “comes nearer to the modern concept of total war than anything else in pre-twentieth-century European history.”

The brutal exercise of total power, the subjugation of the individual to the state, the ruthless marshaling of all resources
for the purposes of the state, the idea of constant, unremitting war—these all have their roots deep in the Russian past, in the terrors of Mongol rule and in the bitter necessities of fighting the Tartar hordes.

•  •  •

Constant expansion also has roots deep in the Russian past. The Duchy of Muscovy spent two centuries expanding its power over its neighbors before Ivan the Great was able to throw off the Tartar yoke in 1480. He more than tripled the lands under Moscow's rule, extending its reach from the Baltic Sea to the Ural Mountains.

It was another Ivan, Ivan the Terrible, who a century later was crowned the first “Tsar of all the Russias.” Tsar is the Russian word for Caesar; his reign marked the beginning of Russian imperial rule.

In the seventeenth century Russia conquered Siberia. Cossacks and fur traders swept 2,500 miles across the wilderness in fifty-five years, reaching the Pacific in 1639. From the frozen north, the Russians pushed south across the steppes of Central Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries toward China, Persia, India, and Afghanistan. Millions of Moslems fell under the sway of the Tsars as the ancient cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, and Ashkhabad felt the alien hand of a European conqueror for the first time.

But two continents were not enough; Russia raced to occupy a third: North America. In 1741 Captain Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator in the service of Russia who gave his name to the Bering Straits, led an expedition which sighted Alaska. Russian settlements were established in Alaska. Until 1867, when the United States bought it, Alaska was known as Russian America. The local authority, the Russian-American Company, had been chartered in 1799 and empowered to discover and occupy new territories for Russia. Venturing south, the company established a settlement and built a fort sixty miles from present-day San Francisco, near what is now called the Russian River. Fortunately the fort was sold to John Sutter only seven years before the discovery of gold on his land launched the great California gold rush. The Russian-American Company also tried to gain a foothold in the Hawaiian Islands, but failed.

Meanwhile, Russia was pressing its expansion in two other directions. In the nineteenth century it conquered the Caucasus,
the gateway to Persia, Turkey, and the Middle East. It also pushed westward against Europe, where it encountered its most sophisticated and formidable foes.

In terms of territory Russia dwarfs the countries of Europe, but for centuries it has found itself threatened and at times overwhelmed by these smaller but technologically more advanced powers. Russia was invaded by Poland in the seventeenth century, by Sweden in the eighteenth, by France under Napoleon in the nineteenth, and twice by Germany in the twentieth. Against each foe the Russians suffered staggering defeats, but they held on, regained the initiative, and eventually triumphed.

•  •  •

Just as the Tartar conquest led Russian rulers to adopt Oriental political techniques, the threat from the West led them to “Westernize.” This has chiefly meant the industrialization and modernization of Russia's military.

Italian architects had been imported to build the Kremlin. German military engineers helped Ivan the Terrible capture the Tartar city of Kazan by blowing up its walls, thereby clearing the way for the conquest of Siberia. But it was Peter the Great, the Tsar from 1682 to 1725, who systematized the importation of modern techniques from the West and made Russia a modern power on a par with the countries of Europe. Peter wanted “Western technique, not Western civilization,” according to Russian historian Vasily Kliuchevsky; the techniques of manufacture, particularly of arms manufacture, not the techniques of self-government. “For a few score years only we shall need Europe,” Peter said. “Then we shall be able to turn our backs on her.”

Peter used his “Westernization,” not to enlighten the people, but to advance the interests of their rulers. The Tsars who have been given the title “the Great” in Russia have earned it not for benevolence but for their military conquests. Peter was no exception. After he got what he wanted from the West, he warred with Sweden, Turkey, and Persia for twenty-eight consecutive years, from the age of twenty-four to a year before his death. He was hailed for defeating Sweden in the Great Northern War. But his greatest accomplishment was not in the lands he himself conquered but in those he made it possible for his successors to conquer. He has been called by some “Russia's
most important industrializer before Stalin.” This was his genius: he wedded Western industry to Russian expansionism. After his reign Russia's army was able successfully to assault the West.

The next “Great,” Catherine, who ruled from 1762 to 1796, subjugated the Crimean Tartars and secured for Russia a permanent place on the Black Sea. It was one of Catherine's ministers who delivered the classic warning: “That which stops growing begins to rot.” She partitioned Poland three times with Prussia and Austria, until in 1795 there was nothing left of it. The Russian move toward Central Europe had begun.

Next, Russia took advantage of the chaos caused by the Napoleonic wars to seize Finland. Russian armies drove deep into Central Europe, extending Russia's borders to within 200 miles of Berlin. When the dust had settled, Russia was the predominant military power on the continent.

•  •  •

In the mid-nineteenth century Russia's relentless expansion drew a baleful notice from a New York
Tribune
correspondent in Europe, who little imagined that future Russian expansionism would be pursued in his name: Karl Marx. On June 14, 1853, Marx wrote a piece for the
Tribune
in which he pointed out that in just the past sixty years, the Russian frontier had advanced toward Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna 700 miles; toward Constantinople 500 miles; toward Stockholm 630 miles; and toward Tehran 1,000 miles. The pace was relentless. It did not stop with the Tsars.

What today is called the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” is the product of seven centuries of conquest, first by the Dukes of Muscovy as they subjugated what became Russia, then by the Tsars and their twentieth-century successors as they expanded the Russian empire. Fifteen “Soviet Socialist Republics” make up the U.S.S.R.; fourteen of those are essentially separate nations that were conquered by the fifteenth, Russia.

The Russian general who conquered Turkestan and captured Tashkent, General Skobelev, tersely summed up the Russian theory of conquest: “In Asia he is master who seizes the people pitilessly by the throat.” That, not a Continental Congress or a Constitutional Convention, is the way what now are the “socialist republics” were formed into a “union.”

America is made up of people of many nationalities who
came here voluntarily. Whole
nations
were absorbed into the Russian empire and are kept there by force. We have Armenians and Lithuanians; they have Armenia and Lithuania.

Except for the opening of Siberia, these were not settlements of empty lands. Nor were they an extension of colonial rule over primitive peoples. They were the conquest and subjugation of ancient nations with highly developed cultures, distinct identities, and long histories. In the process the most extensive land empire of its time was created. Imperial methods were needed to acquire and rule it. These came naturally to the heirs of the Mongols, sovereigns over a vast, harsh land where serfdom was the rule, where freedom was unknown, and “human rights” unheard of.

The tsarist tradition is one of brute, autocratic rule. Only a very powerful state could organize the conquest of so many nations, and then preserve Russian imperial rule over them after the conquests.

Bondage for the people was the price of conquests for the state. Military conquest was the first imperative of the state; the greater glory of the rulers was the
raison d'être
of the ruled. The people were resources, to be harnessed along with all other resources to the systems of the state. In effect, the people became the property of the state, to be used for its purposes.

•  •  •

The first “Tsar of All the Russias,” Ivan the Terrible, was also the first Tsar to make the use of terror a state policy; the origins of both the tsarist secret police and today's KGB can be traced to him. Ivan used his own private secret police to eliminate rivals for power, especially among the Russian nobility. He crudely but effectively ensured that they would never limit his power with a Russian Magna Carta.

At one point Ivan attacked Novgorod, one of his own cities, and put to death thousands of his own subjects by such bizarre means as “impaling, flaying alive, boiling, roasting on spits, frying in gigantic skillets, evisceration, and most mercifully, drowning.” For a time, he actually put half of Russia under the direct rule of his secret police, establishing, quite literally, a police state under his personal control, a method later favored by Stalin. Stalin admired Ivan the Terrible and made a point of having his reputation rehabilitated in Soviet history books.

Peter the Great, remembered as the great modernizer for
his openings to the West, was one of the most despotic rulers at home. He described himself as “an absolute monarch who does not have to answer for any of his actions to anyone in the world.” It was he who instituted the hated internal passport system, which made it illegal for most people to move about their own country without permission.

•  •  •

In our own century Joseph Stalin personified Russia's tsarist heritage. The dynasty he represented was a party, not a family, but like the “great” Tsars before him, he extended Russian rule over vast new areas. Countries that had broken free from the Russian empire in the aftermath of the Russian revolutions were reconquered by Stalin. In 1940 he retook the Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—and seized Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania. At the end of World War II he captured Poland, this time all of it, and part of Germany as well. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania all fell under Russian rule for the first time.

Like Ivan the Terrible, Stalin created his own private secret police and employed terror as a basic instrument of state policy. Like Peter, he appreciated the value of Western technology in fashioning a modern fighting machine. Also like Peter, he cemented his power over the people with an internal passport system.

Stalin will never be known as “the Great” or “the Terrible,” but people in the Soviet Union have their own wry way of noting the continuity between the tsarist past and the communist present. It was perhaps best expressed by a Russian youth who said to an American visitor, “You have Jesus Christ Superstar, we have Lenin Super-Tsar.”

As the Russian conflict with the West has its roots deep in the past, so does its conflict with China. It goes back to the mid-1600s when Russian expansionism first encountered the might of the Chinese empire. The Chinese and the Russians fought their first battle in 1652. Whether ironically or prophetically,
it was at the mouth of the same Ussuri River that was to be the site of violent border clashes three centuries later, in 1969, after I became President. It was at the negotiating table that the Chinese won that first test, in the process giving the Russians a good lesson in the value of negotiating from a position of strength.