The Chosen Path to the Lost Russian Century

Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety. — Proverbs 11:14

Dear Reader,

Jingoism is an attitude of belligerence, aggressive foreign policy, expressing a belief in the righteousness and superiority of one's own nation or group, and eagerness to fight. Perhaps it is no wonder that it was coined in relation to events started by Russia.

I often tell my students that history teaches that choices matter, and choices by small men in big offices can devastate a people for a century. Thus is the lesson of Russia before the Great War. Though, in fairness, the little man in Saint Petersburg was a product of his culture. And yet, it was still his responsibility to set his people on a better path. The Russians could have become Europe’s greatest kingdom, but instead they chose to become its most oppressive empire and ultimately set themselves and the world on the path to ruin. Choices.

Emperor Nikolai II, known to the West as Tsar Nicholas II, had many problems. But he did not see them as problems, and like much else, he was wrong. First was the legacy of aggression and the almost total subordination of society to the monarch inherited from Peter and Catherine the Great.

Peter the Great is often hailed as the architect of modern westernized Russia, and he did reorient the country by moving the capital to Saint Petersburg and building the first Winter Palace, but his reform of the Russian Orthodox Church tells a more complicated, even sinister story. In his effort to centralize power, Peter stifled one of Russia's oldest engines of cultural creativity and moral reform. While we often speak of a Patriarch, the reality is that when the First World War broke out, there was no Patriarch in Russia. Peter the Great used his influence as the only independent great power Orthodox monarch to destroy the office granted by Constantinople in the 16th century. By abolishing the Patriarchate in 1721 and replacing it with the state-controlled Holy Synod, Peter turned bishops into bureaucrats. The clergy were muzzled, made to preach loyalty to the Tsar, not the Gospel. Monastic life was curtailed, and the Church's property was appropriated for the state. The ober-prokuror—a secular official—oversaw it all, ensuring the Church functioned as an obedient arm of government.

What was lost in this arrangement was the Church's capacity to challenge, to create, to elevate: the things that cause the beginning of a popular enlightenment. The Orthodox Church was a source of deep theological thought, artistic expression, and social conscience. By reducing it, Peter may have secured short-term obedience, but at the cost of long-term cultural vitality. The mystical energy that helped the Protestants build the modern world began by contemplating the Holy Scriptures and the nature of the Creator and His creation. Russians were robbed of that experience with a curtailed Church. In weakening the Church's independence, Peter also undercut its ability to be a reforming force.

At the same time, though Russia was largely secure from major threats, it perceived the steppes of Eurasia as a threat, as if the rulers of Saint Petersburg expected another Genghis Khan to spring magically from the east. So it continually expanded in that direction, eventually reaching Alaska, and conquering the Muslim majority central Asian lands. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Russian foreign policy centered on expansion, or rather conquest, to seize access to warm-water ports and greater influence in Eastern Europe, down into the Balkans. The more they expanded, the more they extended their borders, the more they came within reach of other powers like the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the west, British India in the south, and China and Japan in the east. The long series of Russo-Turkish Wars aimed to push Russia’s southern frontier to the Black Sea and project power into the Ottoman Empire’s European territories. They lusted for Constantinople to secure their claim as the “Third Rome,” but given what happened to the Patriarch in Moscow, one wonders what Catherine the Great or her successors would have done to the ancient office of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople.

We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.
We fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople. — Macdermott's War Song (1878). The British song that created the term “jingoism”

Russia was a meddler. It conspired to rob Poland. Stole Finland, then helped Sweden snatch Norway, and plotted to send troops to crush the Latin American revolutions, which scared President Monroe into issuing his doctrine against European interference. Yes, the Monroe Doctrine was originally aimed squarely at Russian Tsar Alexander. The Crimean War of 1853-56 exposed the tensions between Russia’s ambitions and the concerns of other great powers, as Britain and France intervened to support the Ottoman Empire against Russian advances. Later, in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, Russia championed Balkan rebellions and won a sweeping peace settlement at San Stefano, though the subsequent Treaty of Berlin rolled back many of those gains. You see, it was this war that removed Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro from Turkish rule, granted autonomy to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and created a large autonomous Bulgaria under Russian protection. It created the “Balkan problem” without the means to ensure stability and peace throughout the region. And it scared the other great powers, so Britain and Austria-Hungary responded because creating a huge Bulgaria under Russian influence was too much power for a clearly hyper-aggressive state. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck offered to host a conference in Berlin to resolve the issues, which was held in the summer of 1878.

Bismarck's primary goal at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 was to preserve peace in Europe and have Germany be the peacemaker, which would reconcile as many countries as possible to the creation of the German Empire in 1871, which had the potential to become the greatest state in Europe. By managing the tensions between Russia and Austria-Hungary, he hoped to keep both of them friendly and secure Germany’s eastern borders without his allies fighting one another, which would force Germany to choose, and lead to disaster. However, it was Russian aggression as much as anything that Kaiser Wilhelm II did later that strained Russian-German relations. The Congress made major changes to the results of the Russo-Turkish War: Bulgaria was reduced in size, the independence of Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania was still recognized, but their territory was also reduced. Russia kept its conquest of the Turkish city of Kars and the port of Batum in Asia Minor. Austria-Hungary was given control of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The British occupied the island of Cyprus because, of course, they did. Everyone was satisfied except for the Ottomans and the Russians. To be Russia’s friend has historically meant letting Russia conquer without restraint because they believe it is their right, and attempts to limit Russia's ambitions or to preach restraint have been interpreted as betrayal rather than as friendly acts.

Russia continued modernizing in terms of industry, but became the site of the rise of modern nihilist and anarchist terrorism and the birthplace of a new antisemitism. It was spiritually darkening. The word “pogrom” refers to violent mob attacks, often tolerated or encouraged by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. A Russian word that means havoc and demolish, and it was the sad experience of Jews in the Russian Empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Russia, the first signs of the horror to come were brutal anti-Jewish riots that erupted after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by bombing in 1881. Though the assassin was not Jewish, rumors spread, setting a fire of hatred that engulfed Jewish communities in mass violence across more than 200 cities. Some Jews who were prominent in commerce and education were scapegoated by both peasants and officials, foreshadowing later communist agitation. Most were average subjects just trying to get by under tsarist rule that had conquered lands where they already lived.

But in 1882, Tsar Alexander III, the new ruler, decreed new “Temporary Regulations” known as the May laws, which would last for the rest of the Russian Empire’s existence. These laws imposed restrictions on Jewish settlement outside the Pale of Settlement, a designated region in the western part of the Russian Empire where Jews were legally allowed to live that was established after the partition of Poland. The Pale included parts of modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, areas later deliberately targeted by the Nationalist Socialist regime in Germany during the Holocaust. The May Laws also imposed university quotas that limited the number of Jewish students, and granted Christian residents the power to petition for the expulsion of Jews from municipalities. The pogroms shattered the hope of Jewish integration into Tsarist Russia and were one catalyst for the rise of Zionism as an ideology to seek a Jewish homeland free from rule by others who might persecute you at a moment’s notice. Russia’s Jews faced the choices of fleeing or enduring the fear of persistent vulnerability. Many took to the ships and escaped, starting a wave of immigration to the United States, other Western countries, and prompting some to look to Ottoman Palestine for something new and yet old.

For by wise guidance you can wage your war, and in abundance of counselors there is victory. — Proverbs 24:6

Twelve years later, Nicholas took the throne in 1894. The Tsar proved unable to govern effectively, lacking the strength and skill to manage Russia’s complex administrative system, but theoretically simple political system, with himself as the source of all power. He struggled to appoint capable advisors and failed to delegate authority. His indecisiveness and tendency to agree with whoever spoke to him last led to erratic and inconsistent policies. A believer in autocracy, Nicholas resisted democratic reforms, further alienating liberals and fueling revolutionary sentiment across the empire. In the 19th century, Russia gave the world a unique cultural output. It was the land of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, whose novels looked deep into the human soul, and in music, it was the age of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. A people who could still produce such men deserved to be unleashed by liberty and real reform, not chained by the personal fecklessness and symbolic gestures that Nicholas II offered in place of peace, order, or good government.

He and the Russian elites did not grasp until too late that the representative institutions developed in the West since the High Medieval period were a source of strength, not disorder. Then and today, wannabe tsars do not know how the West became great; they merely copy what they see at the surface, and the depth of tradition and experience is lost on them. And then Nicholas walked his empire into a kata-guruma and got tossed when he found a country he could not bully.

The Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) was driven by Japan and Russia's competition over Korea and Manchuria. Japan had defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War, but then Japan was forced to surrender many of its gains under European pressure led by Russia, under the pretense of taking up the Chinese cause; the Russians then took control of some of the key territories and strategic positions that they had denied to Japan. This was clear and blatant European hypocrisy, the sort that was common during the high period of racial-imperialist diplomacy. Empire and colonies were okay for them, but not for racial inferiors. However, Japan, unlike the other non-Western countries, had seen this coming and had spent the last generation engaged in self-strengthening with the United Kingdom as its model. Now, with the confidence of having defeated China in one-on-one warfare, the Japanese Empire would not stand for humiliation at the hands of Russia. It allied with the British to keep other Europeans out of its next conflict. Voices in Tokyo clamored for the chance to prove that they were not inferior to the Europeans. Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur, located in Manchuria. This was followed by huge battles leading to the Battle of Mukden, the biggest battle in history before the Great War, 600K men in combat, 160K casualties, and a Japanese victory. Peace talks followed, mediated by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, and the resulting Treaty of Portsmouth forced Russia to recognize Japan's dominance in Korea, cede territory, and quit Manchuria. The Samurai gave the Bear a katana haircut in front of the whole world.

Yet, the Russians had imbibed the racial chauvinism of the Western Europeans. The idea that Russia was defeated by a non-Western power, a supposedly inferior Asian people, was too much for the Russian mind, and it harmed the prestige of the Tsar's throne. Rationally, they should have borne the defeat with stoicism as they had provoked a conflict with an ancient warrior nation, close to that nation's shores and far from Russia's own power base. Losing, under those circumstances, should have been seen as a possible outcome and not a shameful one, but racism makes you stupid, and over this, many Russians began an ill-planned Revolution, the defeat at the hands of the Japanese, and not the continued failure to protect their Jewish fellow subjects led Russians to revolt. And yet it might have been prevented as late as the winter of 1905.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was the uprising that pushed Tsar Nicholas II to at least make the appearance of an effort to transition the Russian government from autocracy to the semblance constitutional monarchy. Sparked by discontent across society, which was intensified by Russian defeats in 1904 during the first year of the Russo-Japanese War, protests ranged from protests to strikes and mutinies. Then, in January 1905, Bloody Sunday happened.

Father Georgy Gapon was a priest who led the Assembly of Russian Workingmen, a compromised group put together by government agents to limit the influence of radicals in the workers’ movement. It made sense, a priest could advocate and channel the energy into helpful solutions. But, in January 1905, Gapon arranged a mass demonstration of workers in St. Petersburg, hoping to present their request for reforms directly to Emperor Nicholas II. If he lived in a normal country, we could say he did everything right. The demonstrators peacefully carried religious icons, they held pictures of the sovereign to show their loyalty to Nicholas II, and they brought petitions with clear goals. Textbook from an American perspective. Religious, patriotic, respectful. So they marched toward the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, but the Tsar was not in the capital, and the imperial guard fired upon the demonstrators. The massacred people had sung, God Save the Tsar!

After this tragedy came the news of the defeat of the Russian Army at Mukden in March, and of the Russian Navy in the Battle of the Sea of Japan in May. From January to June 1905, Russia was plagued by massacres, protests, assassinations, and defeat in the field. Domestically, it was a revolution; in East Asia, it was a thumping. Father Gapon survived, but his old love for the tsar was gone. He was murdered a year later by the Socialist Revolutionary Party because of his Christian moderation made him suspect to the radicals.

“Suddenly the company of Cossacks galloped rapidly towards us with drawn swords. So, then, it was to be a massacre after all! There was no time for consideration, for making plans, or giving orders. A cry of alarm arose as the Cossacks came down upon us. Our front ranks broke before them, opening to right and left, and down this lane the soldiers drove their horses, striking on both sides. I saw the swords lifted and falling, the men, women, and children dropping to the earth like logs of wood, while moans, curses, and shouts filled the air. It was impossible to reason in the fever of this crisis. At my order the front rows formed again in the wake of the Cossacks, who penetrated farther and farther, and at last emerged from the end of the procession. Again we started forward, with solemn resolution and rising rage in our hearts. The Cossacks turned their horses, and began to cut their way through the crowd from the rear. They passed through the whole column and galloped back towards the Narva Gate, where—the infantry having opened their ranks and let them through—they again formed line. We were still advancing, though the bayonets raised in threatening rows seemed to point symbolically to our fate.” —Gapon, Georgy. The Story of My Life.

In September, the war with Japan ended, and the 1905 October Manifesto, issued by Nicholas II, marked the official end of autocracy in Russia and initiated a shift toward a constitutional monarchy. So it seemed. The manifesto promised civil liberties, a broad electoral franchise for men, and a popularly elected legislature, the Duma. These concessions placated sufficient moderates, and so were enough to weaken the revolutionary momentum.

The Tsar’s government was able to regain effective control of the country in early 1906, and he issued a further decree, the Fundamental Laws, a constitution for Russia. Officially, this was Nicholas keeping his promises from October. But the new Duma was merely to be the lower house of the parliament, with an upper house created where the Tsar picked half the members. The Duma could question ministers but not dismiss them, and the Tsar's veto could not be overturned; all this may have worked except that Nicholas did not have the mental constitution to be a constitutional monarch, he would not concede his right to change the electoral system whenever he wanted, allowing him to pick the electorate he desired. This really meant that Nicholas was bidding his time and did not realize the wisdom of sharing power or tapping into the creative energies of his people. He was seeking an oppurtunity to reassert his absolutism, and remove the memory of getting beaten by the Japanese. Something like a foreign crisis in the Balkans.