Zee Beam News

July 10, 2006 - Wall Street Journal - By Edvard Radzinsky -
Mr. Radzinsky is the author of "Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar" (Free Press, 2005).
Russia is an exceptional place. In the 20th century, over a single lifetime - 70 years - it saw three civilizations. Each of the first two was rejected by its successor, forcing people to renounce their convictions. You can imagine the chaos of ideas and beliefs in their hearts. The era of Muscovite czars and the following 300 years of Romanov reign was one of ruthless autocrats. The opportunity to destroy the autocracy appeared rarely, but it did appear. For example, in the early 1540s, the boyars (or nobility) ruled the country as regents of an infant czar. They could have established an aristocratic republic. Instead, they squabbled furiously, without forgetting the main occupation of Asiatic bureaucracy - stealing. The reign of Alexander II was another of those rare times when autocracy could have been transformed. This Russian Lincoln not only emancipated the serfs in 1861; he became the father of perestroika, reforming all parts of Russian life. But he was a typical Russian reformer, a Janus with one head facing forward, the other looking back. The reforms stopped in the first half of his reign. The czar was hated by liberals for stopping reforms, and by conservatives for starting them. Russia was still an autocracy, and the young - seduced by the reforms - felt deceived. An unprecedented terrorist organization was born in Russia, and in some measure, the czar was to blame. The "young people pure of heart," as a contemporary called them, gradually turned into cold killers, assassinating Alexander II in 1881. His son, Alexander III, returned Russia to the ruthless autocracy so dear to the hearts of its rulers. He dreamed of reverting to the times of his grandfather, Nicholas I (1796-1855), who had said, "Despotism exists in Russia because only it is in accordance with the spirit of the people." But toward the end of his reign, Alexander III asked his adjutant-general: "[T]here is still something wrong in Russia, isn't there?" The reply should be memorized by all of Russia's rulers: "Your majesty, imagine an enormous steam boiler filled with simmering gases. But there are people with hammers around it diligently riveting the smallest openings. One day the gases will break though a section that they will not be able to rivet back." The czar, according to accounts, "groaned, as if in pain." His son, Czar Nicholas II, became the victim of the explosion. That is how the first Atlantis, the autocracy of the Romanovs, perished. Astonishingly, it was members of the ruling class, the intellectual nobility who would not accept autocracy, who fomented the revolution. A poet wrote in the 19th century: "In Paris the cobbler revolts to become a landowner - that's understandable. In Russia, when the nobility makes a revolution, is it because they want to be cobblers?" In Russia, poets are often prophets. The son of a shoemaker, Joseph Stalin, became the first Bolshevik czar, and the No. 3 man in his government was a former shoemaker. The fantastical came to pass as a result of the Russian Revolution. In pious Russia, unknown radical Bolsheviks took power. The Bolshevik state created by Lenin became ridiculously similar to Nicholas I's ruthless monarchy. The barracks were completed by Stalin, child of the Russian Thermidor, an Asiatic Napoleon come to consummate the new Bolshevik civilization. Stalin had studied in a seminary, and said that Russia needed god and czar. He gave it a new religion: Asiatic Marxism. As befitted medieval religions, dissent was heresy, punished ruthlessly by death. The greatest temple was the Mausoleum, where, following the model of the imperishable saints, lay the body of imperishable Lenin. Stalin gave the country a new religion and he gave it czar and god in one person. Lavrenty Beria, chief of his security apparatus, explained the task of the film, "The Vow," to its director during production: "'The Vow' must be an exalted film, where Lenin is the biblical John the Baptist and Stalin is the Messiah Himself." Stalin's name was repeated all day on the radio. "Stalin this and Stalin that. You can't go to the kitchen or sit down on the toilet, or eat lunch without Stalin pursuing you: He got into your guts, your brain, he filled in all the holes, he ran nipping at your heels, called into your soul, got under the covers with you, and shadowed memory and sleep," wrote a woman in her diary. At the end of his life, Stalin signed a resolution to create a statue which could be compared only with the Colossus of Rhodes. Almost 50 meters tall, it was erected on the Volga-Don canal, built by convicts. One day, the keeper discovered that birds liked to rest on the head. You can imagine what the new god's face would look like. You couldn't punish birds, but the local authorities, smelling danger, found a solution: high-tension electricity passed through the giant head. Now the statue stood surrounded by a carpet of dead birds. Every morning the keeper buried the little bodies, and the earth, so fertilized, flowered. This was the symbol of the Bolshevik civilization built by Stalin, the second Atlantis, which drowned in 1991. Gorbachev began the path toward freedom, Moses moving eternally through the desert. It was a difficult journey. The republics spoke up. Stalin had built the USSR in an inviolable way, the republics held together by economic chains. Gigantic collapse was looming. The center did not want separatism, but the republics did. Young people in the republics, hot-headed, were ready to die for independence. Civil war stood on the doorstep of a country filled with nuclear warheads. A world catastrophe was very near. The peaceful dissolution of the USSR will be Yeltsin's greatest contribution to the history of the new Russia, which is only starting on its path. How difficult it is to build capitalism in a country where the unrighteousness of wealth is a beloved popular idea, a country without rule of law for a millennium, where the concept of "law" successfully substitutes for the concept of "justice," and where the bourgeoisie is brilliant at making money and totally useless at governing. The sad fact of Russian history is that the bourgeoisie has no experience of state leadership. How difficult it is to build democracy in a country where the dream of equality always trumped the dream of freedom. A major reason for Gorbachev's fall was that he did not understand this. He tried to become an ordinary politician, a political dancer - step to the left, skip to the right. But the public, after a millennium of autocracy, needed yet another czar, albeit in democratic garb. A czar does not dance, a czar commands. Yeltsin was like that. Yeltsin's tragedy was that he was an autocrat who sincerely tried to be a democrat. He forced himself to put up with what is most odious for a czar - freedom of speech, that is, public insults from Communists and other opposition parties. He knew how to shut them up, of course. He knew, but did not do it, for he was a democrat, and what would his best friends - Friend Clinton and Friend Kohl - say! This constant tension, of knowing what to do but not being able to do it, made him seek solace in the bottle and destroyed his colossal health. The end of his reign was marked by chaos and wild corruption. So once again, the people, as in the days of Ivan the Terrible, wanted a strict father. Yeltsin's majesty lay in doing the impossible for a Russian czar: voluntarily giving up power. Surprising the country, he turned the reins over to an unknown person. His fantastic sixth sense did not let him down. He selected a man the country wanted to see. After a president who made people wonder whether he would be able to get up from a chair, came a normal, modern and young man. He skied, and spoke breezily, without notes. He was probably the first Russian leader that teenage girls got crushes on. Vladimir Putin has ended the era of Kremlin ancients who elicited sarcasm in the West. He decisively executes what the majority wants from him: Authority has been strengthened, stability established, and the concept of "super power," without which Russians cannot live, is being returned to Russia. He deals with the oligarchs in a manner that befits a czar. But besides the will of the people there is the will of History, and they do not always coincide. Does History want a continuation of Yeltsin's royal democracy? Or does it demand an understanding of what Alexander II saw much too late? - that it is dangerous to begin reforms in Russia, but much more dangerous to stop them. "Russia! Where are you speeding? Answer me!" the great Gogol once asked, in vain. In 1916, in a village above the Polar Circle, where it gets to 40 below, lived an exiled prisoner. He was 38, his wife was dead; he belonged to a pathetic, underground party, with most of its members in prison and the rest fled abroad. He would spend days at a time lying in bed, face to the wall. Who would have guessed that just two years later that exiled Georgian, Joseph Stalin, would be in the Kremlin, ruler of half the world? Who would have guessed that a middle-aged provincial party functionary, Boris Yeltsin, appointed to lead the Moscow Communists, would destroy the USSR just a few years later? Gogol gave the only truthful answer to the question he asked Russia: "It does not answer."