Russia by Philip Longworth

It was a sad coincidence that I was in the midst of reading a history of Russia when I heard that Alexander Solzhenitsyn had died. I had just finished the chapter on the decline of the Romanov empire when I decided to take a break and have some dinner. While I waited for the stove to heat up, I checked the news online and saw the story. When I returned to Philip Longworth's Russia, it was not more than fifty pages before Solzhenitsyn's name popped up.

And he was mentioned in an interesting context. Longworth listed him as one of the "few" dissidents in the Soviet Union, where "there was no sign of serious discontent." This comes at the start of an extended analysis on how surprising the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union was, considering how well-functioning it appeared to be:

As late as the 1970s and even in the 1980s there was no obvious indication of impending disaster. Indeed, the auguries read well. The Soviet Union was as mighty in weaponry as its only rival; surprising as it may seem, its population was as contented as that of the United States; and there was hardly a ripple of dissidence or nationalism anywhere in the Empire.

Surprising indeed, and consider me unconvinced by Longworth's thin sourcing. It may or may not be true, I am not a Russia expert, but this defense of life in the Soviet Union comes near the end of a book in which Longworth seeks to either minimize or rebut many of the great sins committed by the various Russian empires and its rulers.

Discussing Ivan the Terrible, he states that while "Ivan was indeed responsible for terrible massacres," so were the Spanish conquistadors, Lorenzo de' Medici, Louis XI, and Queen Mary. As such, Longworth argues that Ivan should not "be judged outside the context of his own turbulent and violent times." Perhaps, though it is only a few paragraphs later that Longworth concedes that the "murder of Ivan's opponents and suspected opponents had begun in 1563... In effect Ivan was given carte blanche to punish those who disobeyed him and anyone he considered a traitor -- without the formality of a trial." Never fear, however:

The purge was not the whim of a half-crazed paranoiac, which is the line of one popular genre of literature about Ivan. His plan was to eliminate opposition to his exercise of autocracy, which he deemed essential if Russia were to fulfill its imperial potential.

If Longworth is just rebutting the specific claim of mental illness, that is one thing; though is it worth mentioning that Ivan "killed his own eldest son in a fit of rage." But to suggest that Ivan cannot be condemned for his bloody reign either because everyone else was doing it, or because it was justified by his autocratic ambition seems far too sweeping a pardon for Ivan's behavior. Longworth seems almost eager to justify the death and destruction:

Advantage was also gained from Ivan's massacres, for they had helped to complete the revolution in landholding begun by the Tsar's predecessors.

As long as there was a reason, I guess. Longworth is similarly blasé about anti-semitism in Russia and Russian pogroms against Jews. For the most part he simply fails to discuss these issues. When he does, he is quick to make clear that it was not Russia's fault:

Hostility to Jews had been imported into Russia, as into every other Christian country, with the writings of the Church Fathers. Yet Russians themselves were no more anti-Semitic than other European peoples, and less so than many... Anti-Semitism in the Empire was for the most part characteristic of certain subject peoples rather than the Russians themselves, having been entrenched for centuries among Ukrainians, Balts, and Poles.

And there you have basically the only paragraph in the whole book about the treatment of Jews. Don't look for "pogrom" in the index, you won't find it. The only mention of pogroms is the Khmelnytsky Uprising in which Cossacks and Ukrainians killed tens of thousands of Jews. Only the briefest reference to the Pale of Settlement, and none about Tsar Alexander III's May Laws, setting harshly discriminatory policies against Jews, the expulsion from Kiev, or the Kishinev pogrom.

Longworth glosses over other Russian missteps as well. Thus the discussion of World War I moves quickly from a brief mention that Nicholas II made "a series of questionable appointments and decisions" to the fighting itself. Longworth makes no reference to Russia's pre-war support for Serbia or its full mobilization order, which many credit with triggering the broader conflict. I am not suggesting that Russia was more responsible that Austria-Hungary, or Germany, or Serbia itself, but the omission seems notable in light of Longworth's diligence in analyzing the causes of other Russian wars, such as the Crimean War and World War II.

It came as no surprise then, after this perpetual defense of Russia, that Longworth places the blame for the Cold War squarely on the shoulders of the West. According to Longworth, the Cold War was not caused by disagreement over how Europe should be governed (though he is quick to point out that "Stalin stuck to the letter of his agreement with the Western Powers), or even the ideological tensions between capitalism and communism:

[T]he Cold War could have been avoided even after Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech of March 1946. The curtain fell only over a year later, when the Marshall Aid programme was introduced to help Western European countries to recover from the war. Its terms had been designed to be unacceptable to the Soviet Union and its followers... So, when the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia applied for Marshall Aid, and learned that as beneficiaries they would be subject to public American scrutiny on a collective basis, like all other beneficiaries, they withdrew. It was, after all, unthinkable that the Power which had done most to defeat the common enemy should be exposed to what was tantamount to public humiliation.

The Marshall Plan was undoubtedly a major tool in the United States' new policy of containment. But to suggest that this caused the Cold War, rather than to acknowledge it was a weapon in the already-burgeoning conflict, is just silly. Longworth is laughably suggesting that the terms of the Marshall Plan, and the Soviet Union's inability to get cash for itself, were more responsible for the Cold War than the underlying post-war political tensions in Europe and the ideological divide between the American sphere and the Soviet one. I'll have more on this soon, as I've just started John Lewis Gaddis' recent The Cold War. Suffice it to say he tells a different story.

Longworth is also forgiving of the flaws of Vladimir Putin's early reign. He acknowledges that Putin's polices "were certainly authoritarian, but they were not directed towards a restoration of an all-encompassing state sector nor to the suppression of democracy as some suggested." You see, it was the good kind of authoritarianism. The best line:

In December 2003 Putin won an overwhelming endorsement from the electorate. Managed democracy was working. It might not meet the highest standards of constitutional politics, but was no worse a travesty than the American presidential election of 2000 had been.

Wow. Now I am no defender of Bush v. Gore. I thought it was awful law then, I think it is awful law now. But I think it bears no equivalence to an election where the incumbent wins 71% of the vote in the absence of free speech or a free press.

Perhaps it is I who have approached the book with a slanted perspective; after all, I am an American descended from Polish Jews. And perhaps Longworth is struggling against a perceived Russophobia that he feels compelled to combat at every turn. But the angle taken is so constantly pro-Russian, and so poorly sourced at exactly these pivotal moments, that it comes across more like whitewashing than a legitimate defense.

This posture is unfortunate in light of the book's overall strength (which I would have preferred to be able to emphasize), and costs Russia a full star in my rating. Longworth covers a tremendous period of time, from the 9th century to the present, and does so at a modest, measured pace. He generally does well in identifying the key actors and events, though the book definitely presumes a modest familiarity with European history.

From the start, Longworth consciously focuses heavily on the political and military history of the Russian state/empire. There is little discussion of social or cultural issues. Religion is only discussed insofar as the Orthodox church played a political role in Russia, or when the faith of particular groups affected their loyalties either toward or away from Moscow. But this is a 300-page book, and it accomplishes what it needed to, aside from the bias described above; I've got Figes and Service to fill in the details. If Longworth had just stuck to the facts, he would have succeeded admirably.