explaining history summer journal

7/27/2019 Explaining History Summer Journal

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Explaining History Journal

Summer 2013Essays, Articles and Observations on modern history and memory.Nick Shepleywww.explaininghistory.com

Nick Shepley: [email protected]
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.explaininghistory.com/http://www.explaininghistory.com/


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The birth of nations:

Evaluating the development ofcivil society, the revolutionarymovement and peasant 'volia'

between 1892 and 1905.

NICK SHEPLEY

During the 1905 Revolution, Count Sergei Sheremetev wrote a diary entry that

articulated the distance that Russian society appeared to have travelled in adecade. He said: "Dear God, how far we have departed since 1894, and inwhat direction! But then I never did have any hopes for the successor


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[Nicholas II]. Russia in 1894 and Russia today! I don't know if anyone will everread this diary, but what we are now experiencing with him, I had premonitionsof long ago."[1]Sheremetev, one of Russia's biggest landowners had witnessed the ineffectualNicholas II fail to contain or to appease the protest movement of 1902-1905,and instead watched it evolve into a full blown revolution following Bloody

Sunday in January 1905. He had also watched horrific bloodshed take placeon his own lands, with land seizures and anti Semitic pogroms happen withregularity. Sheremetev began to take as dim a view of the peasants as he didof Russia's Czar, shifting away from the previously naive and generousposition he had held, that the peasants represented something honest andegalitarian that much of Russia had lost.[2]The view put forward about the period 1892 to 1905 by many commentatorsincluding Geoffrey Hosking, Orlando Figes and most recently Douglas Smith,is that a broader sense of civil society emerged in Russia during this period,largely as a response to autocratic failings. This new sense of nationhood orpatriotism was pioneered mainly by the small middle class and by largesections of the nobility, and was expressed through a powerful sense of socialobligation to the peasantry. Liberal nationalist figures such as the writer AntonChekhov, or Prince George Lvov, did not advocate revolution in anymeaningful sense before 1917, but concerned themselves with practicalmeasures to assist the poor. Using institutions such as the Zemstvos andZemgor the Russian middle classes and nobility built part of the infrastructureof a modern Russia that existed in tandem with Czarism, and as Czarismfaltered and retreated, it filled the void.Growing parallel with this liberal and progressive sense of nationhood, wereanarchist and Marxist strands of the intelligentsia who were dismissive of

notions of nationhood in the traditional sense or of progressive measures ingeneral, and who's energies were consumed by loyalty to a future imaginedsociety, the outcome of a hoped for revolutionMissing from this analysis is a third phenomenon, the evolution of a peasant'volia' described by Smith in 'Former People', as: "Total licence and the right toact as one sees fit, unrestrained from any larger authority."[3]Volia was barely articulated as an idea at all by the Russian peasants or theurban 'hooligans', who had begun to exhibit challenging and disrespectfulbehaviours towards the nobility since the turn of the century. By 1917 the useof the term Burzhui (Bourgeois), should not be seen as any kind ofunderstanding of class, revolutionary politics or Marxist dialectics, but simple a

shorthand for 'hated other', and could incorporate Russia's middle classes,Germans or Jews.This essay will seek to explore how these three notions of collective identityevolved, interacted and eventually clashed in 1917, and will seek to evaluatethe impact that the period 1892-1905 had on their development. In doing so, itdoes not ignore the fact that there were many multiplicities of collective identityor nationhood emerging at the time, from the industrial working class tonational minorities such as Jews, Finns, Poles, Armenians and Ukrainians,though to explore all these senses of emergent nationhood would be beyondthe scope of this essay and suitable for a wider study. The use of the termintelligentsia will be avoided in this essay, as it is too broad and imprecise aterm to describe the progressive and radical opponents of the Czar alone,there were conservative intellegentsia also who did not share the sameambitions as their oppositional colleagues.


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Figes gives an outline sketch of this period of intensifying tensions in ChapterFive of Russia: A People's Tragedy, First Blood and begins with anexamination of the Volga Famine of 1892.[4]Incompetence, rather than malice seems to have been the root cause of thecrisis in the Volga. Russia up to the 1960s, according to famine historianCormac O 'Grada, experienced famine conditions in some part of her territory

on average once every nine years, so the Volga famine of 1892 should nothave been unexpected[5]. The reaction to the famine was marred withincompetence and corruption from the regime, which forced it eventually toappeal to Russia's middle class and nobility for help. The crisis tested theautocracy to its limit and its failure created an opportunity for civil society toassert itself.Figes writes: "Politically this was to prove an historic moment, for it opened thedoor to a powerful new wave of public activity and debate which thegovernment could not control and which quickly turned from the philanthropicto the political."[6]In many of the accounts cited by Figes, particularly those of Chekhov andTolstoy, there is evidence that immense guilt and sense of obligation and dutytowards the peasants existed, and it was from this sense of obligation that newnotions of nationhood emerged. Loyalty to the Czar no longer made one aRussian, after the famine to be a good Russian one must demonstratedevotion to the people. In this sense a separate and conflicting view ofRussian-ness emerged, and it was one incompatible with Czarism. InDecember 1916, shortly after the murder of Rasputin, Nicholas II stilldemonstrated his rigid adherence to the first view of Russian identity. Britishdiplomat George Buchanan could clearly sense the darkening mood inPetrograd and urged the Czar to make some gesture to restore public

confidence in his rule. The Czar replied, incredulously: "Do you mean that I amto regain the confidence of my people, or they are to regain my confidence."[7]Figes states that a new confidence in the institutions of Russian civil society(which he argues was too nebulous to be described as a class), was mirroredby a declining assertiveness and competence by the Czarist system. In a veryreal sense, the middle strata of Russian society was maturing, and themetaphor of a society coming of age is particularly apt, given the fact thatmuch of the Russian population were figuratively and practically infantilised bythe regime. The title of Batyushka or 'Little Father', given to the Czar obviouslyhad deeply religious Orthodox connotations, but it also implied a world viewheld by the regime of an innocent and child like population. This mostly applied

to the peasantry, and the new bourgeoisie seem rarely to have entered into theregime's calculations.Figes identifies the schism between gradualist and radical opponents of theregime in the run up to 1905, in the guise of liberal Zemstvo men and thestudents.[8] Whilst the two groups were galvanised into action by theimmediate crisis of the famine, their philosophical motivations for oppositionwere fundamentally different. The members of the Zemstva werepredominantly the rural nobility (though many of these were titled men withoutthe vast wealth of Sheremetev) who were deeply loyal to Czarism and whosaw no future for its absolutist incarnation, they believed that coming to amodern constitutional arrangement with the Czar was the best way to save hisregime. Many were mindful that the consequences of a collapse in the regimewould be personally catastrophic, involving terrible bloody violence frombelow. This loyalty was frequently expressed as exasperation, but it was only


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in 1917 that a majority of Zemstvo members finally abandoned the Czar andembraced the Provisional Government. Following the signing of the OctoberManifesto many quickly embraced the new reforms, convincing themselvesthat the Czar was sincere about a constitutional monarchy.Many Zemstvo nobles and intellectuals were far more comfortable with anautocratic Czar than either Alexander III or Nicholas II realised. Both Czars

repressed and harassed the local government organisations after 1890,arresting their leaders and censoring publications, not realising that awidespread desire existed to help support the Czar and his fundamental laws.Dmitri Shipov, Mikhail Stakhovich and Georgi Lvov, all members of the Party ofPeaceful Renovation, established just after the revolutionary year of 1905,were eager to revive a respect for Czarism amongst the peasants and to allowautocracy to grow naturally from the peasants love for the Czar, not from theimposed and artificial authoritarian notion of autocracy that relied ondisciplining the population to accept Czarism. Even this model of progressiveaccommodation with the people was unfavourable to Nicholas II, who viewed itas an erosion of his god given rights and responsibility to govern Russia as anabsolutist, leaving the country in the words of Figes 'an autocracy, without anautocrat.'[9]The students the Figes identifies, had a fundamentally different outlook. Hestates that the terms 'student' and 'revolutionary' were virtual synonyms forone another, though this may be something of an over simplification. Therevolutionary movement in the modern era had a long heritage, pre dating thestudent movement of the 1880s and beyond. The Decembrists of the 1820shad been aristocrats and young army officers, and the revolutionaryunderground that is vividly portrayed by Alex Butterworth in his history of theanarchist movement in Europe, The World That Never Was, was equally

populated by minor aristocrats and bourgeois professionals. SergeiKravchinsky, Peter Kropotkin, Vera Zasulich and Mikhail Bakunin all present afacet of the revolutionary movement far removed from the university campus,yet able to occupy the attentions of the Third Section's most brilliant counter-subversive, Peter Rachkovsky, in a way the student movement never did.[10]This is not to say that the student movement didn't present a more radicalopposition to Czarism, the educational reforms of the 1860s had created anenlarged body of predominantly young men studying new subjects, particularlynatural sciences. The reaction period of Alexander II's reign, and thesubsequent twenty five years of retrenchment and anti intellectualism fromAlexander III and Nicholas II created a radicalised movement amongst the

students where initially none might have existed. The radicalisation of thestudent body was the product of a confused and locally led crack down theturn of the century on campuses across Russia, with local Czarist governorsacting out of a 'proizvol' or a self directed localised despotism. The studentbody had been exploring new ideas since the 1860s, and this had brought itgradually into conflict with an older order, as depicted in the character ofBazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons of 1862. However the pettyrestrictions placed on student life by arch reactionary Dmitri Tolstoy, and theunnecessary brutality shown towards protesting students created a body that,like many of the nobility saw itself as having a national duty to work forchange, but the change itself would be revolutionary, not gradual.A large part of the reason for this difference in approach is down to theabsence of roles provided by the Czarist state for the new waves of youngeducated people after the 1860s. The failure of the reform era to


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fundamentally change Russia, the inability of industrialisation to take hold to asufficient degree to absorb large numbers of graduates, and the monopoly ofthe aristocracy over prestigious government jobs gave the newly educatedlittle incentive to have any loyalty to the regime. They were excluded from it,and lived in a culture that did not value their ideas or outlook. Following theaccession to the throne of Alexander III and the rise in prominence of

Konstantin Pobedonostsev within his government, reactionary Slavophilismdominated Russian public life. The idea that Russia was not a Europeannation and therefore could not benefit from European enlightenment ideas,that the country had a separate historical path and that the answers to hercurrent dilemmas could be found in her ancient, peasant, Orthodox past,swept student hopes for a modern Russia away.The violence of anti student measures at campuses across Russia between1899 and 1902, was the result of a long simmering anger over the removal ofprivileges by Tolstoy in 1884, and the fact that Russia experiences threesuccessive years of protest is telling. The reforms of Alexander II were noteasily undone once they had been created, they were responsible for a greatunleashing of intellectual energies in Russia, and the attempt to stymie thesenew forces set up an irreconcilable tension within Russia that was to fullymanifest itself in 1905. The journey of thousands of students into the SR Party,which contained the only fully organised terrorist wing within the Russianrevolutionary underground, created the armed opponents that the authoritieshad feared, and provided many of the foot soldiers for the SR's campaign ofviolence in 1905.The revolutionary year evolved from a series of interlocking revolts orrebellions, coalescing in a year of violence and chaos in 1905 itself, butcontinuing until 1907 at least. Students, sailors, peasants, the middle classes

and some nobility and workers all played a part in critical weakening theregime.Between the late 1890s and 1905, partly as a result of Alexander III'sindustrialisation, the 'Great Spurt', the numbers of Russia's industrial workingclass rapidly grew. However, as nearly all new workers migrated from thecountryside, and returned their in times of economic shortage, many had yet tofully abandon their peasant world view and mentality. The experience ofmodern urban living and industrial work forced most peasants-cum-workers toembrace new forms of collectivism and solidarity, perhaps with echoes of thevillage Obschina, but suited to the conditions of the factory. The unions,workers organisations and parties that emerged were quickly infiltrated and

later controlled by the Okhrana, but would still play a key part in the 1905revolution, beginning with the massacre on Bloody Sunday.The mass killing at the gates of the Winter Palace was another avoidabledisaster for the Czar, who had not initially been faced by an angry mob, morea procession of deferential workers humbly submitting a petition to the Czar.Zubatov, the secret policeman who ran the workers unions in Petrograd,himself a former populist, wanted to recreate the sense of rural paternalismtowards the peasants in the cities. Instead of cruel landlords and swindlingJews that the Czar would offer protection from, it would be greedy and ruthlessbosses and factory owners. Father Gapon, the priest and police informer wholed the procession was deeply committed to autocracy and led the workers tothe gates of the Winter Palace in a piece of elaborate public propaganda.The ensuing slaughter indicated how poor the internal communications andinternal reasoning of the regime was, because an opportunity to strengthen


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the regime was squandered and instead a war between the regime and thevast majority of its subjects began.The notion, however, that good, quiescent and obedient workers existed untilBloody Sunday, and angry rebellious ones developed thereafter is obviouslyfar too simplistic.For a decade before the killings, there had been mounting evidence of a

sentiment emerging from within the ranks of the young male working class,that is described by contemporary observers as 'hooliganism'.Joan Neuberger in her essay 'Hooliganism and Futurism',[11] states that theHooligans, bands of 'young working class toughs', implicitly attacked thevalues of the respectable urban bourgeoisie by mocking, insulting andoffending with crude and aggressive public behaviour.She writes: "Their defiant assertion of "uncultured" behaviour providedevidence of the failure of culturalism to civilise the common folk or assimilatethem into society. Hooligans openly refused to accept the role of culturelessobjects who could be transformed with a simple infusion of what theintelligentsia, playing Pygmalion, considered to be culture."Neuberger raises a number of issues in this statement, the most importantbeing that clearly while Czarism sought to patronise the peasants and hadvague thoughts about patronising the workers, the urban bourgeoisie clearlysought to 'improve' them. By making reference to Pygmalion (the play and notthe classical myth) Neuberger reminds readers that this was a European widelate Victorian phenomenon, perhaps a response to unexpected accumulationsof urban workers due to industrialism across the continent. Neuberger'sassertion that this was a bid to assimilate workers 'in to society' is also veryrevealing, suggesting that contemporary bourgeois thinking excluded the noncultured individual from 'society' itself. More egalitarian, fraternal notions of

society therefore either didn't exist or were minority discourses at the time, andthe main barrier to being part of society itself seems to have been the veryproletarian-ness of the workers. This process of 'othering' the worker was verysimilar to the 'othering' of the peasant, and it reflected an acute anxietyamongst the affluent classes that the 'civilisation' that they cherished extendedonly so far. The bourgeoisie were conscious that they existed as islands in alarge and uncivilised sea, with only the power of the state to keep themsecure. The Hooligans, Neuberger shows, existed as a cultural phenomenonin part to reject this attempt to civilise the working classes. Working classculture in Russia's cities before the revolution was rich and diverse and largelymisunderstood by the middle classes who ignored its vitality and relevance.

After 1905, the focus of antagonism towards the affluent classes shifted backto the land, where long suppressed resentments and hatreds could now beexpressed far more openly. During the revolutionary year of 1905 thepeasantry seized land across Russia, forcing landowners to flee in terror, andas the first quote by Sheremetev suggests, any naive optimism over the'goodness' of ordinary peasant folk, was dispelled. Unlike the workers in manyof the Soviets that formed themselves, particularly in Moscow, the peasants in1905 were not militarily crushed, instead their uprising met with success. In theCzar's October Manifesto, the peasants' debts were abolished, and eventhough the reintroduction of some semblance of order to the countryside hadinvolved harsher more military style discipline against the peasants, the moodin rural Russia was permanently altered. Douglas Smith writes that: "...Eventhough order was re-established, the problems that had sparked the violenceremained; what is more the harsh tactics fuelled the peasants desire for


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revenge and convinced them that the next time they would have to fight evenharder to drive the masters off the land for good. The tense atmosphere thatnow gripped the countryside did not escape the landowners. When onenobleman returned to his estate in Samara Province, he noticed the peasantsprevious "courtesy and friendliness was replaced by "animosity andrudeness"."[12]

The revolutionary year of 1905, whilst it had failed to lead to a full politicalrevolution, had brought about a partial social revolution in the countryside. Ithas permanently shaken the old ties of deference to the nobles and allowedunspoken animosities now to be expressed openly, as the peasants eagerlyawaited the next major failing of the Czarist state. Many in the nobilityfollowing 1905 were acutely aware of the shift, and the failure of Nicholas II inthe coming decade to either be a convincing autocrat or a committed democratleft many nobles with a sense of doom and dread.This was articulated by Baron Wrangel in 1914, who said: "We are on theverge of events, the likes of which the world has not seen since the barbarianinvasions", Wrangel was not speaking of the war that was to break out duringJuly that year, but about the end of any pretence that the countryside wasgoing to return to normal.During the February revolution, three years later, the antagonism of thepeasant soldiers and their anarchic indifference to orders had been crystallisedby the experience of war. General Alexei Brusilov commented that: "Thesoldiers what only one thing, peace, so that they can go home, rob the landowners, and live freely without paying any taxes or recognising any authority."Brusilov, who unlike many of his fellow generals, knew the mentality andattitude of his men well is a reliable and objective commentator on theattitudes that had reached the level of mutiny by 1917.

The lexicon of revolutionary terminology had been appropriated by workersand peasants by 1917 in a way that it had not been in 1905, now 'Burzhui' hadentered into common parlance when describing the middle classes andlandowners. This term not only loosely identified 'enemies' but could also beused to legitimise violence against them. Similarly in 1905, corruptions of theword 'revolution' were used, and its meaning was reduced to being somethingsimilar to volia; revolution simply meant the peasants could do as theypleased.Can it be argued that this constitutes a sense of peasant collective identity, letalone nationhood? Obviously volia was a hyper individualistic approach, and itwas hardly as well expressed and articulated as the many intelligentsia

discourses and debates on the status of Russian identity and nationhoodeither. As a conception of freedom, however, it was almost universallyendorsed amongst the peasantry and was therefore a deeply sharedsentiment, but the idea itself precluded any kind of greater nationalcollectivism as it resulted in localised attacks on the bourgeoisie and upperclasses. Peasants used it as an idea to justify individual acts of 'freedom' andplunder, and the concept only existed in the moment, there was no sense of adialectic to this new freedom or any idea of what kind of society would emerge.Peasants acted not so much out of a clear picture of what they wanted beyondextra land, but more out of a notion of what they opposed and hated. The voliaconception of freedom was simply a reaction against social pressures faced bythe peasants and to some extent the urban workers, and as such did notcontain any of the ideas that might be instrumental in building a newconception of Russia. In this regard it mirrored the semi anarchic nature of


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peasant life, which tried to have as little to do with the state, the church andoutsiders as possible.After 1917, during the Russian Civil War and during the various Leninist andthen Stalinist attempts to collectivise agriculture, the peasants would besubjected to the predations of an ever growing state, and simplistic ideasabout land ownership and freedom of action would be uniformly crushed.

Hosking makes the point that following the failure of the reforms of AlexanderII, reaction manifested itself in an artificial attempt at nation building in theguise of Russification. This in itself failed to build a stable and lasting base ofsupport for the autocracy, and following this failure, the construction of a'nationhood' shifted out of the hands of the regime and was taken up byRussia's various social classes, nationhood and national identity fragmentedas state power and authority diminished, leaving the formulation of new kindsof Russian-ness to the people. Inevitably these new interpretations of theessence of Russian-ness reflected the social and material conditions of thevarious groups in question. The anarchic sense of freedom and 'volia' that thepeasants embraced was more than simply an excuse for individual plunder, itwas a shared value, based in older peasant notions of fairness andegalitarianism, but with the added factor of the revolution offering carteblanche justification for any an all acts of theft, violence and revenge. It is easyto see how this attitude was channelled by the Bolsheviks in 1917 against thebourgeoisie and the nobility, unleashing waves of popular violence before thestate had sufficiently built up its mechanisms of repression to do the job itself.In order to fully assess the degree to which the bourgeois, radical andpeasant/worker senses of shared identity and nationhood emerged in theperiod 1892-1905, it might be instructive at this point to use the work ofBenedict Anderson, particularly his ground breaking study of nationalism,

Imagined Communities.In coining the term 'imagined community' Anderson made a fundamental claimabout the nature of national identity itself, he argued that in order for one tofeel Russian, or to have a sense of solidarity with millions of strangers, onemust first imagine that there are shared similarities in culture, outlook andethnicity. That sense of solidarity must also be mirrored by a sense of'otherness' for those who lie beyond national borders, as no nationalism hassought to assimilate the entire world into the ethnic group in question.[13]Some of Anderson's principals apply in most cases, with the exception of thevery lowest classes of Russian society. It is fair to say that during Volgafamine, an imagined community developed rapidly amongst the liberal nobility

and middle classes who worked through the Zemstvo in order to alleviate thepeasants misery and hardship. Whether or not these pioneers of civil societyincluded the peasants in this community is harder to discern, a sense ofobligation to the lower classes does not necessarily equate to a sense ofsocial equality or inclusion with them. In many ways the peasants were just asinfantilised by the middle classes and liberal nobility as they were by Czarism,the difference being that the former group had a far better idea of what wasgood for the peasants than the latter, though there appears to be littleevidence of either party empowering the peasantry to look after themselves.Neuberger's observations about the attempts by the urban bourgeoisie to bringculture to the working classes, as a condition of their acceptance into societyagain suggests that the noblesse oblige of the middle classes was entirelypaternal and was not part of a programme of classless fraternity. The imaginedcommunity of the bourgeois progressive, whilst essentially altruistic and


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benign had distinct borders and checkpoints. A future society led by the middleclasses with a constitutionally fettered Czar would be run in the interests of thelower classes, to whom the Zemstvo elites felt such an acute sense of guilt,but it would not be directed by them. Evidence of this can be seen briefly in theProvisional Government, which hoped to act on behalf of workers, peasantsand soldiers who had already committed themselves to the Soviets and who

did not give this new paternalism much legitimacy at all.The second imagined community, that of the radical left, the students,the SRparty and eventually the Bolsheviks was one united by an eschatology, ahistorical goal to be worked towards, and therefore it was a community thatexisted far less in the present than in some entirely unseen and thereforeimagined future. Timothy Snyder, in conversation with Tony Judt, just beforeJudt's death discussed the impact of this eschatology on Lenin, and in turn,Lenin's impact on it. He said: "I wonder if Lenin's success doesn't also have todo with a certain audacity about the future...Lenin decided that "scientists ofhistory" are allowed not just to observe the experiment but to intervene in it, tonudge things along. After all, if we know the results in advance why not getthere more quickly?"[14]The extent to which there was a shared consensus view amongst therevolutionary movement about who was included within the community andwho was not, and which social classes participate in the revolution and whowould not differed from the 1860s onwards. The decline of populism and theascent of Marxism by the 1890s, and following that the evolution of theBolsheviks as a national force decided how this majority consensus wouldevolve, but most incarnations of the revolutionary movement had one thing incommon, they spoke on behalf of peasants first and then workers, but wereseldom directed by either. Lenin's pledge to seize power and then 'educate the

population in socialism' gives us a sense of the limits of his desire to co-opt thelower classes, he would not consult them, but build a classless utopia forthem.Finally, whatever sentiment might be attributed to worker hooliganism andpeasant volia, it cannot realistically be seen as an attempt to create animagined community, as all imagined communities in Anderson's view relyheavily on an interaction with texts. The levels of illiteracy amongst workerswere not as high as that amongst the peasantry, but even so, there is littleevidence of a community of worker to worker texts that do not originate frommore revolutionary and therefore bourgeois sources. The transference ofinformation within the cities, including the new penny press was for the most

part a vertical top down process, not a horizontal one. Peasant ideas ofrevolutionary activity and the role of the peasant nation within it was largely amixture of poorly understood ideas inherited from the revolutionary movement,with the most expedient concepts (that justified peasant land grabs and arejection of authority) cherry picked. A sense of fraternity rarely developedbeyond regions, and even by the 1930s it was hard to argue that manyRussian peasants had taken on a coherent sense of Russian nationality. Mostoften the peasant class simply viewed themselves in terms of their ownotherness and were united during War Communism against the predations ofthe state, an example being the Antonov Rebellion.Whilst the two expressions of nationhood from 1892 to 1905 were not inclusiveof the entire nation in an egalitarian sense, both proposed models of Russian-ness in a paternalist way that proposed solutions for peasants and workersthat largely precluded their participation. Czarism's paternalism by 1905 was


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devoid even of solutions and simply demanded unconditional loyalty as theentry criteria for being considered part of the 'nation'. It was the abject failureof the regime's ability to protect it's subjects that led to a fragmentation innotions of Russian-ness throughout the 19th Century, a process thatradicalised in its last decade and in the first decade of the 20th. The newinterpretations nationhood and the peasant rejection of the nation altogether

would ultimately collide with catastrophic consequences between 1917 and1953.

BibliographyBooksAnderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London, 1993)

Butterworth, Alex, The World That Never Was (London, 2010)

Emmons, Terrence and Vucininch, Wayne S. The Zemstvo in Russia(Cambridge 1982)

Figes, Orlando, Russia: A Peoples Tragedy (London, 2003)

Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age Of Empire (London, 1975)

Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age Of Extremes (London, 1992)

Hosking, Geoffrey, Russia: A History (London, 1998)

Judt, Tony, Thinking the 20th Century (New York, 2011)

Neuberger, Joan, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture and Power in St Petersburg,1900-1914 (Berkeley, 1993)

OGrada, Cormac, Famine: A History (London 2003)

Smith, Douglas, Former People (New York, 2012)

Service, Robert, Lenin (London, 2006)


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[1] Smith, P 55[2] Ibid[3] Smith, P27[4] Figes, PP157-192[5] OGrada P97[6] Figes, 158[7] Smith, P64[8] Figes, P164[9] Figes, P23[10] Butterworth PP 47-66[11] Nueberger, 185-203[12] Smith, 66[13] Anderson, P P1-7[14] Judt, 24

Naomi Klein's Shock DoctrineNick ShepleyIt is possible that in theeconomic history of theworld a turning pointwith a significance thatmay still be too early toassess, was reached atthe end of the 1970s,as The USA, Britainand later in the early1980s China,embracedneoliberalism.

Keynesian economics,notions of socialdemocracy and the fragile compact between labour and capital that had heldtogether through the Great Depression, the Second World War and throughthe long boom that lasted up to the 1970s; all of this was declared redundantin the decade that followed, as an economic radicalism without historicalprecedent swept the world.


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The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is the story of that revolution, of howeconomic shock therapy, prescribed for countries suffering from the twin ills ofinflation and unemployment ,was accompanied by two other kinds of shock.

The first kind, explains Klein, is invariably some kind of natural disaster,political upheaval or social catastrophe, guaranteed to leave people in a pliant,

regressed state of helplessness. The second form of shock is the deliberateviolence of the state, an authoritarian aggression designed to steamrollthrough change that the majority of the population is unlikely to favour.She gives a clear example of the exploitation of natural disaster, examining thepost Katrina re-ordering of New Orleans, citing the godfather of neoliberalismMilton Friedman as a man who could see revolutionary opportunity in themidst of crisis.

...Uncle Miltie as he was known to his followers, nonetheless found thestrength to write and op-ed for The Wall Street Journal three months after thelevees broke. Most New Orleans Schools are in ruins, Friedman observed,as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children arenow scattered over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity toradically reform the education system. (Klein, 4)

By reform, Friedman means privatisation, and but the use of the word reformcouches the shift from public to private ownership of education, in thelanguage of positive change. Kleins argument that crisis is used to bring aboutradical change in the economic workings of a society seems to be born out bywhat happened next.

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired andthe electricity grid was brought back online, the auctioning off of New Orleansschool system took place with military speed and precision.

Crisis was used in a similar fashion in the USA following 9/11 when a recordnumber of privatisations and de-regulations were passed in early 2002 whileany criticism of the Bush presidency could be condemned as unpatriotic.

In his overambitious postmodern take on 20th Century History The End ofHistory Francis Fukayama argued that liberal democracy and free marketswould spread around the world together now that the twin evils of Fascism and

Communism had been defeated. Klein takes exception to this, arguing thatfree market capitalism is a fundamentally violent, anti democraticideology. (Klein, 207).

The experience of World War Two had shown Britain and America that acentralised state intervening in the economy could get things done. In theUSA the state, particularly the defence establishment, expanded rapidly afterthe war in a bid to meet the challenges of Americas new global status. InBritain a similar expansion occurred under the post war Labour and ToryGovernments, the belief that war time planning could address the equallyimportant struggle for living standards and employment dominated bothparties.


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The first proponent of the neoliberalism, was Austrian aristocrat and anticommunist Friedrich Von Hayek, there was in his eyes a veritable craze ofstatist solutions in the Western Democracies.. Hayeks core belief, a belief thatwas taken up by Milton Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs, his effective successors,was that individual well being and freedom were incompatible with the notionof a large and interventionist state.

In studying the likes of Friedman and Sachs Klein presents the reader with adilemma; what sort of economists are they? Are they evangelists with amessage of radical economic redemption, revolutionaries every bit asdedicated to feeding populations bitter but necessary economic medicine asLenin or Mao? Or are they fraudsters? Are they men who saw an opportunityto claw back the concessions granted by ruling classes to their people duringtimes of national crisis? Whilst she never gives a final verdict on this answerthe weight of evidence that she presents seems to lean towards the former.

In an interview following the publication of the Shock Doctrine, Klein said:These (Hayek and Friedman) are brilliant mathematicians, in many cases, soit looks perfect in their modelling. But I think anyone who falls in love with asystem is dangerous, because the world doesn't comply and then you getangry at the world. The parallels between purists on the ultra right and ultraleft here are fascinating, unbending theoretical wizards who have fallen intothe age old trap of creating utopian models and imposing them on a reluctantreal world, always arguing, of course, that the results will be so extraordinarythat they will justify the means.

The Chicago School of Economics was the hotbed of economic revisionism in

the 1970s and many of the measures that would be implemented in the richworld were tested by the Chicago Boys as alumni of the school were known,in South America. Klein makes the point from the outset when discussing theChicago School that it was an academy for producing a neo liberal orthodoxy,educating commissars of capitalism.

It was not just training students; it was building and strengthening the ChicagoSchool of Economics, the brainchild of a coterie of conservative academicswhose ideas represented the bulwark against the dominant statist thinking ofthe day. (Klein, P49).

Klein paints a picture of the peculiar form of utopian market madness thatFriedman envisaged.Friedman dreamed of depatterning societies, of returning them to a state ofpure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions - government regulations, tradebarriers and entrenched interests. (Klein, P50).

One clue as to the reason for Chicago School radicalism and inflexibility lies,suggests Klein, with its joint founder Frank Knight, who thought professorsshould inculcate in their students the belief that each economic theory is asacred feature of the system not a debatable hypothesis. (Klein, 50)

The Chicago School was directly funded by the CIA, who saw its free marketcreed as part of the economic arsenal necessary to role back globalcommunism. The CIA also pioneered research into personal and social


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shock, writing a manual, with the help of notorious psychologist cum torturerDr Ewen Cameron.

It is fascinating to note, and I think this comparison alone adds great strengthto Kleins argument, how similar the forced imposition of neo liberalism was inboth Chile and later in Iraq. Three decades had passed between the overthrow

of President Salvador Allendes government in 1972 and the invasion on Iraqin 2003, but in both instances the first objectives appear to have been theremodelling of the laws of ownership itself, mass privatisation and deregulationand the second seems to be laws to prevent the native population from doinganything about it.

Klein expertly compares disparate examples of shock and finds similarities,and this does make for very compelling reading, but in making the case thattextbook neoliberalism is being implemented around the world in someMachiavellian plan for global domination by the US she portrays a conspiracyalmost too cinematic, it is a mistake that many historians make when seekingout similarities, they fail to see the errors, omissions, idiosyncrasies and caseby case differences. Anyone reading Tim Weiners Legacy of Ashes, a historyof the CIAs mistakes, might be forgiven for thinking that the USA is tooincompetent for anything as underhand as structural adjustment programmes.

The 1980s were the decade when the First World experienced neoliberalism,and when Klein turns her attention to Britain the first questions about hertheory crop up. There are some similarities between the violent neoliberalismof Pinochets Chile and the more democratic model practiced in ThatchersBritain, but to make serious comparisons between the two is to misunderstand

modern Britain in quite a clumsy manner (normally it is commentators likeMichael Moore who make such ill judged observations about Britain) and tobelittle the suffering of the Chileans.

The point that Klein only partly makes is that whilst Chile was indeed thelaboratory for the neoliberal experiment and the Chileans were subject to boththe shock and its after effects mass impoverishment, far milder remedies wereapplied to Britain. Privatisation was carried out in Britain at a slower pace, awelfare state was still largely in tact at the end of the Torys time in office in1997, trade union power had been curbed but at that point any comparisonwith Chile ends.

The shock that Thatcher used to further her neoliberal goals was, accordingto Klein, the Falklands War. This was a war, she argues, that neither side didmuch to avoid. This is true, but the fault lies here mainly with incompetentforeign office mandarins in Whitehall in the 1970s and mixed messages beinggiven to the Argentinians over the Falklands by both Heath and Callaghangovernments.

It was true that Thatcher did directly benefit from the war, her abysmal pollratings were revived by the victory and it gave her the mandate she needed toimpose neo liberalism on Britain from 1983 onwards, but to some extent shehad been originally voted to power in 1979 on a mandate of union reformanyway. Far from being the shock factor of the Falklands that opened the doorto radical right wing economics in Britain it was the Trotskyite shop floor


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stewards of the 1970s whos sole intention seems to have been to wreck theBritish economy.

If Neo Liberalism has been successful in Britain it has not succeeded in theway the most altruistic of its proponents had intended. It has resulted in adramatic reduction in the power of organised labour, a permanent shifting of

the political discourse to the right (so much so that in 2002 Peter Mandelson ofthe Labour Party famously said: we are all Thatcherites now.) However, therehas been a polarisation of wealth in the hands of a shrinking super elite, thegrowth of an disenfranchised underclass and a heavily taxed and shrinkingmiddle class. Anthropologist David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalismargues that all these failings have been necessary in a bid to restore thepower and privilege of elites following four decades of retreat.

The problem with all of this is that it is extremely expensive. The overall taxburden under Thatcher went up, as income tax fell, the shortfall in statespending was taken up by borrowing and the ever growing deficit had to bepaid for by stealth taxes which are for the most part regressive and fall on thepoor hardest. The aspirant working classes, bribed by council house saleswere happy to vote Thatcher a third term in 1987 and weather the rise in VATand stamp duty. Thatcher also believed a revolution in government could bebrought about and a reduction in the size of the state achieved. The stateactually grew in the 1980s, Britains centralising tendencies, established beforethe Second World War and flourishing thereafter, continued to expand due tothe PMs ever more personalised style of government, and a large welfare,security and judicial system was needed to deal with the fallout from economicshock. The fact that Britain faces crippling deficits today and has a public

sector larger than the private would tend to suggest that Thatcherismsucceeded only in its initial mission, to hamstring the unions.

One aspect of neo liberalism not touched on in the Shock Doctrine, are thecountries that have adopted the creed without the need for shock. NewZealand, Australia and Sweden are three notable examples, all socialdemocracies for much of the post war era, all now to some extent free marketeconomies. The story of their less violent adaptation to neo liberalism is yet tobe written. In all three instances, it would be difficult to pin the advent of thefree market on CIA dirty tricks either, in fact, the simple truth about neoliberalism in the first world and the third is that irrespective of whether or not

shock is used to introduce it, its main appeal to economists and ideologues isits usefulness for reducing the power of labour.

In our own times vulnerable societies such as Pakistan and Haiti, both in 2010,have been exploited economically following natural disasters. The IMF and theWorld Bank in their rescue efforts have effectively removed economic policyfrom the purview of democratically elected officials and structural adjustmentprogrammes have been introduced. Klein tells similar tales of the ruination ofpost tsunami Sri Lankan fishermen, who saw their villages swept away andinstead of being rebuilt, simply replaced with hotels for wealthy tourists.

We might well be living in post-shock times, nothing in Kleins writing can reallyexplain the current state of affairs in Britain, for example. A slashing of statespending, based around the claim that it will reduce sovereign debt (in reality it


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will stop the level of debt rising so dramatically, not reduce it) more radical thananything Thatcher was able to get away with, has been tabled by DavidCamerons Government.

With comparatively little protest, the most drastic neo liberal package ever tobe visited on the UK has been accepted by the public. This (almost) quiet

acquiescence demonstrates the real power of the ideology, its ability toinfiltrate every level of social, psychological and cultural space until marketdogma and Victorian social ideas are accepted as common sense. This is thereal victory of neo liberalism.

The real value of this book lies in its scholarship. As with any writer whomakes bold claims, powerful evidence is also needed to give any reader adegree of faith in the argument. Kleins extensive end notes and bibliography,justifying every point is consistent with the best radical journalism today fromthe likes of John Pilger, Arundhati Roy, Robert Fisk and Kleins clearinspiration, Noam Chomsky.


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Civilsation and Discontent:Niall Ferguson, Tony Judt andthe Crisis of the West

Nick Shepley

Last October (2011) a furious row broke out between conservative historianNiall Ferguson and writer Pankaj Mishra, who reviewed Ferguson's latest bookCivilisation: The West and the Rest in the London Review of Books. Mishrawrote a lengthy and critical essay about the book, prompting threats of libelaction from Ferguson.Mishra claimed that Ferguson's argument required: "...sustained and complexanalysis, not one hell-bent on establishing that the West was, and is, best." [1]The review was designed to be provocative, Mishra, a writer who focuses onthe complex and often contradictory relationships between India and the West(having in recent years written the foreword to new editions of Kipling's Kimand E.M. Forster's A Passage To India) was given the task of critiquing theforemost proponent of empire itself.The results were predictable, Mishra, while acknowledging Ferguson'simpressive scholarship, accused him of dismissing evidence that didn't fit histhesis out of hand.The Ferguson argument, which questions how and why Europe and thenAmerica have had such a long period of wealth and power, and whether thisperiod is now at an end taps deeply into a growing body of thought about thestate of Western society, and its ability to project power globally. Popular titlesin recent years such as False Dawn and Black Mass by John Gray, Why theWest Rules, For Now by Ian Morris and an entire industry of US non

academic, quasi historical punditry, questioning America's relative declinehave filled bookshops and the Internet.The world economic crisis has given these inquiries a renewed sense ofurgency, as the beneficiary of the West's ills, China and the other BRICcountries begin to demonstrate their newfound prosperity, and old certaintiesabout Europe and America's place in the world become less of a given.At the same time, long term perceived flaws and weaknesses in the way theeconomy of the Western World operates and the way wealth is distributedhave also come under scrutiny, neoliberalism, the economic orthodoxyadopted in Europe and America since the 1970s has come underunprecedented criticism since the crisis of 2008, and in a number of landmark

texts, the scale of social damage caused by it has been examined.In 2009 The Spirit Level, a statistics led inquiry into the corrosive effect oninequality, written by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett received critical


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acclaim and was required reading by the leaders of Britain's three mainpolitical parties. It was followed in 2010 by Tony Judt's penultimate book, IllFares the Land: A Treatise On Our Current Discontents, which covered similarterritory to the Spirit Level, but from the perspective of a historian, not a socialscientist.In this essay I will examine the two texts, Ferguson's Civilization and Ill Fares

the Land by the late Judt, both are not so much conventional histories buttreatises on the causes of economic and social crises in the West. Both havebeen written largely in response to the world economic crisis and both bookshave one similar theme, that values that made the Western world 'great' havebeen abandoned and that in order for the West to move forward, these valuesmust be reinvigorated.Here is where the similarities end. Ferguson examines six key advantages thatthe west had, labeling them 'killer apps', property rights, competition, science,medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. He argues that it wasthese practices and innovations that enabled the West to have half a millenniaof global hegemony, one which he believes is now coming to an end.Ferguson believes that it is the abandonment of the 'killer apps' that madeBritain the dominant global power in the 19th Century and America the 20thCentury hegemon, that are leading inexorably to Western decline.[2]Judt, writing shortly before his death in 2010, laments the loss of a socialdemocratic golden age, one which existed from the end of the Second WorldWar up to the mid 1970s in Europe and America.He is less concerned with the West's growing failure to exert itself abroad, andmore concerned about the collapse of society as he sees it as a result of theideological and social pressures of neoliberalism. Judt interprets the West'scomparative decline as the result of an abandonment of social democracy,

which is consistent with his liberal left wing views.In order to make keep this essay to a manageable size, I will just examineFerguson and Judt, though it goes without saying that there are other highprofile and popular historians who frequently foray into the realm of topicaldebate and proffer solutions to contemporary problems. I have specificallychosen these two writers because they represent the poles of conservativeand liberal politics, but even so, their proposed solutions to our presentproblems are remarkably similar.Ferguson introduces Civilisation with the assertion that, as the future ofWestern ascendency looks increasingly doubtful, that the most interesting

question a historian can ask is how and why it came about in the first place,and also, based on the answers that arise, what predictions might be madeabout the future. [3]In starting from this less than optimistic position, Ferguson seems to havereached the end of a decade long journey of inquiries into the rise of theWestern World. In 2003 he wrote Empire, a history of Britain's imperial pastand an explicit defence of the benefits of British Imperialism. In the concludingchapter, he laid the groundwork for his next examination of empire, Colossus,by arguing that American Empire, and the benefits of civilisation that itconferred onto its subjects, had now replaced that of Britain.When he wrote Colossus in 2004, a tone of pessimism had entered his writing,which had not been detectable in Empire, and Ferguson shifted his emphasisfrom simply conveying a historical narrative (albeit from a specific ideologicalperspective) to being critical of US policymakers.


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Colossus was an examination of American Empire, but one which concludedthat the abandonment of thrift and the Protestant work ethic at home,combined with a weak and vacillating post Cold War foreign policy, had seenAmerica substantially weakened[4]. As with Civilisation, however, Fergusonbelieved in Colossus that he was delivering a timely wake up call and animpassioned 'call to arms' to rouse Western Civilisation from it's slumbers and

prepare to face the menace competition from the non Western World.Ferguson's role as an advocate of Neo-conservatism should be examinedhere. In an interview with the Guardian Newspaper last year he rejected thetitle of 'right wing' claiming it was an invention of the left, but clear positionedhimself as the antithesis of Judt in terms of ideology.He said: "Ask me not are you rightwing, but ask me are you a committedbeliever in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment? Then, yeah, ifbeing rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the Wealth ofNations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments, then I'm rightwing. If beingrightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity,then I'm rightwing. If you think that it's rightwing to say that the welfare statehas trapped 10-20% of the population of western Europe in a dependencyculture, an abyss of social failure, then I'm rightwing."[5]Throughout the past decade, Ferguson has used his position as a high profileTV historian and celebrity academic to argue the case for US foreign policyunder George W. Bush. In another interview with the Guardian, Fergusonreiterated the point that in general, he had approved of the Iraq War, but felt ithad been mishandled due to a manpower shortage.He said: "The problem I constantly wrote about then was that if you invade andoverthrow the bad guy, hold elections and then piss off, it doesn't work."[6] Hissolution, put forward in Colossus, to the lack of manpower that the US Army

faces is the conscription of convicts, the unemployed and illegal immigrants.As with Civilisation, Ferguson here is also reaching back into the past to findsolutions that existed in the heyday of European hegemony and trying to applythem to contemporary problems.He imagines that America can find troops to fight huge campaigns (the onewhich he thought should have been fought in Iraq, the occupation of the entirecountry) in the same way that Britain, with it's traditionally small standing army,found enough men to fight Napoleon and have a large colonial army.That Ferguson suggests these measures, ones which he must surely beaware no Western politician of bureaucrat would ever entertain, does raisequestions about his intentions as a writer. Most contemporary commentators

agree that the quality of his scholarship is beyond rebuke, but the fact thatFerguson has become his own brand name, with books, TV. shows and DVDsales making him exceedingly wealthy casts some doubt over the sincerity ofhis conclusions. Some of his more provocative and controversial statementsmay well be born of an urge to live up to a well established caricature, that ofprofessional contrarian and now TV pundit.In Civilisation, the indication as to how the economic crisis has affected hisarguments can be seen in his examination of other competing cultures,particularly Chinese and Islamic, his work articulates a set of anxieties that arebeing felt across the West in its supposed time of decline.Ferguson notes that now that Protestantism has taken hold in China, that sotoo has the industriousness of the Protestant work ethic.He writes: "The rise of the spirit of capitalism in China is a story everyoneknows. But what about the rise of the Protestant ethic? According to separate


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surveys by China Partner and East China Normal University in Shanghai,there are now around 40 million Protestant Christians in China, compared withbarely half a million in 1949." [7]A possible inference that can be drawn from the comparison between Chinesecapitalism and Chinese Protestantism, is that the West's economic decline andher growing secularism are directly related. Ferguson, whilst articulating

anxieties also appears to be shaking his head ruefully at the West, remindingus that we only have ourselves to blame.Ferguson's belief about the rise of Western hegemony, and about theexpansion of empires that accompanied it, is that on balance, the westernimperial project was beneficial, and as with the example of America and Iraq,most of the tragedies and atrocities of imperialism were the result ofincompetence rather than malice.When discussing the Treaty of Versailles at the Hay Festival with EricHobsbawm in 2009, Ferguson described Hitler, Stalin and Mao as the three'great evil men' of the 20th Century, and the contrast is telling. Evil empiresexist outside the Atlantic world, well meaning, if sometimes fallible empiresexist within it.What seems to have changed in Ferguson's writing as a result of the worldeconomic crisis is not a dimming of his enthusiasm for Western civilisation andits perceived merits, but a sense that its days might be up, and that the failureto uphold values that made the West great are to blame.Like Judt, as we shall see, Ferguson proposes a number of ideas that might'save the day'. Firstly, he questions the well established tradition in academicscholarship of charting the 'rise and fall' of civilisations. Oswald Spengler,Arnold Toynbee and more recently Jared Diamond have all created modelsthat chart the lifespan of civilisation, all of which seem to have their inspiration

in Edward Gibbons Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. [8]Ferguson argues that even though the reasons for the rise of empires can beclearly mapped, the causes of their decline are highly unpredictable, and it isdoubtful that the idea of 'rise and fall' can be made to fit a simplistic historicalnarrative of 'inevitability'. Ferguson argues that there is still everything to playfor, but that we must re-learn the strategies that have worked in the past.In the same chapter, however, he tempers his optimism by saying: "Thefinancial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 should therefore beunderstood as an accelerator of an already well-established trend of relativeWestern decline."[9]Here the economic crisis is tied into a longer historical process, one caused,

as Ferguson argues, not just by a Western disregard for innovation, thrift andeffort, but by the non-Western adoption of these values. However, in the nextparagraph, Ferguson argues that the Chinese saved their economy by doingsomething decidedly un-Western after all.He says: "This was very nearly a Great Depression. The reasons it has beenjust a Slight Depression are threefold. First, Chinas huge expansion of banklending, which mitigated the effect of slumping exports to the West."[10]What he means by this is that the Chinese Government directed state ownedand private banks to intervene directly in the economy and inject huge sums ofcapital into subsidising manufacturers and other industries, hit by a collapse inorders from the West. Britain, America and other European countries chose todirectly subsidise their banks to keep the banking system from collapsing, andboth acts were a curious mis-reading of Ferguson's third Killer App, that ofPrivate Property. Ferguson nowhere argues that a distinct Western advantage


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is the willingness of governments to subsidise and rescue private industry andfinance that has found itself in trouble.It is arguable that Western governments have in fact subsidised and protectedmany of their major industries for centuries, but it is 'Killer Apps' such as these,which might be perceived by Ferguson's readers as 'cheating', that are left outof the historical narrative.

In his book on the economic crisis First as Tragedy, then as Farce, SlavojZizek illustrates how Western state intervention in the commodities marketshave given the First World a critical advantage over the Third.He writes: A couple of years ago a CNN report on Mali described the realityof the international free market. The two pillars of the Mali economy arecotton in the south and cattle in the north, and both are in trouble because ofthe way Western powers violate the very rules they try to impose onimpoverished third world nations. Mali produces cotton of top quality but theproblem is that the financial support that the US government gives to its owncotton farmers amounts to more than the entire state budget of Mali, so it is nosurprise that they cant compete. In the north the culprit is the EuropeanUnion: Malian beef cannot compete with the heavily subsidised European milkand beef. The EU subsidises every single cow with around 500 euros per year more than the per capita GDP in Mali. As the Malian minister for theeconomy puts it: we dont need your help or advice or lectures about thebeneficial effects of abolishing excessive state regulation, please just stick toyour own rules about the free market and our troubles will basically beover.[11]In a final thought, Ferguson states that the West is currently its own worstenemy: "Maybe the real threat is posed not by the rise of China, Islam or CO2emissions, but by our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our

ancestors."[12]He adds that the last great threat to Western civilisation, Nazism, was aproduct of the corruption of the West: "In 1938 those barbaric and atavisticforces were abroad, above all in Germany. Yet, as we have seen, they were asmuch products of Western civilization as the values of freedom and lawfulgovernment that Churchill held dear. Today, as then, the biggest threat toWestern civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our ownpusillanimity and by the historical ignorance that feeds it."[13]Ferguson therefore treats the world economic crisis as the West's perhapsfinal wake up call, a challenge to us all to recapture values that we havefoolishly abandoned.

Now I will turn to Judt's essay, which like Ferguson's is a criticism of Westernvalues that have culminated in crisis, but also which have featured as part ofan overall long term trend.In order to understand Ill Fares the Land, it needs to be seen in its propercontext, alongside Judt's other writing. By examining a wider body of his workit becomes possible to see how the world economic crisis has affected hiswriting. Ill Fares the Land was originally an essay published in the New YorkReview of Books, a magazine that Judt has contributed to frequently overhearthe past two decades. In his anthology of essays from the New York Review,Reappraisals, Judt raises concerns that are echoed in Ill Fares the Land.The first of these is a phenomenon also identified by Eric Hobsbawm in TheAge of Extremes, which is the Western World's appetite for dispensing with itspast. [14]


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"Not only did we fail to learn very much from the past...But we have becomestridently insistent-in our economic calculations, our political practices, ourinternational strategies, even our educational priorities- that the past hasnothing of interest to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world: its risks andopportunities are without precedent."[15]The extent of the world economic crisis was beginning to be comprehended

when these words (in the introduction) were written, some time in early 2008,but the essays in the book to which the introduction refers were all written priorto 2007. This makes a comparison between Reappraisals and Ill Fares theLand is useful, in judging the impact on Judt's writing as a public intellectual.Throughout Reappraisals he is concerned with themes such as memory, therole and the responsibility of the intellectual and the uses and abuses of thepast.Ill Fares the Land is far more focused on one central thesis, and whilst theworld economic crisis is chief in guiding Judt's thoughts towards anexamination of the social crises neoliberalism appears to have caused in theWest, the fact that Judt had months to live also heavily influences the text.The book itself is short in comparison to most of his work, a mere 232 pages,and in it he attempts to convoy the culmination of a career's writing in politicaland intellectual history. He starts by continuing with the theme of forgetting, butapproaches the West's amnesia from his central thesis, that out abandonmentof social democracy has been a disaster."We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder thatunregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall preyto its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue...And yet we seemto be able to conceive of alternatives. This too is something new." [16]It would be easy to assume that Judt's writing about historical amnesia prior to

the crash, and his notion that we seem incapable of conceive of alternativesare really a truncated form of the same idea, but on closer inspection they areworlds apart.In Reappraisals he writes about the hubris of a self confident culture, one thatwas fuelled by an enormous credit and housing bubble. It is this arrogance, heclaims, that lead to a willful forgetting of the 20th Century and a sense ofahistorical detachment from the past.The reasons for the present inability to conceive of alternatives have little to dowith confidence, Judt writes in Ill Fares The Land, but because both the leftand the right have manifestly failed. Instead of creating an arrogant selfassured generation, Judt believes the current wave of young people living

through the crisis is beset by anxiety.He goes on throughout the course of the chapter 'The World We Have Lost' toexplain the failure of Left and Right, arguing in both instances that theabandonment of the most basic ideas of collectivism and mutuality in the westhas bankrupted both parties.The ideas contained within Ill Fares the Land are not particularly new, theyclosely resemble the ideas of the new left in the 1950s and 1960s, which werecritical of the excesses of free market capitalism, but unlike the previousgeneration of the 1930s, did not look to the Soviet Union for answers.Following the suppression of the Budapest uprising in 1956, Westernenthusiasm for the USSR all but vanished.The opening paragraph of Ill Fares the Land is strikingly reminiscent of ErichFromm's 1955 treatise on the ills of modern America 'The Sane Society'.


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Judt writes: "Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. Forthirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest:indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense ofcollective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they areworth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is itfair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better

world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easyanswers. We must learn once again to pose them." [17]Nearly sixty years beforehand, Fromm had argued for a humanistic anddemocratic socialism, whereas Judt, with only a slight difference in emphasis,argues for a rediscovery of the values of Social Democracy.The idea that virtue has come from the pursuit of material self interest, andthat self centred, acquisitive materialism has corroded the institutions that bindsociety together is a core theme within the book. The most serious damagethat has been done, argues Judt, is the ruination of trust within westernsocieties, this, he points out, is a paradoxical and unintended side effect ofunconstrained market forces, because without trust, capitalism itself founders.Fromm, in the Sane Society made a similar point, arguing that the spirituallycorrosive effect that capitalism itself had on societies was that of alienation.Fromm was less interested in the decline of trust, writing, as he was, in theafterglow of Roosevelt's New Deal (a form of social democracy that Judtargues, is very conducive to societal trust), but believed that mass productiondivorced individuals from meaning in their labours and subsequently in theirlives, creating the paradox of emotional depression in a time of materialabundance. It was on this basis that he questioned society's sanity.Judt's question is slightly less focused on the sanity of the West, more on itsquiet apathy, like Ferguson he marshals his argument as a 'call to arms' or at

least a wake up call, claiming that the economic crisis has made itconsiderably easier to question a previously unchallengeable economicorthodoxy.He says: "The Washington doctrine was everywhere greeted by ideologicalcheerleaders: from the profiteers of the Irish miracle (the property-bubbleboom of the Celtic Tiger) to the doctrinaire ultra-capitalists of formerCommunist Europe. Even old Europeans were swept up in the wake. TheEUs free- market project (the so-called Lisbon agenda); the enthusiasticprivatisation plans of the French and German governments: all bore witness towhat its French critics described as the new pense unique. Today there hasbeen a partial awakening. To avert national bankruptcies and wholesale

banking collapse, governments and central bankers have performedremarkable policy reversals, liberally dispersing public money in pursuit ofeconomic stability and taking failed companies into public control without asecond thought. A striking number of free-market economists, worshipers atthe feet of Milton Friedman and his Chicago colleagues, have lined up to donsackcloth and ashes and swear allegiance to the memory of John MaynardKeynes." [18]He adds that this alone does not constitute the solution to our ills, there is noreal abandonment of an economic orthodoxy that has seen Western societiesbecome mores economically polarised than at any time since the 1930s,Keynesian demand side economics is but a tactical retreat. He argues thateven if it were wholeheartedly adopted in full it would still not address the hugemoral deficit decades of neoliberalism has bequeathed to the West.


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Judt, like Ferguson, articulates the values that in his opinion, we have foolishlyabandoned.He says: "To understand the depths to which we have fallen, we must firstappreciate the scale of the changes that have overtaken us. From the latenineteenth century until the 1970s, the advanced societies of the West were allbecoming less unequal. Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies

for the poor, the provision of social services, and guarantees against acutemisfortune, modern democracies were shedding extremes of wealth andpoverty." [19]He adds: "Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away. To be sure,we varies with country. The greatest extremes of private privilege and publicindifference have resurfaced in the US and the UK: epicentres of enthusiasmfor deregulated market capitalism." [20]Judt's penultimate chapter in the book is quite knowingly titled 'What is to bedone?' echoing the title of Lenin's revolutionary manifesto of 1903, where heset forward clear suggestions about how to overthrow Russia's ancien regime.Unlike Lenin, who's prescriptions were divisive enough to split the RussianSocial Democratic Party in to the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Judt believesthat a new flowering of democratic dissent within civil society is urgentlyneeded and that official economic and political orthodoxies must bechallengedHe says: "Not many 'lay' people are likely to challenge the Chancellor of theExchequer, the Secretary of the Treasury or their expert advisors in suchmatters. Were they to do so they would be told, much as a medieval priestmight have advised his flock-that these are questions with which they do notneed to concern themselves. The liturgy must be chanted in obscure tongue,accessible only to the initiated. For everyone else, faith will suffice. But faith

has not sufficed, the emperors of economic policy in Britain and the US, not tomention their acolytes and admirers everywhere from Tallinn to Tblisi arenaked...we need to relearn how to criticise those who govern us." (20)Judt is as critical with the failings of the left as he is with the weaknesses ofright wing economics."The left has failed to respond effectively to the financial crisis of 2008-andmore generally to the shift away from the state and towards the market overthe past three decades. Shorn of a story to tell, social democrats and theirliberal and democratic fellows have been on the defensive for a generation,apologising for their own policies and altogether unconvincing when it comesto criticising those of their opponents."[21]

Judt's prescriptions for change are in some ways less clearly articulated thanhis analysis of the problems facing the West, he argues that the current antistatist discourse that is so strong in America, and to a lesser extent in Britain,is folly, as it is the state that has intervened to save the financial system. Healso argues that as the state will be with us for a long time to come, that weshould find ways to make it work for us instead of attacking it.What kind of state we should aspire to create in the future is unclear, andperhaps Judt, as with Ferguson, was hoping to commence a debate not writea comprehensive manifesto.Judt's analysis of the current crisis sees the financial crash of 2008 in thecontext of three decades where social democratic values were abandoned,and he argues that without social democracy, capitalism itself will cease toeffectively function.


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These two historians are remarkably different in world view but are fromrelatively similar backgrounds. Both are British academics who crossed theAtlantic to live and work in academia in the USA, perhaps experience of lifeand research on both sides of the Atlantic has given them a morecomprehensive view of 'the West' in general.In both instances, the world financial crisis has been used by Ferguson and

Judt as the prism through which to observe the west, and in both instances,from differing perspectives, the West has been found wanting.It seems increasingly the case that the world economic crisis would beperhaps more appropriately titled the Western World crisis, as China, Indiaand Russia's economies, along with South Korea, Japan and Germany (wholimited the amount of neoliberal orthodoxy she adopted) have all seeneconomic growth throughout the last four years. It seems hardly surprising inthat context that voices on both the left and right are raising serious questionsabout the best way to resolve these crises.As mentioned earlier on in this essay, the discourse of decline is notuncommon in western historiography. In his intellectual history of the inter waryears, Richard Overy dedicates the first chapter to 'Cassandras andJeremiahs', citing Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee as the leadinghistorians of western decline in the immediate post First World War era[22]. Itdoes not take a great leap of imagination to conclude that the destructivenessof the war had a profound effect on the ability of historians or intellectuals toconceive of a future, one only needs to examine Freud's Civilisation and itsDiscontents to see that a profound anxiety about the future viability ofcivilisation had entered into popular thought.In the case of Ferguson and Judt, the overall sense of despair and inevitabilityis not quite as acute, though both use their positions as reputed interpreters of

the past in order to have a contribution to, as EH Carr puts it, the ' unendingdialogue between past and present.'The two historians do not see an end to Western civilisation yet, though bothseem to agree that unless shared values that we have discarded arerediscovered and reinterpreted by today's generation, then a continuation inthe West's comparative decline, with all that might entail will continueunabated. The two writers, as historians and public intellectuals have beenaffected by the economic crisis in as much as it has given both of them ahistorically unique opportunity to demonstrate the nature, as they see it, of theWestern World's contemporary ills, and to suggest that the remedies do not lieahead, in some imagined future, but are in our collective past, a place that

historians instinctively visit for answers.


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[1] P Mishra, 'Watch That Man', London Review of Books, 3 (Nov 2011), 10-12.[2] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P32-34[3] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 1[4] Niall Ferguson, Colossus (New York, 2004) P23-26

[5] D Aitkenhead, 'Niall Ferguson: 'The left love being provoked by me ... theythink I'm a reactionary imperialist scumbag' G2 Guardian (11th April 2011)[6] W Skidelsky, 'Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerablefreedom is' The Observer, (Sunday 20 February 2011)[7] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 32[8] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P368-374[9] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 340[10] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 340[11] Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then As Farce (London, 2010) P16[12] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 406[13] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 406[14] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (Oxford, 1995) P18[15] Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections On The Forgotten 20th Century (London2009) P2[16] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents(London, 2011) P2[17] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents(London, 2011) P1[18] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents(London, 2011) P6-7

[19] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents(London, 2011) P6-7[20] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents(London, 2011) P6-7[21]Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents(London, 2011) P178[22]Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London, 2009)Bibliography

BooksCarr, E.H, What is History? (London, 3rd Edition, 2002)Evans, Richard J, In Defence of History ( London,1997)Ferguson, Niall, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011).Ferguson, Niall, Empire (London, 2003)Ferguson, Niall, Colossus (New York, 2004)Fromm, Erich, The Sane Society (New York, 1955)Gray, John, Black Mass (London, 2008)Gray, John, False Dawn (London, 2003)Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes (Oxford, 1995)Judt, Tony, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents (London,2011)


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Judt, Tony, Reappraisals: Reflections On The Forgotten 20th Century (London2009)Overy, Richard, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London, 2009)Zizek, Slavoj, First as Tragedy, Then As Farce (London, 2010)Articles

Mishra, P,'Watch That Man', London Review of Books, 3 (Nov 2011), 10-12.Aitkenhead, D, 'Niall Ferguson: 'The left love being provoked by me ... theythink I'm a reactionary imperialist scumbag'G2 Guardian (11th April 2011)Skidelsky, W, 'Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerablefreedom is' The Observer, (Sunday 20 February 2011)


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The Collapse Of The Romanov

RegimeNick Shepley

In order to make sense of the collapse of the Romanov regime in February1917, its important to take a historically long view of the century that precededit. The journey from 1815 to 1917 was littered with opportunities to prevent thefinal crises of Czardom.We have to step back into the 19th Century to examine why Russia, unlike therest of Western Europe failed to industrialise. It was the last Czar, Nicholas IIs

contention that most of Russias contemporary problems could actually beattributed to her greatest westerniser greatest moderniser, Peter the Great.Nicholas II disliked St Petersburg, Peters modern European city, modelled onthe Neo-Classicist architecture that was prevalent in Paris, Berlin, Vienna andMadrid. This architecture was steeped in European thinking, in theRenaissance and the Enlightenment, in scientific revolutions, radical newthought on the scope and the role of government. These new ideas questionedthe nature of the individual and his or her potential, and worst of all inNicholass view, it challenged religion as a superstition.The Enlightenment, a century and a half of radical new ideas that started withthe likes of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, swept away old superstitious

ideas about the nature of the universe and established much of modernscientific thinking. The implications of this on economics, politics philosophyand culture led in no small part to the French Revolution. The sweeping awaya bankrupt state in its entirety, by men armed with modern ideas had beenresolutely resisted by most Czars that followed Peter.Peter the Great, who ruled nearly a century before the revolution, had nointerest in diminishing his power with anything as naive as liberal democracy,but he did take on board one new innovation from the West; modernbureaucracy and a restructuring of the army on European lines. Peter died justbefore the dawn of the 18th Century, but lived through a time where in Europenations like England and Holland were becoming major maritime powers,establishing financial innovations such a national debts in order to punch wellabove their weight on a global level. Christopher Wren remodelled London asa modern planned stone built city, using the latest scientific architecturalinnovations and in the aftermath of the 30 years war the continent was awashwith state of the art military know how. Peter was the first Czar to set foot outof Muscovy and saw the new Europe with his own eyes and was instantlytaken with it, he knew where the future lay.It was Nicholas IIs contention that when Peter the Great decided to create amodern civil service, he created an almost blasphemous barrier between thedivinely appointed Czar and the ordinary Russians who were in Nicholass

eyes the children of the Czar. What Peter established was an new andoriginal, if schismatic direction in Russian society, known loosely as thePetrine Tradition, it was western looking, modern and assured of the notion


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that Europe held the answers. During Peters reign a steady stream of foreignexperts in all fields came to Russia to assist in the Czars designs.It is worth acknowledging at this point a few of the many shortcomings ofNicholas, and why exactly he was so adamant in his criticism. Nicholas IIembraced a wholly different tradition in Russian discourse, one thatcommentators have described as being Muscovite.

Nicholas, who ruled from 1894 to 1917 moved his royal court to Moscow,capital of the ancient medieval kingdom of Muscovy. In doing this hesymbolised to the rest of the country his desire to step back into the past.Instead of a uniform or a suit as befitted the modern 19th Century monarch,Nicholas sometimes indulged in dressing up as a medieval Boyar (RussianNoble of the elite rank), and the fact that this fantasy world existed inNicholass mind at the same time that enormously pressing modern problembore down upon him is no coincidence; as the pressure of modernityencroached on Nicholas, he retreated into a romanticised day dream world,imaging an idealised past.The rot that Nicholas believed had set in during Peters reign, and never reallyquite left, was the break in the sacred bond between the Czar and his people.Nicholas assumed a lot of peasant Russia, he believed the average peasantan inherently loyal and benign character, but based this assumption onvirtually no first hand experience. The only peasants he ever met were thosewho had been hand picked and groomed to be presentable to the Czar at thepalace Nicholas would have had very little to say to them anyway as hespoke far better French and English than he did Russian.The birth of the modern world was due to the confluence of two revolutions,the British industrial revolution and the French political and social revolution,and a period of radical social and political upheaval marked the last decades

of the 18th Century and the first decades of the 19th, it is a period of time thatMarxist Historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the period of the dual revolution . TheFrench revolution in particular sent shockwaves throughout Europe, fromSpain to Poland, from England to Greece; the very idea that instead of beingruled by an autocrat, the people had the chance to renegotiate the terms, andthat populations would simply not submit to be ruled any more if the basicrequirements for living were not being provided changed the relationshipbetween ruler and ruled across Europe for good.The vast economic output and the new wealth of Great Britain, signified by herhuge naval power and growing colonial acquisitions in Asia (and up until thelate 1770s America) demonstrated how mercantilism had captured global

markets in the name of the crown and the City of London.These dual revolutions would be vigorously resisted by Russia throughout the19th Century, but western ideas, in the form of Marxist Leninism wouldexplode in Russia at the Dawn of the 20th; the arguments that Karl Marx setforth in the Communist Manifesto and in Das Kapital were the product of themeeting of both revolutions.

In 1812 Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor Of France and ruler of most of Europelooked to Russia as his final and greatest conquest. Frances armies hadmarched the values of the revolution of 1789 across Europe over the previoustwo decades, destroying the Ancien Regime wherever they went.In 1796 Napoleon invaded and conquered Italy, then an appendage to theAustrian Empire. He unified the disparate and fragmented kingdoms and citystates into a united Kingdom of Italy, with himself as king, of course. He swept


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away the fragmented system of law and replaced it with the standardNapoleonic Code, giving a sense of uniformity and cohesion to the peninsula.To many the idea of Italian nationhood was born with Napoleon, which islargely why there was such a vigorous reaction to liberalism in Italy after thewar, Austria and the other powers at the Congress of Vienna crushed any hintof modern liberal democracy.

In 1812 Czar Alexander I had incurred the wrath of Bonaparte, he had brokenthe alliance he had made (under duress) with the French to join them in acrusade against Britain. In discussions between the Czar and the Emperor in1807 the idea of a joint quest against British India was mooted, and though thechances of it being even remotely successful were next to none, themotivation for Napoleon was c

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