The Last Great Game: USA Versus USSR: Events, Conjunctures, Structures 9781474290562, 9781474290586, 9781474290579

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The Last Great Game: USA Versus USSR

History and Politics in the 20th Century: Bloomsbury Academic Collections

Focusing on international relations, this set covers international relations throughout the 20th century and pays special attention to how international relations were strained, or strengthened, during times of upheaval and conflict, such as the Cold War, the Troubles or the post-Soviet struggles in Eastern Europe. All eight titles are facsimiles from our imprints The Athlone Press, Pinter and Continuum. The collection is available both in e-book and print versions. Titles in History and Politics in the 20th Century are available in the following subsets: International Relations in the 20th Century Europe in the 20th Century Conflict in the 20th Century Postcolonialism in the 20th Century Multidisciplinary Approaches Other titles available in International Relations include: Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourse of Politics by Simon Dalby European Values in International Relations edited by Vilho Harle History, the White House and the Kremlin: Statesmen as Historians edited by Michael Fry International Relations: A Handbook of Current Theory edited by Margot Light and A.J.R. Groom Revolution and Change in Central and Eastern Europe by Roger East and Jolyon Pontin Revolution and International Politics by Peter Calvert The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland by Brendan O'Leary and John McGarry

The Last Great Game: USA Versus USSR

Events, Conjunctures, Structures Paul Dukes

History and Politics in the 20th Century: International Relations BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC COLLECTIONS

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 1989 by Pinter Publishers This edition published by Bloomsbury Academic 2016 © Paul Dukes 2016 Paul Dukes has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-9056-2 ePDF: 978-1-4742-9057-9 Set: 978-1-4742-9295-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Series: Bloomsbury Academic Collections, ISSN 2051-0012

Printed and bound in Great Britain

THE LAST GREAT GAME

I

THE LAST GREAT GAME: USA VERSUS USSR EVENTS, CONJUNCTURES, STRUCTURES PAUL DUKES Professor of History, University of Aberdeen

Pinter Publishers, London in association with John Spiers

© 1989 Paul Dukes All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, by any other means without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Please direct all enquiries to the publishers. First published in Great Britain by Pinter Publishers Limited in association with John Spiers 25 Floral Street, London WC2E 9DS British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 86187 002 6 ISBN 0 86187 006 9 (pbk) First published 1989 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Billings & Sons Ltd, Worcester

Again to my Mother and Father

Contents Preface

xi

PART ONE: EVENTS 1. Introduction Cold War - Great Game: analogy and evolution Description of book' s argument

5 5 8

2. Events of the Cold War: Approaches Cold War interpretations: Western and Soviet Second World War: barbarization in the East Teuton and Slav in German historiography Second World War: global barbarization Second World War: world views of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin Cold War historiography: some developments

13 13 16 20 21

3. Events of the Cold War: Reactions Archibald MacLeish on freedom, 1952 AHA Presidential Addresses, 1948-9 US writing on Soviet and US history, 1947-50 Stalin, Zhdanov and Soviet writing, 1947-9 US-Soviet approaches to history, 1968-70 Braudel: event, conjuncture, structure, 1949Porshnev: the diachronic-synchronic approach, 1970-

31 31 34 35 39 43 51 53

23 26

PART TWO: CONJUNCTURES Chapter 4. The Great Conjuncture: Leninism versus Wilsonism Why Leninism and Wilsonism? vn

63 63

Vlll

Contents War and international relations, c. 1870-1905 Wilson and Lenin: early careers, intellectual backgrounds and activity Some features of the early contemporary world Lenin and Wilson on war and revolution Lenin and Wilson as 'great men' in history and precursors of Stalin and Roosevelt

85

5. Conjunctures in Transitions to Modernity and Contemporaneity Modernity and contemporaneity German modernisation: an exception in Europe? Early modern Europe, c. 1500-1660 US and Soviet exceptionalism The making of modern Europe: Russia and USA Revolutions: conjunctures and disjunctures

89 89 91 95 99 101 113

64 66 76 79

PART THREE STRUCTURES 6. American-Russian Aspects of the Structure of the First Great Game A geopolitical introduction Medieval components: church, society and family The 'discovery' of America and Russia Colonisation, cameralism and mercantilism Slavery and serfdom Economic divergence Montesquieu's views of size in Russia and North America Russian and US frontier cultures Forecasts of superpower, and early US attitudes to Russia The impact of the Crimean and American Civil Wars Early Russian attitudes towards the USA: Herzen and the future 7. Towards the Structure of the Last Great Game: USA versus USSR Political culture and historical sociology Reason and Enlightenment and the American Revolution Marx and Weber and the Russian Revolution Perceptions of continuity and change Subjectivity and objectivity

121 121 122 126 128 131 132 135 136 142 149 154

157 157 162 166 169 178

IX

Contents

8. Conclusion Concluding Summary US-Soviet discussion of Second World War and Cold War

185 185 188

Notes Further Reading Index

190 203 206

Preface Since this book takes a somewhat uncoventional approach to the US-Soviet relationship, some prefatory points of definition and explanation might be advisable: 1. The First Great Game was the imperial rivalry of the nineteenth century, especially between Britain and Russia in Central Asia. The Last Great Game is a twentieth-century variation on a comparable theme, the superpower rivalry between the USA and the USSR throughout the entire world. 2. Events, conjunctures and structures are different orders of time— short-term, middle-term and long-term—or levels of significance: surface, halfway and fundamental. The basic aim of the book is to argue for the necessity of the study of both superpowers together in the widest space-time dimensions. Such a task is way beyond the capabilities of one historian, possibly indeed of all historians put together. And so a further aim is to hint at the manner in which specialists in the humanities and social sciences might collaborate in a common endeavour. Colleagues should be assured that such an apparently arrogant step has in fact been taken with much hesitation and reconsideration: almost certainly, it would not have been begun at all if at least some of them had not given an encouraging reception to two earlier books tackling aspects of the same subject: The Emergence of the SuperPowers: A Short Comparative History of the USA and the USSR, published in 1970, and October and the World: Perspectives on the Russian Revolution, which followed in 1979.1 have attempted not to repeat what I wrote in those two books while making this one as self-contained as possible. XI

Xll

The Last Great Game

Another indispensable precondition for the completion of the present project has been my good fortune in finding friends kind enough to spend some of their valuable time in the scrutiny of earlier drafts. Walter LaFeber of Cornell University, whose work on the Cold War has seemed to me as near the truth of the matter as any not only increased my understanding of the US-Russian relations 1900-14 in a series of Callander Lectures at Aberdeen in March 1987 but also elaborated in conversation his already useful written comments and suggestions. Evan Mawdsley of Glasgow University drew on his experience of teaching a Special Subject on the Cold War and his more general knowledge of Russian and Soviet History to make me think again on a wide range of assertions. I have benefited from the advice and elucidation given by colleagues in the History and other departments at the University of Aberdeen, not forgetting those in the Queen Mother and King's Libraries. In particular, Jean Houbert of International Relations laid bare inadequacies in methodology and presentation which have now been rectified, I hope, as far as my powers of logic and understanding will allow. To these and other generous scholars I owe a deep debt of gratitude, as I do to John Spiers, who has given constant support since our first contact. Whatever merits the book may be said to possess are due largely to those mentioned above, and to those whose books and articles I have plundered to illustrate and develop its arguments. I have listed in the Notes the sources on which I have drawn, and provide a Further Reading Section. I should perhaps explain that the paucity of references to Soviet publications stems not from any lack of respect for them but rather from the fact that they would be inaccessible to most of the readers for whom the book is in the first instance intended. Of course, I accept full responsibility for the errors and misunderstandings that have remained throughout or crept in during several rewritings. Finally, as ever, I would like to acknowledge the support of family and friends, from the north of Scotland to the south of England and also to add my thanks to Owen Dudley Edwards of Edinburgh University for his suggestions and encouragement. King's College, Old Aberdeen 23 November 1988

Paul Dukes

PART ONE EVENTS

Part One: Events 22 June 1941 7 December 1941 28 November to 1 December 1943 4-11 February 1945 7 May 1945 26 June 1945 6 August 1945 14 August 1945 9 February 1946 5 March 1946 12 March 1947 5 June 1947 22 October 1947 30 March 1948 4 April 1949 23 May 1949 22 September 1949 30 September 1949 5 October 1949

German invasion of USSR—'Barbarossa' Japanese attack on USA—Pearl Harbor Teheran Conference Yalta Conference German surrender—VE Day UN Charter signed in San Francisco Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima Japanese surrender—VJ Day Stalin election speech Churchill 'Iron Curtain' speech Truman Doctrine speech Marshall Plan speech Announcement of Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) Berlin crisis begins North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) formed Formal Proclamation of the Federal Republic of Germany Western Announcement of Soviet A-Bomb Berlin Airlift ends Announcement of formation of Democratic Republic of Germany

3

1

Introduction The term 'Cold War' is not a new one. It was certainly used by a Spanish writer in the fourteenth century to describe the struggle between Christians and Moslems in the following manner: 'War that is very strong and very hot ends either with death or peace, whereas cold war neither brings peace nor gives honour to the one who makes it.'1 We can be fairly confident that the Greeks and Romans had a word for it, too. However, the global conflict that has arisen since the Second World War obviously possesses several distinctive features, the most important of which is the final nature of any Third World War arising from it. Any such conflict would be so strong and hot that it would be followed by general death and no peace. There is therefore at least a little honour owing to those who have prevented the present Cold War from escalating into all-out struggle. Among them, undoubtedly, are the historians and other analysts who have striven to uncover the origins of the Cold War in its various phases. Analogy with former wars, both hot and cold, from ancient times through medieval and modern to contemporary, has thrown light on our recent predicament and has helped us to understand it. However, analogy is not enough. For just as the understanding of the fourteenth-century conflict would require some discussion of the evolution of the Christian and Moslem religions from their early beginnings onwards, so it is necessary in analysis of the Cold War to look at the manner in which the major protagonists, the USA and the USSR, evolved before 1945. This book is aimed at a contribution to such a process through an examination of certain aspects of the roots of the great rivalry. It takes its title by analogy, but then goes on to develop an argument 5

6

Events

concerning modes of approach to pertinent aspects of historical evolution from the medieval period up to our own times. In other words, it is not about the Cold War but about the long-term US-Soviet relationship of which the Cold War forms a central part. And it considers the Cold War to be ever present, as long as the superpowers share the capacity for one million Hiroshimas, and more. The First Great Game was played in the nineteenth century by Britain against Russia. The principal venue was Afghanistan, which was atfirstviewed by both powers as a neutral buffer zone, but in the last quarter of the nineteenth century both adopted a variation of the 'forward' policy. This was an earlier version of what has become known more recently as pre-emptive advance, one side asserting its presence in order to forestall the encroachments of the other. Writing in the early 1920s, the British historian W. H. Dawson observed: It will always be a point of dispute how far the suspicion of Russian designs, which was diligently fostered by a powerful party in England through the' seventies, accentuated the very danger against which it was directed... Russia had, of course, just the same right to approach Afghanistan from the one side as Great Britain from the other. Dawson conceded that British alarmism might have prompted the deviousness of the Russian rival, but himself went on to add that 'Russian diplomacy was not as straightforward as it might have been'. Certainly there were at least some members of tsarist ruling circles who believed that the opportunity had arisen for Russia to win the struggle for imperial supremacy on the plains of India. General M. D. Skobelev worked out plans in 1876-7 for a 'forward policy' in which a small Russian force would ignite the combustible disaffection of the Empress of India's subjects. The likely consequence would be a 'general uprising in India' and 'the ruin of the British Empire', then 'a social revolution' back in Britain itself leading to the collapse of the metropolis. Apprehension concerning the consequences of a Russian advance was widespread, from London to Auckland. Equally, the Russians feared a threat to their vital interests, from the Baltic and Black Seas to the Pacific Ocean, and there were some British Officers who would have liked to make

Introduction

7

that threat active. If concentrated in Central Asia, then, the imperial confrontation was in a real enough sense global. The Last Great Game, which has begun since the Second World War, is more truly global, but also bears some of the other distinguishing marks of its predecessor. Both superpowers have their own version of a 'forward' policy to forestall each other, while even in these days of subtle electronic listening and monitoring devices, neither of them can be certain about its rival's intentions. Moreover, strategic considerations developed during the First Great Game are still looked upon as relevant today, even as they move from earth out into space. In particular, the science of geopolitics developed in the late nineteenth century by such individuals as Alfred T. Mahan and Halford J. Mackinder, and taken up by Imperial German and then by Nazi analysts, retains at least some of its old vigour. As we have already pointed out, Germany could not compete successfully either as late empire or early superpower, and the geopolitical inheritance passed from the British Empire to the USA and USSR. Already in 1884, Sir John Seeley had indicated the manner in which 'steam and electricity' were enabling continental states to make full use of their human and natural resources. He pointed out that 'Russia and the United States will surpass in power the states now called great as much as the great country-states of the sixteenth century surpassed Florence.' About sixty years later, as that prediction was nearing fulfilment, the US Military Staff reinforced it during the Second World War with the forecast that the conflict would come to an end with the USSR and USA as 'the only military powers of thefirstmagnitude', owing to a 'combination of geographical position and extent, and vast munitioning potential'. While 'both in an absolute sense and relative to the United States and Russia, the British Empire will emerge from the war having lost ground both economically and militarily', the two new rivals would unwittingly repeat the experience of the British Empire and tsarist Russia in Afghanistan and further afield from the point of view that 'the relative strength and geographical position of these two powers precluded the military defeat of one ... by the other.' To sum up so far, in his analysis of the nineteenth-century 'Great Game', David Gillard has written: The cold war between the communist and the non-communist worlds

8

Events

has given rise to comparable disputes. Were the communist powers responding defensively to a threat from the United States and Western Europe, or was it the other way round? In this case, the rivalry and mutual suspicion of the Russians and the British in the nineteenth century have been called upon to prove either the continuity of Russian expansionism, or else the dangerous absurdity of harbouring fears about it. As Gillard goes on to indicate, controversies persist not because some historians are more competent than others at drawing conclusions from the available evidence, but because as yet there is 'no consensus among them as to when a sequence of international events and the behaviour of the participants can be classified as aggressive, defensive, purposive, opportunistic and so on.' But in the end, he himself has no doubt that: 'Great Game' and 'Cold War' are simply different names for what is broadly the same immemorial phenomenon: therivalryresulting from the urge of powerful governments to reduce relatively weak states— especially those whose control by another powerful government might constitute a threat—to some form of dependence, ranging from mildly restrictive economic ties to outright annexation. Although the 'civilizing missions' of the nineteenth century differ from those of the twentieth, and other changes have occurred in the interim, Gillard nevertheless believes that the analogy between the 'Great Game' and the 'Cold War' can contribute to our wider understanding of some basic problems of international relations.2 Concurring with Gillard on this last observation to the point of including the Cold War in the Last Great Game, I disagree with him about the appropriateness of the applicability to both rivalries of the term 'imperialist'. The reasons for doing so stem largely from the radically changed nature of the 'civilizing missions' as defined by Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin, then modified by Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. V. Stalin, and also from the categorically different nature of the conflict that would ensue should the Cold War become hot. But the argument will need spelling out at some length, especially since, as already stated at the outset, analogy is not enough: an entire evolutionary process must be examined as well.

Introduction

9

To analyse aspects of this process is the basic purpose of this book. We will proceed in the following manner. In Chapter 2,1 will consider some approaches to the events of the Cold War, in two senses, chronological and historiographical. That is, I will make some observations about how the Second World War helped lead to the Cold War, and about how this passage has been perceived. Certainly, it is striking how the approach of Western historians to the Cold War has changed over the years in contrast to the much less varied treatment of the subject by their Soviet counterparts. The reasons for this disparity stem partly from the Second World War, which in the east of Europe was fought on a much larger scale and in a much more barbaric manner than in the west of the continent. A long and broad historical perspective would provide some of the explanation of this other gulf. Similarly, while the traumatic nature of the wartime experience influenced Soviet postwar historical interpretation, there would be deeper seated and wider ranging reasons for this interpretation as well as its Western equivalent. Chapter 2 will continue with some observations about how, as the Second World War came to an end, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were all in their own ways thinking about the settlement of the peace in a manner that was both historical and global, before some concluding remarks about how that settlement has caused problems in historiography. Chapter 3 examines certain reactions to the events of the Cold War, beginning with some of those of an imaginative writer, Archibald MacLeish, who feared that free enquiry might succumb to a restrictive conformity. A glance at some Presidential Addresses of the American Historical Association shows how MacLeish's fears were coming to be realized in the late 1940s. Even some of the best historians could not escape partisan interpretation. Under the influence of J. V. Stalin and A. A. Zhdanov, the Soviet predicament was much more forbidding. Academics of various kinds, including historians, found themselves in trouble for formulations deemed unorthodox. However, after the death of Stalin and particularly with the arrival of detente, possibilities arose for Soviet and American scholars each within their own cultural tradition to revise some of the views established at the height of the Cold War. The potential for rapprochement between them is examined against the background of the International Congress of Historical Sciences meeting in Moscow in August 1970. It became apparent that,

10

Events

along with the Soviet-American division, there was another, more traditional split between continental Europeans looking upon history as science, while their British and American colleagues considered it as art. While there was obviously a long way to go before rapprochement, the way forward had been demonstrated by a number of historians, reacting to the events of the Cold War when considering subjects far removed from them. The Frenchman Fernand Braudel working on the Mediterranean region in the sixteenth century, and the Russian Boris Porshnev studying the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century, both argued for a new approach from the chronological and geographical points of view. Could their kind of approach be adapted for an examination of the Cold War in particular and the rivalry between the USA and the USSR in general? Chapter 4 concentrates on two individuals, Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin, and on their ideologies. After a brief survey of the period in which they were born and brought up, there is an analytical description of their early careers, including some of their own publications, and then of some of the circumstances influencing their outlooks. It is pointed out that Wilson's intellectual heritage was primarily Anglo-Scottish, while Lenin's was continental European, especially German. Thus the American and Soviet leaders approached their comprehensive world views from different points of departure, although they were both subject to the impact of the First World War in the formulation of their mature ideologies. At the end of that great conflict, both of them were compelled by some of the consequences to make compromises with some of their fundamental assertions. Nevertheless, it is argued, Wilsonism after Versailles was to remain the basis of the USA's international outlook, while Leninism after the Russian Revolution, Civil War and Intervention was elevated to become the central set of principles for the Soviet Union at home and abroad. The chapter does not go on to investigate the manner in which the successors to Wilson and Lenin adapted their ideas to new evolving conditions, giving its full attention to what is called the Great Conjuncture, the confrontation of Wilsonism and Leninism and the sources from which it sprang. The setting for that great conjuncture is the subject of Chapter 5, which discusses conjunctures in transitions to modernity and contemporaneity, on the frontiers between which Wilsonism and

Introduction

11

Leninism were first formed. The chapter begins with a list and brief description of what are taken to be eight distinctive features of the contemporary world, which originated at the beginning of the twentieth century and has come to maturity since 1945. It then turns to the preceding phase of modernity, commencing with the problem of Germany, so central to the two world wars intimately connected to the emergence of contemporaneity. For example, how does the Third Reich created by Hitler relate to the Second created by Bismarck? There is some discussion of the extent to which the course of German history may be considered an exception to the course of history of Europe as a whole. It is followed by further discussion of the bases for normality and then of two further possible exceptions, the USA and the USSR, together with their colonial and tsarist predecessors. Then, after the itemization of eight features of modernity in rough parallel to the earlier listing of eight features of contemporaneity, there ensues a discussion of the manner in which the United States and imperial Russia acquired these modern features that had first been developed in Western Europe before the USA and USSR went on to play leading parts in the creation of contemporaneity. In conclusion, there is a brief consideration of the manner in which continuity in historical development is broken by one of the characteristics of 'normal' modernization, revolution. Chapter 6 is devoted to aspects of the American-Soviet relationship within the structure of the First Great Game of the modern period between Britain and pre-revolutionary Russia. In turn, attention is given to geopolitical, medieval and modern aspects of the subject, social, economic and cultural. The period dominated by the French Revolution and Napoleon witnessed the major appearance on the world stage by the Russian Empire and the USA together. At the end of 1790, the first substantial forecast of the later emergence of the superpowers was made by Baron Melchior von Grimm, at about the same time as the early emergence of the First (Anglo-Russian) Great Game, and of the cultural phenomenon known as Russophobia. Some early American attitudes, foreshadowing some later American attitudes towards the Soviet Union, are summarily described before rather closer attention is given to some strong views on this subject emanating from British and American clergymen at the time of the Crimean War. Then, against this background, there is a short consideration of American-Russian

12

Events

relations during the years of the American Civil War, on the eve of the climax of the First Great Game, and a final short passage on nineteenth-century Russian attitudes to the USA, especially those of Alexander Herzen. Emphasis is given to the impossibility of the full delineation of the structure of the contemporary Last Great Game through the description of the features bequeathed to it by the modern First Great Game. In Chapter 7 a mode of interpretation for the structure of the Last Great Game is investigated. The chapter begins with a description of certain important aspects in the evolution of intellectual enquiry during the transition to modernity, arguing that the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment brought important advances prefiguring some of the later breakthroughs made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Outstanding among those were the interpretations of Karl Marx and Max Weber. However, these were put forward before the transition to contemporaneity was completed. Although the emergence of America and Russia as superpowers was foreseen from the time of the American Revolution and the formation of the Russian Empire, nobody could discern clearly how it would take shape after the Russian Revolution and American entry into the First World War. While those attempting to analyse the relationship between the superpowers as it has manifested itself since the Second World War make varied use of the work of their predecessors, they are necessarily to a large extent on their own. Therefore collaboration between specialists in different disciplines (as well as in different fields within those disciplines) becomes all the more imperative. This needs to make full use of the concepts of structure and conjecture, even though the awesome nature of potential events appears overwhelming, thus reinforcing the customary preoccupation with the affairs of the present day. In other words, all four dimensions must be exploited to the full. Fruitful approaches which both meet these desiderata, especially 'political culture' and 'historical sociology', would be even more productive if combined with aspects of political economy and international relations. There is much to be said for taking up aspects of the Last Great Game in an imaginative fashion, literary and otherwise. Above all, there must be a full awareness of the dangers inherent in a compartmentalized approach considering one side from the other. The structure of the Last Great Game must be interpreted in a manner which recognizes a reciprocal relationship.

2

Events of the Cold War: Approaches Let us begin our task, then, with a glance at the manner in which interpretation of the Cold War has evolved on both sides of the relationship. In the West the first dominant reaction in the late 1940s has come to be known as the orthodox view. This consists basically of the belief that the Soviet Union under Stalin broke many agreements made during the Second World War and used as many opportunities as possible to realize expansionist ambitions. The USA and its allies responded to Soviet aggression rather than in any way provoking it or carrying out any aggression of their own. Major revisionist schools then emerged,firstfrom the right and then from the left. In the 1950s and early 1960s, conservative critics argued that Franklin D. Roosevelt and other wartime Western statesmen had trusted Stalin and his henchmen when their suspicions should have been aroused by earlier Soviet behaviour. The accusation of appeasement, first levelled against the men of Munich, was revived with new force: there could not now be peace with honour, and the conciliatory policies begun by Roosevelt had led to the advance of the Red tide not only in Europe but also in China. A more moderate group of conservative critics, the so-called 'realists', asserted that American governments had been motivated too much by moralistic and idealistic considerations and not enough by the world as it actually was and national interests as they should have been. They argued: (1) that the Soviet threat, rather than being driven by ideological dynamics, was opportunistic and sought traditional goals; (2) that the Soviet-American conflict was tragic, but an inevitable 13

14

Events

result of Soviet insecurity and suspicions that resulted in expansionism; and (3) that American policy-makers failed to recognize the limited nature of the Soviet threat and overreacted when they 'globalized' their efforts to contain communism.1 In the mid-1960s, a 'New Left' revisionism arose to give a negative verdict on the policies of Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman. There was no complete consensus, but nevertheless fairly widespread agreement: (1) that the United States' abrupt termination of the wartime alliance heightened Soviet fears of the west; (2) that the United States' aggressive postwar economic expansionism aimed at constructing a liberal, capitalist world further heightened Soviet fears of the west; (3) that because of (1) and (2) above, the United States bears the responsibility for the onset of the Cold War, as Stalin acted defensively in 1945 to achieve secure borders in the face of America's hostile policies; (4) that the containment policy erected during the Truman administration was aimed at stifling social and economic reform in Europe; and (5) that the United States' subsequent globalization of containment policies was essentially antirevolutionary and imperialistic.2 Truman was not as subject to personal attack from the left as Roosevelt had been from the right, but he and his advisers were nevertheless blamed for not taking as much action as they could have done to make relations between the two sides more harmonious. To that extent, the buck stopped on the desk of the president himself. Throughout the years of the Vietnam War, a passionate debate raged about the nature of the USA' s involvement in earlier conflicts, especially the Second World War and Cold War. The common ground of scholarly standards, and even of some measure of interpretative agreement, was largely abandoned. However, in spite of a resurgence of the Cold War from the end of the 1970s onwards, academic arguments largely resumed traditions of restraint and mutual respect, and the realist and New Left schools in particular realized more completely than before an area of agreement which had been called post-revisionist. John Lewis Gaddis

Events of the Cold War: Approaches

15

has suggested a convergence of view along the following lines: (1) 'Full attention to the use by the United States of economic instruments to achieve political ends.' (2) A tendency 'to stress the absence of any ideological blueprint for world revolution in Stalin's mind ... Stalin is now seen as a cagey but insecure opportunist.' (3) Confirmation 'that the government from time to time, did exaggerate external dangers for the purpose of achieving certain internal goals.' (4) Acceptance of the argument that 'there was in fact an American "empire"'.3 The extent of the consensus must not be exaggerated, and there remain groups of analysts or individuals among them who would not subscribe to these tenets of post-revisionism, or even admit its existence, looking upon it as nothing more than 'orthodoxy plus archives'. Meanwhile, the framework for discussion has been widened through attention on previously neglected aspects; for example, there are a number of British historians who have insisted that the Cold War was more than a confrontation between the USA and the USSR, and that the United Kingdom in particular played a part of no small importance in the unfolding of the great drama. True, they sometimes run the risk of replacing the Americanocentrism of some of their colleagues with an Anglocentrism of their own.4 Looking in the other landward direction, we cross the enormous ideological gulf to examine the interpretation of the Cold War given by Soviet analysts. This gulf, it must be said at the outset, does not consist simply of a Marxist versus non-Marxist world outlook but possesses also elements which may in the broadest sense be called nationalist or traditional. Undoubtedly, the American variation from orthodoxy to post-revisionism has not been accompanied by a Soviet counterpart. If we take as an indicator the Englishlanguage, Moscow-based journal International Affairs, as recently as November 1984, P. Sevostyanov discussed 'Soviet Diplomacy during the Great Patriotic War' with emphasis on the difference in aims between the Soviet government and the Western Allies:

Events

16

The world'sfirstsocialist state pursued liberatory, just and progressive goals, while the imperialist powers sought, in the long run, a new redivision of the world through further enslavement of the peoples and establishment of their world dominance. He concluded: From the early postwar years the USA and Britain started pushing the world towards an unprecedented race in nuclear weapons, unleashed a cold war and now—after a short period of detente—are organizing a 'crusade' against socialism. In the present international situation Soviet diplomacy has to conduct a complex struggle in many areas for the preservation and strengthening of peace, for ensuring the security of all peoples and for preventing a new world war. And in this it can rely on the priceless experience of Soviet diplomacy of the war years that made a considerable contribution to the great victory over the enemy of mankind—German fascism. Of course, with the arrival of Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika in 1985, a window of opportunity was opened for a new look at international relations during and since the Second World War. There were indeed some signs of a shift of position in the pages of International Affairs. For example, in a review article in May 1985 of a collection of documents and materials on Soviet-American relations during the 'Great Patriotic War', A. Obukhov noted the emphasis that the new General Secretary gave to this area of foreign policy before asserting: 'The Soviet Union wants good relations with the USA, and the experience of history—including the experience of Soviet-American cooperation during the war with fascism shows that these relations can and must be good.' But hopes that openness and reconstruction could be carried into Soviet discussion of the Cold War had to be balanced against the persistence of suspicions and preconceptions born of experiences, some recent, some age-old.5 And so, we must reiterate the evident difficulty of a convergence between the Western post-revisionist view of the origins of the Cold War and its Soviet counterpart. We must now go back beyond 1945 to seek at least some of the roots of the later conflict in misunderstandings arising from its predecessor, the Second World War. The most important of these are normally associated with Teheran and the Yalta Conferences of February 1945, which we

Events of the Cold War: Approaches

17

must certainly discuss. But we must also take at least a glance at other aspects of the general conduct of the war. So, leaving aside, at least for the moment, the vexed question of how the war was brought to an end, let us turn to the manner in which it was actually fought. One measure of this is the number of casualties sustained by the major belligerents. None of them had an easy war, but by the measure of mortality the USA had the least difficult one: about 300,000 killed in the armed forces and virtually no civilians. In mounting order of horror, Britain lost about 300,000 fighting personnel, but also up to 100,000 civilians and merchant seamen. France lost 200,000 soldiers, but also 400,000 others either fighting for the Resistance, killed in retaliation or dying in deportation camps. Over a million Japanese were killed in battle, about 600,000 civilians by air raids. Nearly the same number of German civilians met their death in a similar manner, while 4-5 million people were killed in battle or died in captivity, over 3 million of them on the Eastern Front. Up to 13 million, possibly even more, succumbed in China, more from starvation and disease than actual warfare. The Soviet Union suffered most of all in numbers: about 6 million killed in battle, about 14 million combatants and civilians outside it. Proportionately, we must not forget, Poland sustained a loss of around 15 per cent as opposed to the USSR's 10 per cent, and, most horrendous of all, between 5 million and 6 million of Europe's 9 million Jews were murdered. In addition to all these human losses, there was vast material destruction—about 30 per cent of the Soviet Union's national wealth, for example.6 Moreover, there are other reasons for maintaining that in the European theatre of war, even on the global scale, the Eastern Front was the most significant. Again, simple statistics are indicative. Up to 70 per cent of Nazi Germany's army was involved in operations in the Soviet Union; in 1942, for example, there were more than 150 divisions on the Eastern Front, just four German along with eleven Italian divisions in North Africa. Moreover, the Soviet forces claimed to have put out of action more than 500 Nazi divisions and 100 divisions of their allies, while the Western forces were accounting for about 175 Nazi and associated divisions. There can, of course, be dispute about the exactness of these figures and about some aspects of their significance. But the overall implications are unarguable. By far the largest-scale European war was fought on the Eastern Front.7

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We must also consider the inhuman nature of the Nazi plans for conducting the War in the East and then for instituting a new order there at what was confidently expected to be a complete victory. This aspect of the subject has been more neglected than most. In a book published in 1985, a young historian observed that, when he began reading German history he was struck by the variation of meaning given to some key terms concerning the Third Reich. He continued: The Germans, for example, were portrayed either as all Nazis or as having had almost nothing to do with the 'criminal clique' which had somehow succeeded in coming to power; 'the generals' were either counted in with the Nazi leaders of the state or, on the contrary, depicted as the last bastion of resistance to National Socialism; 'the Eastern Front' featured in some accounts as the main theatre of war, where the Russians had sacrificed millions of their people in pushing back the Nazi invader set upon enslaving and destroying them, whereas for many West Europeans and Americans it remained an unclear and baffling sideshow. It was often much more convenient to remember what were perceived as the chivalrous battles in the West and in North Africa, where there had apparently been decent chaps on both sides, though unfortunately some were led by rather more unpleasant characters than others. Omer Bartov, the young historian, went on to quote Liddell Hart's 'astonishing conclusion' that 'The German Army in thefieldon the whole observed the rules of war better than it did in 1914-18'. Bartov's reading led him towards his own book investigating the neglected subject of the barbarization of the German troops on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Bartov acknowledged that German historians were themselves now describing aspects of the systematic extermination of 'JewishBolshevism' in order to create living space, or Lebensrawn, and evaluating Operation Barbarossa in general as the 'most terrible war of conquest, enslavement and extermination'. He himself attempted to examine the manner in which army units conducted themselves within such a framework. The terrible conditions in which they fought, including savage winters and inadequate supplies as well as a most determined enemy, combined with the grievous losses they sustained (one unit losing over 118 per cent of its initial number of combat soldiers and over 156 per cent of such

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officers in less than two years) to intensify their savagery and to produce a desperate persistence. But their behaviour would not have been so degenerate without indoctrination. Bartov quoted a bi-weekly news-sheet issued to the troops on the Eastern Front: Anyone who has ever looked at the face of a red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are like. Here there is no need for theoretical expressions. We would be insulting the animals if we were to describe these men, who are mostly Jewish, as beasts. They are the embodiment of the Satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity. The shape of these commissars reveals to us the rebellion of the Untermenschen against noble blood. The masses, whom they have sent to their deaths by making use of all means at their disposal such as ice-cold terror and insane incitement, would have brought an end to all meaningful life, had this eruption not been damned at the last moment. The disregard for the lives of such Untermenschen, or subhumans, was joined to a veneration of Hitler and all that he stood for. As late as January 1945, polls among German POWs showed that over 60 per cent of the prisoners maintained their trust in the Fuhrer. There were no polls taken of Soviet POWs in German hands, since they were duly treated as Untermenschen. Out of a total number of 5,700,000 no fewer than 3,300,000 died in captivity. Many of them died of hunger or disease, although to accelerate their mortality and to prepare the way for that of millions of Jews, the notorious gas chambers of the Final Solution werefirsttried out on them. As for Soviet civilians, they were treated at least as badly during the retreat as during the advance. A soldier noted in his diary: During the retreat we were ordered to destroy all villages, as well as to take to the rear all the cattle. I cannot judge whether this measure was absolutely necessary, but it caused deprivation and misery to the population left behind. According to Sovietfigures,some 70,000 villages and 1,710 towns were destroyed by the German forces. As Omer Bartov rightly pointed out, the massacre in the French village of Oradour made more headlines than all the outrages in the Soviet Union put together. Bartov's general conclusion also seems justified by the evidence that he and others have presented:

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On the Eastern Front, Nazi Germany exercised barbarism on an unprecedented scale; its declared intention was extermination and enslavement; the only way to prevent her from achieving this goal was to defeat her militarily, for whatever we think of the resistance, it proved itself incapable of toppling the regime. It was the combination of these elements which made this war into a unique phenomenon of human history. Only by recognising that fact can we hope to prevent it being repeated. The difficulty in appreciating this fact is intensified by Bartov's further comment that 'the war in the East could just as well have taken place on a different planet'. To take again the question of POWs, while nearly 60 per cent of Soviet prisoners in German hands died, less than 5 per cent of their Western counterparts did so. We are accustomed to the manner in which literature and the cinema have represented heroic escapes and at least a residual sense of chivalry in dealings between Western POWs and their guards. No such representation would be possible of the lives of POWs in the East.8 The reason for such differences must be found in actual history as well as in the distorted view of the past and present projected in Nazi ideology or mythology. For example, we would have to look into the development of relations between Teuton and Slav going back from the second Barbarossa to the first Barbarossa and the Teutonic Knights in the twelfth and eleventh centuries, and even beyond. In other words, there are long-term aspects to the explanation of the barbarization of warfare as well as shorter-term considerations. To illustrate a point that will be developed later, let us briefly mention the 'War of the German Historians' that arose in 1986 concerning the extermination of the Jews in particular and the reinterpretation of the German past in general. On the one hand, there was the view that 'the defeat of National Socialist Germany was ... also in the interests of the Germans themselves', that the 'great intellectual accomplishment of our post-war period is the unconditional opening of the Federal Republic towards the political culture of the West.' On the other hand, the argument was put forward that 1945 was a catastrophe for Germany and Europe alike, since the centre of the continent was destroyed with more than half of it being absorbed by what we may call 'the political culture of the

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East'. An elaboration of this second argument was that the Third Reich should not be considered in isolation, and that its most necessary precondition was the Russian Revolution. If the Third Reich adopted 'Asiatic' methods of mass deportation and extermination, this was because the Soviet Union had already created precedents leading to apprehension and overreaction. Needless to say, Soviet historians would find this a distortion and slander.9 Without entering further into the 'War of the German Historians' or its international ramifications, let us note that the Russian Revolution cannot be discussed apart from its context of the First World War, which takes us into another German historical controversy stemming from Fritz Fischer's thesis put forward in 1961 concerning Germany's responsibility for that conflict. Again, we will not join that debate, except to add an apposite footnote to it from a publication of June 1914 just before the First World War's outbreak. This was an open letter on the circumstances of Russia and Germany included in the Prussian Yearbook by its editor Hans Delbruck. The author was a Professor of History in St Petersburg, Paul von Mitrofanov, who described himself as a patriotic Russian of German descent. His letter consisted mainly of a survey of the influence of German culture in Russia from the eighteenth-century adaptation of the Polizeistaat onwards. From the 1830s the impact of Hegel and others on the intelligentsia had been enormous, although resentment against Germans and all foreigners had persisted strongly among the uneducated masses. A general hatred of 4 Judas' Austria developed after the Crimean War of 1854-6, and in later years even after unification was completed, Germany itself was disliked less for the threat that it posed in the Balkans and elsewhere than for its closeness to Austria. Russian strength was increasing in the early twentieth century with German help, and it would have been disastrous if war broke out between Russia and Germany. Russia had allied itself with another country with which it had a long, special relationship, France, but did not seek war with Germany. If only, according to the letter, Germany were not allied with Russia's enemy, Austria. Not surprisingly, Delbruck could not print Mitrofanov's open letter without an impassioned criticism of it. Russia hated Germany for its attempt to restrain Slavic expansion towards Constantinople and to give support to beleaguered Austria. Russian ambitions ex-

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tended not only through the Black Sea towards the Balkans but also through the Baltic towards Scandinavia. Meanwhile, France which had wanted to encroach upon the Rhine before 1870 now coveted Elsass-Lothringen (Alsace-Lorraine), and sought revenge for defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. Moreover, Britain and the USA were attempting to maintain control over the sea. In such circumstances, if Russia saw it as its mission to dominate Europe and Asia, Germany saw it as its mission to save Europe and Asia from the domination of Muscovy. The introduction of the term Moskowitertum was a reminder of the rivalry of Germany and Russia stretching far back beyond modern times. But Delbruck restricted his rejoinder to the twentieth century, and we will not take the discussion further at this juncture, the basic point having been made: the 'War of the German Historians', like many similar debates, takes on a different complexion in a long historical context.10 A similar approach would be necessary for a full understanding of the Japanese conduct in the Second World War. This never descended quite to the level of the German on the Eastern European Front, and did not have any genocidal element in its ideology. However, Japanese treatment of Allied POWs has received much attention in the West, and more than 25 per cent of such POWs did indeed die in captivity, while most of the rest experienced extremes of discomfort. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of China, Korea and the Philippines suffered worse. The varieties of racialism involved in these various kinds of inhumanity would obviously need an explanation of chronological depth as well as cultural breadth.'' Of course, the victors were guilty of war crimes as well as the defeated. The Red Army has been described as 'killing and looting at will' on the Eastern Front, and the Soviet government accused of mistreatment of its prisoners and own citizens.12 The British and American governments have been charged with taking cold-blooded murder into an unprecedented degree of depravity through their saturation bombing of Dresden and other German cities and their dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While historical investigation would be relevant in these cases too, in the last of them there has to be recognition that here was a departure without precedent or evolutionary provenance. The door was now open towards universal genocide at the push of a button. Total war would be followed by zero sum.13

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In the short run, the use of the atomic bomb has been widely discussed also as a significant milestone on the road to the Cold War, especially as a diplomatic weapon against the Soviet Union. This subject is the last and the most awesome of the sources for disagreement and recrimination among the victorious Allied powers. Among the others have been the problems of the importance of American and British aid to the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the opening up of the Second Front,14 which dominated the first meeting of the Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Teheran, Iran, late in 1943. Their understandings and misunderstandings continued at Yalta in the Crimea early in 1945 as they discussed the manner in which the war would be brought to an end in Europe and Asia, and at least began to consider the question of the shape of the postwar world in general. These conferences have been the subject of much academic analysis and controversy, to which we cannot begin to do justice here. Instead, on the basis of the published records of the proceedings, we will attempt to sketch the basic positions of the Big Three, taking them in the English alphabetical order adopted at Yalta itself. Churchill stood stoutly by the British Empire. He was most agitated by the possible threat posed to it by the opening of the question of the trusteeship over colonial and dependent peoples. While the Union Jack flew over the territories of the British Crown, he would not allow any piece of British soil to be put up for auction. But he pointed out on several occasions that he was responsible to his Cabinet and Parliament, and ultimately to the people; he could be voted out of office quite soon. He was also concerned about postwar great-power alignment, acknowledging that the British Empire might not be able to stand alone. He therefore considered its participation in a wider English-speaking union along with the USA, and at least voiced the possibility of the UK playing a leading part in a more integrated Europe. As far as that continent in particular was concerned, he wanted a restoration of France, so that the balance of power could be restored, and, for the same purpose, the reduction of Germany, with special penalties for Prussia, which he saw as the root of most of the evil. While not showing any great enthusiasm for the Poles, he insisted that Britain was most concerned with the fate of Poland as a matter of honour, as it had entered the war to defend that country from German aggression. Since it had not been able to achieve

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much in 1939, it should strive to make up the deficiency in 1945. Thinking back to the First World War, he was anxious that Bolshevism should not penetrate the Balkans. Imperial responsibilities as well as the desire to remain a world power obliged Britain to take an interest in the Asian as well as the European theatre of war. Roosevelt was probably not much more preoccupied with Europe than with the Pacific, where the USA's war had started and was still being significantly fought. As a former naval man, he would be very conscious of the fact that the maritime Battle of Leyte Gulf off the Philippines in October 1944 had been the biggest in history, and that more would have to come before the final victory over Japan. But an overriding thought was the realization that the USA now discharged global responsibilities to an extent much greater than the USA before or its Allies right now. Hence a vision of a New Deal for the whole world, guaranteed by the United Nations Organization, in which the USA would participate in a vigorous manner compensating somewhat for its failure to join the League of Nations after the First World War. Conscious of his unsuccessful predecessor Woodrow Wilson's policy of an open door for American business in a world made safe for democracy, Roosevelt was anxious to move further in this same direction. This could mean some tension with the empires of Europe, as well as other trouble in the first location of the open door, the Far East. The special relationship with Latin America, where doors were not so open, would have to be preserved. As far as Europe was concerned, the President certainly wanted Germany to be made to pay. In a meeting with Stalin on 4 February, he looked forward to the execution of 50,000 officers in the German Army. Later, he expressed the view that the USA did not want German living standards to be higher than those of the Soviet peoples. Germany should certainly be dismembered, although it might be Utopian to talk of complete decentralization. On Poland, Roosevelt referred to the necessity of giving assurance to the millions of its former citizens who now lived in the USA, but recognized the Soviet need for security as well as the various Polish desires for restoration. Stalin paid several compliments to the Poles, with brave fighters, outstanding scientists and great artists among them. The Soviet Union was still conscious of the bad treatment meted out to the Poles by tsarism, and was anxious to redress legitimate grievances.

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Yet twice within thirty years, the Germans had attacked through Poland and a barrier had to be set up against any future repetition. The Soviet peoples would not forgive Stalin and Molotov if they turned out to be less reliable spokesmen than Curzon or Clemenceau. Allowing for rhetorical exaggeration, we still have to recognize that Stalin was giving voice to an intense enough apprehension. He appears to have been moving to a tacit acceptance of spheres of influence in postwar Europe, making no more than token suggestions for Soviet representation in decisions concerning liberated Italy and France. On Germany, he was more insistent than Churchill and Roosevelt that 'the Germans were savages and seemed to hate with a sadistic hatred the creative work of human beings.' All too conscious of the vast task of postwar reconstruction, he was much more determined than his two colleagues on reparations. Incapable of harbouring any immediate hopes of world revolution, Stalin was nevertheless heir to the ideology developed by Lenin and therefore probably hopeful that at some future time there might be a global role for communism. But in the shorter run, he was considering at most an extension of his own idea of 'socialism in one country' as a guarantor of Soviet resistance to the infiltration of harmful outside influences. Going back explicitly beyond the Russian Revolution of 1917 in his argument, he sought in Asia the recovery of ground lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Hence, his commitment to join in the war against Japan as soon as possible after the Allied victory in Europe. Somewhat surprisingly for a self-styled Marxist-Leninist, although not so surprisingly for the central figure of a 'cult of personality', Stalin said to his British and American counterparts that: ... as long as the three of them lived none of them would involve their countries in aggressive actions, but after all, ten years from now none of them might be present. A new generation would come into being not knowing the horrors of war.15 As we all now know, two of the Big Three had departed from the centre of the world stage in a matter of months, Roosevelt through death and Churchill by way of a general election. Personal continuities were therefore all too quickly broken. In any case, there has probably been too much 'cult of personality' in later analysis of Yalta. This point may be elaborated by turning from the Big Three

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to some of the many commentators on their meeting, and its sequel. However, before we do so, I must make a disclaimer. I have made no special study of any of the Big Three but have introduced them here as an illustration of the manner in which statesmen are necessarily influenced by historical realities and their own views of history. At their meeetings, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to restore order through a successful conclusion of the Second World War and a satisfactory reordering of the postwar world. Age-old problems for Europe, especially that of Germany, were imposing themselves upon the Big Three at the same time as they had to look to Asia and other continents as well. In this book, I am concerned to demonstrate the longer-term considerations. For example, generally speaking, Churchill was a product of the First Great Game, the struggle for imperial influence. Roosevelt and Stalin were more aware of the Last Great Game to the extent that they were the heirs of Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin. We will look more closely in Chapter 4 at the manner in which the First World War and the Russian Revolution helped Wilson and Lenin to effect the transition between the struggle for empire and the superpower rivalry. Returning to the historiography of the Cold War, let us note that there has been much perceptive analysis of the Conference and its sequel, which can mostly be assigned to one of the categories outlined at the beginning of this chapter. Until fairly recently, however, most Western writing on the early origins of the Cold War, of which Yalta forms a centrepiece, has been extremely introverted, concentrating on the blamelessness or guilt of the United States and its Allies. Omission of the Soviet Union has not meant exoneration, however, even for the New Left historians who have anatomized thoroughly errors and misunderstandings of Western statesmen. Tacit though it may often have been, condemnation of Stalin had been virtually universal. Vojtech Mastny's Russia s Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945, first published in 1979, marked a new departure in the sense that it was the first work to make as much use as possible of easily available Soviet documents as well as Western materials in a scrutiny of Stalin's wartime policies leading towards the Cold War. Yet he did not produce a new thesis so much as give solidity to conventional orthodox wisdom. This is not to underrate the value of his work,

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which is in fact great, both for those who share his views and those who do not. Nevertheless, with all due respect, the book lacks ultimate objectivity, since, like most writers on the subject, Mastny cannot escape using phrases such as 'cynical opportunism' and 'ruthless power politics' when dealing with such events as the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its aftermath, whilefindingno such cause for condemnation in the Munich Agreement and its sequel. A second prerequisite for a balanced assessment of the great rivalry is an approach which, taking a broader view than is customary, at least hints at the priorities of the two sides in geographical and historical perspective. There is no hint in Mastny's title or subtitle that his book's concentration is almost exclusively on Eastern Europe, which even Churchill in the famous 'percentages' deal of October 1944 recognized as the Soviet Union's major sphere of influence. Stalin's efforts to adhere to wartime commitments as well as his comparative restraint in postwar Western Europe, even in Greece, receives insufficient emphasis. His interest in the Far East is dismissed as founded on spurious historical claims; his exclusion from negotiations with and from the occupation of Japan goes unmentioned. In his opening discussion of 'Traditions and Antecedents', Mastny restricts his geopolitical considerations to Eastern Europe and too readily equates Soviet with tsarist rapaciousness, allowing neither regime any legitimate goals in foreign policy.16 A useful corrective to this one one-sided view comes from Thomas G. Paterson in his Soviet-American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War, published in 1973. His essential thesis is: The United States was no more evil or more noble in its relations with international organizations than Britain or Russia; each major power attempted to employ them for its own national purposes. But there was a difference; the United States held a distinct advantage in the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund and so added them to its arsenal of Cold War weapons. American failure to grant a loan to the Soviet Union and the use of aid as a diplomatic weapon combined to revive Soviet fears that the USA was creating an international bloc that would behave in a manner reminiscent of the years following 1917. Stalin told the

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American emissary Averell Harriman at the close of the war, 'I will not tolerate a new cordon sanitaire\ but could avert this possibility only by consolidating Soviet power in Eastern Europe. Even this could barely be achieved by armed forces much weakened by the arduous nature of the war. As an American memorandum put it at the beginning of 1946: The Red Fleet is incapable of any important offensive or amphibious operations ... a strategic air force is practically non-existent either in material or concept ... economically, the Soviet Union is exhausted. The people are undernourished, industry and transport are in an advanced state of deterioration, enormous areas have been devasted, thirty percent of the population has been dislocated Maintenance of large occupation forces in Europe is dictated to a certain extent by the necessity of 'farming out' millions of men for whom living accommodations and food cannot be spared in the USSR during the current winter. This also aids the popular opinion that the USSR is a tremendous military power, therefore influencing political decisions to a degree out of proportion to the USSR's actual present offensive potential.... The USSR is not expected to take any action during the nextfiveyears which might develop into hostilities with the Anglo-Americans. It was against such a background that the rejection of a Soviet request for a postwar loanfirstmade in January 1945 and the abrupt termination of Lend-Lease early in May 1945 fuelled Soviet suspicions of American postwar intentions.17 A juxtaposition of the arguments of Mastny and Paterson helps us some way along the road to a balanced understanding of the early origins of the Cold War, to which they themselves have made signal contributions. In conclusion to this chapter, let us look at the points on the agenda for further work on the Cold War as listed by John Lewis Gaddis, 'the father of post-revisionism', in 1983: 1. Washington's perception of the adversary in Moscow. For how long and in what way did the USA perceive international communism as a monolith? 2. The American perception of the balance of power, especially in the early years after 1945. Was the USA fully aware of its preponderant power, especially since the USSR's conventional forces were superior? 3. The role of the American bureaucracies, of their civilian officials and military officers.

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4. The internal determinants of foreign policy, corporate and other interest groups, for example, and cultural influences. 5. More comparative history, with less emphasis on American 'exceptionalism' and more use of a wider framework over space and time, including comparative biographical studies. 6. The impact of US policies on foreign societies. 'The American empire, like other empires in history, brought about profound changes in countries that came into contact with it.' Were they for better or worse, in the Third World as well as in areas more developed? 7. The nature of international systems: what made for stability and instability? Why, for example, has Germany divided turned out to be a less disruptive force than was Germany unified? Why has the Cold War itself led to both stability and instability? 8. The impact of what historians write on the making of history itself. Since they affect consciousness in the future, they have an obligation to get history as straight as they can from the beginning in order to achieve the maximum amount of objectivity, straying neither to the left nor the right.18 Commentators on the agenda put forward by Gaddis have given emphasis to the phenomenon of American empire (although there has also been a reminder of the counter-current of isolationism). Several of them have stressed the defensive nature of American expansion after 1945, for example Lloyd C. Gardner: The string of strategic bases that soon stretched around the world was equally necessary, ... whether the enemy was chaos, caused by the collapse of the other capitalist empires, Britain and France, or the rise of a new Communist empire in the East, whose threat was all the more dangerous because of its powerful ideological weapon—Marxism. This is indeed a reasonable point, but in the wider context, as Warren F. Kimball asserts: The idea of a 'defensive empire' falls short. After all, generals may argue that the best defense is a good offense, but the winners in the National Football League argue vice-versa, and I suspect the two concepts are interchangeable. And it is a little difficult to see NATO, Point Four, and the Marshall Plan as defensive unless you admit that the American Empire already included over half of Europe.19

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And, whatever the motives for its introduction, a string of strategic bases stretching around the world would be perceived in the Soviet Union not as a necessity but as an offensive installation. Arguably too, as suggested at the beginning of Chapter 1, the term 'empire' is not as appropriate within the context of the Last Great Game as it was within the context of the First. Generally speaking, this chapter has attempted to illustrate the manner in which the transition from the Second World War to the Cold War might be more fully understood if more attention is given to their long-term provenance. It has not sought to deny the importance of short-term consideration, for example, the fear of a second Barbarossa or another Pearl Harbor. Nor has it sought to score points off Western and Soviet historians of that transition, whose work has made many steps forward within the restraints of chronological proximity and ideological preconceptions.20 But while saluting their achievements, I have also attempted to argue for point 5 in the agenda of Gaddis, that further work on this important subject should include the incorporation of longer chronological and broader geographical dimensions, with more comparative history and biographical studies. In such a manner, it may be possible for the gap between Soviet and Western interpretations to be narrowed. But for the moment, we must turn to examine some of the writing from the period in which that gap grew to its widest before looking at ways in which the same period showed the path forward to more objective appraisal.

3

Events of the Cold War: Reactions 1945, the year in which the celebrations of victory were mingled with the first intimations of the new struggle, brought hopes for the success of the United Nations Organization and universal peace, and apprehension that it might become the forum for international bickering. All too soon the Cold War began to pervade not only political debate but also intellectual enquiry. In this chapter I shall investigate some of these reactions, concentrating on a few representative individuals rather than attempting to establish the general climate. The mood that developed in the USA in particular was well caught by the writer Archibald MacLeish. Born in Glencoe, Illinois on 7 May 1892, he graduated with distinction from Yale in 1915 and transferred to Harvard for the study of law. The USA's entry into the First World War persuaded him to enlist in the American army, and he served in France as captain before returning to complete his law degree. Already a published poet, he established a literary reputation between the wars. A supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, he was a member of government information agencies during the Second World War before becoming Assistant Secretary of State from 1944 to 1945 and a founder member of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from 1945 to 1946. MacLeish believed that the best hope for postwar peace was to be found in 'peaceful coexistence' managed by the United Nations. He was in favour of the Marshall Plan but sceptical about the Truman Doctrine. Above all, he seems to have been concerned with the conformist climate arising in the USA during the late 1940s. Anti-Marxist and anti-communist, he believed that the American 31

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revolutionary spirit was in danger of being crushed in a witch hunt. As Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard from 1949 to 1962, he wrote several essays expressing this anxiety.1 In 1952 Archibald MacLeish brought out a book entitled Freedom Is the Right to Choose: An Inquiry into the Battle for the American Future. In its Preface, MacLeish asserted: The time through which we are living is a revolutionary time and the revolution is the revolution of the individual: the revolution not of Marx but of Jefferson: the struggle of the individual man and mind and conscience against the official Truths, the established Dogmas, the organized inevitabilities inherited from the past or newly imposed upon the present. Our time is difficult and dangerous because ours is a time of change in the relation of men to the universe: a time in which men must at last accept the individual responsibilities for choice and for decision which they have concealed from themselves in the past by the acceptance of institutional authority, and which the new institutional authorities of the totalitarian State would deprive them of forever. The future must be won now, for if it is not won now it will be forever closed by dogma. And the future can be won now only by winning now the revolution of the individual. One of the essays in MacLeish's book, T h e Conquest of America' begins: Sometime along in the nineteen-eighties when the world has left us as far behind as we have left the years that followed the First World War, somebody is going to publish a piece called The Late Forties. I hope to be dead at the time. In its turn, that piece would begin more or less: Never in the history of the world was one people as completely dominated, intellectually and morally, by another as the people of the United States by the people of Russia in the four years from 1946 to 1949. American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic politics were full of similar reflections, MacLeish considered. Nobody could be elected to public office without public avowal of hatred of the Russians; proposals for peace or rearmament could be supported only if they were the converse of

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Russian proposals; and political controversy was sung to the Russian tune—'left-wing movements attacked right-wing movements not on American issues but on Russian issues, and rightwing movements replied with the same arguments turned about'. American education and intellectual life were subject to the same domination, and even religious dogma was affected—'the first duty of a good Christian in the United States in those years was not to love his enemies but to hate the Communists'. All this happened, the piece would continue, at a time when the USA had become the greatest world power ever. The basic reason for this ridiculous lapse was a failure to think, especially about communism and 'the great traditional objectives of American life', in rapidly changing circumstances. Even in them, MacLeish argued, nobody but the ignoramus or the fanatic believed that communism was really the fountain of all evil, or that the world suffered exclusively because of the wicked works of a personal devil—Joseph Stalin (or, from the Russian point of view, Harry S. Truman). The real difficulty involved 'a conflict not between nations but between worlds: a dying world not altogether dead; a new world conceived but not yet born'. MacLeish went on to explain: The dying world is the world which reached its highest European integration in the Middle Ages: the world in which men were able to realize themselves and fulfil their lives as members of the closely knit body of a city or a church or a state or a feudal or institutional structure of some kind. This world began to decay with the Renaissance and has disintegrated with a rapidly accelerated momentum over the years which include the two great world wars. The new world is the world in which men, exiled from an institutional security and an institutional fulfilment, will realize themselves as individual human beings answerable to their consciences and God. The new world, though it was foreseen and its possibility declared a hundred and seventy years ago, has yet to be established. The limbo in which we live is the interval between the two. Reasserting his belief that communism was essentially a reactionary force, attempting to turn back against the current of human evolution to the 'decaying city of hierarchical and disciplined order', MacLeish went on to declare that the true spirit of revolution was

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American, Jeffersonian. Moreover, 'A people who have been real to themselves because they were/or something cannot continue to be real to themselves when they find they are merely against something.' And so, they begin to ask themselves questions. For example, 'Are they still the young champions of freedom in the west who warned the Holy Alliance to let the fires of revolutionary freedom burn as they might on this continent, or have they joined with those who put the fire out?' Some of us in the 1980s would think that this was rather a onesided interpretation of the origins of the Monroe Doctrine. Generally speaking, we might find MacLeish's rhetorical style difficult to accept. His view of communism might be rejected by many noncommunist analysts of today, who would place it in the mainstream of human evolution rather than claiming that it was working against the current. Nevertheless, as well as catching the spirit of the 1940s, he also correctly senses a crisis of transition. The two world wars had indeed given a rapidly accelerated momentum to one of the great changes in history, even if not in the manner that he suggested. Above all, MacLeish argues for an open-minded approach which we would do well not to reject: If we do nothing, if we continue to stand where the 'forties have left us, we will have taken one decision, we will have ceased to be what we were and we will inevitably become something else, something very different, something the founders of the republic would not recognize and surely would not love. Or, more succinctly, The true test of freedom is in its use.'2 Some of the difficulties that historians in particular would be up against in using their freedom in the late 1940s may be most succinctly demonstrated by a glance at some of the Presidential Addresses of the American Historical Association from that period. In December 1948, 'The Christian Understanding of History', was delivered by Kenneth Scott Latourette, Professor of Missions and Oriental History at Yale. Latourette talked of the historian's dilemma. On the one hand, he was all too conscious of the many different interpretations of history that had been put forward and therefore held back from complete adoption of any of them. On the other hand, he needed to make a choice, however arbitrary, while 'haunted by the persistent hope that a framework and meaning can

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be found which possesses objective reality'. Latourette declared: The hope is peculiarly insistent in our day. We appear to be living in a time of major revolution. As historians we are familiar with many earlier periods of rapid change. Indeed, if there is one feature which we are agreed upon as characterizing history it is flux. It seems probable that no culture — if we can assent to the existence of such an entity— and no institution remains permanently unaltered. Yet so far as we are aware, never before has all mankind been so drastically on the march. Never at any one time have so many cultures been in what appears to be disintegration. In no other era have all men been faced with such colossal possibilities of what they deem good and ill. Never before has the race as a whole been so assailed by those who urge upon it dogmatically one or other interpretation of the historical process to explain and to guide in humanity's painful transition. Latourette himself was by no means dogmatic. However, he did maintain that, if it was now apparent that history must be seen in its entire setting, this was what the Christian had always contended. His conclusion was an affirmation, but tentative: The historian, be he Christian or non-Christian, may not know whether God will fully triumph within history. He cannot conclusively demonstrate the validity of the Christian understanding of history. Yet he can establish a strong probability for the dependability of its insights. That is the most which can be expected of human reason in any of the realms of knowledge.3 Of sterner stuff was Conyers Read, Professor of English History at the University of Pennsylvania, who gave the Address in December 1949. Entitled T h e Social Responsibilities of the Historian', his speech asserted that an end was coming to the age of liberalism in which 'neutrality went so far that we ceased to believe, out of mere fairness, in our own objectiveness'. Confronted by the alternative ideologies imposed by Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin, Americans 'must clearly assume a militant attitude if we are to survive'. Conyers Read continued: The antidote to bad doctrine is better doctrine, not neutralized intelligence. We must assert our own objectives, define our own ideals, establish our own standards and organize all the forces of our society in support of them. Discipline is the essential prerequisite of every

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effective army whether it march under the Stars and Stripes or under the Hammer and Sickle. We have to fight an enemy whose value system is deliberately simplified in order to achieve quick decisions. And atomic bombs make quick decisions imperative. The liberal neutral attitude, the approach to social evolution in terms of dispassionate behaviourism will no longer suffice. Dusty answers will not satisfy our demands for positive assurances. Total war, whether it be hot or cold, enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part. The historian is no freer from this obligation than the physicist. People still looked to the past to sustain patterns of the present. If the evolution of civilization was presented as 'haphazard, without direction and without progress, offering no assurance that mankind's present position is on the highway and not on some dead end', they would seek assurance in more positive alternatives 'from Rome or from Moscow'. As Conyers Read declared, 'This sounds like the advocacy of one form of social control as against another. In short, it is. But I see no alternative in a divided world.'4 Against such a background, it was difficult to present to the American people an objective account of the development of the Soviet Union. In the Preface to the fullest account in English of prerevolutionary Russia produced since the Second World War, M. T. Florinsky approved in 1947 of H. A. L. Fisher's Preface to A History of Europe published in 1935: Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can only see one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen. Like Fisher, however, Florinsky does make several generalizations in his great work. Moreover, Russian: A History and an Interpretation stops short at the very moment where, for him, the contingent and the unforeseen make their greatest impact, following the revolution of 1917. 'The Second Moscow Period', which was to run from March 1918 onwards and to form Part IV of his twovolume study, was 'indefinitely postponed' in 1947.

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The major reason for Florinsky's decision deserves quotation at some length: It is extremely difficult to fit into the framework of a study such as mine the relatively brief but vastly important span of the Soviet rule. The political, social, economic, and intellectual life of the USSR is ordered by the communist doctrine. Even in the 1920s, when divergencies of views within the Communist Party were still tolerated, discussion centered on abstruse points of communist theory which are difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to make intelligible to a noncommunist audience. Moreover, the distressing uniformity and onesidedness of the information available confront the historian with problems which, to the best of my knowledge, still await solution Outside the narrow circle of the initiated the vast majority of Soviet leaders are mere names, lifeless and bloodless shadows about whom next to nothing is known. Lenin and Stalin, according to their official biographies, would seem to spend their lives reciting, to the applause of the worshipers, paragraphs from the writings of Marx or resolutions of the Communist Party. Surely, this cannot be the true picture. Florinsky goes on to quote again a passage from the pre-revolutionary historian S. M. Solovyov that he had first used when discussing the difficulties of the problem of explaining the growth of Moscow absolutism: The actors perform silently, they make war and they make peace, but they will not say, nor will the chronicler explain, why they make war and why they make peace; in the city, at the court of the prince, all is quiet, all is still; everyone keeps behind closed doors and thinks his thoughts all by himself; the door is open, the actors walk on the stage and do something, but they do it in silence. Florinsky himself comments: No one will accuse the Soviet leaders of keeping silent; yet, reversing the familiar saying cum tacent clamant, the torrents of Soviet propaganda are singularly unrevealing of what the Soviet leaders and people actually think and do. It is not suggested that the history of the Soviet Union cannot and should not be written, but merely that information for a broad and comprehensive picture such as I have attempted to trace for the earlier periods is not, and perhaps never will be, available. In spite of the unquestionable element of continuity of the Russian tradition,

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Soviet history, if it is to rise above the level of a mere catalogue of facts and repetition of communist propaganda, calls for a novel and fresh approach, the time for which is not perhaps ripe. There may be truth in Lenin's dictum that it is more pleasant to make a revolution than to write about it.5 Florinsky was later able to overcome his inhibitions and incorporate a substantial section on the Soviet period in a volume which also contained a condensed version of his two-volume work on prerevolutionary Russia. Meanwhile, the history of the USA presented no comparable problems to its practitioners. The fourth edition of The Growth of the American Republic by S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager, which came out in 1950, had no difficulty in taking developments up to the re-election of President Truman in 1948. Discussing the events of 1947, they approve of the USA taking the offensive with the Truman Doctrine as well as promoting the economic rehabilitation of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan. They welcome George Kennan's argument for containment of the Soviet Union leading to 'either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet policy', but comment that the sequel already showed that this was to some extent 'wishful thinking'; there was no 'mellowing' of Soviet policy. The authors also mention the formation of NATO in 1949, pointing out that the North Atlantic nations found authorization for their agreement in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, while 'Russia regarded it as an open declaration of hostility'. The authors conclude: The Atlantic Pact was an attempt to recreate the Atlantic Community. A very real thing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it had been ignored in the nineteenth as the United States turned westward and southward. History, tradition, interest, technological advances, sentimental and moral values had inevitably brought the United States back into the Atlantic Community, however, and twice in the twentieth century she had found it necessary to pledge all her resources to its salvation. Now at mid-twentieth century she prepared to recognize formally what she could not longer escape.6 Thoughts such as these could carry generations of American college students through the years of the Cold War, down to the end of the 1960s. For them, the American Republic had indeed grown in a regular manner while the Soviet Union was widely viewed as an enemy created by a break in the continuity of Russian history.

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Towards the end of the 1960s, however, with the agonies of Vietnam and the arrival of detente, there was a reappraisal of both American and Soviet history. Before examining his reappraisal, however, we must cross the Atlantic and Europe to consider Soviet reactions to the impact of the Cold War as it emerged during the years after 1945. Needless to say, they were more stereotyped than American. If Archibald MacLeish was accurate in his observation that 'Never in the history of the world was one people as completely dominated, intellectually and morally, by another as the people of the United States by the people of Russia in the four years from 1946 to 1949', the converse was also in a real enough sense accurate. The same might be said of MacLeish's further remark that 'American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse.' However, there is more to the comparison than mirror images and intellectual and moral domination. The combination of a more difficult situation both internal and external, a more recent revolution and a widely different tradition led to some distinctive attitudes. To start at the top, in an 'election' speech of 9 February 1946, J. V. Stalin talked of the inevitability of war as long as capitalism existed and the formation of two hostile camps in the Western world owing to the uneven development of capitalism. Although there was no overt reference to hostilities between the communist and capitalist powers, at least some commentators in the West saw this speech as the beginning of the Third World War. In the Soviet Union itself, Stalin's wise words and actions were given the most positive reception in the authorized version of the Leader's life as produced in 1947: In conjunction with the tried and tested Leninists who are his immediate associates, and at the head of the great Bolshevik Party, Stalin guides the destinies of a multinational Socialist State, a state of workers and peasants of which there is no precedent in history. His advice is a guide to action in all fields of Socialist construction. His work is extraordinary for its variety; his energy truly amazing. To turn to the most notorious name after Stalin's, that of A. A. Zhdanov, we may briefly note his characterization of the period following the Second World War:

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Today the centre of the struggle against Marxism has shifted to America and Britain. All the forces of obscurantism and reaction have today been placed at the service of the struggle against Marxism. Brought out anew and placed at the service of bourgeois philosophy are the instruments of atom-dollar democracy, the outworn armour of obscurantism and clericalism: the Vatican and racist theory, rabid nationalism and decayed idealist philosophy, the mercenary yellow press and depraved bourgeois art. But apparently all these are not enough. Today, under the banner of ideological struggle against Marxism, large reserves are being mobilised. Gangsters, pimps, spies and criminal elements are recruited.7 In September 1947, at the creation of the Communist Information Bureau or Cominform, Zhdanov announced the division of the world into two camps, the socialist and capitalist-imperialist. Debates which had previously been taking place in a number of disciplines were now brought to an abrupt end. For example, E. S. Varga had brought out in 1946 a book on Changes in the Economy of Capitalism as a Result of the Second World War, suggesting that Western governments had acquired enough power and introduced enough planning to mitigate the effect of crises. In such a manner, capitalist states were coming to resemble their socialist counterparts. Another book, The War Economy of the USSR in the Period of the Fatherland War by N. A. Voznesensky, came out in December 1947, and, although not attacking Varga personally, denounced as 'sheer nonsense' the arguments of 'some theoreticians who claim to be Marxists' concerning the 'decisive role of the state in the war economy of capitalist countries'. In particular: After the end of the Second World War the government of the United States of America, carrying out the will of the rulers of American monopoly capital, has abandoned all attempts at planning production and circulation .... Having waxed fat on the people's blood during the Second World War, monopoly capitalism of the United States of America stands now at the head of the imperialist and anti-democratic camp and has now become the instigator of imperialist expansion everywhere in the world. Imperialist expansion of the USA is moving towards a new war as a means of crushing democracy, preventing an economic crisis, and opposing the working class within the country. After the death of his patron Zhdanov in 1948, Voznesensky fell

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from favour and was executed in 1949. But his new 'two camps' view lived on after him, a version of it being taken up by no less a person than Stalin himself. In the humanities, Zhdanov made his views fully known in an attack on G. F. Aleksandrov's book The History of Western European Philosophy made in the summer of 1947. He made a powerful declaration for a 'sharp, relentless, and ruthless struggle with bourgeois ideology in all its manifestations', against 'admiration and servility toward all that was foreign... self-important, professorial quasi objectivism ... political attitudes toward bourgeois ideology'. N. L. Rubinshtein's Russian Historiography was given similar treatment in the spring of 1948, coming under heavy fire at a history conference for its 'antipatriotic' and 'cosmopolitan' tendencies. Using other Zhdanovist terminology, one of the critics assailed Rubinshtein's alleged underestimation of Russian scholars and overestimation of their immigrant colleagues with the accusation that 'such a conception of the development of Russian historical scholarship is an expression of fawning before the West'. On American history in particular, another meeting in the spring of 1949 attacked L. I. Zubok's work on The Imperialistic Policy of the USA in the Countries of the Caribbean Basin, 1930-1939. The substance of the charge was that he 'elucidated the nature and policy of American imperialism from a cosmopolitan standpoint..., gave attention to the open idealisation of the policy of American imperialism in the period of the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt'. A more correct view had been put forward in 1947 by D. Voblikov: The Truman Doctrine concerning the world domination of the USA supplemented and made concrete in the so-called Marshall Plan, places that country in the forefront of world imperialism and reaction. American monopolistic capital, enriched by the excess profits of the war years and emboldened to the extreme, has led an offensive against the popular masses within the country and against the progressive forces of the whole world .... The new addition to the Monroe Doctrine combines hypocrisy and brutal coercion, the policy of the dollar, and the policeman's club, spreading this policy throughout the world. The correct general line was indicated in an editorial appearing in the periodical Problems of History in the spring of 1949 with the title 'The Tasks of Soviet Historians in the Field of Modern and Contemporary History'. Denouncing 'bourgeois cosmopolitanism

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and servility towards bourgeois scholarship', the editorial made no secret of the best model to follow: The works of genius of Comrade Stalin are of exceptional significance ... In the works of Comrade Stalin, historical scholarship gained a new and deep historical analysis of the most important events of modem and contemporary history, representing, along with the treasure house of ideas of the previous works of J. V. Stalin, a basis for the research works of Soviet historians in modem and contemporary history.8 The onset of the Cold War in the USA was caught by a Soviet visitor, Ilya Ehrenburg. Born in Kiev on 27 January 1891, he had developed a considerable reputation as a journalist and novelist during the inter-war years, and then, from 1941 to 1945, as a war correspondent. In Knoxville, Tennessee, in the spring of 1946, Ehrenburg glanced through a newspaper calling attention to the fact that in Psalm 120 there is a reference to a place called Mesech where lived 'him that hateth peace', while the prophet Ezekiel in Chapter 38 had denounced Gog and Magog, to whom obeisance was made in the place called Meshech. Mesech and Meshech were one and the same place, none other than Moscow. This was just a provincial newspaper, but Ehrenburg also found himself denounced more widely in the Hearst press as' a disguised agitator', * comradecynic' and 'Ilya of the Comintern'. The new harsh mood was described to Ehrenburg by 'a friend of Roosevelt', whom he quotes as saying: Truman doesn't have a war in mind. He believes that Communism threatens certain Western European countries and could triumph if the Soviet Union were to recover economically and forge ahead. An implacable American policy and atom bomb tests will force Russia to spend all her strength^nd her resources on modernising her armaments. The supporters of the hard line talk about the threat of Soviet tanks, but what they're doing in fact is to declare war on Soviet saucepans.9 Whatever the truth of Ehrenburg's reportage on the falling temperature in the USA, it is a matter of regret that he says less about the Soviet counterpart. As we have seen above more than amply, the implacability of American newsmen and politicians was no match for that of Stalin and his adherents. After the death of Stalin, there occurred the so-called 'Thaw'.

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We must be careful, however, not to read too high a temperature into what was undoubtedly a defreeze, but fell somewhat short of high summer. For historians in particular, there were strict limits to the Moscow spring. This point can be best illustrated by citing the example of interpretation of the Russian Revolution, in particular of historians who found themselves in trouble for taking too far reappraisal in the direction of spontaneity.10 By the late 1960s, for their part, American historians were also taking a fresh look at the Russian Revolution, and at the American Revolution, too. Alexander Rabinowitch, one of the leading revisionists on 1917, has described the manner in which he and his colleagues moved away from the view of the October Revolution as nothing more than a coup from above engineered by Lenin. As he puts it: .. .the October Revolution in Petrograd was in part a genuine expression of popular forces, as much as a complex political struggle as a military contest, in which the fate of the Provisional Government, though not the precise composition and character of the new Soviet regime, was sealed well before the Leninist coup d'etat of October 24-25. Obviously, this interpretation is more complex and less satisfying than the traditional western view of the October Revolution as a brilliantly organized military conspiracy without popular support, which implies an essential continuity between Leninist prerevolutionary thought, Bolshevik behavior and method of operation in 1917, and Soviet totalitarianism. Rabinowitch goes on to ask, 'why was the Bolshevik so easily and quickly transformed into one of the most highly centralized, authoritarian political movements in modern history?', and other, similar questions, suggesting less revision on the post-October period than on the October period itself. Nevertheless, the shift in interpretation of the opening event of Soviet history was itself significant. It was also in parallel with a revision in the interpretation of the opening event of the history of the USA, the American Revolution of 1776, the so-called 'New Left' looking more closely than their colleagues at the lower social levels of the revolutionary movement.11 With the arrival of detente at the end of the 1960s, the possibility arose of discussion rather than confrontation between Soviet historians and their Western colleagues. If we take as our measure of that possibility the International Congress of Historical Sciences, we

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would certainly have to note that there was not much meeting of minds between the two world wars or immediately after 1945. At Oslo in 1928, Soviet historians talked of the inevitable fall of bourgeois historiography and the certain triumph of historical materialism. Their assertiveness was probably one reason why their request for a section on the Russian Revolution along the lines of one on its French counterpart already in existence was turned down. Further reasons no doubt would be Western parochialism and anti-Soviet prejudice, which contributed to the official response that the Russian Revolution was not yet 'classical'. After the Second World War, Soviet historians made their reappearance at Rome in 1955, but the record of the International Congresses does not show much evidence of genuine interchange before Moscow in 1970.12 As we shall now see, even in Moscow at that time the degree of progress was not as great as might have been hoped. At the Thirteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences meeting in August 1970 in Moscow about 1,400 Soviet colleagues mingled with foreign delegations, the biggest of which, in ascending order of size, were from Japan, 76; Italy, 92; France, 171; and the USA, 222. It was therefore numerically implied that there would be sessions involving American and Soviet historians and their ways of thinking. But first, a few observations on the preliminaries. The Congress opened at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on Sunday, 16 August 1970, at 5 p.m. The Chair was taken by Academician Alexander A. Gouber, who introduced various addresses of welcome with warmth and charm. One of these, read out on behalf of Prime Minister Kosygin, told the delegates that history is called upon to study the complicated and varied path taken by humanity, the very rich experience of generations in the struggle for social progress, for the most perfect organisation of society. Without recourse to history, a correct understanding of contemporary social processes is impossible. Studying and generalising the experience of the past, historical science assists the recognition and the use of the lawful regularity of social development for the good of all mankind.13 How many visiting delegates found Kosygin's remarks approaching their own concept of history would be difficult to say. The Americans among them appeared to number few if any of the

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radical historians who might be expected to express fullest transatlantic agreement with the ideas of the Soviet Prime Minister if not with his methods of putting them into practice. No delegate of any political persuasion could have received much enlightenment from the opening lecture, 'Lenin and History'. Perhaps it would be best understood as a recital of Lenin's qualities and achievements rather than as a searching scholarly analysis of them. Yet in the nineteenth century, Americans could be as reverential in their own way about George Washington, the leader of their revolution, as Soviet citizens were now about Lenin. At the opening of the Congress, however, even Lenin was for the moment forgotten as the speeches were finished and the stage was adapted for a superb performance of the ballet Giselle, a brief victory for art over eternal politics. The working sessions of the Congress were held at the University of Moscow, and they commenced on Monday, 17 August, with the discussion of two major topics under the headings 'Methodology' and 'The History of Continents'. The most sceptical paper under the first heading was that of J. H. Hexter of the USA on 'History, the Social Sciences and Quantification'. Hexter dismissed the pursuit of a grand strategy in history as a dangerous waste of time indulged in particularly by the untutored young who seek a 'Great Leap Forward that will soar above the nasty little tactical problems with which as working historians they will have to spend most of their lives'. The fragmentary quality of the data of his disposal and the catholicity of his discipline's scope rendered the evidence too minute and the explanation too huge for the historian to be able to make use of the tools of the social sciences, particularly their quantifying techniques. Recognizing that the computer was here to stay and confessing, as most of us would have to, that he did not understand more than its simplest uses, Hexter nevertheless did not believe that its exploitation by historians had yielded any worthwhile results. At the same time, he was very aware of the inherent dangers, particularly the distortion of the vision involved in its adaptation to the needs of the machine. To Hexter, the essential task of the historian was expressed by Garrett Mattingly in his judgement of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Admiral of the Spanish Fleet in 1588: It did not matter at all 'to the dead whether they receive justice at the hands of succeeding generations. But to the living to do justice, however

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belatedly, should matter.' Pleading for a right and reasonable balance between detachment and engagement, Hexter concluded his paper by regretting that his arguments could not fully apply to those, 'all of whose ultimate conclusions and many of whose immediate judgements are imposed upon them, willy-nilly, from higher headquarters by the monopolists of violence'. Hexter declared: To historians and social scientists alike in this situation, who seek, however tentatively and cautiously, to win some footing of intellectual freedom for themselves and their fellows, we more lucky ones can only express sympathy for their misfortune and admiration for their courage. For the rest, and I hope they are few, who batten and fatten off the yield of their own sycophancy, for them it is hard to feel anything but pity and contempt. An honest and eloquent denunciation, but spoken by whom?—a historian striving for balance, as recommended by Garrett Mattingly; or a partisan like a character from Mattingly's famous The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, similar to the men of 1588 who believed that they were about to witness 'the beginning of Armageddon, of a final struggle to the death between the forces of light and the forces of darkness'?14 Predictably enough, there was no shortage of critics against Hexter's point of view. Several discussants from Eastern Europe and some from elsewhere argued in favour of the utility of the Marxist approach to both history and the social sciences, and for the necessity of their interdependence. The attitude of such critics to the narrower issue of quantification was also antithetical to that of Hexter. For example, Academician Vladimir Khvostov was quoted as saying, 'It is hard to imagine that a machine could be applied to the study of political history. In economic history it is a different matter. The machine is now indispensable for the quickest processing of economic and social data.'15 A paper submitted by a Soviet group under the leadership of I. D. Kovalchenko was in line with Khvostov's observation, emphasizing that while Marx was said to have maintained that 'only then does a science attain perfection when it manages to employ mathematics', quantitative analysis is only a tool and needs to be preceded by qualitative analysis of the processes, phenomena, or objects studied. Going beyond what his Soviet counterparts had

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said, Jean Schneider from France put forward the suggestion that, 'the application of electronic methods can lead to a revision of methodology, and possibly of the concept of history itself. In his paper, 'The Machine and History', Schneider declared that: the renewal of the historical disciplines was carried out in the nineteenth century by techniques of erudition; in the twentieth century, it is by borrowing concepts and methods from the other human sciences that history has found a new fecundity. The utilisation of powerful materials could lead historical science to define more clearly an object and its methods on the double level of synchronic and diachronic studies. However: the lack of adaptation of men, of their institutions and of their work to the rapid progress of techniques is without doubt the major reason for the imbalance in contemporary society. In historical research, recourse to machines will be a factor of progress only to the extent that methodological reflection becomes the primary consideration. It has become banal to recall that the machine produces only that which is put into it. Banal though his final observation might have been, the prospect that Schneider opened up to his fellow historians was indeed exciting. In the discussion of methodology, then, the traditional Anglo-American view of history as an art was defended by J. H. Hexter (he himself comparing it at the Congress to that of cooking), while the continential speakers spoke for it as science, with the Eastern Europeans giving a heavy Marxist emphasis.16 Under the second major heading, 'The History of Continents', a similar kind of gap emerged. It can perhaps be best described by taking two papers dealing with the Americas, one from the USA, one from the USSR. In his contribution, entitled, 'Emancipations and Reconstructions: A Comparative Study', C. Vann Woodward pointed out at the beginning that 'One habit of mind that has complicated American ways of dealing with the problem of failure ... has been the isolation of American experience from comparative reference. Comparisons are essential to all historical understanding. ' Woodward had already practised what he was preaching with a collection of essays edited by him and entitled The Comparative Approach to American History.11 The fact that the essays in the

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volume were first produced as talks for the Voice of America detracted less from their historical objectivity than it first suggested, and the collection went a long way toward breaking down the isolation of which their editor was now complaining. In his paper, he took a further step in the right direction by selecting for the area of his study what has been called 'a magnificent laboratory for the comparative approach*—plantation America, stretching southward from Virginia to Brazil and eastward from Texas through the gulf to Barbados. While such an area had already been made the basis for comparative studes of slavery and the slave trade, Woodward was almost the first to subject the process of emancipation there to a similar scholarly analysis.18 Woodward's approach, which made the experience of the United States 'central to our concern and its illumination the main purpose of these comparisons', contrasted with that of another paper in the same series, 'Latin America and the World Historical Process in the 19 - 20th Centuries', by A. N. Glinkin of the USSR. For Glinkin, 'the history of Latin America bears witness to the fact that regional and national peculiarities, however great their impact, fail to interfere with the basic law of the historical process'. In other words, Glinkin moved from the general to the particular and back again, while Woodward from the particular to the general and back again. A second difference between the two papers was that while Woodward's had no explicit aim, Glinkin's was intended to demonstrate that: the socio-economic backwardness of the Third World is not God's curse, nor is it the fatal effect of invariable geographical factors, or racial and biological peculiarities of the people, but it is rather caused by social reasons, by the objective laws governing the functioning of social systems based on the exploitation of man by man. That is not to say that Woodward was any less concerned than Glinkin for the plight of humanity—rather that, at least in these papers, the two scholars took differing views of the nature and purpose of history. Such a difference in attitude continued to be apparent as the Congress moved from the consideration of its two major topics to that of somewhat narrower subjects in four sections—ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary. In the modern history sec-

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tion, for example, it could clearly be detected in two papers, by Richard Pipes on 'Russian Conservatism in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century', and by A. V. Efimov and G. P. Kuropiatnik on The General Trend of the US History'. While Pipes in introducing his paper made an open avowal of his liberal faith, of his rejection of any orthodoxy or dogma, there was no overt political comment in his paper, unless ambiguity could be detected in the use of the future and present tenses in some sentences, including the first, which ran thus: The term conservatism will be understood here to mean the ideology which advocates for Russia an authoritarian government, subject to restraints neither by formal law nor by an elected legislature but only to such limitations as it sees fit to impose on itself. Those who saw the Soviet leaders as neo-Slavophiles or neonationalists might choose to interpret this definition as support for their view, but Pipes gave them no certain encouragement in his paper. Efimov and Kuropiatnik, on the other hand, concluded by giving theirfirmopinion that 'the expansion of US capitalism in the sixties of the twentieth century is living again through the 1890s when the so-called 'free lands' had been depleted'. In the discussion of the two papers, A. Ya. Avrekh criticized Pipes for being inadequately theoretical, and Oscar Handlin suggested that Efimov and Kuropiatnik were too theoretical. Here as elsewhere, a clear pattern could be detected.19 As well as such interesting occasions, there were moments of tedium, too. The nadir of the Congress was the public consideration of an uninspiring paper by M. Kim on 'Some Aspects of Cultural Revolution and Distinctive Features of Soviet Experience in Its Implementation'. 'Discussion' of this paper took the form of unsolicited but impassioned testimonials of the excellence of their native regions by delegates from all quarters of the Soviet Union ranging over to Yakutiia. Everywhere, before 1917, we were given to understand, there was darkness, nowhere afterwards was there not light. These speakers were also agreed that the best method of indicating the progress that had taken place was statistical, and all of them recited simple but long lists of figures concerning schools, universities, libraries, and other indices of their local cultural revolution.

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However boring, this meeting recalled the earlier experience of that other great melting pot, the USA, and a discussion of certain aspects of it by C. Vann Woodward. He had quoted an illuminating remark made by the anthropologist M. J. Herskovits: 'The extent to which the past of a people is regarded as praiseworthy, their own self-esteem will be high and the opinion of others will be favorable.'20 Possibly, what the Irish and other poor immigrant groups had done for themselves in the United States, the Yakuts and other nationalities were now attempting to do for themselves in the Soviet Union. Such longer-term observations would also help contribute towards an understanding of the difference in outlook between Soviet historians and their American colleagues at the Moscow Congress of 1970. To some extent, no doubt, it was because little praise was extended by each group for the past of the other that their own selfesteem was vigorously asserted by themselves.21 More generally, the insufficiency of scholarly rapprochement that could be brought about by diplomatic detente was the result of a continuing gap in methodology and outlook, which was based on a deep-set divergence of tradition. While Soviet historians were avowed 'MarxistLeninists', they were also the heirs of pre-revolutionary historians equally concerned with system. To mention just two of the greatest of them, S. M. Solovyov drew his overall framework from Marx's predecessor, Hegel, while V. O. Klyuchevsky wrote of the need for an 'historical sociology' modelled partly on that of his continental European colleagues22 American historians, for the most part, were in their own time-honoured way empiricists, owing more to British than to continental European models. The difference in outlook is revealed most succinctly in terminology separating English-speaking scholars from their continental European colleagues in general. 'Historical Sciences' is by no means as conventional a phrase as 'sciences historiques', 'Geschichtswissenschaften' or 'istoricheskie nauki'. While there was not as much progress as could have been hoped by 1970, there were certainly some signs that changing world conditions were leading to the narrowing of the gap between Soviet Marxist historiography and Western bourgeois historiography in general. To some extent, this reflected a closing of the gap between the 'science' and 'art' views of history as a whole. Advances that had been made since 1945 may be most conveniently appreciated

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by taking two individual examples, one from the West and the other from the Soviet Union. Fernand Braudel was born in 1902 in the north-eastern French province of Meuse, and was educated in Paris, where he took a degree in history at the Sorbonne. Graduating in 1923, he went to teach history at a secondary school in Algeria, where he first developed his great love for the Mediterranean. He returned to Paris in 1932 to continue such teaching, then left in 1935 for Brazil, where he was a member of the Faculty of Arts at Sao Paulo. Coming back to Paris in 1937, he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1939, he was called up for military service, and departed for the Maginot Line, where he was made prisoner in 1940. In captivity for the rest of the war, he reconstructed from memory his vast thesis on The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, which he then defended successfully in 1947 before its publication in 1949. In 1946, he became editor of the journal Annates: Economies, Societes, Civilisations, and in 1949 Professor of Modern History at the College de France. Many other honours and duties followed. Apart from The Mediterranean, his other major work was Civilisation and Capitalism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, which was first published in its full version in 1979. Fernand Braudel died on 28 November 1985 just before the publication of the first of two completed volumes out of a projected quartet on The Identity of France. He explained his distinctive approach in the Preface of May 1946 early edition of The Mediterranean. The book was divided into three parts, each of itself an essay in general explanation. The first, 'The Role of the Environment', was 'almost timeless history ... in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, everrecurring cycles.' In this part, there was heavy emphasis on 'man's contact with the inanimate'—land, sea and climate, communications and cities. The second, 'Collective Destinies and General Trends', studied in turn economic systems, states, societies, civilizations and forms of war. Thirdly and most briefly came 'Events, Politics and People'— 'surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs'. Braudel considered that this was 'the most exciting of all, the richest in human interest, and also the most dangerous'. He declared:

52

Events We must learn to distrust this history with its still burning passions, as it was felt, described, and lived by contemporaries whose lives were as short and as short-sighted as ours ... Resounding events are often only momentary outbursts, surface manifestations of these larger movements and explicable only in terms of them.

In the Preface dated 19 June 1963 to the second revised edition of The Mediterranean which was published in 1966, Braudel looked at what he considered to be the basic problem confronting every historical undertaking within the dialectic of space and time (geography and history), declaring: Is it possible somehow to convey simultaneously both that conspicuous history which holds our attention by its continual and dramatic changes —and that other, submerged, history, almost silent and always discreet, virtually unsuspected either by its observers or its participants, which is little touched by the obstinate erosion of time? This fundamental contradiction, which must always lie at the centre of our thought, can be a vital tool of knowledge and research. Relevant to every area of human life, it may take on a variety of forms according to the terms of the comparison. Historians have over the years grown accustomed to describing this contradiction in terms of structure and conjuncture, the former denoting long-term, the latter, short-term realities. Clearly there are different kinds of structure just as there are different kinds of conjuncture, and the duration of either structure of conjuncture may in turn vary. History accepts and discovers multidimensional explanations, reaching, as it were, vertically from one temporal plane to another. And on every plane there are also horizontal relationships and connections. Within this complex and contradictory framework, what place is there for the individual? Braudel appears to have encountered little difficulty here, observing in his conclusion dated 26 June 1965: I would conclude with the paradox that the true man of action is he who can measure most nearly the constraints upon him, who chooses to remain within them and even to take advantage of the weight of the inevitable, exerting his own pressure in the same direction. All efforts against the prevailing tide of history—which is not always obvious— are doomed to failure.

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When he thought of the individual, he said: I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before. Underlining this vision with a great profusion of detail depicting the constraints on the individual, Braudel summarized his approach as an attempt to write a new kind of history—total history. Now that he is dead we can the more easily look at the manner in which Braudel was imprisoned within his own destiny. He himself wrote at the end of the Preface to thefirstedition of The Mediterranean: It will perhaps prove that history can do no more than study walled gardens. If it were otherwise, it would surely be failing in one of its most immediate tasks which must be to relate to the painful problems of our times and to maintain contact with the youthful but imperialistic human sciences. Can there be any study of humanity, in 1946, without historians who are ambitious, conscious of their duties and of their immense powers? 'It is the fear of great history which has killed great history', wrote Edmond Faral, in 1942. May it live again! With many further asides to the war and postwar periods in The Mediterranean and his other works, we can have little doubt that they were among the greatest influences on Braudel.23 Many of his contemporaries were similarly persuaded to take the wider view, in a manner which we will illustrate below. To call our approach 'Braudelian' is therefore to say as concisely as possible that it follows in their collective wake. Among such scholars have been some from the Soviet Union. On the face of things, as Marxists they should have been taking a global view by definition. However, during the later Stalinist period they were in many ways turned in upon themselves and have only resumed the broader outlook since Stalin's death in 1953. Let us take our second individual example. Boris Fedorovich Porshnev was born in 1905 in St Petersburg. He graduated from Moscow University and began his teaching career in Rostov-onDon before returning to work in various institutions in Moscow. From 1943 he was a senior research associate of the Institute of

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History of the Academy of Sciences, but he also continued teaching at Moscow University. He defended his doctoral dissertation 'Popular Revolts in France before the Fronde (1632-1648)' in 1940: it was published under the same title in 1948, awarded the State Prize in 1950 and translated into German (1954) and French (1963). He retained his interest in social movements while developing research in several directions. B. F. Porshnev developed the ambition to write a trilogy comprising a synchronic analysis of the development of social, political and international relations throughout Europe during the time of the Thirty Years' War, which he considered to be the first conflict to embrace the whole continent as well as one of the principal divisions between medieval and modern times. After a series of articles connected with this ambitious project, he brought out in 1970 its concluding volume, France, the English Revolution and European Politics at the Middle of the Seventeenth Century. The second part, not yet published although adumbrated by a further series of articles, was planned to consider the turning-point that occurred in relations between Western and Eastern Europe in the mid-1630s. Thefirstpart of the projected trilogy, The Thirty Years' War and the Entry of Sweden and the Moscow State came out in 1976 after its author's death. It takes as its centrepiece the Smolensk War of 1632-4, which has received little or even no mention in English-language accounts of the wider conflict. Porshnev argues that even before the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War, the interconnections of Europe were greater than has often recently been thought, placing the conclusion of Moscovy's Time of Troubles (1598-1613) in a wider context, for example, asserting that complete triumph for Poland would have encouraged the Habsburgs to carry the conflict to their enemies at an earlier date. Concerning Germany, Porshnev detects four groups of contradiction: political, between the Emperor and princes; confessional, between the various religious groupings; national, between Germans, Slavs and Hungarians; and social, between the classes. Superficially in descending order of importance, according to Porshnev, these groups of contradiction actually ascend in such an order. Against such a background, the principal subject of the book is elaborated: the Swedish period of the Thirty Years' War, 1630-5, is more fully understood in a context which includes the Russo-Polish War for Smolensk, 1632-4, its preliminaries and its aftermath. The threat

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from the East was sufficient to provide a diversion enabling the Swedes to make their descent deep into Germany. The third volume of the trilogy, France, the English Revolution and European Politics at the Middle of the Seventeenth Century, published in 1970, begins with a chapter on the sociology of international relations. Porshnev argues that the history of one country alone is no more conceivable than that of one branch of human activity alone, the history of ideas completely separate from socioeconomic life, for example. The only permissible approach to history is therefore the universal. Universal history has three aspects: the whole of time, the whole of humanity, and all human activities. Concentrating his attention on the second of these three aspects, Porshnev asserts that by the history of one country has usually been understood the history of one state, but the state is the reflection of a class conflict of much wider import. This leads him to the adoption from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure of two methods of approach, the diachronic and synchronic, which involve the vertical or horizontal dissection of human experience, that is within any given area over a period of time, or throughout the whole world at any given moment. Elaborating the second of these approaches, Porshnev suggests that, whereas if the moves of one piece throughout a game of chess are known, the moves of the other pieces are difficult to guess at; if the positions of all the pieces but one at any given stage of the game are known, the position of the remaining piece can be calculated with some certainty. Admittedly, such an approach to history tends to be static, but dynamism can be achieved by taking several synchronic, horizontal slices and then making observations about the movement between them on the basis of diachronic, vertical slices. To tackle even one slice is a daunting prospect for a single historian, but the universal approach has always been the aspiration of progressive people. For example, the leaders of the English Revolution sought to deliver their message to all mankind. It is therefore the legitimate task of the historian to examine the world in which such an aim was conceived. While most of his book is concerned with the English Revolution's European context, Porshnev also considers an even wider point of view. He argues that, since two-thirds of the world's population probably lived in Asia in the seventeenth century, that continent must not be omitted from any examination of the impor-

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tant historical movements of that time. This remains so even though Asia did not encroach upon Europe as much as before. If China and India had not been preoccupied with domestic conflict and Persia and Turkey had not been at war with each other, Muscovite Russia would probably have felt more pressure on its southern and eastern frontiers and would therefore have been unable to devote its energies to the infiltration of Siberia and to the struggle with European rivals. Turning to the longer chronological direction, Porshnev asserts that there are three main periods in the development of international relations: before the formation of political units; before 1917; and since 1917. An important step in the first period was the English Revolution and the Thirty Years' War, in the second the French Revolution and its international repercussions. But for him, obviously, the most significant moment is the Russian Revolution of 1917.24 Whatever their differences on this and other questions, there is in the work of Braudel and Porshnev a considerable movement towards an all-embracing approach that could help close the great divide. Whatever else it had brought with it, total war had also created total history. Some interesting sidelights are thrown on this observation by Vasily Grossman in his novel Life and Fate. He contrasts the life of the prisoner in which 'the twilight monotony of the months and years engenders a sense that time has contracted, has shrunk' with that of the fighting soldier: The distortion of the sense of time during combat is something still more complex. Here there is a distortion even in the individual, primary sensations. One second can stretch out for eternity, and long hours can crumple together. The special emphasis given to these age-old sensations by total war was accompanied and underlined by contemporary science. To quote Grossman again: The world was no longer Euclidian, its geometrical nature no longer composed of masses and their speeds. Science was progressing with ever increasing impetuousness in a world liberated by Einstein from the fetters of absolute time and space.25

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In parallel manner, this chapter has endeavoured to illustrate the manner in which the Cold War has encouraged reconsiderations in history. However, both the foresight and limited vision of MacLeish remind us how difficult it is to throw off inhibitions and prejudices. Further reminders come from the declarations of Latourette and Read, the interpretations of Florinsky, and of Morison and Commager. Needless to repeat, Soviet intellectuals were under much more severe constraints during the last years of Stalin. A tour d'horizon taken in 1970 emphasizes the problems involved in crossing ideological gulfs, but also helps to suggest the manner in which historians might progress by joining their efforts to those of social scientists. European historians, Western as well as Eastern, have helped to indicate the way forward to their more empirically minded British and American colleagues, whose guarded suspicion of grand schemes, Annalien, Marxist or whatever has been of service in the reverse direction. The greatest contribution that historians as a whole can make to a common endeavour, as I will now attempt to illustrate, is through their sense of chronological development. If a week in politics can sometimes be a long time, a century in history has often passed relatively quickly. A comprehensive use of time, and of space too, is therefore desirable. What Braudel did for the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II (c. 1556-98) and Porshnev did for Europe during the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) must be extended to a wider context.

PART TWO CONJUNCTURES

Part Two: Conjunctures 1618 - 48 1638 - 49 1688 - 1721 1776 - 1815 1854 - 71

Thirty Years' War Civil war and revolution in England, Scotland and Ireland; social disturbances throughout Europe Revolution in England, Scotland and Ireland; Russia's 'arrival' in Europe American and French Revolution; Napoleon Crimean War; American Civil War; sale of Alaska; Franco - Prussian War; German Empire; Paris Commune

The Great Conjuncture 1898

Spanish - American War; Lenin, Development of Capitalism in Russia

1899

Wilson, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics

1902 1904 - 5 1912 1914 1916

Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Russo - Japanese War Wilson, The New Freedom First World War begins Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage ofCapitalism The Russian Revolution; US entry into First World War; Wilson's Second Inaugural;

1917

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1918 1918-21 1919 1920 1921

Conjunctures

Lenin's April theses Wilson's Fourteen Points; Treaty of Brest Litovsk; the Armistice Russian Civil War Treaty of Versailles US rejection of Treaty The return of 'normalcy'

4

The Great Conjuncture: Leninism versus Wilsonism Atfirstglance, it may seem more than a little odd that, having just argued for a comprehensive use of time and space, we immediately narrow the focus of our study to the consideration of two individuals and the bodies of thought associated with them. Is this not to fall for the allure of what Braudel has called, of all kinds of investigation/the most exciting of all, the richest in human interest, and also the most dangerous... Events, Politics and People'? Have we forgotten that the master deemed them no more than 'surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs'? The short answer is that Lenin and Wilson, Leninism and Wilsonism, bear a significance greater than that of nearly all other individuals and ideologies associated with them. They therefore deserve inclusion under Braudel's heading 'Collective Destinies and General Trends'; in other words, they constitute together a great conjuncture. This assertion may be supported by the following characterization of American inter-war internationalists, emphasising their homogeneity: Virtually all were old-stock Protestant Americans. Descendants of English and Scottish settlers, they were Anglophiles who believed that the United States had inherited England's role as arbiter of world affairs.... The world they wanted to save was limited to Europe and its overseas possessions; they took Latin America for granted and neglected the Orient. Here, to a considerable if by no means full extent, is a typification of Wilson and Wilsonism. But if this transference is implicit and 63

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incomplete, the message comes through more directly in the following reminiscence of a senior American historian: 'I remember attending thefirstcollegiate UN assembly back home in Maine in the spring of 1946 when we expected America to pick up the task Woodrow Wilson left behind'.l More generally, N. Gordon Levin Jr has written: looking back, what seems clear is that Wilsonianism, even while losing the battle over the League of Nations, eventually triumphed in the longterm struggle over the ultimate definition of the nature of twentiethcentury American foreign policy. Wilson established the main drift toward an American liberal globalism, hostile both to traditional imperialism and to revolutionary-socialism. Many who had been associated with Wilson, or who accepted the essentials of his world view, such as Herbert Hoover, Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Foster Dulles, would continue in later periods to identify America's expansive national interest with the maintenance of a rational and peaceful international liberal order. Ultimately, in the po^t-world War II period, Wilsonian values would have their complete triumph in the bi-partisan Cold War consensus.2 Gordon Levin also makes some interesting comparisons between Wilsonism and its antithesis, Leninism, which, it goes without saying, remained the guiding ideology of Soviet foreign and domestic policy throughout the post-revolutionary period, even if subject to Stalinist distortions. To turn to the terminology of Porshnev, we will be looking at a synchronic horizontal section centred on the years 1917-19, but stretching back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and even further to the early, formative years of our two protagonists, Wilson and Lenin. The future American President was born in 1856, and was therefore an impressionable young boy during the American Civil War, at the end of which his predecessor Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The future Soviet leader was born in 1870, and would therefore have childhood memories of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8, as well as of the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. Their respective adolescences and early manhoods were spent on the threshold of the great changes that were to take place at the turn of the century, to which we must now give an introduction. The USA fought no major war against a foreign enemy from the

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war of 1812 against Britain to the Spanish-American War of 1898. The MexicanWar of 1846 did not necessitate a full mobilization of American might, which was called for even less by the long series of hostilities against the Indians. Similarly, the navy did not grow to full size before the end of the nineteenth century, when the blowing up of the USS Maine in Havana harbour was the trigger of the Spanish-American War of 1898. President Theodore Roosevelt, mostly on land at the time as leader of his Roughriders, was a powerful advocate of the navy during his presidency, not only for protection of the Panama Canal under construction, but for the exercise of American strength wherever it might be appropriate throughout the entire world. Throughout the nineteenth century and before, Russia maintained armed forces of considerable size, especially the army. After the war of 1812 against Napoleon, the army was used several times against foreign enemies, especially the Turks, and then against the invading French, British and allied force in the Crimea from 1854. The Russian failures in that war emphasized the need to modernize, and a comprehensive reform of the army was carried out from 1874 onwards. Its performance was far from distinguished in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8, but it managed nevertheless to gain a somewhat awesome reputation, probably because of its sheer size, both actual and potential. Meanwhile, the large navy which had been less in evidence throughout most of the nineteenth century, was making its presence felt especially in the Baltic and Black Seas, and in the Far East, too, facing Japan. In the great carve-up at the end of the nineteenth century which has come to be known as the New Imperialism, the USA was a vigorous participant. It clashed with Britain and Germany in Latin America and the Pacific as well as actually fighting Spain. It asserted its interests from Panama to China and, to some observers, was even poised to take an interest in the affairs of the continent that most of its inhabitants had rejected—Europe. As for Russia, its long-established reputation as a great bear always threatening to lumber over Europe was now extended fully to Asia as well. Hence, the first 'Great Game'3 in which the Russian Empire clashed with the British in Afghanistan, and in which the Russophobia that had developed earlier in the century reached new levels of intensity. While Russophobia was to be found elsewhere in Europe, it did not reach the USA with full force until the end of the nineteenth

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century. Before then, it was not persistent and there could be a resumption of earlier good feelings with mutual congratulations at the end of serfdom and slavery in 1861 and 1865 respectively as well as over the American purchase of Alaska in 1867. However, Americans were increasingly opposed to the Russian autocracy, which the emancipation did little to dispel. The tsarist government was increasingly repressive as it felt itself under threat from the growing revolutionary movement. In particular, there was an intensification of anti-Semitism, unofficial and official. Russian Jews had been confined to the west and south of the empire throughout the nineteenth century, but the first pogroms did not occur until the 1870s, when an ugly variety of anti-Semitism was encouraged by the future Emperor Alexander III himself. American revulsion against tsarism was increased by publicity given to the exile system in Siberia and the actions of the police against dissidents everywhere. Soon after 1900, tension between the two future superpowers grew as their interests clashed in Manchuria. President Roosevelt was at first hoping to see Japan put a stop to Russian expansionism in the war of 1904-5, although the comprehensive nature of the Japanese success made him wonder if his hopes had been overfulfilled. For the Open Door policy to be maintained, balance of power was needed, too. On the Russian side, reverses in the war against Japan helped bring about the Russian Revolution of 1905, which gave Lenin hisfirstfull opportunity for exercising leadership in the Bolshevik cause, at a time when his future counterpart was still involved in academic politics as president of Princeton.4 Having sketched in the background to their early careers, we will now look at how Wilson and Lenin spent the first part of their lives. Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born on 28 December 1856 in Staunton, Virginia, where his father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was a Presbyterian minister. His mother was Jessie, daughter of Thomas Woodrow, another Presbyterian minister who had emigrated from Carlisle in northern England. His blood was probably all lowland Scottish, to the extent that such was the origin of all his grandparents. His childhood passions were said to be for God, for his earthly father and for words, especially as spoken or declaimed. But, sickly and shy, he was also unusually attached to his mother and the rest of his family. An early aim was to emulate Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister whom he saw as 'the Christian statesman'.

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In 1875 he became a student at Princeton, and added the radical John Bright and political scientist Walter Bagehot to his models of excellence. He later remembered that he had formed with a friend 'a solemn covenant... that we would acquire knowledge that we might have power'. (And in London in 1918, he was to observe, The stern Covenanter tradition that is behind me sends many an echo down the years'.) In 1879 he transferred to Virginia Law School, but became ill, and completed his degree at home. From the fall of 1882 to the spring of 1883, he practised as a lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia, but disgusted by what he saw as commercialism and vulgarity, he then returned to academic life as a graduate student in history and economics. He tried to write on the American constitution as Bagehot had written on its British counterpart. One of the happier events in Atlanta had been his meeting with Ellen Louise Axson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, who became his first wife from 1885 until her death in August 1914. In 1886, at the age of 29, Wilson finally became financially independent from his family, earning his living as a university teacher. His new career was most successful, and he became president of Princeton in June 1902, three months before the death of his father (his mother had died in 1888). His experience in the hard world of academic bickering prepared him for entry into state and national politics. He became President of the United States in 1912. Desolated by his beloved Ellen's death at the outbreak of the First World War, he soon married for a second time in December 1915 to a widow, Edith Boiling Gait. She became a powerful helpmate, while the President's closest adviser was Colonel Edward M. House.5 We will consider the policies of Woodrow Wilson during and after the First World War along with those of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, to whose early life we must now turn. The future Soviet leader was born in Simbirsk on the Volga on 22 April 1870. His father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulianov, originated from a lower-class family in Astrakhan, at the mouth of thatriver.His ancestry was Great Russian, with some admixture of Tatar blood. His mother was Maria Alexandrovna Blank, the daughter of a medical doctor and landlord in the province of Kazan and of his wife who originated from the German colony on the Volga, founded in the reign of Catherine the Great.

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The Ulianovs were a secure if undemonstrative family. The father was, according to a friend, 'a strong man of firm character who was very stern in his relations with his subordinates'. Conservative in politics and Orthodox in religion, he was at the time of Lenin's birth a provincial inspector and superintendent of schools. In 1874 he rose in the tsarist bureaucracy to the rank of Actual State Councillor, which conferred upon him hereditary nobility. The young Lenin was a serious, somewhat aloof schoolboy, keener on reading and writing than on talking, unlike the young Wilson. At the age when Woodrow had a profound religious experience, Vladimir lost his religious belief. While the heroes of the American's late adolescence were Gladstone, Bright and Bagehot, the Russian turned from Turgenev and Tolstoy to Chernyshevsky, author of a political novel entitled What Is to Be Done?, and then to Marx and Engels. The young Lenin's development was also profoundly influenced by family events. His father died prematurely at the age of 55 at the beginning of 1886. In the spring of 1887, his much admired elder brother was executed for his part in a failed attempt to assassinate Alexander III. If Freud was correct in his observation that young men do not often undertake significant independent action activity until after the deaths of their fathers, the way was now open for Lenin (as it became for Wilson in 1902). If some historical observation has been accurate, his brother's self-sacrifice in the anti-tsarist cause helped persuade him to take the path of revolution. Because of the treasonous shadow hanging over the Ulianov family since 1887, it was difficult for Lenin to complete his education. But, largely owing to the financial support and continued intervention with the authorities of his mother (who was not to die until 1916), he was able to achieve first place in law examinations at the University of St Petersburg in 1891. This, in spite of the fact that he had been rusticated from the University of Kazan for suspected revolutionary activities soon after entering it late in 1887, and was allowed to go to the University of St Petersburg only to take the examinations. Early in 1892, like Woodrow Wilson about ten years before him in Atlanta, Georgia, Vladimir Ilich Ulianov became a practising lawyer in Samara, a town on the Volga. Again like Wilson, the future Lenin did not enjoy the experience and lasted little longer at

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it (about eighteen months as opposed to six). Confirmed in his view that the only exit from the troubles of the Russian people was revolution, he gave up the professional practice of tsarist law in favour of the full-time pursuit of its overthrow. Soon after his removal to St Petersburg for this purpose, in 1894 he met Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaia, a comrade in the capital's Marxist circle. The couple then married, although Krupskiaia changed her name to Ulianova no more than legally. Less than legally, her husband began in 1901 to use the revolutionary pseudonym (taken from the River Lena) by which he became known later to the world. By this time arisingmember of the Bolshevik wing of the SocialDemocratic Party, Lenin was making his energetic contribution to the cause that triumphed in 1917 with the October revolution.6 It was in this year too that Woodrow Wilson came on to the world stage with the entry of the USA into the First World War. Before making a few comments on the emergence of Wilsonism along with that of Leninism, however, let us look a little more at their respective intellectual backgrounds and activity. We have already seen how Wilson's background was more specifically Scottish Presbyterian and how the heroes of his adolescence included Gladstone, Bright and Bagehot. A small but indicative point is that it was not until 1902, under pressure from a publisher, that Wilson completely abandoned the English spelling of such words as 'honour' and 'valour'. A rather more important point is that he excluded from a Calendar of Great Americans that he drew up in 1894 the name of the major author of the Declaration of Independence, explaining that 'Jefferson was not a thorough American because of the strain of French philosophy that permeated and weakened all his thought.' Whilst he did later defend Jeffersonian individualism against socialist collectivism, this did not lead him to the more radical fringes of a democratic outlook. Indeed, about ten years later, he declared, 'I sometimes fear that in the time of the American Revolution, had I lived then, I would have been a Tory. Patient change appeals to me.' Of the most extreme of the newer outlooks, he said in 1906, 'The Socialist motive is that of Christ himself, but the method is madness.' Accepting the nostrums of the Socialists, 'You would enslave the individual by making him subject to the organization.' Wilson was aware of Marx, but does not seem to have read any of him. He would much rather turn to Edmund Burke, whom he considered a couple of years later 'the

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only entirely wise writer upon public affairs in the English language.' Wilson was by no means entirely ignorant of Europe. He did learn German, if for American academic reasons, as part of the graduate programme at Johns Hopkins University, but could not be said to have much of an interest in Germany or France, still less in Russia. In 1885 he mentioned the work just out by Eugene Schuyler, Peter the Great, but does not appear to have read it. At the end of the decade, his first wife read Turgenev's On the Eve, which she described as 'a beautiful and pathetic tale of true and passionate love. Oh so sad though.' We do not know how Wilson himself reacted to this.7 By about the beginning of the twentieth century, he was becoming aware of Russia both internally and internationally, the Jewish problem and the countdown to the war with Japan, for example. References to Russia in his papers now became more frequent, and he included it in his academic writing, even if as an exception to the general rule made by Europe and the USA. In The State, first published in 1899, he wrote: There can be no reasonable doubt that the power of Russia's Czar, vast and arbitrary as it seems, derives its strength from the Russian people. It is not the Czar's personal power; it is his power as head of the national church, as semi-sacred representative of the race and its historical development and organization. Its roots run deep into the tenacious, nourishing soil of immemorial habit. The Czar represents a history, not a caprice.... The measure of the Czar's sovereignty is the habit of his people ..., their humor also, and the humor of his officials. By about the same time, Wilson was also shifting his ideological position somewhat, arguing for the pursuit of a happy medium between laissez-faire and socialism: A truer doctrine must be found, which gives wide freedom to the individual for his self-development and yet guards the freedom against the competition that kills, and reduces the antagonism between selfdevelopment and social development to a minimum. And such a doctrine can be formulated, surely, without too great vagueness. And such a doctrine was indeed found by Wilson himself in the 'New Freedom' that he outlined during his presidential campaign

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of 1912, although it cannot be said that he avoided vagueness, or even contradiction.8 Now of course, he had little or no time for academic pursuits, but editions of The State continued, presumably with at least his perusal along with his approval. In an edition up to December 1918, a very specific date probably given because of the flux in which states found themselves, Russia found itself in a supplementary chapter along with Turkey, which was more briefly dismissed since its government had always been regarded 'as an absolute monarchy despite the fact that it at times had had the form of constitutional arrangements'. Meanwhile, although 'autocracy reached its highest development in Russia', there had been changes since the revolution of 1905. The tsar retained 'supreme autocratic power', but exercised the legislative power 'in conjunction with the Council of the Empire and the Douma'. It is interesting to note at some length how later developments were described: The Douma never acquired a position of influence and control, but survived until the revolution in 1917. As a result of the military disasters and scandals, including the betrayal of the army to the Germans, the Czar was deposed in March 1917, and a republic proclaimed under a provisional government. A constituent assembly was chosen to determine a constitution, but before it assembled the Bolshevik regime was inaugurated. Soldiers and Workmen's Councils were established in Petrograd and other places and the radical Socialist element secured control of the machinery of the central government. Lenin, as president of the Council, and Trotzky, as Foreign Minister, have been the controlling forces in what government there has been. A condition bordering on anarchy has existed for more than a year. The Ukraine proclaimed its independence as a republic; other parts of the Empire broke away from the central authorities and proclaimed republics, notably Murman in the north and Siberia, and more recently an All-Russian government has been proclaimed with the object of reuniting the separate parts. The Lenin-Trotzky government made peace with the Central Empires by the Brest-Litovsky Treaty, by which several of the western provinces passed under German control. The United States and the Allies have from the first taken the position that this treaty was secured by treachery and bad faith and as victors they have compelled the Central Powers to abandon it. It is not possible to tell what the outcome in Russia will be, but it is not probable that the autocracy will be reinstated. It is equally unlikely that the Bolsheviki will much longer retain the power9.

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Before we go on to consider the earlier intellectual evolution of the man who did more than anybody to make that unlikelihood a reality, let us note the fact that an earlier edition of Woodrow Wilson's The State was translated into Russian and published in Moscow in the year 1905. An interesting Preface was added by the sociologist Maxim Kovalevsky, who had several years earlier been encouraged in his researches on communal practices by none other than Karl Marx. However, Kovalevsky did not share the views of Marx and by 1905 was turning his back completely on German metaphysicians, although singling out for dismissal Hegel rather than Marx, and congratulating Wilson for avoiding flights of fancy and concentrating on historical realities. According to Kovalevsky, the contents of Wilson's book could be put thus: He wants to reveal the nature of the contemporary state, as opposed to the ancient and medieval, to demonstrate its various types and explain their origins not by references to the individual creation of this or that legislator and still less—to the successful or unsuccessful borrowing from a foreigner, but by the discovery of the internal process of evolution. There was, nevertheless, a general process of evolution, from as far back as a tribal stage, but later showing an unvarying tendency to move from unlimited government or a minority of leaders to the self-government as far as possible of the whole of society. Kovalevsky made bold enough to recommend Wilson's full explanation of representative democracy and legal order to Russian readers, adding: Not cut off by a Chinese wall from the civilised world, possessing in our past those selfsame rudiments of free development as were shown by Western Europe in the Middle Ages, and in the contemporary transformation of state estates into economic classes—the guarantee of the changeover to the system of self-government of society, we, evidently, are bound by necessity to interest ourselves in the solutions reached by the races of the German - Roman world. These solutions might be achieved by us in the near future, but not because of inorganic borrowing, but because of the force of circumstances, by our intellectual and economic development, by the transformation of our contemporary state order. Wilson's book will help us to understand the many political

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questions still presenting themselves to our minds in an obscure manner, thanks to the backwardness of our procedures and the consequent a priori nature of our views towards the necessary conditions of a better future. Indicating to us by what means this better future has been achieved in actuality by the leading peoples of the world, the work now published will bring us likewise an undoubted practical use. Kovalevsky, then, was assuming that Russia would take the constitutional path already followed in Britain, the USA and elsewhere in the Western world. For him, as for Wilson, the state would act as arbiter between the individual and the community, reducing to a minimum 'the antagonism between self-development and social development.'' °.' But not all his fellow Russian intellectuals would agree with him, especially those who looked upon the state as the expression of the interests of the dominant class in its conflict with the other downtrodden classes. Among such socialists was V. I. Lenin. An important first point to make here is that, just as Wilson's cultural outlook centred on Britain and the USA, so Lenin's was focused on Germany and Russia, where understanding of the state had arisen in a different tradition from the seventeenth century onwards. In the 'police' outlook of the cameralists, which we will examine more fully below, the state played a much more positive and all-embracing part than in the British tradition, at least from Locke onwards. Although he was aware of the British - American ideology, Lenin paid little attention to it. Even then, he lighted not on Gladstone, Bright and Bagehot, but on Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose History of Trade Unionism was among his translation assigments during Siberian exile at the end of the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, he used the Webbs' researches as a support for his declaration that socialism could never have existed without direction by middle-class intellectuals. In fact, these researches did not indicate necessarily what Lenin wanted them to, approaching them as he did from his different basic outlook. As already noted, Lenin's youthful admiration was mostly for Chernyshevsky, and then for Marx and Engels. Here, too, the pupil gave his own distinctive interpretation to the writings of his teachers, grafting a somewhat rigid formulation on to the populist outlook represented by Chernyshevsky to form his own 'Lenin-

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ism'. On his way to that end, Lenin was helped to a considerable extent by the writings of Georgy Plekhanov, in, for example, the adoption of 'dialectical materialism' as a mode of explanation and the insistence on 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' as opposed to a more voluntarist transition to socialism. But if he broke with Plekhanov, who expressed the fear during the Menshevik - Bolshevik split that Lenin's policy would lead to 'a dictatorship over the proletariat', Lenin remained faithful during the arguments of the first decade of the twentieth century to his interpretation of Marx and Engels (possibly because they were both dead?). So much was this the case that both his supporters and opponents were to accuse him of 'an uncritical willingness to perceive the Russian historical experience as the mere repetition of a German model.'11 In his first major work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, completed in 1898, Lenin argued that a process of stratification was occurring among the peasantry, to an extent sufficient for the more prosperous strata to make demands stimulating the growth of large-scale industrial production. This process could continue if the Russian economy continued to take the Prussian, landlord road as opposed to the American, free-farmer road. In his next major work, taking the same title as Chernyshevsky's novel, What Is to Be Done?, and first published in 1902, Lenin turned his attention to the new class being produced by industrial growth, the proletariat, arguing that it could not carry out its historic task of leading the revolution overthrowing capitalism unless given direction by a political party. Even in Germany, he argued, where there was a less restricted social order, a stable core of experienced leaders was difficult to maintain. After the revolution of 1905, Lenin continued his struggle for what he saw as the correct interpretation of Marxism and the apppropriate strategy for the pursuit or revolution. He placed no faith in the parliamentary road to progress through the agency of the Duma, but believed nevertheless that it could have its uses as the revolutionary momentum failed, as an instrument for 'enlightenment, education and organisation.' To those who argued that the Duma was a sham, Lenin countered with the observation that the German Reichstag was elected on principles which were well short of complete democracy, but the German Social-Democratic Party had managed nevertheless to assert a powerful presence in it. With the outbreak of the First World War, Lenin's development

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entered a new phase. He denounced the German Social-Democrats and others who had betrayed the cause of internationalism to support the capitalists of each belligerent state rather than the workers of the world. He also looked for a comprehensive explanation of the process that had led to war, beginning as always with his mentors Marx and Engels but going on to use more recent writers, too. As he himself freely acknowledged, he turned to the principal work on the subject of imperialism written in English, by J. A. Hobson. Following Hobson and other authorities, especially the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding on Finanzkapital, Lenin concentrated on the economic aspects of imperialism. This phenomenon could be discerned in four principal types. First, there was the concentration of production at a very high stage, which took the form in the advanced countries of cartels, syndicates and trusts. Second, there was the seizure of the most important sources of raw materials, especially coal and iron. Third, monopoly had sprung from the banks, some three to five of which in each of the leading capitalist countries had achieved an important connection between themselves and industry. Fourth, there was imperialism in its most customary sense, growining out of colonial policy. Lenin wrote: To the numerous old motives of colonial policy, finance capital has added the struggle for the sources of raw materials, for the export of capital, for spheres of influence, i.e. for spheres for profitable deals, concessions, monopoly profits and so on, economic territory in general. When the colonies of the European powers, for instance, comprised only one-tenth of the territory of Africa (as was the case in 1876), colonial policy was able to develop by methods other than those of monopoly—by the free grabbing of territories, so to speak. But when the nine-tenths of Africa had been seized (by 1900), when the whole world had been divided up, there was inevitably ushered in the era of monopoly possession of colonies and, consequently, of particularly intense struggle for the division and redivision of the world.12 Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was written in the first half of 1916. Although he followed the approach of J. A. Hobson and took many of his examples and much of his supporting evidence from the history of Britain or the USA, he still concentrated mostly on German data. This would be partly the consequence of his residence in Berne and Zurich, Switzerland, and partly the consequence of his previous area of concentration.

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Moving towards a global outlook, Lenin still had a centre of focus for his attention in Central and Eastern Europe. As we have seen, Wilson approached globalism from a different point of departure, the Anglo-American tradition, which gave far less prominence to the role of the state and much more emphasis to the pluralist nature of the nation's existence. Wilsonism as it was to emerge in 1917 differed from the Leninism that was to mature at about the same time, not only because of the wide gap between 'bourgeois' and 'proletarian' concepts of democracy but also because of the scarcely overlapping intellectual settings in which the concepts had arisen. But they were both under the influence of the constituent features of the early contemporary world, not just the emergence of the USA and Soviet Russia within the immediate framework of imperialism and the First World War, along with the attendant features such as the 'second industrial revolution' of steel and oil, and its implications for commerce and warfare. Another important trend was towards what later became known as the population explosion. Moreover, of the approximately 1,680 million human beings, Europe, which ranked second in order of continents, accounted for just over 400, while nearly 1,000 were to be found in Asia. This disproportion, which appeared to be growing, aroused widespread apprehension of the 'yellow peril', a phenomenon reinforced by the Japanese victory over Russia in the war of 1904—5. The implications of that victory were wider. It gave encouragement to the movement among the peoples of Asia and elsewhere that later became known as decolonization. It helped President Theodore Roosevelt of the USA to make the remark: The Mediterranean era died with the discovery of America; the Atlantic era is now at the height of its development, and must soon exhaust the resources at its command; the Pacific era, destined to be the greatest of all, is just at its dawn. Awareness of the 'yellow peril' and its implications was spread, along with many other scares and sensations, by the mass 'yellow press'. A prominent feature of the pre-contemporary world was a publication explosion, accompanying and encouraging the rise of literacy. Although radio and cinema were already in existence, they were yet to make their great impact. Similarly the media as a whole

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were not yet dominated by either governments or other interests to such an extent that the pre-contemporary world could be called 'pre-totalitarian\ But the power of the state (or the federal government) was already expanding by 1917 in the USA and the other belligerent powers.13 These developments were accompanied by a great change in perceptions of time and space. The key to chronological adaptation, as to so much else in the late nineteenth century, was the railway. Before the iron horse began to eat up vast distances, local time, determined by the relation of any given point on the revolving earth to the sun up in the sky, gave rise to no major inconvenience. But around 1870, a train journey from the east to the west coast of North America made necessary the adjustment of timepieces on more than 200 occasions. The railroads themselves tried to simplify matters by introducing their own time systems. Thus, for example, stops along the Pennsylvania line used Philadelphia time, which was five minutes in arrears of New York time. But in 1870 there were still about eighty different systems in the USA alone. And so the need for simplification was felt much more strongly in North America than in Britain, which because of its compactness had little difficulty in adhering throughout to Greenwich time. Of many proposals put forward for a more general simplification, the successful one turned out to be that put forward by Mr (later Sir) Sandford Fleming, a Scottish immigrant to Canada and chief engineer of the Dominion government from 1867 to 1880. His experience of Canadian railway construction helped him to form a scheme which was published in the journal of the Canadian Institute of Toronto for 1879. The Institute distributed Fleming's scheme among the leading governments of the day, and an international meeting ensued in Washington DC, in 1884. This Prime Meridian Conference proposed that Greenwich time should be adopted as a standard for the world. In 1883 American railroads had already agreed upon a uniform time. The 1884 agreement took some time to permeate to all corners of the earth. Many European countries adopted Greenwich in the 1890s, but France held out until 1911, and Russia adhered to a basis of the Pulkovo observatory just south of St Petersburg. This was two hours, one minute and 18.7 seconds ahead of Greenwich, while in measurement of days, according to the Orthodox calendar, Russia remained thirteen days behind the West in the twentieth

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century. One of the well-known supporters of the idea of standard time was the German Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke, who just before his death in 1891 pleaded with the German Reichstag to adopt it for military reasons. Germany's five different time zones complicated planning, which the further changes to be met at the French and Russian frontiers made increasingly difficult. Germany duly accepted the great change in 1893, and Europe as a whole sufficiently co-ordinated its chronology for the 'war by timetable' to go ahead in 1914. Just over a year before the outbreak of the First World War, at 10 a.m on 1 July 1913, the Eiffel Tower began a relay of the first time signal sent around the world. As Stephen Kern has written: The independence of local times began to collapse once the framework of a global electronic network was established. Whatever charm local time might once have had, the world was fated to wake up with buzzers and bells triggered by impulses that travelled the world with the speed of light.14 Wireless telegraph, first developed in the early twentieth century, was soon to be accompanied by the telephone. By 1914 there were more than 9.5 million telephones in use in the USA (9.7 per 100 of population); just under 1.5 million in Germany (2.1); and just over 0.75 million in Britain (1.7). Shrinkage of distance, first accomplished by the railway, was now accelerated by the extended use of motor-driven or electric public road transport, and the automobile. By 1909 the USA was the world leader in production with nearly 115,000 cars, followed by France with 45,000. Even in Russia, the wireless telegraphy, the telephone and mechanized transport were all supplementing the railway as a reducer of vast spaces previously difficult even to contemplate. Meanwhile, travel and transport by sea was increasing in scale. Between 1900 and 1910, the world's tonnage increased from just under 30 millions to nearly 42 millions. Britannia still came nearest to ruling the waves, owning more than 45 per cent of the total, but was being joined by two upstarts: the USA, more than 12 per cent and Germany, more than 10 per cent. If comparisons were restricted to war vessels, Britain's lead would be cut still further. Russia lagged behind the other great powers in navies and railways, as well as in other forms of transport and communication. But

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automobiles were moving along roads still used by oxcarts, for example. And even in the most advanced directions, Russia was not immobile. From 1908 to 1912, an aviation industry developed in Kiev, Moscow and especially St Petersburg, where the first aviation exhibition was held in 1911. Anticipating the 'gigantism' of the early Soviet period, some of the early Russian designers drew plans for aircraft of enormous scale, at least some of which got further than the drawing board. Probably, neither Wilson nor Lenin ever flew, but they both certainly drove, or were driven. In 1906 Wilson could observe that automobiles were 'the picture of arrogance of wealth, with all its independence and carelessness'. He helped try to have those machines banned from Bermuda. But he came to make full use of them, while Lenin commandeered a Rolls-Royce which may be seen today in the Lenin Museum in Moscow. Both leaders made famous trips by railway (as well as many routine ones): Wilson's 'whistle stop' in favour of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations; Lenin arriving at the Finland Station after crossing Germany from Switzerland early in 1917 by 'sealed train'. Both of them might have preferred the direct spoken or written word, but nevertheless had recourse where necessary to the telephone and telegraph. In 1919 when other channels of communication were cut, the Soviet government attempted to broadcast its message to the rest of the world by radio. In most of these as well as many other ways, then, Wilson and Lenin lived in a different world from that of their heroes such as Gladstone and Bagehot, Chernyshevsky and Marx. In a comparable manner, their respective views of political science had been modified by these changes in time and space even before the most important experience of all, that of the First World War.15 Let us examine how the latter stages of great conflict affected the outlook of Lenin and Wilson respectively. When Lenin arrived at the Finland Station in the spring of 1917 he surprised his associates with the announcement of what became known as his April Theses. He began by insisting that the Bolsheviks must overcome the deception of the masses by the bourgeoisie: we must especially fully, insistently, patiently explain to them their mistake, explain the inseparable connection of capital with imperialistic war, prove that without the overthrow of capital it is impossible to

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end the war with a truly democratic and not an annexationist peace. 'Revolutionary defensivism' could become a reality only if the bourgeois government were overthrown by the proletariat with its poor peasant comrades. Lenin went on to his second main point: The peculiarity of the present period in Russia is the transition from the first stage of the Revolution, which gave power to the bourgeoisie as a result of the insufficient class consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, to its second stage, which must give power into the hands of the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry. The transition had the following principal characteristics: the maximum of legal toleration (in Lenin's view, Russia at the moment was 'the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world'); the absence of violence against the masses; and the ignorantly trustful attitude of the masses towards the government. Again, he urged the importance of the educational task of the Party 'in the midst of unprecedentedly numerous masses of the proletariat, who are just awakening to political life'. There must be no support for the Provisional Government, and no meaningless 'demands' that the government of capitalists change its imperialistic ways. As a minority in the Soviets, the Bolsheviks must explain to the masses that the Soviets constituted 'the sole possible form of revolutionary government', that a parliamentary republic would mark a step backward. The masses would free themselves by experience from their mistakes, which by strong implication included not giving the Bolsheviks their majority support. Along with the bourgeois government, its chief supports would have to be eliminated—the police, army and bureaucracy. A people's militia would have to be set up instead, and officials (who were to be elected and removed at any time) would receive no more than the pay of a good worker. The land of the landlords would have to be confiscated and nationalized. All banks would have to be fused into one general bank under Soviet control. Socialism could not be introduced all at once, but the transition to it could be begun through Soviet control over public production and distribution. Immediately, a Party Congress must be called to change the programme (including a demand for a 'state-commune' modelled on that of Paris in 1871) and the name (since 'Social-

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Democrat' had become besmirched by SD support for the war all over the world). Finally, a new International should be set up as a replacement for the discredited Second International, to which many of the treacherous SDs had belonged.16 Lenin was to develop many of his ideas in The State and Revolution completed during the enforced brief renewal of his exile in the summer of 1917. Several of his ideas could be seen clearly reflected in the decrees issued by the Soviets at the time of the October Revolution, for example the Decree of Peace, which included the following ringing declaration: The just and democratic peace for which the great majority of warexhausted, tormented toilers and labouring classes of all belligerent countries are thirsting; the peace for which Russian workers and peasants are so insistently and loudly clamouring since the overthrow of the tsarist regime is, in the opinion of the Government, an immediate peace without annexation (i.e. without the seizure of foreign lands and the forcible taking over of other nationalities) and without indemnity. To prolong the war because the rich and strong nations could not agree how to divide the small and weak nationalities was a most criminal act against humanity. In order to advance the cause of peace, the Soviet government would do away with all secret diplomacy, and would proceed at once to publish secret treaties agreed by its Provisional predecessor, and would annul most of them as infringements of Soviet principles. The Soviet government was prepared to begin immediately negotiations for peace by discussions, in writing or by telegraph, and proposed a general armistice of at least three months to begin immediately. An appeal in particular was made 'to the intelligent workers of the three foremost nations of mankind, and the leading participators in this war, England, France, and Germany'. The Decree of Peace asserted that 'The toilers of these countries have rendered the greatest service to the cause of progress and Socialism by their great examples'. There was no mention of the USA, which had by November 1917 already been in the war for seven months.17 In his war message to Congress of 2 April 1917, Woodrow Wilson asserted: It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible ... of all wars, civilization itself seeming to hang in the

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balance. But therightis more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy,... for therightsand liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion ofrightby such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. Soon after the war began, the President according to J. M. Blum 'restated in memorable language the presumptive faith of two centuries of democrats': in his own words, the equal rights of all people 'to freedom and security and self-government and to a participation upon fair terms in the economic opportunities of the world.'18 Here, while departing from his own principles in Latin America, Wilson would strike a chord in the hearts of many in the Western world. For example, in Britain the radical Union of Democratic Control had put forward a programme in November 1914 asking for, among other things, self-determination and the open forum of an international council. In May 1916 it added another point to its programme concerning the promotion of 'free commercial intercourse between all nations and the preservation and extension of the principle of the Open Door'. This point was drafted by none other than J. A. Hobson, author of the study ofImperialism, which Lenin was drawing on in 1916 for his own study of the same name.19 But Lenin would certainly not have subscribed to the principle of the Open Door, so essential to Wilson's concept of 'a participation upon fair terms in the economic opportunities of the world'. More generally, Blum has rightly observed that Wilson 'overestimated the attraction to most people of Anglo-American political habits'. Even some of his own people did not share their President's vision, and paradoxically, for the sake of the cause of freedom, he himself found it necessary drastically to curtail civil liberties.20 However, Wilson was anxious to widen his appeal as much as possible, and, to some extent, the announcement of his famous Fourteen Points was a response to the Soviet Decree of Peace and other such declarations. As well as referring to other circumstances, he stated in his address to Congress of 8 January 1918: There is, moreover, a voice calling for these definitions of principle and purpose which is, it seems to me, more thrilling and more compelling than any of the many moving voices with which the troubled air of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian people.... They call to us

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to say what it is that we desire, in what, if in anything, our purpose and our spirit differ from theirs; and I believe that the people of the United States would wish me to respond, with utter simplicity and frankness. The general principles among the Fourteen Points, such as open covenants of peace, absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, removal of all economic barriers, reduction of arms and impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, could not be accepted by a Soviet government bent on the overthrow of world imperialism. Nor could it admit the idea of 'a general association of nations', On the other hand, Lenin and his beleaguered associates might have welcomed one of the more specific points, 'The evacuation of all Russian territory', while regarding with suspicion the hope for Russia of an 'independent determination of her own political development and national policy ... under institutions of her own choosing'. But it soon emerged not only that Wilson and his associates believed that such institutions must be other than Bolshevik but also that, far from maintaining the call for evacuation of all Russian territory, the USA would join the ranks of the interventionists. Wilson's address on the Fourteen Points, as it itself fully recognized, was made against the background of the negotiations currently unfolding between Bolshevik Russia and the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. Indeed, Wilson recognized that the Russian representatives were 'sincere and earnest' and could not entertain Central Power proposals for 'conquest and domination'. The President's address was more explicitly directed at these negotiations, which had temporarily been broken off.21 Therefore, while marking an important step forwards for Wilsonism, the beginning of the year 1918 also marked a significant step backwards for Leninism. The Bolshevik leader had to argue hard and long before his policy of realism was accepted by a sufficient number of his comrades. Some of them, such as N. I. Bukharin, were for revolutionary war, while others were in favour of Trotsky's 'neither war nor peace' formula. Finally, the majority agreed that 'the most humiliating and oppressive peace treaty' of Brest-Litovsk had to be accepted in order to give the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic 'a breathing space'. And so, on 3 March 1918, the treaty bringing about a vast Soviet withdrawal from the Baltic provinces, Poland and the Ukraine was finally signed, with the ever-present threat of worse to come. However, the Eighth Party Congress of the Com-

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munist Party, meeting in March 1918, passed a secret resolution (itself a betrayal of the earlier intentions) accepting the enforced Treaty, but also concluding: Convinced that the workers' revolution is steadily growing in all the belligerent countries, the Congress states that the socialist proletariat of Russia, with all its forces and all the resources at its disposal, will support the brotherly revolutionary movement of the proletariat of all countries.22 Such a conviction was to ebb and flow during the years 1918 and 1919, while the Treaty of Versailles was being drawn up in Paris, and ripples, even waves reached the Western Allies as they discussed the postwar settlement. Nevertheless, Brest-Litovsk had pushed Leninism to its first great compromise. The Versailles Treaty and its aftermath were now to do the same for Wilsonism. In Paris Wilson hoped that the Fourteen Points might serve as a basis for persuading the Allies to work for a just peace. In particular, he hoped that the acceptance by the Allies of his draft for the Covenant of a League of Nations would lead to the successful creation of that international body. At the heart of the Covenant was Article 10, or X, which obliged signatories 'to respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and ... political independence of all members of the League'.23 In order to persuade the European powers to accept the League, Wilson had to abandon any rigid insistence on the Fourteen Points. A mid-conference return to the USA made clear to him that further revisions would have to be made in the peace and the Covenant in order to satisfy at least some of the objections of the American Senate, which would have to ratify any proposals by a two-thirds majority. Frustration back in Europe pushed Wilson to the brink of sailing to the USA again, without final agreement with the Allies, early in April. But then, the Allies modified their position enough for Wilson to sail back home confident that the agreement finally agreed was sufficient to achieve the aims that he had first set out with. He went on a tour of the United States to persuade his fellow countrymen of the truth as he saw it. At Helena, Montana, he declared: America is going to grow more and more powerful; and the more

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powerful she is the more inevitable it is that she should be trustee for the peace of the world.... All Europe knew that we were doing an American thing when we put the Covenant of the League of Nations at the beginning of the Treaty.... The most cynical men I had to deal with ... before our conferences were over ... all admitted that the League of Nations, which they had deemed an ideal dream, was a demonstrable, practical necessity. This treaty cannot be carried out without the League of Nations.... The rest of the world is necessary to us, if you want to put it on that basis. That is not the American basis. America does not want to feed upon the rest of the world. She wants to feed it and serve it. America... is the only national idealistic force in the world, and idealism is going to save the world.... That is the program of civilization.24 But Wilson collapsed in September 1919 before the end of his tour, and in March 1920, partly because of his incapacitated insistence on no further compromise, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations along with it. However, the USA's isolation under Wilson's successors was far from complete, and arguably, American inter-war foreign policy was conducted along lines largely determined by the nature of its participation in the transition from modernity to contemporaneity. Similarly, the Soviet Union' s activity in international relations after Brest-Litovsk was basically conditioned by the same transition. In both American and Soviet cases, the ideology for participation in the affairs of the contemporary world was modified, although it remained at bottom Wilsonism and Leninism respectively. Generally speaking, the role of the individual in history has been best described by Plekhanov: A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes. Carlyle, in his well-known book on heroes and hero-worship, calls great men beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others, and desires things more strongly than others. He solves the scientific problems brought up by the preceding process of intellectual development of society; he points to the new social needs created by the preceding development of social relationships; he takes the initiative in satisfying these needs. He is a hero. But he is not a hero in the sense that he can stop, or change, the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and

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free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course. Herein lies all his significance; herein lies his whole power. But this significance is colossal, and the power is terrible.25 (Do we also see in Lenin and Wilson a working out of Braudel's 'paradox that the true man of action is he who can measure most nearly the constraints upon him, who chooses to remain within them and even to take advantage of the weight of the inevitable, exerting his own pressure on the same direction'.) In this chapter, we have looked at the manner in which 'general and particular causes' gave rise to what we have called the Great Conjuncture, the clash of Leninism and Wilsonism. In our view, both Lenin and Wilson were great men in the sense proposed by Plekhanov and Carlyle, and the bodies of thought associated with them were outstanding statements of the ideologies of the nascent USSR and the transformed USA. As Soviet founding father, Lenin possessed an added significance that could not be shared by Wilson, President of the United States well over a century after George Washington. Many would argue that Lenin's intellectual powers were greater than those of Wilson. While this indeed may be so, it could also be the case that a gulf is suggested less by their innate abilities than by the differences in the nature of the political traditions that they drew on. That is, the Russian - Germanic school was more systematic and philosophical than the American-British, based firmly as the latter was on pragmatism and empiricism (as we have already seen towards the end of Ch. 3). Thus Wilsonism has never been identified or asserted in the same manner as Leninism.26 To be sure, to a considerable extent, what was presented as Leninism in the 1930s was in fact Stalinism, while Franklin D. Roosevelt's homage to Wilson contained a pronounced element of his own distinctive manner of thinking. These changes came about partly, even largely, because the general and particular causes were no longer the same as they were in 1917 and immediately after. However, whether or not Stalin and Roosevelt were men as great as their illustrious predecessors is not a question that we shall examine here, although we have already touched upon it. Instead, we will turn to investigate aspects of what Plekhanov called 'the natural course of things', especially the transitions to modernity and contemporaneity which Lenin and Wilson each in his own way embodied.

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To revert in conclusion to some of their own words, in his second Inaugural Address of 5 March 1917, about a month before American entry into the First Word War, Woodrow Wilson declared: The greatest things that remain to be done must be done with the whole world for stage and in co-operation with the wide and universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for those things.... We are provincials no longer. The tragical events of the thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back. 4

American' principles were 'not the principles of a province or of a single continent'. Wilson asserted, 'We have known and boasted all along that they were the principles of a liberated mankind.' Here is a Wilsonian version of the American aspect of the Great Conjuncture. What we must examine now is the process that brought the provincials with their long-held universal principles on to the world stage.27 This must be done along with the examination of the comparable, associated process of the emergence of Leninism. In one of his last writings early in 1923, Lenin described the manner in which the Russian Revolution had meant the following of an historical path different to that of Western Europe. First, it was connected with the 'first imperialist world war', an unprecedented kind of conflict after which there could be no return to 'normal' bourgeois relations. Yet Russian reformists still persisted in their erroneous belief that normal bourgeois relations were the limit of development. Second, such critics were complete strangers to the ideas that: while the development of world history as a whole follows general laws it is by no means precluded, but, on the contrary, presumed, that certain periods of development may display certain peculiarities in either the form or the sequence of this development. For instance, it does not ever occur to them that because Russia stands on the borderline between the civilised countries and the countries which this war has for the first time definitely brought into the orbit of civilisation—all the Oriental, nonEuropean countries—she could and was, indeed, bound to reveal certain distinguishing features; although these, of course, are in keeping with the general line of world development, they distinguish her revolution from those which took place in the West-European countries

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and introduce certain partial innovations as the revolution moves on to the countries of the East. To those who said that civilization was necessary for the building of socialism, Lenin replied why could they not create in their country such prerequisities of socialism as the expulsion of the landowners and the capitalists? Napoleon had declared that you should first engage in a serious battle and then see what happens. Well, they hadfirstengaged in a serious battle in October 1917, and then saw such phenomena as the Brest peace and so on — ' And now there can be no doubt that in the main we have been victorious.'28 And so, Wilson in a simple, Lenin in a more complex way were each saying that his own country had emerged on to the world stage through a 'provincial' or 'borderline' relationship to a Western European metropolis or centre. That process would continue through the 1920s after the return of 'normalcy' and into the following decade up to the Second World War when both powers would assume an even greater role. And so Brest-Litovsk and Versailles were on the road to Yalta. But now we must look back to examine the earlier process of the emergence of the future superpowers within the framework of the transitions to modernity and contemporaneity.

5

Conjunctures in Transitions to Modernity and Contemporaneity We are living in historical circumstances differing radically from those of the 1930s and before. The prewar world is indeed one we have lost. But how should the new world be described? If we accept that modern history begins in the middle of the seventeenth century and contemporary history at the beginning of the twentieth century, how are we to label our account of these present times? It could be 'post-world-war history', and for three main reasons: because 'contemporization' has been a more global process than 'modernization', which was concentrated, at least at first, on Europe; because it had immediate origins in preceding world wars, especially the second; and because it cannot comprise another, third world war, which would bring history to an end. Alternatively, we could say that, just as a pre-modern or early modern phase (from about 1500 to 1650) precedes modern as such, so we should now accept that pre-contemporary or early contemporary developments occur from about the 1890s up to 1945, and that the real thing comes after 1945. To begin with, I shall assert that contemporary history proper does indeed begin after 1945, and that it possesses at least eight distinctive features: (l)Therivalrybetween the superpowers, the USA and USSR (2) Atomic weapons (3) Third industrial revolution (4) Demographic explosion 89

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(5) Decolonization (6) Atlantic-Pacific transfer (7) Post-printing culture (8) Neo-totalitarianism1 These eight features need no introduction, but at least a few words of comment would not be amiss here. For example, doubts have been cast on the importance of the Superpowers', including some on the very use of the word. However, since the USA and the USSR are unprecedented from a number of points of view, their designation should be exclusive to them. Moreover, although in time they, like the imperial powers that came before them, might pass away, or be joined by others similarly qualified, neither of these eventualities is likely in the near future. The superpowers are most clearly distinguished by the armaments at their disposal, a preponderant share of the atomic energy that could be unleashed, to the level of one million Hiroshimas and rising. The third industrial (or scientific-technical) revolution follows the first of iron and coal from the end of the eighteenth century, and the second of steel and oil from the end of the nineteenth century. It is distinguished by the adoption of an advanced technology including the widespread use of the computer and polymers. It has been accompanied by production levels so great that some of the world's raw materials are approaching exhaustion while the planet and its atmosphere have been threatened by a suffocating pollution, and by social dislocation involving mass starvation and disease. Nevertheless, according to the Population Institute in Washington, DC, the total number in millions of the world's inhabitants reached 5,000 by mid-1987 and is forecasted to overtake 6,000 by the end of the century. At the beginning of the century it was 1,680, this in itself a steep rise from the 770 or so at the middle of the eighteenth century. The break-up of the British and other older empires has brought about the creation of a Third World. While much of this might be subject to a neocolonialism, Japan and China have each in its own way asserted their full independence and might well help bring about a move of the world's core area from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Television and other forms of electronic communication have overwhelmed to a

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considerable extent a culture previously based on the written word, while influencing and prying into our individual lives to such an extent that we could all succumb to a neo-totalitarianism. All these features are new to human history, to some degree at least. But all of them, with the possible exception of the most awesome, atomic weapons, possess roots in history before 1945. Moreover, much of our mode of perception retains a pre-1945 element, even where atomic weapons are concerned, especially for those who grew up before then, or who have accepted too readily elements of the conventional wisdom formed before that awesome year. Therefore, in order to understand the features of our world today and our ways of understanding them, we need to consider the world of yesterday from which they both sprang. In this exercise so far, we have given special attention to the early contemporary period stretching back to around the beginning of the twentieth century, but at least some aspects of a longer perspective will also be necessary. How far back in time do we need to go? The process could be endless, as we slough off skin after skin, snakelike, through the earlier centuries. In many ways, the process should be endless, for the modern world can only be understood by way of the medieval, the medieval by way of the ancient, and so on. But we need to stop somewhere. So we will concentrate on the modern and contemporary periods. Let us begin by taking a problem already umbrated in Chapter 2 and central to our appreciation of the two great conflicts from which the distinctive features of contemporary life sprang, that of Germany. At the end of the Second World War, A. J. P. Taylor brought out a book entitled The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815. His aim was to answer what he called the historian's question 'How did this state of things come about?' He did not pretend to answer what he called the politician's question; 'How is this state to be remedied?' In his estimate, the 'German problem' had two distinct sides: how could the peoples of Europe be secured against repeated bouts of German aggression? And how could the German people discover a settled, peaceful form of political existence? No easy answer could be given to the questions that he had set himself since:

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The history of the Germans is a history of extremes. It contains everything except moderation, and in the course of a thousand years the Germans have experienced everything except normality.... One looks in vain in their history for a juste milieu, for common sense - the two qualities which have distinguished France and England. Nothing is normal in German history except violent oscillations. In Taylor's view, the Germans could not go back in 1945 to a traditional settled way of life, as the French had attempted to do with a measure of success in 1815 after thefinaldefeat of Napoleon. For the political traditions of Germany had been in process of decay since the time of Luther in the sixteenth century. This predicament had been brought about largely by the position of Germany in Central Europe. Hence, 'No one can understand the Germans who does not appreciate their anxiety to learn from, and to imitate the West; but equally no one can understand Germans who does not appreciate their determination to exterminate the East.' If there had been a broad sea between the Germans and the French, the German character would have been less militaristic, and German borrowings from the West presumably more civilized. If, on the other hand and more conceivably, the Germans had succeeded in eradicating their Slav neighbours to the East, as the Anglo-Saxons in North America had succeeded in eliminating the Indians, the effect would have been similar to that across the Atlantic: 'the Germans would have become advocates of brotherly love and international reconciliation'. However, in reality, there was a routine in German history that had given to it a pattern that was almost monotonous: 'of them, more truly than of most people, it may be said that there is nothing new under the sun.' Even when they talked of acquiring a better place in the sun, of the acquisition of a new world empire, this was no more than a new variation of the empire of Charlemagne at the beginning of the ninth century. The persistence of the old routine of violent oscillations, the continuance of internal decay since Luther and external expansion since Charlemagne, had special implications in the years after 1848. Rapid industrial development placed economic power within a generation into the hands of industrial capitalists, who applied their business standards to politics, giving greatest emphasis to success. In England and the USA, the struggle between liberalism and arbitrary power had been fought out in revolution long before. While in France, in spite of revolution, the pattern was less clear,

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there could be no doubt about what had occurred in Germany: German capitalists became dependants of Prussian militarism and advocates of arbitrary power as naturally and as inevitably as English or American capitalists became liberals and advocates of constitutional authority. Where Anglo-Saxon capitalists demanded laissez-faire, German capitalists sought for state leadership; where Anglo-Saxon capitalists accepted democracy, however grudgingly, German capitalists grudgingly accepted dictatorship. This was the fateful legacy of 1848. This fateful legacy led on through unification under Bismarck to the First World War, and then via the rise of Hitler to the Second World War.2 The treatment of German history around 1945 was exceptional to the further extent that much more attention of the victors was given to it than to the history of the other principal losers, Italy and Japan. The amount of attention devoted to the peculiarities of German history since that time by historians both German and nonGerman has also been exceptional. However, a similar kind of approach to that of Taylor has been taken in the effort to explain other problems that have arisen since 1945. Take, for example, the interpretation given to the origins of the Soviet Union by Richard Pipes, who set out in his Russia under the Old Regime to trace 'the growth of the Russian state from its beginnings in the ninth century to the end of the nineteenth, and the parallel development of the principal social orders' in order to pose the question 'Why in Russia—unlike the rest of Europe to which Russia belongs by virtue of her location, race and religion—society has proven unable to impose on political authority any kind of effective restraints.'3 Like the roots of German uniqueness, then, those of the Russian variety have been discovered at least as far back as the ninth century, the empire of Charlemagne on the one hand being matched by Kievan Rus on the other. Yet uniqueness has not been measured by longevity alone. If such a distinction has indeed been accorded, it has been as much for geographical location, remote from the Western world, as for venerability. Moreover, a state does not have to possess distance in space or time in order to be considered exceptional. While many historians of Britain would still want to insist on the apartness of their own subject, few of them would look for the genesis of British special qualities or difficulties in the period long before the Norman Conquest. Moreover, when we turn to consider the USA, we find a strong emphasis on exceptionalism

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precisely because of newness, with very little reference to what happened before 1776. If there is so much uniqueness in Western history, where is the generality? If there are so many exceptions, where is the rule? For let us be clear, there can be no comprehension without some basis for comparison. In The Course of German History, we noted earlier, A. J. P. Taylor argued that the rule was made by 'England' (Britain or the UK) and the USA. More commonly, perhaps, the rule has been found in the state where Taylor found less of a pattern, France. French historians themselves have often considered their own country's development to be a rule for world civilization, with a simultaneous insistence on the exclusive and universal nature of their national experience. In this respect, they carry a trait that can also be found in Britain and the USA to an extreme degree, perhaps under the perceived threat of the 'Anglo-Saxons' or the Englishspeaking union. Certainly, of the principal examples referred to so far, German historiography since the Second World War does constitute an exception in the sense that there has been little or none of the duality, of the simultaneous insistence on the exceptional and regular nature of the course of German history. The investigation, until 1986 at least, mostly centred around such questions as: where did Germany go wrong? how can repetition of Nazism be avoided? Basically, the 'rule' consists of a 'normal' transition to modernity. This involves a revolution in all three cases, especially France in 1789 but also the USA in 1776 and Britain in 1649, to a lesser extent in 1688. In each case, absolutism was overthrown, and the way thereby prepared for the establishment of a variety of representative democracy. However, a powerful argument against such normality has been put forward by David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley in their book The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Their assertions fall into two main groups: first, the transition to modernity can be made without a revolution or even without representative government; second, many reservations can be made to the attribution of normality to these developments as they actually took place in France, the USA and Britain. Something like the basic position of Blackbourn and Eley was put by Disraeli after the FrancoPrussian War of 1870 - 1 : 'This war represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of last century .... You have a new world .... The balance of power has

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been entirely destroyed.'4 Blackbourn and Eley make their case with energy and skill, yet there is at least one anomalous oddity about it. I refer to their proposal that the argument about the peculiarities of German history should be considered in a framework consisting fundamentally of Western Europe. This, in spite of the fact that Central Europe must be considered in conjunction with Eastern Europe as much as with Western Europe, since one of the major themes of the history of the continent has been the rivalry between Teuton and Slav, and since the history of Germany in particular cannot be understood without reference to the history of Russia. An illustration of the distortions resulting from a one-sided consideration of German history is to be found in E. H. Carr's What Is History? Gustav Stresemann, the Weimar Republic's Foreign Minister, died in 1929 leaving about 300 boxes of papers. His secretary was commissioned to make a selection of these papers, which was published in three large volumes. Out of loyalty or for whatever reason, the secretary made the selection largely on the basis of Stresemann's successes, the Locarno Treaties guaranteeing security for some of Germany's frontiers, the entry of Germany into the American-sponsored schemes for the relief of Germany's financial difficulties, and the withdrawal from the Rhineland of allied armies of occupation. Stresemann's relations with the Soviet Union, to which he devoted much attention, were given far less mention by his secretary, perhaps because they were inconclusive. An English version of the Stresemann published papers reduced the mention of the Soviet Union still further, the editor explaining that it was 'slightly condensed, but only by the omission of a certain amount of what, it was felt, was more ephemeral matter... of little interest to English readers or students.'5 We will return to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries later, but let us now turn to an illustration of the problem of the context of the transition to modernity drawn from the earlier times investigated by Braudel and Porshnev. The two-volume work by Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500-1660, begins with an apt quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville: 'Whoever studies and looks only at France will never understand anything, I venture to say, of the French revolution', Zagorin goes on to consider what setting is appropriate for the consideration of revolution in early modern Europe. He chooses for examination disturbances occurring almost ex-

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clusively in three states, England, France and the Spanish empire— 'with the main exception of the German peasant war.' Europe quickly becomes Western Europe, a shrinkage which is not fully explained, although some emphasis is given to the emergence of the Atlantic economy, and the three states selected are said to occupy 'a paramount position as great powers in Europe.' The rest of the continent is relegated to a footnote: The Ottoman empire, an extra-European great power pressing upon Central and Western Europe, may be left aside; so may the state created by the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs, which did not begin to attain great-power status until the latter part of the seventeenth century. The Dutch republic, which as a result of its commercial, maritime, and colonial ascendancy became and remained a great power in the seventeenth century, was bom out of the revolution of the Netherlands against Spanish rule. Omitted entirely from Zagorin's argument are Poland and Muscovite Russia, on both of which in Eastern Europe the Ottoman empire was also pressing, indeed pressing much harder than upon Western Europe and probably no less hard than upon Central Europe. There is no mention of Sweden, and very little of the central event or series of events of the first half of the seventeenth century in which Sweden, Poland and Russia (in descending order of importance) all played a part. This was the Thirty Years' War, which receives the most summary reference, as does the declining Holy Roman Empire which was at the war's centre. Zagorin asserts that the revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century 'sprang from diverse origins and reveal only partial interconnection at best'. He goes on to say that he has given emphasis to the two most widespread conditions found in conjunction with them. One of these was lengthy economic depression, which does indeed receive some, if perhaps not enough, attention. The other is the Thirty Years' War which, far from receiving emphasis, is almost totally neglected. However, of the effect of this great conflict on the three states on which he chooses to concentrate he does declare: The Thirty Years' War contributed by its fiscal and military oppression to revolts in France and some of the Spanish kingdoms. The English monarchy, though, did not take part in the war, so the revolts against

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Stuart rule were largely independent of its effect. Now, if the war made contributions to revolts in France and the Spanish empire, it should have received more than summary notice. Moreover, closer analysis of the war would surely have revealed that the troubles of Charles I stemmed from it in a manner that was not all that indirect. After all, the king's use of the English navy on behalf of Spain in the late 1630s contributed to his difficulties before hostilities broke out in thefirstBishops' War of 1638 in which the Scottish army was led almost exclusively by officers returning from the experience of fighting on the continent. When Zagorin considers his exceptional case—the German peasant war (which is exceptional in its sixteenth-century as well as Central European situation)—he makes the following observation: In a broad sense, English, French and German peasants (and, as far as the last are concerned, we are dealing primarily with southern and western Germany) belonged to a similarly structured social organism and felt the effects of parallel political and economic changes that dominated the transition from the later Middle Ages to the early modem epoch. Politically, the regimes in which they were subjects also resembled one another more than they did the Russian tsardom or the Chinese empire. Despite their differences, these peasants accordingly had more in common with each other than with either Russian or Chinese peasants. The argument of the last two sentences can be accepted readily enough to the extent that it is a rebuttal of a connection made by the French historian Roland Mousnier of seventeenth-century peasant 'furies' in France, Russia and China. However, it is rather odd to posit a division of the seventeenth-century world between a West consisting of Germany, France and England on the one hand and an East made up of Russia and China on the other. And Zagorin says nothing at all about why exactly Russian peasants should be so completely cut off from their European fellows. Nor is this all. Throughout his two volumes, there are references to the Russian Revolution as an event taking place within the structure of his argument. For example, he writes: The English revolution is usually considered to rank with the greatest revolutions of the Western world, one in a mighty succession that

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passed from England in the seventeenth century to America in 1776 and thence to France in 1789 and Russia in 1917. But there is no suggestion of the manner in which the Russian peasants moved their association from China in the seventeenth century to the Western world in the twentieth.6 Of course, Zagorin deserves our gratitude for having made a courageous attempt to cover some key aspects of early modern history in a manner from which most of his colleagues would shrink. Nevertheless, there are some grave flaws in his presentation, mostly stemming from a failure to consider sufficiently the question: what is the appropriate framework for a consideration of the transition to modernity? Probably, he has failed to make sufficient use of what has come to be called 'historical sociology', among several nineteenth-century founding fathers of which the most influential has been Karl Marx. Even Zagorin, an explicit antiMarxist, goes so far as to concede that 'everything valuable and true in the thought of Marx himself has now been fully assimilated into history and other sciences as their common property and resource.'7 This observation, however objectionable for some Marxists, may also serve as a reminder to them and others that, in his time, Marx assimilated into his own approach what appeared to him to be valuable and true from his own predecessors. For example, his view of the principal stages of the evolution of human society was clearly adumbrated in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. And then, in its turn, the interpretation of Marx has been elaborated and refined by others in the twentieth century, for example, by Lenin in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Alternative schools of 'historical sociology', both drawing on Marxism and reacting against it, were formed, notably by Max Weber. Unfortunately, when one turns to Marx, Weber and others for specific guidance on questions of modern history, one often finds little help. For example, The Secret Diplomacy of the Eighteenth Century is among Marx's less useful works, presenting a caricature of the foreign policy of tsarism. The observations of Marx on Russia and Eastern Europe in general tend to reflect the prejudices of his time and place of origin. He concentrates on developments in France and England to the relative exclusion of those elsewhere, thus tending to encourage thoughts of a normal transition to industrial modernity, and of exceptions to it.

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Moving on to the world beyond Europe, let us take for illustration the answer given to a familiar question by Eric Foner in an article entitled 'Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?' Foner makes a vigorous challenge to the assertion of American exceptionalism as far as the development of a proletariat is concerned. He writes that historians of America often look upon Europe as 'an unchanging class-conscious monolith' opposed to 'the liberal bourgeois United States.' Too often, he continues, Europe has been equated with France, and France with the French Revolution. (Here, we might interject, this has been all the more the case because the French Revolution has been seen in conjunction with the American as constituting an Atlantic Revolution.) Too much emphasis has been given to the heroic struggle of European workers and socialists, too little mention made of their failures, which includes a recent general erosion of worker consciousness and socialist ideology. Foner goes on to argue that the abandonment of American exceptionalism as an organizing principle does not necesitate the assertion that the history of every capitalist nation is identical. Indeed, each has unique elements. But insistence on these diverts attention from the 'common patterns and processes that transcend national boundaries, most notably the global expansion of capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its political and ideological ramifications.' Such insistence also obscures the 'Americanization' that has occurred in Western Europe in recent years. Foner asks: Are not the economies, and the working classes, of both America and Europe today being transformed by the decline of old basic industries, the backbone of traditional unionism and socialism? Is not European politics, like European culture, becoming more and more 'American', with single-issue movementsrisingto prominence and political parties, even those calling themselves socialist, emphasising the personalities of their leaders and their appeal to the entire electorate, rather than a carefully-delineated ideology representing the interests of a particular social class? Perhaps, he concludes, American socialists were the first to encounter the problem of how to define their politics in the setting of

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a capitalist democracy, because mass politics, mass culture and mass consumption all arrived in America before Europe. However, a continuing world economic crisis might bring a return to classbased revolutionary activity and doctrine — 'Only time will tell whether the United States has been behind Europe in the development of socialism, or ahead of it, in socialism's decline.'8 Returning to Eastern Europe, we might pose a question parallel to that of Eric Foner: 'Is there any socialism in the Soviet Union?' No brief or categorical answer could be given here, but at least two observations can be made: neither socialism or capitalism exists anywhere in a pure form; whatever the Soviet system is, it has spread throughout Eastern Europe since the Second World War, as both challenge and response to the 'Americanization' of Western Europe. Communist parties, with bureaucracies and command economies in attendance, have been installed in all 'people's democracies'. Arguably, both major sections of Europe were prepared for their reception of superpower dominance by their previous historical experience. Arnold Toynbee suggested that the line dividing the two sections 'corresponded rather closely, though not exactly, to an older line that was not military or political, but cultural and social.' He continued: The Anglo-American sphere embraced most of those European countries in which the middle class was numerous, competent, and powerful and in which the institution of parliamentary government was well established and effective, whereas the Russian sphere embraced most of those European countries in which the middle class was small, inexperienced, and weak, in which parliamentary government had been exotic and perfunctory. (The principal exceptions were two countries of the 'Western' type, Finland and Czechoslovakia, in the Russian sphere, and two of the 'Eastern' type, Greece and Italy (the South) in the Anglo-American sphere. Spain and Portugal would no doubt have been added to the second list if Toynbee had included them in his discussion.) As Jeno Szucs put it more succinctly, it was 'as if Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had studied carefully the status quo of the age of Charlemagne on the 1130th anniversary of his death.'9 Our own analysis of European development concentrates on the

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period from about the sixteenth century to that of the beginning of the twentieth century, that is the period when Europe came to dominate the world through its transition to modernity. However, the major purpose of the exercise is to examine the manner in which that modernity was handed on to the USA and the USSR, which replaced the empires of Europe as the dominant forces in the world after 1945. In other words, the analysis of the transition to modernity is but a preliminary to that of the passage to contemporaneity. Such a grandiose enterprise cannot be carried out by history alone, at least not by history in the sense of the findings of empirical research. A theoretical framework of some kind will be necessary, and for that reason we shall have something to say in Part Three about the schemes put forward in what we might call the 'recent classics' of historical sociology, building on the foundations of the 'older classics' such as Marx and Weber. However, we will not be able to rely completely on the classics of either variety as much as we would like for two reasons: first, they say much more about the transition to modernity than about that to contemporaneity; second, a respect for the findings of empirical research and an awareness of the great difficulties involved for those deceptively simple achievements engender a cetain suspicion of grand schemes of history, however ingeniously worked out. For that reason, although this work endeavours to be a work of historical sociology, the emphasis is on the history rather than the sociology. Thus we will approach our fundamental purpose, which is not to point morals for today on the basis of yesterday's cautionary tales, but rather to analyse the process which has led to our present predicament. To repeat what A. J. P. Taylor said in The Course of German History: The historian does not deal in remedies; he thinks not of solutions, but of the next stage in a process of conflict of forces. At best he can record that certain 'solutions' have been tried and have proved either successful or unsuccessful; this is useful, but not decisive, evidence that they might succeed or fail in the future.10 Indeed, one must go further. The world that A. J. P. Taylor surveyed in 1944, broken and chaotic though it was, had clear links of continuity with that of the preceding years. That continuity was broken from 1945, especially at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in the other

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directions listed above as well. Therefore the evidence of past 'solutions' is not as useful in the contemporary world since 1945 as it would have been in the early contemporary before. For the moment, let us return to the problem of modernity and the manner in which Russia and America fitted into its framework. Since we have so far discussed modernity as a phenomenon arising in Europe, the following exposition will to a considerable extent consist of an evaluation of the Russian and American relationship to Europe. But before looking at the peripheral powers, let us build on what we have established so far to itemize eight features of modernity in rough parallel to those of contemporaneity outlined at the beginning of this chapter: (1) Before the superpowers, there were the great powers of the nineteenth century, which in turn evolved from states influenced in their mode of government by events from the sixteenth century onwards, especially from the end of the Thirty Years' War and the English Revolution. (2) Atomic weapons were a long way ahead, yet the creation of regular armies and navies from the seventeenth century was a necessary prelude to the manner in which wars have been fought in the twentieth century, as was the scientific revolution. (3) This revolution also had an effect on the industrial revolution, the economic base of modernization. It was accompanied by the formation of capitalism, and led to the discussion of socialism. (4) Although demographic figures for the eighteenth century, like some of the industrial indices, now appear puny, we must remember that they both made a considerable impact on thinkers at that time, such as Malthus, who was already concerned that population would outrun resources. (5) Decolonization began perhaps with the American Revolution, although by then, most of the major European empires had still to be assembled.

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(6) Similarly, before there could be any thought of the AtlanticPacific transfer, there had to be the establishment of the Atlantic civilization. This emerged from the eighteenth, even the sixteenth century onwards. (7) Although printing culture had arisen before the sixteenth century, it did not reach its zenith before the nineteenth century, or even later. Although it was preceded as well as followed by a period in which the printed word did not have pre-eminence, pre-Renaissance Europe might not bear too close a comparison with contemporary Europe, which juxtaposes the print culture with others rather than replacing it. (8) Accompanying the evolution of the modern state has been the evolution of ever new modes of exerting state control and suppressing radical opposition. There was a long prelude to the establishment of totalitarian restrictions in our own times. An important phenomenon accompanying the evolution of these eight features of modernity was the emergence of a collective European identity. While making the necessary reservation that most people continued to identify themselves in local or regional terms more than as members of a nation, much more than as members of a continent, Peter Burke has been prepared to observe: It looks as if by the year 1700 Europeans were more ready to talk about Europe, to see it as a whole, and to contrast it with the rest of the world than they had been in 1500, let alone the Middle Ages. Consciousness of being European was now an important social and political fact. He suggests that it was the threat of Louis XIV's expansionist ambitions that persuaded his enemies to identify their cause with that of the continent as a whole. An English pamphlet of 1677 was entitled Europe a Slave unless England Break Her Chains, while William of Orange described himself as the defender of 'European freedom.'11 Similarly, H. D. Schmidt has asserted: The triumph of William III and the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV, associated as he then was - quite wrongly - with the ambitious aims of setting up a universal monarchy and a united Catholic Christendom,

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brought about the first major stage in the long process of Western secularization, the exchange of Europe for Christendom as supreme collectivity.12 In the same year as the Treaty of Ryswick bringing the War of the Grand Alliance to a conclusion, the young tsar of Russia, Peter I, set off on his famous Grand Embassy to the West. His original intention was to take advantage of the emerging international situation. He believed that it might be possible for a coalition of the Christian powers to be arranged against the Ottoman infidel. He himself had conducted campaigns against the Turkish fortress of Azov in 1694 and 1696, taking it at the second attempt. Like his predecessors, he had already conducted negotiations with the other Christian powers for a revival of the Crusade.13 To some extent, however, negotiations had been inhibited by the old rivalry of Moscow, the self-styled 'Third Rome', with the first city of that name, the centre of Roman Catholicism. Even now, because of this and other obstacles, Christendom was not united. However, Russia's place was soon recognized in the new 'supreme collectivity' of Europe, especially after Peter the Great's victory over Sweden was completed by 1721. And Russia had helped to define the steppe frontier of Europe through its victories over the Ottoman Turks and their allies, the Crimean Tatars. Soon after the beginning of the eighteenth century, then, Russia joined Europe at the very time that the continent was realizing its secular arrival. About 200 years later, as Europe was losing its briefly enjoyed world pre-eminence, Russia left it. Let us look at the estimate made soon after the First World War and the Russian Revolution in the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica published in 1926. From the time of Peter the Great, wrote an anonymous contributor 'X', the tsars had sought to introduce European civilization into Russia and to establish it as an European power, by the westward expansion of the Empire. They had enjoyed considerable success, and had played an important part in the great international meetings from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 onwards. However, the Russian defeat in the War of 1914-18, followed soon afterwards by the Russian Revolution and Civil War, meant a collapse of the Western part of the Empire. The new Bolshevik regime was forced to give up frontier areas from Finland in the north of Europe to Bessarabia in the south. In the estimation

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of 'X', Russia was now confined to 'the semi-Asiatic areas which had never come under the direct influence of European culture and the Western Church. She had in fact once more become not a European but an Asiatic power.' This remark provoked an editorial footnote: 'This may appear to be so if we look at territory alone, but the vast bulk of the Russian population speaks a great European language, possesses a great European literature and belongs mainly, in every way, to the European family system.' 'X' went on to express the opinion that the Communist government took up militant Communism with all the fervour of a new religion, setting itself up as the antithesis of the established political system of Western Europe. Russia became, therefore, 'instead of an integral part of Europe, an alien state threatening Europe'. Again, the editor was moved to add a footnote: 'Historically, it is very important to note that Lenin and his colleagues believed themselves, however wrongly, to be the most European of Russians, the executor of the latest and best European ideas and true spokesmen of the industrial masses throughout Europe.'14 The disagreements between 'X' and the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were being amplified in the 1920s in the assertion and denial of a new 'Eurasian' interpretation of Russian history, accompanied by a similar exposition of Russian geography. The interpretation was taken up and opposed by distinguished emigre historians. G. V. Vernadsky wrote in 1934 that 'The history of Eurasia is the history of the totality of the peoples of Eurasia.' Russian history was a division of the history of the separate peoples of the USSR, in which Russian history necessarily took up an ever broader place as the Russian people seized an ever greater part of the Eurasian area of development.15 On the other hand, P. N. Miliukov asserted categorically in 1930 that Russian civilization was European, explaining: It is such by reason of its paralled development with Europe—not with Asia—at the very periods when the basis of national character is laid down. It is European by its victory over the Asiatic elements of the steppe. It is European even in its Siberian projection, because it brought to the barbarians and the nomads the elements of European culture. It is especially European in its educated class which was formed since Peter the Great's reign and which substantially contributed to the blossoming of the national creative power. Russian civilization is

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European as it is proven by the democratic strivings of the elite of its educated class, the Russian 'intelligentsia', which since the end of the eighteenth century, successfully fought against serfdom and autocracy. It is European even in its mistakes and exaggerations. It is European in the initial idea of Russian revolution being a fight for equality and freedom as against the nationalistic tradition of social privilege and political oppression.16 Whatever its pros and cons, the Eurasian interpretation helped to break down the rather rigid separation between the continents of Europe and Asia, also marked in the two equally separated disciplines of geography and history, at least throughout most of the nineteenth century. At the same time as the debate about Eurasia, the French Annales school was putting forward an argument for the breakdown of the barriers between the two disciplines. As one of the founders, Lucien Febvre wrote, the dialectic of time and space necessitated a merger between them.17 Now, sixty years later, and more than forty years after the Soviet Union's thorough re-establishment of a presence in Europe, we are perhaps in a position to reject more completely the division of continents and disciplines alike, and to take up a basis for our investigations that is in every sense global. For present purposes, however, they are concentrating on three centuries or so of the development of Russia's relationship to Europe. At the beginning of that period, or just before it, there occurred the reign of Peter the Great's father, Tsar Alexis, whose most recent biographer Philip Longworth has written: If Peter wrenched Russia out of 'mediaeval backwardness' and forcibly changed the direction of its historical development, his success was only temporary. Eventually it was to spring back onto its former course. Soviet Russia today reflects the pre-Petrine rather than the Petrine era. Its culture is homogeneous; there is the same stress on ideological purity and conformity as in Alexis' s time. The same lip-service is paid to internationalism as once it was to ecumenism, and Moscow is still assumed to be the Third Rome, the messianic centre of the world. Nor is that all, there is the same collectivism, the same difficulty in distinguishing judicial from administrative action; the same desperate drive to obtain Western technology, the same suspicion of Western ideas, the same high value on secrecy. Even dissent tends to follow the same old pattern —vehemently confronting the totality of the state with innocent idealism; and the methods and the style of countering it do not differ in

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essence from Alexis's. But above all the centralist tradition which Alexis consolidated, and the bureaucracy which he nurtured, have endured. In these respects at least one imagines that, were Alexis to return to the Kremlin today, he would not feel altogether out of place.18 As we have already seen in Chapter 3 above, a view similar to that of Longworth was given in the Preface to the most complete textbook on pre-revolutionary Russian history by Michael T. Florinsky. He too implied there (and elsewhere made explicit) a continuity between Alexis and Lenin, with an intervening 'European' period. We have also noted in the present chapter that Richard Pipes has examined history from as far back as the ninth century onwards in order to investigate the unique relationship of Russia to Europe. We will return to this important subject, adducing more examples, below. For the moment, let us switch our attention to the USA, asking similar questions about the relationship of its history to that of modern Europe, and the connection between its more remote past and the present. An appropriate point of departure is provided by Walter La Feber in his judicious survey, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1984, where he quotes the conclusion to a speech in 1945 by the American Secretary of State James F. Byrnes: T o the extent that we are able to manage our domestic affairs successfully, we shall win converts to our creed in every land.' La Feber goes on to comment, 'John Winthrop had not expressed it more clearly 300 years earlier at Massachusetts Bay. Only now the City Upon a Hill, as Winthrop called it, was industrialized, internationalized—and held the atomic bomb.'19 However, as John Winthrop's contemporary, Tsar Alexis, and some of his Muscovite contemporaries were making tentative steps towards Europe, many of Winthrop's fellow Puritan colonists believed that they were moving in the other direction, both physically and spiritually. They would have had no difficulty in agreeing with Cotton Mather, another of their leaders, that they could seek to lead more fulfilled lives 'having fled from the inquities of Europe to the shores of America.' Therefore a sense of apartness from former neighbours was soon developed, and so was a strong conviction of essential superiority over new neighbours. There was some respect for the Indian way of life, for example a belief on the part of the colleagues of John Winthrop that the Indians too were

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subject to the law of nations and could fight among themselves upon 'breach of convenant'. But Governor William Bradford had no illusions about whose cause was just when conflict developed between the original inhabitants and the incomer colonists: It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise therefore to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and given them so speedy a victory over so proud and so insulting an enemy. It was hardly surprising then that the Indians early on formed the view that, as John Smith put it, he and his fellow incomers elsewhere were 'a people come from under the world to take their world from them'.20 The independence of the United States from the mother country led to heightened intimations of separate destiny. In a debate concerned with the framing of the Federal Constitution in 1787, Alexander Hamilton wrote of * one great American system, superior to the control of all the transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world.'21 Already if not before, however, a certain duality was apparent. The USA, while rejecting Europe, could not shake off its dependence in every sphere. For example, without French military and financial assistance, the Revolutionary war could not have been won. As an indication of the lasting importance of France in these early years, Benjamin Franklin spent several of them in Paris on the American government's behalf. Culturally, however, the ties of the USA remained mostly with Britain. At this time, of course, Europe did not forget America; far from it, often seeing the great experiment of the Federal Union as one to admire and, in various ways, to emulate. The Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century was centred on the Atlantic, with 1776 bearing significant implications for 1789. This duality remained throughout the nineteenth century. The USA was remote from the Napoleonic Wars, yet as a consequence of them gained the Louisiana Purchase and became involved in war with Britain. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was the fullest statement of the apartness of the USA together with the whole of the Western Hemisphere. European powers were to cease looking

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upon the American continents as areasripefor further colonization while the USA would recognize de facto governments in Europe and thus avoid entanglement in the old world's squabbles. President Monroe (or rather Secretary of State J. Q. Adams on his behalf) thus enlarged on the message already given to the American Congress and people by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. But the Monroe Doctrine could not function without the tacit support of the British navy, which patrolled the Atlantic to the Anglo-American advantage. While cultural, economic and other links across the Atlantic persisted and developed, the USA insisted on the separate nature of its historical path. Its first historians gave great emphasis to the justice and transcendence of the American cause, and joined politicians, poets and other purveyors of the spoken and written word in underlining the special quality of America's destiny. Among the countless illustrations of this pronounced tendency, let us take the sample of the evaluation made of those who had opposed the American Revolution, the Loyalists or Tories. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, that is about seventy-five years after the event, that rehabilitation began. In 1864, Lorenzo Sabine wrote: a word of grateful mention of Messrs. Little, Brown and Co., the publishers. Seventeen years ago, when the Tories' had seemingly passed into utter and deserved oblivion, these gentlemen published the 'American Loyalists', without the hope of gain, and with the probability, indeed, of actual loss; and they voluntarily take the risk of the present work under circumstances adverse to adequate pecuniary profit. For them and for myself, I venture to add, that the principal reward is found in the belief that we have done something for the cause of human brotherhood, by lessening the rancor—even the hate—which long existed between the children of the winners, and the children of the expatriated losers, in the civil war which dismembered the British Empire.22 Possibly, the fact that Sabine was writing during the Civil War that temporarily dismembered the United States encouraged him to write in such reconciliatory fashion. Certainly, his hopes were by no means realized in full in the short run. In 1895, M. C. Tyler could still observe:

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Even yet, in this last decade of the nineteenth century, it is by no means easy for Americans—especially if, as is the case with the present writer, they are descended from men who thought and fought on behalf of the Revolution—to take a disinterested attitude, that is, an historical one, towards those Americans who thought and fought against the Revolution.23 Tyler talked of 'at least one century of oratorical and poetical infamy'. And then, with an even longer perspective at his disposal in 1965, William H. Nelson made the point that: During the course of the nineteenth century, it is true, one interpretation of the Revolution came to be widely accepted in the United States. (One wonders whether it still does not lie, barely below the surface, in most American minds).24 This 'Whig' interpretation was associated with the national history of George Bancroft, in which he had declared, 'When all Europe slumbered over questions of liberty, a band of exiles, keeping watch by night, heard the glad tidings which promised the political regeneration of the world.'25 At the time of Lorenzo Sabine's attempt to rehabilitate the Tories, the United States suffered grievously from even greater dissensions. Rapid expansion in the 1840s and 1850s had led to an imbalance between North and South, and 'Manifest Destiny' reached its nemesis in the American Civil War of 1861-5. This epic struggle was fought entirely on American soil and the immediately surrounding waters. Nevertheless, it possessed an important international dimension, and all the major European powers were to some extent involved. After 1865, with the South defeated and slavery abolished, there was even more rapid expansion in the last third of the nineteenth century than there had been in the second. By 1900 the USA had become the world's leading industrial power. By then, too, it had joined in the race for empire with the great powers of Europe and Japan. At the same time, American apologists were arguing that American expansion was categorically different from that of its European rivals. The USA, after all, had been the first government to throw off the bonds of empire, and would show the way ahead for others to do the same. It had rounded out its own boundaries on the continent; it would now expand not only for its own survival in

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an increasingly competitive world but also to bring the benefits of capitalism and democracy to others in all quarters of the globe. Hence the rationale for the 'Open Door' policy in China, and then for involvement in the First World War. The USA was returning to Europe to bring to an end the internecine war and to avert future conflicts through the cessation of old injustices in society and outmoded forms of government. Without abandoning their basic 'Whig' posture, some American historians were giving their encouragement to the outward-looking policies through the formation and development of an 'Imperial' interpretation of American history, which usually included Britain along with the USA in an English-speaking union which had fostered human progress from the Magna Carta of 1215 onwards. Having considered the evolution of the Russian and American relationship to Europe, let us briefly compare the acquisition by the future superpowers of the eight features of modernity: (1) The two of them were preceded by other great powers, and they themselves joined these ranks before their higher elevation. The USA, as we have just seen, became a great power in approximately 1900. Russia was a great power from the eighteenth century onwards, but, relatively speaking, fell behind others considerably in the late nineteenth century. Then, it picked up somewhat, but was still a long way behind the USA, Germany, Britain and France. (2) Except during the Civil War, the USA had no regular army or navy of a size appropriate to its status before the late nineteenth century, or even after. From Peter the Great onwards, Russia always gave priority to its armed forces, arguably beyond its means. (3) These were increasing in the early twentieth century, after a long process of the development of industrial might, beginning again with Peter the Great, if not before. The USA made a vast economic surge forward during and especially after the Civil War. (4) At the time of Malthus, both American and Russian governments were worried about under- rather than over-popula-

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tion. With the closure of the frontier in 1890, the USA began to think it might have enough, and even in Russia, for all the empty spaces of Siberia, there was some feeling that too many mouths needed feeding. (5) The USA was anti-imperialist before it became imperialist, and then soon found it necessary to go through some of the motions of decolonization. In Russia, there were no such qualms. (6) The rush to California in 1849 and the foundation of Vladivostok (Lord of the East) in 1861 both indicated that the USA and Russia were becoming more interested in the Pacific, if by no means to the neglect of the Atlantic. (7) The USA led the way in the spread of the three Rs, but developed a culture growing away from European models at about the same time as Russia in the early nineteenth century. (8) Much more obviously, totalitarian controls were anticipated in autocratic Russia. But even in the democratic USA, if the only good Indian was a dead one, the only good American was a hundred percenter. Even those living an American nightmare could not forget the American dream. To sum up, the transition to modernity was mostly, if not exclusively, a European phenomenon. Of the major European powers, Britain and France trod the most 'normal' path, including in each case a revolution. Without a revolution in the same sense, Germany's route to modernity was more difficult in several ways. For example, its central geographical position, without natural frontiers, made the going hard for Prussia from the seventeenth century into the eighteenth. Even before then, the Eastern frontier in particular had been a source of anxiety as well as of opportunity. Afterwards, Prussia led Germany to a unification too late for empire but too soon for superpower. As a consequence, it lashed out in a harsh and then in a barbaric manner in the two successive world wars. The transition to contemporaneity, accelerated by these two wars, was largely if by no means exclusively a phenomenon

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centring on two previously peripheral powers, the USSR as successor to tsarist Russia (whose relationship with Europe had always possessed a certain ambiguity) and the much expanded USA (which had made a full entry into the international relations of imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century). It is true that the USA was thefirstfully fledged superpower, but if the USSR has in several respects lagged behind its rival, its participation in the transition has been equally vital. One last point needs to be made in this chapter. Our emphasis on conjunctures and transitions has meant perhaps a neglect of disjunctures, of breaks in historical continuity. Have we made the flow of history too smooth in giving too little attention to the disruptive role in history of what we have seen as an integral part of the process of modernization—revolution? Let us briefly consider this question, bearing in mind the appropriate circumstance that the late 1980s contained several important commemorative dates. The seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution was celebrated in 1987 as other revolutions were also reaching significant milestones. In 1988 there were celebrations of the tricentenary of the British Revolution in 1688, the 'Glorious and Bloodless' as it used to be called. Then, in 1989 the French Revolution was to be 200 years old. And back in 1987, in September, a similar amount of time had elapsed since the composition of the American Constitution, which was an important sequel to the American Revolution, eleven years after the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Such chronological coincidence encourages historians to think in terms of comparisons, of which a few are offered here. The first of them is that each of the revolutions constituted the foundation of a form of government. One consequence of this is that none of them could become a subject for completely open public discussion for a considerable period after the event, although the degree of conformity varied according to time and place and the nature of the revolution. To take them in chronological order, the British Revolution of 1688 made certain that the tendency towards Roman Catholicism which was marked in the reigns of Charles II and James VII and II would now be reversed with an insistence on adherence to the principles of established Protestant churches. To take just one example, it was not until the nineteenth century, more than one hundred years later, that English universities ceased to be a monopoly for members of the Church of England. To turn to the

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American Revolution, acceptance of the principles of the Constitution of 1787 remains a condition of American citizenship today. For many years after the Revolution, as we have seen above, there was little if any departure from the view that those who had opposed the breakaway from Britain deserved no serious reappraisal. In France even with the Restoration of the monarchy and the different phases of Bonapartism, there could be no return to the absolutism overthrown in 1789; although there certainly were attempts to reject the principles of the earlier revolution, they led to later vigorous reassertion of them. Needless to say, in different international circumstances but also in conformity with a long-established tradition, there has been strict adherence in the Soviet Union to the fundamental importance of the October Revolution. A second comparative point to make about the revolutions whose anniversaries were to be celebrated in 1987,1988 and 1989 is that their relation to other revolutions in the same country has been a subject of lively discussion. Thus, it has been argued that the British Revolution of 1688 marked a more important break in continuity than the mid seventeenth-century revolution culminating in the execution of Charles I. Charles II was recalled in 1660 without significant conditions. William III, on the other hand, made great concessions in 1688 because of his overriding priority to prosecute war against France. In the American case, the Constitution of 1787 has been viewed by some analysts as the necessary introduction of order and stability after the chaos and insecurity of the preceding four years or so. One authority has written: Sober Americans of 1784 lamented the spirit of speculation which war and its attendant disturbances had generated, the restlessness of the young, disrespect for tradition and authority, increase of crime, the frivolity and extravagance of society.26 All this has appeared to another analyst very similar to the Thermidorean reaction taking place in France ten years later. Certainly, that reaction, as well as the assumption of power by Napoleon after a further five years, in 1799, have been considered as a most significant sequel to the events of the earlier years of the French Revolution. In the Soviet case, the launching of the Five-Year Plans in 1928 and the subsequent collectivization of the peasantry have been looked upon by some commentators in a similar fashion. An

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important accompanying problem in this case has been that of the degree of continuity between the Lenin Revolution and the Stalin Revolution. Third, along with the movement away from the single revolution as an all-embracing centre of attention, there has been a marked tendency to downgrade revolutions in general. Thus great doubt has been poured on the interpretation of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and even the French Revolution of the eighteenth century as essentially bourgeois. In similar fashion, regarding the American Revolution, it has been argued that the Boston merchants and Virginian landowners who dominated society before 1776 resumed power with renewed confidence after 1787. Meanwhile, there has been so much emphasis on the continuity between tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union that the October Revolution has also suffered a reduction of significance in some estimates.27 This chapter has involved the attempt to suggest a strong element of continuity in the history of all countries. Nevertheless, this should not be taken to indicate an implication of completely uniform development. As we have argued in Chapter 4, while Leninism and Wilsonism emerged from the circumstances of late modernity, they also constituted a great conjuncture marking the boundary between modernity and contemporaneity. Moreover, the year 1917 brought forward a baptism of fire for Leninism in the Russian Revolution and for Wilsonism in the American entry into the First World War. Without this experience, the new Soviet policy would have been impossible and the nature of American adaptation to changing global circumstances very different. If both ideologies were thereby forced to make compromises, they became in their modified form a central feature of the USSR and USA in their passage to superpower. Earlier similar roles were played by the revolutions and accompanying wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the formation of modernity, even if comparative remoteness has lessened the force of their impact within a firmer structure. In 1951 Herbert Butterfield defined the 'Whig' interpretation of history as the tendency 'to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphases certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.'28 There is perhaps at least a little of the

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'Whig' in all historiography: certainly, it is difficult to write largescale history without some such sense of direction, explicit or implicit. The very word 'history', the same as 'story' in several languages, is difficult to comprehend without some idea of process. In the Russian case, the greatest of the pre-revolutionary historians, V. O. Klyuchevsky, found his course of lectures virtually impossible to continue beyond 1861 after his own awareness of the implications of 1905 made him doubt the smooth progression of the national polity towards constitutional monarchy, borrowing concepts from the French, American and British revolutions. We have seen above how Maxim Kovalevsky retained some hopes about such a smooth progression at least up to 1905, and how the emigre Michael T. Florinsky found it impossible to move beyond 1917, partly in the wake of Klyuchevsky, so to speak, but also wrestling with at least some of the obstacles impeding the path of his Soviet colleagues. For their part, after 1917 and for many years, they had no difficulty in looking upon the October Revolution as a clean break with the past, and, even now, have not succeeded in incorporating it in a new 'Whig' view taking in completely pre-1917 developments and putting post-1917 developments in their proper place. Meanwhile, although still to come fully to terms with the loyalist question and some others, most US historians have accepted, with various degrees of reservation, their own 'Whig' version of 1776 and after. Of course, at least some of them have given closer attention to the years before 1776. While not denying the importance of either the Russian or the American Revolution, we shall now turn our attention to the early origins of what was to become the superpower relationship. These stretch back to medieval times and then develop within the formation of the structure of the First Great Game of empire.

PART THREE STRUCTURES

Part Three: Structures PREHISTORIC AND ANCIENT Geographical formation; ancient civilizations MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN Pre-1500 Schism in Christian Church; Muscovite and English political culture formation c. 1500 - 1700 Exploration and early colonization MODERN c. 1800 — c. 1650 - 1860 c. 1650 - 1800 c. 1780 —

c. c. c.

1848 — 1880— 1892 —

Cameralism and mercantilism Serfdom and slavery Reason and Enlightenment Laissez-faire and free trade; modern political thought; American - Russian diplomatic and cultural contacts; early forecasts of American - Russian rise to world power; formation of independent American and Russian language and literature Marxism (Karl Marx 1818-83) American industrialisation Weberism (Max Weber 1864-1920)

EARLY CONTEMPORARY; THE GREAT CONJUNCTURE c. 1895 —

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American-Russian Aspects of the Structure of the First Great Game In Chapter 5 we attempted to illustrate the manner in which the core of modern European history was joined by the Russian and American peripheries. Such conjunctures, along with certain significant events, will not be forgotten in this present chapter, although the emphasis will now be on structure, in particular on American Russian aspects of the structure of the First Great Game. Structure for historians cannot ignore chronology, and our discussion will move forwards from the medieval period up to approximately the end of the American Civil War in 1865, that is to the eve of the climax of the First Great Game. We are not going to analyse that phenomenon, but rather its provenance, and in particular the manner in which this involved the future superpowers en route for their more awesome confrontation in the Last Great Game. And while not completely ignoring international relations in the traditional sense, we will give primary emphasis to the symbiotic association of the two European frontiers in social, economic, cultural and ideological development. Let us begin with an observation made towards the end of the allotted time of this chapter with an observation published in 1864 by a Russian Populist historian born in Siberia, A. P. Shchapov: Two European peoples have been destined to a vast colonizing expansion: Anglo-Saxon and Slavo-Russian. And, at the same time, it has been the destiny of those two peoples to carry out the great work of a new physiological and ethnographical organization of peoples. The vigorous and progressive Anglo-Saxon race which, thanks to its riparian situation, has taken possession of the ocean, accomplishes the colonization of the ocean par excellence— that of islands—and at the 121

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same time creates a new racial type. The young Slavo-Russian race, given strength by its advantageous continental situation and appropriating for itself a huge part of the European and the Asiatic continent, accomplishes the colonization of terrafirmapar excellence, and in this manner, by organizing the population of the Northeast, creates a new racial type—the continental type. So one may say that these two powerful races of the old world are elaborating the organization for the future of the greatest part of humanity. Here already in embryo was the Mahan-Mackinder geopolitical dichotomy, between the sea-centred and land-based view of global expansion. However, the differences between American and Russian development were accompanied by similarities, which were well described in 1930 by P. Bizzilli: Political structures, such as Russia or the United States, each of which embraces a whole continent and is the child of colonization, resembles only approximately the national states of western Europe, such as England, France, etc., whose historical evolution has long been regarded as typical and, so to speak, the only 'normal' one. The historical concepts which we have formed for ourselves in studying the political history of Europe, which from time immemorial has been for historians the type form of history..., must be completely modified when we apply them to states such as Russia or the United States. Here the essential thing is the role of space and mass. If Russia, unlike America, may be liable to invasion it is none the less, exactly like America, actually impregnable.1 And so, to revert again to the analogy with Germany, we could never conceive of the USA or the USSR being worried in the 1930s by the problem of living space, like the Nazis. Similarly, the imperatives of superpower since 1945 differ from those of the British or French Empire before then. Such diachronic observations have their dangers, but they need to be made if we are to give to the problem of the structure of the First Great Game any hint of its full complexity. In like manner, space and mass have important implications for the medieval components of this structure. A. J. P. Taylor has declared that the Cold War 'goes back at least to the great schism, which long ago divided the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches'. At greater length on one side of the schism, Arnold Toynbee wrote:

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In this long and grim struggle to preserve their independence, the Russians have sought salvation in the political institution that was the bane of the mediaeval Byzantine world. They felt that their one hope of survival lay in a ruthless concentration of political power and worked out for themselves a Russian version of the Byzantine totalitarian state. The Grand Duchy of Moscow was the laboratory of this political experiment, and Moscow's service, and reward, was the consolidation, under her rule, of a cluster of weak principalities into a single great power. The Muscovite political edifice has twice been given a new facade—first by Peter the Great and then again by Lenin—but the essence of the structure has remained unaltered, and the Soviet Union of today, like the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the fourteenth century, reproduces the salient features of the mediaeval East Roman Empire.2 On the other hand, Edward L. Keenan has argued: It cannot be demonstrated,... that during its formative period (i.e. 1450 -1500) Muscovite political culture was significantly influenced either by the form or by the practice of Byzantine political culture or ideology. Nor is there convincing evidence that any powerful Muscovite politician or political group was conversant with Byzantine political culture, except perhaps as the latter was reflected in the ritual and organization of the Orthodox Church, which itself had little practical political importance in early Muscovy and little formative impact upon Russian political behaviour. In Keenan's view, then, the Byzantine influence that Toynbee had seen as central represented nothing more than 'externalities of one form of Muscovite political behavior'. Toynbee, of course, was no specialist in Russian history, but his views would be supported, albeit to varying extents, by at least some such experts. For example, Dimitri Obolensky has written that 'Byzantium was not a wall, erected between Russia and the West: she was Russia's gateway to Europe ... the main channel through which she became a European nation.' In other words, medieval subjects can be as much matters of dispute as modern and contemporary. Keenan argues that the major determinants of medieval Russian political culture were the natural conditions of economic and social life in the East European forest. Since their effect was to make the top priority survival itself:

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the most significant autonomous actor in peasant life was not the individual (who could not survive alone in this environment), and not even the nuclear family (which, in its extended form, was marginally viable, but still too vulnerable in disease and sudden calamity), but the village, to whose interests all others were in the end subordinated. The fundamental features of the Russian village political culture were: a strong tendency to maintain stability and a kind of closed equilibrium; risk-avoidance; suppression of individual initiatives; informality of political power; the considerable freedom of action and expression within the group; the striving for unanimous final resolution of potentially divisive issues. For similar reasons and through similar modes of behaviour, the Muscovite state concentrated its attention on extremely limited objectives, especially the avoidance of chaos. For this reason, from the earliest times, it followed a strict principle of centralization, even though this was costly and difficult to implement. And who controlled the state? During the civil war among powerful families in the fifteenth century, great regional and dynastic problems were posed. And for Keenan: The solution seems to have been quite simple: there must be only one coalition—that formed around the divinely anointed grand prince of Moscow—and such a coalition must serve both to protect clans from internecine military competition and to guarantee the economic and political status through grants of land and income made nominally in the name of the grand prince and for loyal service, but in fact as a system of corporate resource-sharing controlled by the clans themselves. Like those of its village counterpart, the priorities of the political culture of the clan were conservative, for the avoidance of risk and the promotion of stability. Similar considerations weighed heavily upon the state bureaucracy. If Keenan is in any way correct in his controversial view that the Soviet political culture becoming stabilized by the end of the 1930s contained so many features of its Muscovite predecessor that 'the new may be seen, in long historical perspective, as the continuation of the old', 3 may anything like the same be said about the USA?

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Certainly Muscovy was not the only state rent in the fifteenth century by civil war among powerful families and posing great regional and dynastic problems. If we look at the principal progenitor of the North American colonies, we see in full spate in the late fifteenth century the English Wars of the Roses. But did similar problems bring about similar solutions? Not in the opinion of the historical anthropologist Alan Macfarlane, for whom in England's insular situation the questions had been posed and the answers given at an earlier time. He believes that a very strong case can be made for saying that 'most of the central legal, political, economic, social and demographic premises that were observable in the early nineteenth century were already formed by the fourteenth century at the latest'. The Common Law reached a mature stage of development by the end of the thirteenth century, while the principle that England was not an absolutist state, but that the Crown was under the law and responsible to parliament, was established before the Magna Carta of 1215. Medieval England was already a trading nation with a' shopkeeper' mentality. The nuclear family with male primogeniture and a distinctive marriage pattern was almost the same in the nineteenth century as it had been in the fourteenth, and a consequence of this peculiarly English arrangement had led to an unusual level of demographic stability. And so, when in the early nineteenth century, contemplating the difference between France on the one hand and England and North America on the other, Alexis de Tocqueville came to the conclusion that he was witnessing the birth of a new modern world composed of democracy and individualism, he was mistaken. While there are, in Macfarlane's assessment, good reasons for calling what happened in much of continental Europe in the century after 1789 a real revolution, in England the die had been cast many centuries before. Ironically, he concludes the 'new' world arising from this revolution was founded on 'the ancient models developed in England and exported to her colonies'.4 Why, his fellow anthropologists might want to ask, should England and the colonies be exceptional? In the argument of at least one of them, Emmanuel Todd, de Tocqueville was wrong for a different reason, because of his belief that the process discerned by him was universal. In Todd's view, the great ideas of the French Revolution were nothing more than 'an elegant transcription of a latent anthropological structure which had existed at least since the

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Middle Ages'. For, 'Liberty and equality are the characteristic features of the family model which traditionally occupies northern France.' And so, 'At the very moment when the modern world thought it was gaining control of the French countryside and destroying its traditions, it was itself overtaken by anthropology'. Todd goes on to argue that the French Revolution also saw the birth of a conceptual error still prevalent in political science: the confusion of mass politics with individualistic egalitarianism. He asks us to look at the variety of the impact of mass politics throughout Europe: England embraced the idea of liberty but not that of equality. Germany produced authoritarian, inegalitarian doctrines, preaching submission to the state and affirming the inequality of men and races. Russia invented the modem form of authoritarian, egalitarian communism which proclaims itself universal. Such variety is to be explained by the respective anthropological foundations, with each nation putting its own family values in ideological form: In England the absolute nuclear family requires its children to be independent but not equal. The German family, essentially authoritarian and based on the submission of children to their father's will and on the indivisibility of inheritance, exalts discipline but is indifferent to equality. The Russian community family combines equality and discipline, parity between brothers and obedience to the father. Todd goes on to apply his anthropological analysis to the whole world and a broad sweep of history, including the Soviet - American rivalry. He thus brings us back full circle to the arguments of Keenan, which we should not fully dismiss but place in a wider context. Without wanting to be as determinist as Todd, Macfarlane and Keenan, historians and perhaps social scientists can be converted to the view that there are indeed medieval roots to the First and Last Great Games. But, at the very least, we would also want to look at the process of modernization beginning, perhaps, with the voyages of exploration from the late fifteenth century onwards.5 Russia was 'discovered' or rather rediscovered in 1553, and in a manner recalling the more famous discovery of America in 1492. For, just as the expedition led by Columbus was expected to reach

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the riches of the Orient by way of the western route, so the expedition that came to be led by Richard Chancellor was expected to reach the same goal by sailing East, round the North Cape. A further link between the two routes of exploration was embodied by Sebastian Cabot, earlier renowned for following in the wake of his father John over the new World, later governor of the group sponsoring this fresh venture. Moreover, the letter carried by Chancellor from Edward VI of England and now, after shipwreck in the White Sea, delivered to Ivan IV in Moscow, also recalled the avowed purposes of earlier voyages. It was addressed to 'all kings, princes, rulers, judges and governors of the earth, and all other having excellent dignity on the same, in all places under the universal heaven'. Proposing the establishment of commercial connections, the letter argued that: the God of heaven and earth greatly providing for mankind, would not that all things should be found in one region, to the end that one should have need of another, that by this means friendship might be established among all men, and every one seek to gratify all. The nature of Chancellor's voyage, and of Edward VI's letter, provide at least some justification for our scrutiny of the later sixteenth century for some evidence of Europe's two frontiers already being interconnected. Further justification comes from Ivan IV's response to the English king, and from his proclamation of privileges to English merchants in 1555, which echoes Edward VI's original letter in an opening passage culminating in the observation that: 'all things be in every place ... generally in such sort, as amity thereby is entered into, and planted to continue, and the enjoyers thereof be as men living in a golden world'.6 Moreover, if Klyuchevsky was accurate in his remark that the fundamental fact of Russian history was colonization in a boundless plain, the reign of Ivan IV, or Terrible, was an important moment in the working out of the fact, the conclusion of the second of Klyuchevsky's three phases. First, there was Kievan Rus, then Rus on the Upper Volga. Ivan the Terrible consolidated the hold on the Volga and created the opportunity for expansion beyond with the campaign against Kazan ending in 1552, just before the arrival of the English expedition under Chancellor. He went on to take Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga by 1556. Then, in the later part

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of Ivan's reign, partly at least in response to the opportunities opened up by the Chancellor expedition and other foreign contacts, the Stroganov family with its own private army extended its influence and that of Muscovite Rus, deep into Siberia. Meanwhile, at the same time as resisting Tatar incursions from the south, Ivan attempted to push westwards to the Baltic in the long, drawn-out Livonian War from 1558 to 1582. This fruitless struggle was more than just an episode in Russia's motivation by an urge to the sea, now given new force by Ivan's awareness of the imperatives of the late sixteenth century. How were these imperatives manifesting themselves in the reign of Elizabeth on the other European frontier across the Atlantic Ocean? In 1494 Spain and Portugal had divided the world between themselves for the purposes of exploration. Thereafter, throughout the sixteenth century, English interlopers sought to bypass this Iberian monopoly by succeeding where Columbus had failed in 1492 and finding a north-west passage or other route direct to the riches of the Orient. Hence, the voyages of, among others, the Cabots. Apart from providing a staging post on what was hoped to be this more distant journey, North America also afforded the possibility of bases for organized privateering, which would serve, in the words of Hakluyt: to spoil Philip's Indian navy and to deprive him of yearly passage of his treasure to Europe, and consequently to abate the pride of Spain and of the supporter of the great anti-Christ of Rome, and to pull him down in equality to his neighbour princes, and consequently to cut off the common mischiefs that come to all Europe by the abundance of his Indian treasure. A third potential use of North America, as a source of raw materials and in particular of gold, led to early thoughts of colonization. Sir Walter Raleigh's obsession with the idea of El Dorado was one of the main reasons for his creation of the failed settlement of Roanoke in Virginia in the 1580s. More generally, Hakluyt expressed the view that: We should not depend upon Spain for oils, sacks [sherry], raisins, oranges, lemons, Spanish skins, etc; nor upon France for wood, bay salt and Gascoyne wines; nor on Estland [the Baltic] forflax,pitch, tar, masts, etc.

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Hakluyt believed that such a cornucopia would 'yield to us all the commodities of Europe, Africa and Asia'. Hence, in the interim, to take the last items in Hakluyt's list, one of the driving motives for the development of connections with Ivan IV's Russia. But it was already hoped that North American colonies could provide in the not too distant future the same kind of materials as Russia without the same kind of haggle and hassle. In an attempt to gain the support of the Muscovy merchants for a transatlantic expedition, a Captain Carlile argued in 1583: As for the merchandising, which is the matter especially looked for, albeit that for the present we are not certainly able to promise any such like quantity, as is now at the best time of the Moscovian trade brought from thence: so likewise is there not demanded any such proportion of daily expenses, as was at the first, and as yet is consumed in that of Moscovia and other. In the fairly near future, too, it was expected that the North American colonies would provide a market for goods as well as a supply of raw materials. At the death of Ivan IV 's occasional correspondent, Elizabeth I of England, as David Cressy has pointed out in a telling phrase, 'her subjects in North America could be reckoned on the fingers of one or two of her bony hands'. Nevertheless, before her death, an increasing number of projects for colonies were being put forward, not least by the tireless promoter of English overseas interest, Richard Hakluyt, who enumerated seventy-six separate occupations in five principal categories as the basic manpower requirements for such an enterprise. Such schemes multiplied throughout the seventeenth century as colonies more successful than Roanoke and other early fiascos were founded in North America, both by England and other European states. An interesting French projector was Marshal Vauban, who built castles in stone for Louis XIV on the national frontiers while constructing several others in the transatlantic air.7 Such enterprise might be placed under the general heading of modernization, a process affecting Western more than Eastern Europe, especially in the early modern centuries, as we have seen, but not omitting even Russia, whose response to the challenge from outside has been charted by a number of investigators. For ex-

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ample, in his book on The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia; 1600—1800, Marc Raeff points out that the use of the word 'police' to mean administration in the broadest sense came from classical roots via Burgundy to the Habsburg chanceries, and then to places further afield. The emergence of the well-ordered police state in Central and in Eastern Europe was to a considerable extent, although unwittingly, promoted by the Western part of the continent in its domestic and overseas economic activity. Within such a framework, Raeff notes that 'the colonial experience was of particular interest and relevance, since it gave the administrator from the homeland virtually free rein to shape the life of the natives for the purposes the colonial government demanded and expected'. We have already noted the formulation of schemes from Hakluyt to Vauban. For his part, Raeff pays special attention to the Jesuits in South America, remarking how amazing it is with the benefit of hindsight to observe the degree to which they 'prefigured the outlook, aims, and policies of enlightened absolutism in Austria and Russia (especially with respect to peoples deemed to be on a lower level of culture) and those of the well-organized police state.'8 Making due allowance for Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox traditions and other national variables, we may agree with an older authority, Albion W. Small, that cameralism—the body of doctrine behind many police-state policies—was an equivalent to mercantilism adopted elsewhere, especially when described and defined in the following manner: The whole internal history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only in Germany, but everywhere else, is summed up in the opposition of the economic policy of the state to that of the town, the district, and the several Estates; the whole foreign history is summed up in the opposition to one another of the separate interests of the newly rising states, each of which sought to obtain and retain its place in the circle of European nations, and in the foreign trade which now included America and India... Mercantilism... in its innermost kernel is nothing but state making—not state making in a narrow sense, but state making and national-economy making at the same time; state making in the modern sense, which creates out of the political community an economic community, and so gives it a heightened meaning.9

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As far as Russia in particular is concerned, the implementation of the third phase of Klyuchevsky's fundamental fact of its history, colonization in a boundless plain, began in the seventeenth century. Perhaps we may be excused for shifting forward the line of demarcation of the third phase from the second to the middle of the seventeenth century. For the first half of the century was basically a holding operation, a recovery from the traumatic shocks of the Time of Troubles that supervened soon after the death of Ivan the Terrible. Michael, the first Romanov, failed in the attempt to take retake the frontier fortress of Smolensk and was obliged to conduct a holding operation against Tatar incursions from the south. It was during the reign of the second Romanov, Alexis, that Russia not only regained Smolensk but also probed again towards the Baltic, while, even more significantly at the time, absorbing much of the Ukraine and consolidating its interests in Siberia. At this time, government policies followed a centralized line that was more traditional than influenced from outside. A fuller implementation of cameralist ideas, as well as more complete integration with Europe, would have to wait for the reign of Peter the Great. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the first successful colonies were being founded and developed along the North American coast: Virginia from 1607, Massachusetts from 1630 and so on. The character of the colonies would vary according to geographical circumstances and the nature of the foundation, opportunities for prosperity and changes in government policy. Although the seventeenth century was turbulent enough in the mother country to keep the attention of successive governments nearer home at several junctures, what was known as the Old Colonial system was developed by the end of the seventeenth century on mercantilist foundations. English policy was not as rigorous as that of some of the continental governments, but worked well enough while some kind of harmony could be preserved between the interests of those overseas and those back in the metropolis. Although colonial North America and early Romanov Russia were thousands of miles and widely separate traditions apart, they were subject to comparable pressures exerted by modernizing Europe. As Peter Kolchin has written in his stimulating book, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, the two institutions:

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were part of the same historical process, despite the vastly differing societies in which they emerged. Both were products of geographic and economic expansion in areas of sparse settlement.... In both countries a crisis in the labor supply finally forced landholders and the governments that depended on them to make arrangements that led to the spread and institutionalization of new systems of unfree labor. As Kolchin goes on to point out, both of these developments were to be found in other parts of the Americas and Central and Eastern Europe, and both also depended on the maintenance of a system of values accepting unfree labour as unexceptionable: there was little thought of emancipation before the middle of the eighteenth century. Kolchin continues: Over the course of the seventeenth and first part of the eighteenth centuries unfree labor gradually became entrenched and solidified in Russia and the American South. If at first serfdom and slavery had emerged as institutions designed to help landholders cope with specific problems of labor shortage, by the middle of the eighteenth century they appeared part of the natural order, as God-given as government or agriculture itself. A central feature of this process of entrenchment was the hardening and clarification of class lines, so that in both countries the welter of overlapping groups that still prevailed in much of the seventeenth century had coalesced by the eighteenth into well-delineated classes, the masters and their bondsmen. Of course, there remained intermediate groupings, people who did not fit into either of these major classes; these two, however, dominated society and gave shape to the social order.10 We must be careful not to let too superficial a reading of Kolchin's careful formulations lead us into too close a comparison of the two European frontier societies. A useful corrective here is another challenging work, Russia and America: The Roots of Economic Divergence, by Colin White. Accepting that there are four phases of economic development—pioneering, commercial, industrial and planning—he adds the key concept of a formative period. During this, the basic principles of institutional organization in any given society are established as a consequence of which, the phases comprised within it take on added significance. In White's estimation, the closing date of the formative period was the 1780s for America and the 1580s for Russia. In the 1780s, the United States

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achieved a lasting constitution protecting market institutions, rejected the Proclamation Line holding back settlement beyond the Appalachians and consolidated their pre-revolutionary core to the east of those mountains. In the 1580s, tsarist Russia took a large step towards the establishment of a service state based on serfdom (although the process neared completion in 1649), crossed the Urals into Siberia (although another mid-seventeenth century process, the movement into the steppe, was also important) and, less clearly than in the transatlantic case, crystallized a core around Moscow (with a significant persistence of vulnerability to incursion). Although they would accept his basic argument of divergence, other historians would no doubt give different emphases, or choose other formative periods; we have seen above how Edward Keenan, with a socio-political rather than socio-economic focus, selected the second half of the fifteenth century for Muscovite Russia, for example. As far as an overall concept is concerned, White himself disagrees with distinguished predecessors, finding neither the neo-classical approach with emphasis on the free market a la Adam Smith nor the Marxist interpretation based on the class struggle a comprehensive guide to the phases of development. For him, the environment of competition or conflict in which both schools operate omits the more universal wish for security. Societies are organized in his view not only to promote prosperity but also to lessen or manage risk. Against such a theoretical background, White looks at the benign and malign influences of the material circumstances of the two passages through the four phases of economic development. He indicates that the arrangement of natural assets was less favourable in the Russian case. Again, the cards were somewhat stacked as far as the impact of natural upsets was concerned: 'There can be little doubt that Russian society was more "shocked" than American— more frequently, more severely, more extensively and more inopportunely.' For such reasons, as well as restrictive government policies, the pioneering process was much less powerful and much more protracted in the Russian case, spurts occurring before and after the mostly nineteenth-century action in the USA, where government policies were much more encouraging. Similar considerations would apply to the American and Russian entries into the commercial and industrial phases of economic development. Here again, as it were, Russia missed out on the nineteenth century,

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reaching the commercial phase only at the end, a century of so later than the USA, and the decisive factory industrial phase in the 1930s as opposed to the USA's 1880s. White does not discuss the planning phase, which might have come to the USSR before the USA and also marked an economic convergence. But he is satisfied that in the pioneering and commercial periods, to which he gives greatest attention, the most prominent lines of development are divergent.11 Continuing our comparative line of investigation but leaving social and economic policies and trends, let us turn to political philosophy, taking as our example the father of the 'political culture' approach, Montesquieu, in his major work The Spirit of the Laws, and noting its reception on the two major frontiers of Europe in the eighteenth century. One of the American 'Founding Fathers', James Madison wrote that: Montesquieu was in politics not a Newton or a Locke, who established immortal systems ... the one in matter, the other in mind. He was in his particular science what Bacon was in universal science. He lifted the veil from the venerable errors which enslaved opinion, and pointed the way to those luminous truths of which he had but a glimpse himself. In spite of such reservations, Madison and his fellow framers of the American Constitution made much use of the authority of Montesquieu in their verbal and written arguments, while Catherine the Great of Russia drew heavily on what she called her 'Prayerbook', the masterpiece of 'President' Montesquieu. According to the careful calculations of N. D. Chechulin, 294 of the 655 clauses of Catherine's Instruction to her Legislative Commission were taken wholly or in substantial part from The Spirit of the Laws. But like Madison and her other contemporaries across the Atlantic, Catherine adapted the 'Prayerbook' for her own purposes. Using John Perry's The State of Russia under the Present Czar, first published in 1716, and other sources, Montesquieu argued that Russia was a despotism, but not Asiatic nor quite European. The people were European, but Asiatic traits had been forced upon them by conquest. Moreover, Russia's vastness contributed towards its despotism. Montesquieu attributed great significance to the size of a country, which he propounded as small for a republic, medium for

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a monarchy and large for a despotism. Europe possessed more natural geographical divisions than Asia, and therefore comprised a greater number and wider variety of governments, but they were all of a size moderate enough to accommodate the rule of law and therefore to encourage liberty. As for Asia, while its large states were certainly formed by conquest, this was less the result of the appetites of their rulers than the dictate of geographical conditions. Eastern Europe was closer than Western to Asia not only in location but also in size, since it consisted basically of a large plain with no great mountains or stretches of water. And so, for several reasons including size, Montesquieu believed that Russia was bound to remain to some degree despotic. For Catherine, on the other hand, while absolutism is necessary for Russia, despotism is not. The references in the Instruction's introductory apostrophe to the Christian law, and in the first chapter to the European character of the Russian state, already allow for absolutism, which is then declared in the third chapter to be inevitable, owing to the large size of the empire, to which she gives an emphasis radically different from that of her mentor. She also makes use of another of Montesquieu's arguments, taking him up on his assertion that natural conditions might be overcome by appropriate rational measures of legislation, while possibly noting that he sometimes uses the terms 'rule of one' and 'great monarchies' rather than despotism in discussion of the kind of government appropriate for large areas. About twenty years later, across the Atlantic, one of James Madison's chief collaborators in the argument in favour of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, noted that the Constitution's opponents assiduously circulated Montesquieu's observation on the necessity of a small territory for a republican government. For example, James Winthrop argued that: Large and consolidated empires may indeed dazzle the eyes of a distant speculator with their splendour, but if examined more nearly are always found to be full of misery. The reason is obvious. In large states the same principles of legislation will not apply to all the parts.... The idea of an uncompounded republic, on an average one thousand miles in length, and eight hundred in breadth, and containing six million of white inhabitants all reduced to the same standard of morals, of habits, and of laws, is in itself an absurdity, and contrary to the whole experience of mankind.

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And Gouverneur Morris asserted that: The Busy haunts of men not the remote wilderness, was the proper school of political Talents. If the Western people get their power into their hands they will ruin the Atlantic interests. The Back members are always the most averse to the best measures. Hamilton conceded that the size recommended by Montesquieu for a republic fell far short of the limits of such individual states as Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina and Georgia, but then argued: If we therefore take his ideas on this point as the criterion of truth, we shall be driven to the alternative either of taking refuge at once in the arms of monarchy, or of splitting ourselves into an infinity of little, jealous, clashing tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord, and the miserable objects of universal pity or contempt. Moreover, as Hamilton was able to remind his opponents, Montesquieu himself had talked of the 'confederate republic' as a means of extending the sphere of popular government and combining the advantages of monarchies with those of republics. His collaborator James Madison went further, in an optimistic correction of Montesquieu based on an appeal to nature: As the natural limit of a democracy is that distance from the central point which will just permit the most remote citizens to assemble as often as their public functions demand, and will include no greater number than can join in those functions; so the natural limit of a republic is that distance from the centre which will barely allow the representatives to meet as often as may be necessary for the administration of public affairs.12 Enough has been said to support our assertion that Montesquieu provides a good example of the manner in which a European authority could be adapted to support arguments being put forward on the two European frontiers. A similar approach could be taken to the reception in Russia and America of Rousseau and Blackstone, among others. However, we should perhaps move on to another kind of literature, the imaginative, In this direction, let us

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first remind ourselves of George Steiner's amplification of D. H. Lawrence's insight: 'Two bodies of modern literature seem to me to have come to a real verge: the Russian and the American.' Steiner continues: The history of European fiction in the nineteenth century brings to mind the image of a nebula with wide-flung arms. At their extremities the American and Russian novel radiate a whiter brilliance. As we move outwards from the centre ... the stuff of realism grows more tenuous. The masters of the American and Russian manner appear to gather something of their fierce intensity from the outer darkness, from the decayed matter of folk-lore, melodrama, and religious life. Developing this thought, Steiner goes on to observe that both America and Russia: lacked even that sense of geographical stability and cohesion which the European novel took for granted. Both nations combined immensity with the awareness of a romantic and vanishing frontier. What the Far West and the Red Man were to American mythology, the Caucasus and its warring tribes, or the unspoil communities of Cossacks and Old Believers on the Don and the Volga were to Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy. Archetypal in both literature is the theme of the hero who leaves behind the corrupt world of urban civilisation and enervating passions to affront the dangers and moral purgations of the frontier.... The vastness of space brings with it exposures to natural forces at their most grandiose and ferocious ... all these encounters of man with a physical setting which can destroy him in moments of wanton grandeur lie outside the repertoire of western European realism.13 Following Steiner and recalling Montesquieu, then, we may assert that size influences literature as well as government. However, if we go back to the eighteenth century, it is not just a question of size but also of other aspects of space, and of time. Even into the nineteenth century, let us remember, Russian and American literature tended to follow a European lead. When did they become completely independent, one may ask? Before 1800, the dependence was almost complete, one may assume. If Bernard Bailyn is correct in his observation that 'American culture in this early period becomes more fully comprehensive when seen as the exotic far western periphery, a marchland, of the metropolitan European culture system', something like the same might be said

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of much Russian culture at that period too. Although the extent of the similarity must be left to others more expert, even a non-literary person can immediately recognize significant differences. First of all, there is the problem of Old Russian Culture. Eighteenthcentury Russian writers had to consider this inheritance as well as the desirability of the import of foreign models. Eighteenth-century American writers, on the other hand, depended almost exclusively on such import, with little attention to their own tradition as developed since the beginning of the seventeenth century and even less to the indigenous, or at least much older immigrant as well as almost exclusively oral Indian tradition. Even then, however, we have to recall Klyuchevsky's dictum that the fundamental fact of Russian history is colonization, and that extension of the frontier would involve the import of culture into ever fresh regions of the boundless plain. If we concentrate on the radiation of British culture, further points of interest emerge, beyond the fundamental circumstance that it would often come to Russia in translation through German or other intermediaries. This would obviously mean a considerable time lag in continental cultural transference, with many and varied implications, but such chronological disjunctures would often be found on the Atlantic side, too. When weeks or even months were necessary for the crossing of the ocean, the periphery would always have the feeling that what was new for it was already becoming old for the metropolis. This would be a short-term reaction. In the longer term, there was a more profound disorientation. For example, sequence could appear different in the American colonies from the British Isles. As the American Revolution of 1776 approached, at least part of the debate centred around the issues of the Glorious and Bloodless Revolution of 1688, no longer so vital in England, Scotland and Ireland.14 As much as time, space was a problem in the adaptation of the metropolitan culture to the frontier. Distance lent enchantment to the view, and far from allowing the new environment to influence cultural development, colonists in America and Russia alike more usually attempted to superimpose the metropolitan culture upon the frontier. Let us remember, too, that until the end of of the eighteenth century, the splendours of nature were not considered to be objects of veneration. Travellers on the Grand Tour hurried through the Alps as the price to be paid for the wonders of Italy.

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Until the arrival of the romantic veneration of nature in Western Europe, then, it was difficult for American and Russian culture to come to terms with the grandeur of their own respective frontiers. This point may be conveniently illustrated by a glance at the Ossian phenomenon, which also serves as a reminder that cultural influences on the early USA were by no means exclusively English. As the vogue for Macpherson' s pseudo-translations spread throughout Europe and beyond, it was enthusiastically taken up in Russia after Desnitsky's first discovery at Glasgow University in the 1760s. As a Soviet critic wrote in 1965: Among the enthusiasts of 'Ossian', convinced by the authenticity of his folk origin, were all the adherents of the new literary tradition, the admirers of a direct, 'natural' poetry and of romantic antiquity, for whom the 'Caledonian bard' served as a new proof of the universality of a poetic genius belonging to all peoples independently from the level of civilisation. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, P. A. Viazemsky declared: The imagination is sad and unvarying like the eternal snows of his birthplace. He had one thought, one feeling: love for the fatherland, and this love warms him in the cold kingdom of winter and becomes the plentiful source of his inspiration. His heroes are warriors; the setting for their glory—the battlefield; the altars—the graves of the fallen. The 'discovery' of The Lay of Igor's Host in 1795 led Karamzin to exclaim that it could be placed together with the best parts of Ossian, and the celebration of the national spirit reached new heights with the war against Napoleon. Among the motives acting upon Macpherson was the realization that a great Northern civilization—the Gaelic—was being pushed towards an eclipse. On the other hand, the reception of Ossian in Russia (in which as far as the River Ob' at least, the world-view of Ossian was deemed to stretch) encouraged the formation of another Northern national consciousness, as celebrations of ancient feats contributed to their modern equivalent. Across the Atlantic, among those captivated by Ossian was Thomas Jefferson, who allegedly sat up all night reading extracts before visiting the National Bridge in Virginia. James Fenimore

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Cooper made use of the Bard in his treatment of the American Indian. There are many other examples of transatlantic Ossianism, which, like its Russian counterpart, reached a peak in the 1790s, after the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution. Andrew Hook suggests that the cultural nationalism celebrated in Macpherson's epics caught on in the USA at least partly because it was remote from the genteel society and culture of eighteenth-century England, from which Americans were now striving to establish a more complete independence. Andrew Hook suggests a second reason for the success of Ossian in the USA: By the end of the eighteenth century, and in the early decades of the nineteenth, America had ceased to see itself as a revolutionary society. Ideologically committed to the new society of the New World, it nonetheless rejected radicalism. Its literary tastes mirror such an ethos. By the 1790s it was beginning to respond to the kinds of writings which heralded the onset of romanticism. But it preferred—and went on preferring—its romanticism to be of a reasonably safe and undisturbing nature. This ... is the clue to the success, in America at least, of various manifestations of Scottish literary romanticism. The Ossianic poems are a typical case. They represent no kind of threat to the present, to the status quo and its institutions. The emotions they evoke are nostalgic, elegiac, backward-looking; the epic heroism they celebrate has nothing to do with the modem world; their moral posture is undisturbing. The reader is invited to regret the present perhaps, not to revolutionize it. The release of romantic emotions of regret and nostalgia produced by the poems is in the end quite harmless. May this not be the source of Ossian's appeal for the broadly conservative societies of America and elsewhere?15 As we have seen, the broadly conservative society of Russia assimilated Ossian in its own distinctive fashion, unlike that of the USA. Here, then, is just one example of what we may call the pH test of European culture in its transfer to the frontier. The paper changes colour, as it were, according to its exposure to Russian 'acid' or American 'alkali'. A similar kind of experiment could be carried out on a large number of other literary artifacts. Here is a summary list of just a few of them: Sterne as received by Radishchev and Jefferson; The Spectator as a model for journals on both frontiers; and later, Scott as an influence on both serf-owners and slaveholders. In a similar manner, the basis for comparison

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could move away from the printed word to the painted picture, Hogarth for example, or even out of doors to the house and garden imposed on the wilderness, through the adaptation of the Palladian style by Jefferson and N. A. L'vov, and so on. Some of the 'whiter brilliance' detected by George Steiner in nineteenth-century Russian and American fiction was perhaps caught by L'vov in his free verse: In foreign lands all is minutely planned, words are weighed, steps are measures. ... But among our Orthodox, work is like fire under their hands. Their speech is like thunder, the sparks fly and the dust rises in columns.16 Let us take just one more basis for cultural comparison, the linguistic. In his Dissertations on the English Language, published in 1789, the same year as the onset of the French Revolution, Noah Webster declared: I am constrained to declare that the people of America, in particular the English descendants, speak the most pure English now known in the world. There is hardly a foreign idiom in the language; by which I mean, a phrase that has not been used by the best English writers from the time of Chaucer. Webster expressed the view that every language at some epoch reached an apex, and that English had reached this point early in the eighteenth century. Dangerous innovations, such as those by Garrick in pronunciation and by Johnson, Gibbon and their imitators in style, were to be avoided as much as possible. Hence, the inhibition of the development of an American literature at a time when Russian literature, we may recall, was also finding difficulty in making its way owing to the persistence of foreign models. The point can be emphasized by citing an observation of Carl Bridenbaugh concerning American society in the eighteenth century: 'Because its outlook was eastward rather than westward, it was more nearly a European society in an American setting.' Would it not be appropriate to observe that, in its own way, Russian society in the eighteenth century comprised more nearly a European society in a Russian setting because its outlook was westward rather than eastward? The frontier and the steppe needed to be

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recognized before the two literatures could complete the journey to maturity. In his observations on transatlantic developments, Dr Johnson gave Noah Webster good reason for stylistic censure perhaps in his assertion that 'A nation scattered in the boundless regions of America resembles rays diverging from a focus. All the rays remain but the heat is gone.' In Johnson's view, the absence of a cultural capital, the widespread, sparse nature of the population and the great size of the country all helped to produce the barbarism of the American language, or rather the 'American dialect', which betrayed 'the corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed'. Possibly, similar thoughts occurred to Dr Johnson when he heard the news that, because of the translation into Russian of The Rambler, he would be heard on the banks of the Volga. But he, like so many other eighteenth-century figures, would be inhibited from such comment by the circumstance somewhat exaggerated by a French critic of 'an alphabet of a most limited application for which the learned world had not been prepared by any kind of literature'. While Russian would be included in the Indo-European family of languages being identified towards the end of the eighteenth century, it would remain cut off from the European mainstream, in spite of the efforts of Catherine the Great and others to put it there. Meanwhile, in spite of the strictures of Dr Johnson and others, the transatlantic variety of English had little such difficulty as it came to maturity. This linguistic divergence would have almost as many implications for the future as the economic and social.17 Before moving on to the final argument of this chapter, let us pause for a moment to remind ourselves of its fundamental purpose. So far, I have been discussing for the most part medieval and modern aspects of the development of Russia and North America as peripheries of Europe, elaborating a point already made in the previous chapter. The early struggle for European empire, in which both Russia and North America played important roles, partly active, partly passive, comes to an end towards the end of the eighteenth century. The American Revolutionaries showed that they could adopt the imperial urge before their descendants acquired it for themselves. The French Revolutionaries, following in their wake, added to a new political rhetoric and a new direction for European and world history. The years from approximately 1776

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to 1815 therefore constituted an important conjuncture changing the shape of the embryonic first Great Game, and, according to at least some authorities, giving birth to the fully-formed infant.18 Along with this parturition came two further developments: the first specific realization of the future significance of the American - Russian relationship; and the intensification of the phenomenon which we have come to know as Russophobia. In the remainder of this chapter, we will examine these two developments within the framework of the maturing First Great Game. Just after the beginning of the American Revolution, the American diplomat Silas Deane observed in 1777 that 'Russia like America is a new state, andriseswith astonishing rapidity'. Then, in 1780, Russia played a leading part in the Armed Neutrality which brought about the first diplomatic contacts between the forerunners of the superpowers and made a positive if minor contribution to the successful outcome of the American Revolution a year or so later. Soon after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Baron Melchior von Grimm wrote to Catherine the Great in 1790 of a future in which: Two empires will then share all the advantages of civilisation, of the power of genius, of letters, arts, arms and industry: Russia on the eastern side, and America, having become free in our own time, on the western side, and we other peoples of the nucleus will be too degraded, too debased, to know otherwise than by a vague and stupid tradition what we have been. Grimm was inaccurate in other aspects of his prophecy. He believed that the French Revolution would hasten the downfall of Europe, for example. Nevertheless, both he and Silas Deane before him had clearly seen what was happening on the peripheries of the continent.19 The period of the American and French Revolutions also encouraged prophecy of a more apocalyptic variety. To refer to just one representative of the genre, a pamphlet was published in London in 1800 with the title, Lights and Truth: or, the Will of God, Revealed to Man, from the Loss of Eden to the Worlds End.... The anonymous author considered it a certainty that: part of the prophecy was accomplished by the French Revolution in

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1789; when the national assembly overturned that monarchy; abolished nobility and the whole feudal system; confiscated the wealth of the clergy and the church; and declared that great nation to be a republic. We will see soon how such tracts blossomed in the nineteenth century as part of the irrational exaggeration of the Russian threat which we know as Russophobia. An important piece of evidence concerning the growth of this fear was the forgery during the period of the American and French Revolutions of the expansionist 'Testament' of Peter the Great. This reinforced an alarm already apparent during the actual reign of Peter the Great, when a pamphlet was published in London, probably in 1711, possibly by Daniel Defoe, with the title Armageddon: or, the Necessity of War, if such a Peace cannot be obtained as may render Europe safe, and Trade secure. The author was particularly worried about the position of the Holy Roman Empire in the centre of the continent, and considered it earnestly to be desired that Britain's allies and other powers would: hold the balance of the Empire, and restrain the Violation of Treaties, and take the lesser Powers of that part of Europe into their Protection, that the Muscovite may not get a footing in the Empire, and grow too Formidable for his neighbour Princes, and perhaps at last Troublesome to all the rest of Europe. The early roots of Russophobia may be traced back into the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, and even further. Coming forward, the alarm of the pamphlet Armageddon was echoed and amplified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.20 In our discussion of such trajectories, we are looking in particular for signs of the Last Great Game emerging even before the First Great Game was completely under way. Russia's threat to Asia was first detected at least as far back as the reign of the Emperor Paul at the end of the eighteenth century. Its threat to Europe was given new emphasis by the presence of Russian troops in Paris after the victory over Napoleon in 1812. At this time, as Joseph I. Shulim puts it: The opinions of Russia held by Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though influenced by the few acts of the autocracy which affected this country, were based primarily on Rus-

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sia's relations with western Europe. The major problems of western civilisation were focused in France. American attitudes toward the French Revolution, the supposed relation of Napoleon Bonaparte to the revolution, the war between France and its inveterate enemy Great Britain, and the relations between the United States and those two powers were crucial in determining the attitudes toward Russia. Conservative Federalists tended to be pro-British and anti-French, more liberal Republicans the other way round.21 And so, when Russia left the Second Coalition against France to form a second Armed neutrality with Napoleon in 1800, a Federalist lawyer, Fisher Ames, speculated whether the Russian motive might be French support for its designs on the Ottoman Empire. He wrote of Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century: It is an empire so vast, so new, so motley, and so barbarous; it is such a Babel, whose tongues are yet so confused; a gigantic infant that changes so often by its growth, and so much oftener by caprice. Russia was making a serious mistake in opposing Britain, its trading partner and defender, while the ignorance of its people could provide a fertile soil in which French principles might sprout. Meanwhile, the Republican Thomas Jefferson was taking a fancy to Emperor Alexander I, who succeeded to the throne in 1801, but his fellow Republicans in general wavered in their attitude to Russia during the fluctuations of Alexander's foreign policy in the years 1805-7, when Russia joined the Third and Fourth Coalitions against Napoleon. Opinion turned in favour of the French Emperor, who would restore Poland, an act which would compensate for his earlier 'evil deeds' by erecting a 'Chinese wall, which the preservation of civilized Europe requires to be erected against the iruptions of these semi-civilized barbarians'. If the French were defeated by the Russians, these latter-day Goths and Vandals would overrun Europe and then threaten the United States. After the Russo-Austrian defeat at Austerlitz in 1805, one commentator declared, 'The Alarics and Attilas of modern times, are chained to their own mountains.' But Napoleon had shown his magnanimity in the ensuing Tilsit Treaty with Alexander in 1807. Tilsit confirmed the Federalists in their anti-Russian attitudes, but the Franco-Russian War of 1812 made them think again. A

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newspaper sympathetic to their cause compared Napoleon's occupation of Moscow to Howe's occupation of Philadelphia during the American War for Independence. Gouverneur Morris of New York attributed the subsequent defeat of the French to 'the excellence of the Russian troops, founded on the physical and moral qualities of the people' as well as to superior generalship. Celebrations including religious services were held by Federalists, an oration of one of them including the exhortation, 'Russia go on! Thine own chains broken, break thou the chains of others.' Victory for Russia and defeat for France, Federalists hoped, would force the Republican administration to bring to an end its own war of 1812 against Britain. There were some notes of caution. The vast expansion of Russia along with the French Revolution would probably determine the future of Europe, wrote a Federalist journalist, looking upon Russia as 'more favourably situated for the prosecution of a boundless scheme of conquest, than any nation that has ever existed.' None other than Chief Justice John Marshall advised that France should not be allowed to retain its natural boundaries, while Russia should be restrained from further expansion, especially towards the centre of Europe. But both he and Gouverneur Morris agreed that Russia's remote vastness and backward economy would act as a restraint on encroachments on Europe. For their part, Republican spokesmen ridiculed and belittled the Russian victory of 1812 over Napoleon. American naval victories over Britain were celebrated, and the Federal opposition's thanksgiving and junketing were criticized. Jefferson became less enthusiastic about Alexander I, and by 1821 denounced the Russian Emperor as a 'hypocritical Autocrat'. But he had earlier uttered words of caution concerning the dangerous consequences likely to follow from a French conquest of Russia.22 By 1815 the major elements in American attitudes to tsarist Russia had already been formed. Apprehension concerning the expansion of a barbarian colossus was counterweighted to some extent by the belief that Russia could help to maintain the European balance of power. Already, there was also talk of a global balance, too, in which the USA would play a leading part. The forecast of von Grimm was repeated and developed by other writers. For example, an Englishman brought out in New York and London in 1818a book entitled The Resources ofthe United States of America.

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It was later published in German in 1819, and in French in 1826 and 1832. John Bristed observed that America 'is rapidly emerging into unparalleled greatness; isflamingupwards, like a pyramid of fire, so that all the Western horizon is in a blaze with the brightness of its ascending glory'. America was playing a waiting game until the Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and Austria had come to an end. Then, it would 'gradually bear down all possible opposition from any single foe'. Bristed declared: Behold another and a greater Russia here. With a better territory, a better government, and a better people, America is ripening fast into a substance, an attitude of power, which will prove far more terrible to the world than it is ever possible for the warriors of the Don or the defenders of Moscow to become. Here possibly, even probably, was the source for the more celebrated remark in 1835 of Alexis de Tocqueville that Russia and America were two great nations, of which 'each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world'. Several other less well-known figures had discussed the future of America and Russia in a manner involving not just the partition of the world but also a great struggle. For example, the American diplomat Alexander Hill Everett wrote in 1827 of Russia as an immense military empire 'advancing with giant steps to the conquest of the west' which if completed would mean 'a return to barbarism'. Such an eventuality would probably be averted 'because the principle of civilizations and improvement will be powerfully sustained by aid from abroad, that is, from America.' And Michel Chevalier, engineer turned economist and politician declared in a letter to the Journal des Debats in April 1834, two years before the publication of his own book on American civilization, that there were 'two great figures which are rising today at both ends of the horizon ..., two young colossi who watch each other from one shore of the Atlantic to the other and touch each other on the banks of the Pacific Ocean' which would probably soon divide among themselves the 'dominion of the world'. Chevalier also asserted that 'the struggle between the East and the West' was 'the most general fact in the history of the civilization to which we belong', expressing at the same time the thought that America

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might be best able to reconcile the two. On the whole, conflict between the two great nations was not foreseen as much as their rise to world power in the place of the nations of Europe, the Journal des Debats echoing von Grimm in an editorial leader of September 1845 showing alarm about the American annexation of Texas at the expense of Mexico: Between the Russian autocracy in the East and the democracy of the United States thus enlarged in the West, Europe could one day find itself compressed more than would comport with its independence and its dignity.23 Apprehension concerning the spread of the USA never reached the proportions of that concerning the expansion of tsarist Russia. This, after all, had roots stretching back into the more remote past, at least as far back as the reign of Peter the Great. His actual policies, even more those ascribed to him in the fictitious so-called Testament', were summoned as evidence at moments of crisis. In his Secret Diplomacy of the Eighteenth Century Karl Marx wrote: It is in the terrible and abject school of Mongolian slavery that Muscovy was nursed and grew up. It gathered strength only by becoming a virtuoso in the craft of serfdom. Even when emancipated, Muscovy continued to perform its traditional part of the slave as master. At length Peter the Great coupled the political craft of the Mongol slave with the proud aspiration of the Mongol master, to whom Genghiz Khan had, by will, bequeathed his conquest of the earth.24 The Petrine and earlier legacies combined with Catherine the Great's leading part in the partitions of Poland and other expansive policies to produce by the end of the eighteenth century the phenomenon known as Russophobia. For Britain at the centre, grave concern about tsarist intentions towards Turkey in the ever more serious posing of the Eastern Question was exacerbated by the first clashes between the British and Russian spheres of influence in Afghanistan. Russophobia was already deeply embedded in the national consciousness in the first half of the nineteenth century, reaching unprecedented proportions at the time of the Crimean War of 1854-6. The introduction of a Description of Sevastopol published in London in 1855 asserted that:

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Russia, by fraud or force, has succeeded in extending the limits of her empire from the Polar Regions of America to the centre of Europe, from the Arctic Circle to the sunny regions of Persia. Whatever territories her armies may have conquered, her treacherous and cruel diplomacy has acquired positions more dominant, and places of attack and defence still more important ... upon the issue of the present war in the Crimea depends the future fate of Europe; and the armies of England, France, Sardinia and the Porte have entrusted to them one of the most important missions in the history of the world. Where lay analysts could be alarmist, clerical commentators could be apocalyptical. Robert Gillan, DD, in Alarm of War, a discourse in St John's Church, Glasgow, on the last day of 1854, declared: It is the cause of civilization, of enlightenment, of liberty, of true religion, that is imperilled—a cause which, if lost on such an ample scale, Europe would be but a prison-house—but a miserable bondsman's enclosure, and all save one might be slaves. And Gillan had been surpassed by the Rev. Thomas Dymock, MA, in The Voice of God, a discourse preached in the Free Middle Church, Perth, on Wednesday, 26th April 1854, 'the day appointed for the National Humiliation in reference to the Present War': The sound of the battle may come more near our shores—victory may be declared on the side of our enemies. The very idea is awful, of an invaded country—of blood flowing down our streets—of despotic sway—of crushed liberties—of privileges removed—of bonds and death. We deserve this—our sins called loudly for it—and but for the interposing mercy of God in our behalf, that doom may be ours. On the same day, Robert S. Candlish, DD, broadened the awful version in The Sword of the Lord, a sermon preached in Free St George's Church, Edinburgh: How can it be quiet, that sword of the Lord? ... Quiet! How can it be quiet, when nations are still trodden down under the iron hoof of military despotism and oppression? Quiet! How can it be quiet, while the wail of slavery resounds from Eastern Africa to the remotest American West?25

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Some of this evangelical spirit may have crossed the Atlantic as far as the less remote American Mid-West, for on 24th February 1857, according to the National Intelligencer, instead of the Chaplain of the House of Representatives the Rev. Mr Waldo, the Rev. F. E. Pitts of Nashville, Tennessee, gave a discourse, his theme being the fulfilment of prophecy, with special reference to the United States. The account continued: With no leaning to cant or fanaticism, and with no tendencies to a politico-religious sermon, the reverend speaker entered upon his task of unfolding the prophecies, both of the Old and New Testaments. The events which he detailed with reference to our own country, were made to fit with such surprising chronological accuracy to the predictions, that it was by the almost unanimous desire of a large and attentive audience that his lecture was continued in the afternoon. In the morning, the Rev. Pitts used biblical evidence to demonstrate that 'the United States arose in the providence of God, as the model political government; and that its great mission was the overthrow of monarchy, and the utter destruction of political and ecclesiastical despotism'. In the afternoon, the speaker turned more especially to 'the last great battle between civil and religious liberty on the one hand, and political and ecclesiastical despotism on the other, termed in Scripture the "Battle of Gog and Magog"; the battle of "Armageddon", and the battle of the "great day of God Almighty"'. The National Intelligencer s summary of the second lecture ran as follows: That the United States would be invaded by monarchy. That Russia would be the leading power, and England, and all the autocracy of the world, would be allied with Russia against the United States, except France; that France would be with us in the end as she was with us in the beginning. That an armament such as the world never saw, composed of millions, would invade our country. That the battle-field was the valley of the Mississippi. (See Ezekiel xxxix, 11.) That Heaven would be upon our side. But in this last dreadful fray there would be trouble such as never was.... That monarchy would be overthrown for ever, and Republicanism everywhere prevail, and nations learn war no more. Then sets in the millennial day, when science, commerce, manufactures and the arts would spread, the religion of the Son of God have sway, righteousness and peace among the people walk, Messiah reign and earth keep jubilee a thousand years.26

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Prophecies of the growth of the Russian and American empires and of their inevitable confrontation were nothing new by the 1850s, as we have seen. However, somewhat surprisingly, the 1850s were a decade of amicable relations between the powers that Pitts looked upon as the leaders of light and darkness. Second, some of the inspiration for Pitts may have come from across the Atlantic, specifically from the furore aroused by the Crimean War.27 As the crisis leading towards this war deepened, Edouard de Stoeckl, the Russian charge d'affaires in Washington, believed that an alternative struggle might develop between the major English-speaking peoples. As Frank Golder reported his views as expressed to his government early in 1854: It will be a battle of giants, he said, the earth will tremble, commerce will be crushed, the world will suffer; but there will be certain gains to civilization, nevertheless. Weakened England will stop meddling in other people' s affairs and exhausted America will cease to protect revolutionists and to cause trouble to other states.... The Americans will go after anything that has enough money in it. They have the ships, they have the men, and they have the daring spirit. ... When America was weak she refused to submit to England and now that she is strong she is much less likely to do so. When the Crimean War actually broke out between Russia on the one hand and Britain and France on the other round about the time that de Stoeckl's note was being received in St Petersburg, the United States refrained from joining in the hostilities; nevertheless, by the time the war was over, in Golder's estimation, 'the United States was the only nation in the world that was neither ashamed nor afraid to acknowledge boldly her friendship for Russia.'28 But diplomacy and national interest were one thing, attitudes towards a friendly power outside official communication could be another. There was indeed a widespread prejudice in America against this friend of convenience, expressed best perhaps by the rising politician who was trying to speak for the whole country in its growing domestic crisis, Abraham Lincoln. For example, attacking the bigotry of the Know-Nothing Party in a letter of summer 1855, he wrote that if this party gained control, 'I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.29

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The American crisis became civil war just a few weeks after news had crossed the Atlantic of the Russian emancipation of the serfs. Now the abolitionist element in the war aims of the North encouraged some of its journals to reverse completely their previous image of Russian despotism and of the absolute tsar. For example, the Atlantic Monthly declared: He is the Greatest of Russian benefactors in all these thousand years— the Warrior who restored peace, the Monarch who had faith in God's will to make order, and in man's will to keep order, the Christian Patriot who made forty millions of serfs forty millions of men—Alexander the Second—ALEXANDER THE EARNEST.' And Harper's Weekly could go so far as to compare Alexander IPs repression of the Polish Insurrection in 1863 with the attempt of Abraham Lincoln to prevent the South from seceding from the Union, predicting that: Russia, like the United States, is a nation of the future.... Like the United States, Russia is in the agonies of a terrible transition: the Russian serfs, like the American negroes, are receiving their liberty; and the Russian boiars, like the Southern slaveowners, are mutinous at the loss of their property.... To two such peoples, firmly bound together by an alliance as well as by traditional sympathy and good feeling, what would be impossible? ... An alliance between Russia and the United States at the present time would relieve both of us from all apprehensions of foreign interference. Harper s Weekly underlined its confidence in the future by pointing out that the presence in both New York and San Francisco of Russian naval squadrons constituted an indication of the tsar's liberalism and of his desire to assist the cause of the North through action beyond words.30 In fact, the purpose of the Russian naval presence in American waters was less altruistic, as can readily be seen in the following instruction given to the commander of the Atlantic squadron: The aim ... in the event of war at present foreseen with the Western powers is to act with all the possible means available to you against our opponents, inflicting by means of separate cruises the most painful

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damage and loss to the commerce of the enemy, or making attacks with the entire squadron on the weak and poorly protected places of the colonies of the enemy. Should war break out with Great Britain and France over Poland, Admiral Lesovsky was to concentrate on the Atlantic, but at his discretion could move to the Indian Ocean or the Pacific, where he might possibly link up with his counterpart Admiral Popov, who had ordered the ships under his command 'carefully to make the acquaintance of the colonies of the European sea powers, to seek out their vulnerable points, and constantly to be on guard'. The actual reasons for the presence of Russian naval squadrons notwithstanding, Northern society came quickly to accept the interpretation put out by Harper's Weekly and other journals. During the Atlantic squadron's stay, deputations from a number of states made courtesy calls, and the officers were invited to a number of mutually congratulatory balls and banquets. Before their departure, Lesovsky and his fellows gave a reception in Washington itself, with invitations going to members of the Cabinet and congress and other leading members of society31 Among the company at this glittering occasion in the spring of 1864 were probably some of those who some seven years previously had been present for a scarcely less popular if more solemn event, the discourses on Armageddon by the Rev. Pitts. In the short run at least, the great battle predicted by him for the Mississippi valley had been replaced by another as General Grant put remorseless pressure on the beleaguered South, while the guns of civil rather than international war made a fearful noise in the Rev. Pitts' own state of Tennessee. What the clergyman himself made of these developments we do not know; certainly the newspaper that had recorded the enthusiasm which he had been accorded in 1857, the National Intelligencer, was not at all complimentary about the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, dismissing the measure as a hoax. Furthermore, while sermons predicting Armageddon and receptions given by the navy of one putative side in thefinalstruggle for the citizens of the other could easily be taken in their stride by those caught up in the social round of the American capital, and the alarm aroused by the Rev. Pitts could easily be forgotten in the warmth of a handshake with Admiral Lesovsky, there was perhaps beneath the

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diplomatic verbiage and the journalistic rhetoric a deep-seated mutual suspicion between the Russians and Americans which different times would bring again to the surface. Abraham Lincoln did not change his views of a country where 'they make no pretence of loving liberty' and would probably have been appalled by some of the remarks made about him after his assassination by official Russia, even though he might have welcomed those by Leo Tolstoy.32 And the Russian charge d'affaires, de Stoeckl, could at the same time work for co-operation between his own country and the USA while expressing no confidence in the American political system: The experience of recent years has taught us how easy it is to manipulate the universal suffrage in all ways everywhere. In the United States this institution has been cleverly exploited by a bunch of politicians of the lowest class, who through corruption and flattery of the passions of the populace, have come to exercise an absolute control over the elections.33 De Stoeckl's condemnation of the absolutism of universal suffrage did not come out of the blue; it was indeed a variation on a theme enunciated by Russian critics earlier on in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, of course, there had been Russian admirers of the USA from 1776 onwards. But rather than entering a discussion of the counterpart of Russophobia or its antithesis, we have concentrated here on the American side. This decision was taken partly because it is all too well-known that from the time of Ivan the Terrible onwards, even before, the Russian attitude towards foreigners and their ideas was normally suspicious and hostile. Such xenophobia no doubt contributed to the making of Russophobia. To be sure, Russian admiration for aspects of US civilization from Radishchev through to the Decembrists and beyond deserves more attention than it has received here, but it has received a considerable amount of attention elsewhere.34 Nevertheless, to redress the balance at least a little, we will look briefly in conclusion at the manner in which the future significance of the American - Russian relationship was realised to an unprecedented extent by Alexander Herzen. An early interest in this subject came to a climax with the dual emancipation and the end of the American Civil War, especially in the Letters to a Traveller, published in 1865, the year after the

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Shchapov observations quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Herzen declared, 'Classless, democratic America and peasant Russia, which is moving towards classlessness, remain for me, as before, the countries of the immediate future.' Anticipating Keenan, he wrote of Russia: Aside from the village, no one feels any attachment for anything, and everybody either feels or understands that everything else is like a temporary shack that has been given the outwards appearance of an old and solid building. By 'everything else' and 'temporary shack' we are given to understand that Herzen means not only the autocracy of the tsars and the privileges of the nobility but also the institution of private property. Similarly, the USA was for Herzen a fragment of Europe cut off from its 'native soil, from palaces, from the Middle Ages' and freed fom the 'historical shackles of monarchy and aristocracy'. With at least some anticipation of Macfarlane, he observed that, while leaving certain negative features of European thought and practice such as the caste system behind them, immigrants had imported to North America some of the best features, the Common Law, for example. So both Russia and the USA were untrammelled by many burdens of the past, the latter thereby possesing actual freedom while the essential spirit of the former was one of the inner freedom. Comparing slavery and serfdom in a manner that recalls Kolchin, he talked about the respective processes of expansion that also arouses echoes, more distant of Alexis de Tocqueville, more proximate of Colin White: The United States sweeps everything from its path, like an avalanche. Every inch which the United States seizes is taken away from the natives forever. Russia surrounds adjoining territories like an expanding body of water, pulls them in and covers them with an even, uniformly coloured layer of autocratic ice. Herzen also made some interesting remarks about the literary evocation of the lives of American and Russian settlers, likening the novels of Fenimore Cooper to Sergei Aksakov's Family Chronicle. However, his most striking observation was a prediction, that the

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problem of the future was not a choice between individual freedom and socialism, but their reconciliation in a higher form of existence. As Herzen put it: The North American States and Russia represent two solutions which are opposite but incomplete, and which therefore complement rather than exclude each other. A contradiction which is full of life and development, which is open-ended, without finality, without physiological discord—that is not a challenge to enmity and combat, not a basis for an attitude of unsympathetic indifference, but a basis for efforts to remove this formal contradiction with the help of something broader—if only through mutual understanding and recognition.35 Unfortunately, through the years of the First Great Game, of which the American - Russian relationship was an integral if peripheral aspect up to the years of the Last Great Game, centrally comprising the relationship of the USA and the USSR, the vision of Alexander Herzen was for the most part lost.

7

Towards the Structure of the Last Great Game: USA versus USSR At the time of the Great Conjuncture, Woodrow Wilson observed that his new diplomacy had brought an end to 'the great game, now forever discredited, of the balance of power'. Lenin also believed that his international relations would mean an end to the imperial struggles of the nineteenth century. But a new 'great game' arose after the Second World War and is still in progress a century or so after the old. The players are the USA and the USSR, and the venue has included not only Afghanistan but also South-East and Southwest Asia, Europe and Latin America, indeed the whole world. With the ever-continuing development and global deployment of nuclear weapons, along with appropriate ideas of strategy and interaction including ever more sophisticated 'games theories', the two superpowers have been conducting a long-running rehearsal for mutual and universal annihilation. In the preparation for such a spectacle, there is an undoubted sporting or play element, with groups or individuals taken as members of the respective teams.1 Can today's complexities be dismantled by looking at the manner in which they have been constructed? Such a task is obviously too much for one historian, even for all historians put together. Fortunately, they are not alone, for although time, the fourth dimension, is their stock in trade, it is by no means their exclusive possssion. A growing number of social scientists are making use of it, too. Take for example the approach of certain specialists to the central problem of the comprehension of the Soviet Union. Here, increasingly, they are adopting the concept of 'political culture'. This has been defined by Archie Brown as 'the subjective perception of history and politics, the fundamental beliefs and values, the foci of identification and loyalty, and the political knowledge and 157

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expectations which are the product of the specific historical experience of nations and groups'. More broadly, Stephen White talks of 'the attitudinal and behavioural matrix within which the political system is located'. As White points out, there is nothing new about such a concept: Montesquieu included consideration of the 'morals and customs' of nations in his treatise L'Esprit des lois; de TocqueviUe discussed the habits, manners and opinions which contributed to the formation of Democracy in America; in a sense, like so much else, it all started with the Greeks. Still today, in White's view, to understand the 'political culture' of the Soviet Union, it is necessary not only to examine the system but also the imprint of autocracy and the social fabric of absolutism helping to form the 'historical specificity' of its origins.2 To grasp such 'historial specificity' is in general an extremely complex undertaking, not least because of the elusiveness of a full comprehension of the passage of time. This deceptively simple problem is taken up by another social scientist, the late Philip Abrams, in his posthumously published Historical Sociology( 1982). Here, Abrams argues that debates between historians and sociologists about the nature of their respective disciplines are based on a false dichotomy. He quotes with approval the declaration of A. Giddens: What history is, or should be, cannot be analysed in separation from what the social sciences are, or should be.... There are no logical or even methodological distinctions between the social sciences and history— appropriately conceived. And Abrams himself goes on to indicate the manner in which various thinkers have addressed themselves to what he sees as the appropriate conception—the process of structuring. Then, in conclusion, he suggests that the way forward for us all is indicated in the masterpiece of Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. According to Braudel, as we have seen, while history exists at hundreds of different levels, at the risk of over-simplification these may be reduced to three. On the surface there is a kind of microhistory, the history of events, in the case of the Cold War, say, from 1945 (Yalta and Hiroshima) onwards. Half-way down, in a slower rhythm, there is the history of conjunctures. This has so far been

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exemplified for the most part in a material manner, in economic cycles, but important political phases could also be cited. 1917 brings to confrontation the universal outlooks of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, which in amended form still clash today. 1929 introduces Stalin to full power leading to 'socialism in one country' while the Great Crash of the same year points towards the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the implementation of his New Deal, which might be a characterized as 'capitalism in one country'. Hence, the path to the Second World War and then to the Cold War. At the basic level, considering whole centuries at a time, there is the longue duree, the history of structure. As far as the present crisis is concerned, this is the least examined, and therefore in greatest need of exposition. For such an approach, certain problems must be indicated. For many Western historians, Braudel and the Annales school of which he is doyen have never held any attractions. For them, there is only one level of history, there is only 'historical specificity' and nothing more. For at least a few Western historians devoted to the ever-changing French intellectual scene, Braudel has become vieuxjeu, the longue duree a dure longueur. Even for those adhering to his views, there are difficulties in making simultaneous use of the hundreds of different levels, even of the simplified three. Nevertheless, as Abrams says, 'we need to be able to think of epochs, periods and moments as all interacting orders of structuring'. In this regard, we shall also be helped by the diachronic - synchronic concepts of B. F. Porshnev, discussed along with the ideas of Braudel at the end of Chapter 3.3 Further difficulties stem from Braudel's focus on the sixteenth century and Porshnev's on the seventeenth, while the period of history that Abrams concentrates on is more recent, comprising the transition to industrialism. This vast transformation, moreover, took place on a much wider scale than that adopted in the books of Braudel and Porshnev, and in one sense or another came to envelop the whole world. Arguably too, the transition to industrialism is not one movement but several: after the 'classical' revolution beginning in the late eighteenth century there was a second towards the end of the nineteenth century as coal and iron gave way to electricity and oil, steel and chemicals; and, in our own day, since the Second World War, there has been a third such change, the greatest of all in scale, introducing nuclear power, which could seal the fate of the earth, as well as electronics and all kinds of new

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technology. And as an accompaniment to the transition, especially in its latter stage, there have been enormous political, cultural and social changes, notably the population explosion, occurring in spite of widespread disease and death. Demographically, at least, the case for concentration on the recent past is supported by the probable circumstance that there have been more people living in the twentieth century than in the previous two and a half thousand years of recorded history. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the transition to industrialism, however, has been its enormous speed, compared with earlier basic changes in the human condition. When William Blake wrote his 'New Jerusalem' at the end of the eighteenth century, there were in fact not all that many 'dark satanic mills' to be seen in 'England's green and pleasant land'. Now, towards the end of the twentieth century, industrial and post-industrial enterprises along with pollution are to be found all over the world, with the major focus possibly moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the wake of decolonization. Through the wonders of television, we see these processes happening before our very eyes. Meanwhile, through these and other techonological marvels, governments are able to carry out surveillance on their citizens and on each other to an extent beyond the wildest dreams of the totalitarian governments of the 1930s.4 For historians, the 200 years or so that have elapsed since Blake wrote do not constitute as vast and unfathomable a passage of time as they might appear to others. Nor is it all that long a period measured on the scale of the individual. The oldest person now alive could have been born in the year of the death of a predecessor who as a child had experienced the American Revolution. If we think of the many people still alive today at 85 and over, and then go back much less than two spans of comparable length, we arrive similarly at the year 1776. As most of us younger folk understand only too well, the chances of a baby born in 1985 achieving extreme age in 2100 or even 2070 are extremely slim. For all the advances being made in medicine and biology (which we must hope will counterweigh new diseases and other environmental hazards), even the healthiest child will be no less vulnerable than its less favoured fellows to the unleashing of even a fraction of the destructive devices that we have at our present disposal. Like other disciplines, the study of history needs a future as well as a past, and its uncertainty adds

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just one more obstacle to the completion of an already difficult task. The cumulative nature and recent provenance of our present problems impede the Braudelian approach to the present crisis, especially since conjuncture and structure have been in many ways overtaken by events. Nevertheless, attitudes towards what is largely a new situation are still governed by previous conjunctures, as well as by the persistence of certain elements in the structure. In the first place, there are the major determinants evolved through geological rather than historical time, such as the relation of land masses to water, of mountains to plains and the distribution of natural resources.5 Then, the ancient and medieval eras both left indelible marks on the modern and contemporary centuries, even if many of them were carried across the steppe or over the ocean, rather than originally inscribed there. But instead of reiterating or expanding what we have already discussed in earlier chapters, we will turn our attention in this final chapter to the problem of interpretation. We will approach this problem as we have approached others, through a chronological survey, making a few observations about the evolution of interpretation from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century up to our own times. We must begin with a disclaimer, even stronger than that made in earlier chapters. I am going to trespass on territory which is much less familiar to me than it is to social scientists, among whom I am lucky to include some of my best friends. I hope that they will forgive this intrusion, and may even discover that an outsider historian's viewpoint throws some light on their specialist researches. The purpose of social science enquiry from the Enlightenment onwards may be said to be threefold: a key to explanation; a spur to action; and an aid to group cohesion. All three purposes, which are not only overlapping but also to an extent interdependent, may be discerned in an example that we have already used above, that of Montesquieu. He himself wrote in the Preface to U Esprit des his: 'I should think myself the happiest of mortals if I could help men to cure themselves of their prejudices.' We have seen in Chapter 6 how Catherine the Great of Russia and the Founding Fathers of the USA used Montesquieu's masterpiece for their own purposes. James Madison declared:

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Is it not the glory of the people of America, that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? (Catherine in her own way probably thought much the same about her own glory.) For Peter Gay, the American Revolution was the 'science of freedom' in practice (although he is much less generous to the Russian Empress), and such authorities as Bernard Bailyn and Garry Wills have shown in more detail how Madison and his fellows drew on the English, Scottish and other sources of the Enlightenment. To the by no means small extent that today's US ideology draws on the American Revolution, it too draws on aspects of the Enlightenment.6 Montesquieu's L'Esprit des his, we should not forget, has been seen as among the first modern works to develop the 'political culture' approach during the Enlightenment when the social sciences in general and indeed the arts too began to take on their clearer definition. But specialization had not yet gone so far that boundaries were placed between one discipline and another. As a pertinent illustration of this circumstance, let us take 'Hints for a Course of Lectures', written by the polymath James Anderson in the year 1780. For Anderson, the function of a lecturer was not so much to teach his pupils all particulars in whichever brand of science preoccupied him as to show them how they could most easily become acquainted with the details of whatever they themselves wished to investigate. Therefore, perhaps the best that could be done or ought to be attempted was 'to give a bold outline or historical sketch accompanied by such occasional physical, philosophical and political disquisitions as may enable the student to read with intelligence and form a judgement for himself. For this purpose, Anderson proposed three self-contained but connected courses: on philosophical geography and natural history; on history properly so called and chronology; and on political economy and commerce. The earth should be presented as a planet, and a globe used to show how by changes in the position of its axis the phenomena that students experienced could not have been produced by any other such position. Earth's various zones, torrid,

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frigid and temperate, should each be explained, as should the climates, flora and fauna appropriate to each. Kingdoms and cities should only then be introduced, in the context of the principal rivers and remarkable mountains. As far as history was concerned, chronology was the most difficult branch for the memory. Therefore, in historical narrative there would be given a mere sketch of events aimed at giving a connected view of the whole. For each period, the nation that had cut the greatest figure on the globe at that particular time would be chosen as the principal theme although there would be some reference to any important collateral events. At each remarkable epoch, there should be a pause for a glance to be taken at the whole globe in regard to government, manners and the arts. Throughout the course, there would be more emphasis on the history of the progress of the human mind than of empires, of the people rather than of kings. Students should be encouraged to distinguish between the real and the apparent ruling power in every state—'a study of the utmost importance, which has scarce yet had a beginning'. The purpose of the third course would be 'To form the man of business by a careful selection of facts collected from the records of modern history.' For this purpose, there would be a survey of all the modern kingdoms of Europe, together with an exact description of their constitutions, especially the legislative power and any curbs on it, proceeding from ancient customs, religious prejudices or the manners of the people. Such an exposition could not be achieved without a recapitulation of the principal events in the history of each kingdom leading to its present form of government by gradual or more sudden change, and to the prevailing modern ideas in each case. The hurtful or beneficial tendency of each change should be pointed out and illustrated by examples from history ancient and modern. The whole exercise was calculated 'to instruct the pupils on what principles law should in all cases be formed most effectually to establish the stability of each particular state, to promote the general felicity of individuals, to excite a spirit of industry, and to encourage arts, manufactures and commerce'.7 In this unpublished paper of one of the lesser luminaries of the eighteenth century, James Anderson, as in the masterpiece of one of the greater, Montesquieu, we can clearly see what would now be called a multidisciplinary approach being taken at a time before the

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academic disciplines had taken on their distinctive, separate character. Anderson's 'Hints for a Course of Lectures' calls to mind some of the twentieth-century attempts to break down the barriers between disciplines, as, for example, in the Annales school, of which the outstanding member since the Second World War has been Fernand Braudel. His approach to the Mediterranean, with its structures, conjunctures and events, is not so different from Anderson's recommendation of philosophical geography and natural history; political economy and commerce; and history properly so called and chronology. The work of Anderson and of Montesquieu may also be taken as an indicator of a further important consideration: that much of the groundwork for the development of the social sciences and arts was well and truly laid during the Enlightenment. Of particular importance for the present work are the comparative approach and the concept of stadial development, both of which were to be refined in the nineteenth century by, among others, Marx and Engels and later Weber. Before looking in turn at them, let us refresh our memories about the major developments of the nineteenth century, especially as they concerned Russia and America. We have noted how, at the time of the French Revolution and the beginnings of the first industrial revolution, their later predominance was already emerging and so discerned by von Grimm, de Tocqueville and others. Already, too, lines of continuity were being drawn in foreign policy. The partitions of Poland and a series of victories over Turkey had brought Russia fully into Europe, where Alexander I was able to act as arbiter in the years following the rout of Napoleon in 1812, while probes into Central Asia beyond the Caspian constituted a clear prelude to the First Great Game. Across the Atlantic Washington's Farewell Address in 1796 advised friendship to all nations but entangling alliance with none at a time when the USA were increasing their number as the 'confederate republic' began its expansion across the continent. In 1812 the war against Britain was a second war for independence. Then in 1823 came the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine, warning that European governments should not seek to expand their influence in the New World. The government of the USA would consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of the western hemisphere as dangerous to US peace and safety. On the other hand, the USA would not become involved in the squabbles of

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Europe but would recognize all its de facto governments. Tsarist Russia had to think hard soon after its intervention in the 1848 revolution when it suffered the shocking reverse of the Crimean War. For a century and a half, the armed forces had been much more accustomed to victory than defeat, but from 1854 to 1856 backwardness was starkly revealed not only in their equipment and transportation but also in the socio-political system that supported them. So serfdom had to go, and at least a modest amount of reform had to be introduced into administration and law as well as into the armed forces. Moreover, although retaining a keen interest in what the British called the Eastern Question, the tsarist regime put much of its energies into expansion in more remote parts of Asia adjacent to Afghanistan and China. This partial change of direction, almost as much as encroachment towards Constantinople, alarmed many other European powers, especially Britain, where Russophobia reached new heights in the First Great Game. But at least one of them, Germany, welcomed and encouraged Russia's Asian activity as a diversion from its own unification and subsequent imperial expansion through the Balkans. Meanwhile, the USA had brought an end to slavery, almost at the cost of an end to united existence, and had proceeded from the Civil War to increase the scale and pace of the transition to industrialism, rounding out the continental boundaries, and moving beyond them. To put it briefly, both Russia and America were being sucked into the vortex of empire made all that more powerful by the onset of the second industrial revolution. The movement had been identified as early as 1864 by Chancellor Prince Alexander Gorchakov: The United States in America, France in Algeria, Holland in her Colonies, England in India—all have been irresistibly forced, less by ambition than by imperious necessity, into this onward march, where the greatest difficulty is to know where to stop. Looking back from the vantage point established during the process of Decolonization after the Second World War, at least a considerable number of historians were agreed that the competition for acquisitions overseas and overland, involving Russia and Germany as well as the powers cited by Gorchakov, should be analysed as a phenomenon somewhat different to its predecessors as a New Imperialism. Of particular significance to us was the clash

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between Russia and America in Manchuria before the First World War.8 The manner in which the struggle for world influence became a wider phenomenon may be illustrated with a glance at the Manifesto of the Communist Party, written on the eve of the revolution of 1848 by Marx and Engels. Their emphasis is very much on Europe throughout; for example, almost at the end: The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions ofEuropean civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution, [emphasis added] By 1882, when Marx and Engels came to write their Preface to the second Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, German unification had been completed without revolution of either variety, and their attention, while remaining on Europe, also turned to the outliers of the continent. For them, 1848 was the time when 'Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through immigration.' Both countries were at the same time suppliers of raw materials to Europe, and markets for the sale of industrial products from Europe. Therefore, in one way or another, both were 'pillars of the existing European order'. Marx and Engels go on to exclaim, 'How very different today!' The USA's gigantic agricultural production was already offering sufficient competition to shake the very foundations of European landed property, while its tremendous industrial resources were being exploited in such a manner that the industrial monopoly of Western Europe would soon be broken. As a consequence, 'a mass proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital' were in the process of formation. Marx and Engels continue with the declaration, 'And now Russia!' During the 1848 revolution, the tsar (Nicholas I) was the dominant leader of European reaction, now (Alexander III) he was hiding away on one of his estates as a 'prisoner of war of the revolution', and 'Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe'. Here, too, vast economic and social changes were under way, and vaster still to come. However, although

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increasingly involved in the world economy, Russia had not yet progressed very far along the path to industrialization. There, Marx and Engels found: face to face with the rapidlyfloweringcapitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian commune, though greatly undermined, yet a form of the primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer that Marx and Engels could provide in 1882 was: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development. In 1882, then, the communist founding fathers went so far as to suggest that a Russian revolution might break out, although it would be communist not because of the party which led it but because of its social foundation — the peasant commune. Marx in particular had done much research on this subject, and had abandoned his earlier belief that capitalism would have to be all pervasive before revolution could occur. Although his death in March 1883 was to prevent definitive formulations, apparently he now believed that as capitalism advanced, village communes would not be smashed but strengthened.9 This particular view came to be shared by Max Weber, who actually lived to analyse the Russian revolution of 1905 and 1917. In most other respects, Weber differed from Marx: in particular, he believed that capitalism provided the best possible basis for democracy and that a socialist revolution could not fulfil the hopes of those working for it. The events in Russia demonstrated not the possibility of socialist revolution but the great obstacles standing in the way of bourgeois-democratic revolution. Weber asserted in 1906: The historical development of modern 'freedom' presupposed a unique and unrepeatable constellation of factors, of which the following are the

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most important: first, overseas expansion... secondly, the characteristic economic and social structure of the 'early capitalist' period in Western Europe; thirdly, the conquest of life through science... finally, certain ideal conceptions which grew out of the concrete historical uniqueness of a particular religious viewpoint. He added: It is ridiculous in the extreme to ascribe to modem high capitalism, as currently being imported into Russia... any inner affinity with 'democracy' or even 'freedom' (in any sense of the word). The question is rather 'How are any of these at all possible in the long run under its domination?' 'Modern high capitalism', a central feature of Weber's thought, was characterized by bureaucracy, cartels and standardization. Therefore any society which had not developed its own liberal traditions before the advent of such capitalism had no more than a remote chance of developing it afterwards, especially because the bourgeoisie had not achieved a share in political power before the arrival of the proletariat, which had driven it into the arms of traditional authorities. We have seen above how Maxim Kovalevsky was among those Russians who would have disagreed with Weber on this point. But, for the leading father of contemporary sociology in the West, even in those societies which had developed liberal traditions, there was a threat to their survival. For example, American democracy had long possessed traits of individualism and voluntary association, constructed on Puritan beginnings. Most individuals were members of some association, previously Christian, now secular as welL But by the early contemporary period, 'bureaucratic rationalism' was tending to break up this liberal order.10 Weber died in June 1920 and therefore did not live to see the manner in which his analysis fully worked itself through in the years following the Russian Revolution, the First World War and the return to 'normalcy'. Nor could he know how his work would be taken up and adapted by later social scientists. Still less were Marx and Engels, because of their earlier deaths, in a position to observe the Great Conjuncture, and the manner in which their writings were used by Lenin and others. Equally, Lenin and Wilson, drawing on an earlier intellectual tradition, were by their

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deaths in 1924 in no position to understand how their arguments would be drawn on in the 1930s and after. We will not set out here the familiar moments of US and Soviet history since 1921, although historians would want to emphasize that familiarity must not lead to contempt for specificity. From Lenin and Wilson, through Stalin and Roosevelt, up to Gorbachev and Reagan, most of them would want to insist, there is a time and a place for everything. The task of structuring cannot ignore process even though it may include much else besides: to recall the words of Philip Abrams, 'we need to be able to think of epochs, periods and moments as all interacting orders of structuring'. The present crisis, involving the threat of terminal war and ecological disaster, is without precedent, and must therefore largely be solved by means previously unrealized. Nevertheless, to the extent that the USSR and the USA of today embody in their 'political culture' the conditioning influences of their pasts, their historical provenance cannot be ignored. And 'political culture', important though it is, must be considered in the framework of 'historical sociology'. These two useful approaches have not so far overlapped as much as they should, a consequence of the specialization and fragmentation of academic analysis. A satisfactory structure of 'The Last Great Game' must be based on them both. For similar reasons, studies of the two protagonists tend to be compartmentalized; at least some of the Western study of 'communist systems' is based upon an idealized version of pluralist democracy; equally, even more, Soviet analysis of 'the capitalist system' is made from the vantage point of an idealized version of socialist democracy. The observers and the systems perceived, the subject and object, must be considered together. However, in our discussion of structure, emphasis remains on the historical approach, on progress through time. Special attention must be given to periodization, especially to concepts of modernity and contemporaneity. Modernization, we have argued, is the process that took place in Europe from about the sixteenth century until the early twentieth. Let us remind ourselves of this passage of time by considering the conclusion of A. J. P. Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848 -1918: In January 1918 Europe ceased to be the centre of the world. European rivalries merged into a world war, as earlier the Balkan wars had

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prepared the conflict of the Great Powers. All the old ambitions, from Alsasce and Lorraine to colonies in Africa, became trivial and secondrate, compared to the new struggle for control of the world. Even the German aim of dominating Europe became out of date. Europe was dwarfed by two world Powers, the Soviet Union and the United States—implacable, though often unconscious rivals. This was more than a rivalry of Power; it was arivalryof idealisms. Both dreamt of 'One World', in which the conflict of states had ceased to exist. Universal revolution on the one side and the Fourteen Points on the other presented Utopian programmes for achieving permanent peace. Ever since the defeat of the French revolution Europe had conducted its affairs merely by adjusting the claims of sovereign states against each other as they arose. In 1914 Germany had felt strong enough to challenge this system and had aimed to substitute her hegemony over the rest. Europe was to find unity as Greater Germany—the only way in which the Continent could become a world Power, capable of withstanding the other two. Though Germany was defeated by a narrow margin, the legacy of her attempt was Bolshevism and American intervention in Europe. A new Balance of Power, if it were achieved, would be world-wide; it would not be a matter of European frontiers. Europe was superseded; and in January 1918 there began a competition between communism and liberal democracy which has lasted to the present day. The 'present day' in 1954, when Taylor's book was first published, comprised a vastly different set of circumstances to the present day of 1988. For since 1945, we have argued, the contemporary period of history proper begins, and the pace and scale of change have been unprecedented. Nevertheless, as well as catching the significance of the modern period including the French Revolution, Taylor also points the way towards the importance of what we have called the early contemporary period, arising from the 1890s onwards.11 This chronological scheme has to be borne in mind if we are to make full use of the fourth dimension in our structure, and we must not forget that this does not cease to exist after 1945, even if our ideas of time have changes since then. We have already briefly noted above in Chapter 2 the manner in which interpretations of the Cold War have evolved from the late 1940s onwards, at least in the West. Successive stages of development can also be noted in the work of the distinguished American diplomat and writer George F. Kennan. His famous long telegram early in 1946 suggested that at the 'bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is the

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traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity', which had been compounded after 1917 by communist ideology and 'Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy'. By the summer of 1947, as the Cold War intensified, in the even more famous article by 'X' on 'The Sources of Soviet Conduct', there was less about Soviet insecurity and more about expansionism. Soviet diplomacy, moving along 'the prescribed path', was now likened to 'a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets some unanswerable force'. At this point, Kennan was taken to task by the analytical journalist Walter Lippmann for not giving enough consideration to the historical dimension, to the recognition that 'Stalin is not only the heir of Marx and of Lenin but of Peter the Great, and the Czars of all the Russias'. By 1950 Kennan had adapted his position, arguing against the adoption of the important NSC-68 document based on the premise that 'Soviet efforts are now directed towards the domination of the Eurasian land mass'. However, it was not until his retirement from diplomacy and his concentration on a new career in research and publication that he developed his interest in the longer historical dimension, first of all in a book on The Marquis de C us tine and His Russia in 1839 published in 1971, and then, some years later, two cautionary tales with a wider focus, on The Decline ofBismarck's European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875-1890, published in 1979, and The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia and the First World Warx following in 1984. By now, Kennan was among those warning most solemnly how the Cold War could become hot, and making use of the period leading up to the First World War to show how diplomatic accidents can all too easily happen.12 Kennan's use of history is less satisfactory in his book on the Marquis de Custine, where he asserts: even if we admit thatLaRussie en 1839 was not a very good book about Russia in 1839, we are confronted with the disturbing fact that it was an excellent book, probably in fact the best of books, about the Russia of Joseph Stalin, and not a bad book about the Russia of Brezhnev and Kosygin. 'Disturbing fact' indeed, especially since Kennan goes to comment that it requires very little demonstration, since

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It is something that has been recognized by practically everyone who has had any knowledge of Stalin's Russia and who has then, in the light of that knowledge, read even the recent condensations of La Russie en 1839. He continues: Here, as though the book had been written yesterday (but in better and more striking language than most of us today would be able to command), appear all the familiar features of Stalinism: the absolute power of a single man; his power over thoughts a well as actions; the impermanence and unsubstantiality of all subordinate distinctions of rank and dignity—the instantaneous transition from lofty station to disgrace and oblivion; the indecent association of sycophancy upwards with brutality downwards; the utter disenfranchisement and helplessness of the popular masses; the nervous punishment of innocent people for the offenses they might be considered capable of committing rather than ones they had committed; the neurotic relationship to the West; the frantic fear of foreign observation; the obsession with espionage; the secrecy; the systematic mystification; the general silence of intimidation; the preoccupation with appearances at the expense of reality; the systematic cultivation of falsehood as a weapon of policy; the tendency to rewrite the past.13 There is indeed enough that is plausible here to make the identification of Russia in 1839 with the Soviet Union of 100 years later at least superficially persuasive. However, it would not be impossible to take Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, of which the second part was first published in 1840, and make comparable assertions about the unchanging nature of the USA. A key difference, apart from the fact that Democracy in America is a far better work than Russia in 1839, is that nobody would be taken seriously who asserted that a book set in the presidency of Andrew Jackson was 'an excellent book, probably in fact the best of books' about the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Let us be clear. We are not denying the importance of historical continuity—indeed, that is our basic theme. Moreover, interesting and useful insights have been gained by looking at FDR's New Deal in the light of the experience of Jackson's 'politics for the common man', and vice versa, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr among others. Undoubtedly, the same holds for Nicholas I's Russian Empire and Stalin's Soviet Union. Our objection is to the assertion

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that in the latter case nothing has changed. Once again, let us assert that the search for historical continuity is by no means an eccentric exercise, but rather an essential element in our search for understanding. Moreover, Kennan, like Florinsky, Keenan, Longworth and Pipes whom we have quoted above, is at least to some extent doing nothing more than putting in his own way a feeling shared by all those historians in the West who have studied the Soviet Union and its predecessors. And the feeling has been reinforced by workers in other fields.14 However, as far as continuity with tsarist absolutism is concerned, Kennan might have been better advised to have looked more closely at the eighteenth century, when this form of government was at its height, rather than at the nineteenth century, when it was already in decline. His books on Bismarck's European order and the Franco-Russian alliance concentrating on aspects of the arrival of the First World War are therefore more useful than that on Custine. And there are some serious implications in the continuity argument taken to such an extreme. If the USSR is little more than Old Russia, the role of Marxism-Leninism in the conduct of Soviet policy becomes negligible. The Last Great Game becomes even more directly the heir of the First Great Game, and the communist - capitalist ideological conflict since 1917 loses most of its significance. A second objection is, why the disparity? Why is continuity so much more marked in the Russian-Soviet case than in others? Is it simply because 'closed' societies are considered to be unchanging while their 'open' counterparts evolve? Or do we need to look further for an explanation? However, as we have seen, there is every reason for examining the pre-natal USA before 1776, certainly back to the seventeenth, even back to the sixteenth century, and beyond. To take again just the example of the Puritan inheritance, the full chronological and spatial context of the adaptation of Puritanism is a vital element in any approach to the American political culture. To turn to other elements of more recent provenance, let us note that for socialism in general theory preceded practice, while capitalist practice preceded theory. When Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, the proletariat had barely become a class, let alone the question of that class seizing power. NonMarxist socialist writers were more concerned with what might

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come to pass rather than with what was actually happening, to such an extent that Marx and Engels dismissed them as 'Utopian'. Opponents would later tar Marxism with the same brush. Be that as it may, when Lenin and his comrades came to power in 1917, they were very conscious of making the first attempt to put socialist theory into practice, the brief experiment of the Paris Commune of 1871 apart. On the other hand, when Adam Smith brought out The Wealth of Nations in 1776, capitalism had been in process of formation for several centuries. The American Declaration of Independence, proclaimed in the same year, had its theoretical, even its Utopian, aspects. But its essential ideology was borrowed to a considerable extent from the British Revolution of 1688, and aimed at recapturing something lost as well as reaching for something still to be gained. However, while much analysis of the USA and Russia as they developed in the nineteenth century would be against a yardstick imported from outside or still to receive embodiment in the future, paradoxically, Western insistence on the continuity in the Soviet case would become all the stronger after 1917, when practice failed to match the theory. In the American case, there was no comparable apparent break making necessary the reassertion of an underlying continuity. There is another, possibly even more important reason for the disparity between recent attitudes towards America and Russia in the 1830s, especially as demonstrated in Western writing. We come back to the subject-object relationship, which tends to bring about the discernment of more continuity in the object than in the subject. In Western terms, the West itself is the subject and is viewed as capable of variation and adjustment, the East is the object and looked upon as unchanging and uniform. Consider the following observations of the British statesman A. J. Balfour to the House of Commons in 1910: First of all, look at the facts of the case. Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for selfgovernment ... having merits of their own... You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government. All their great centuries—and they have been very great—have been passed under despotisms, under absolute government. All their great contributions to civilisation—and they have been great—have been made under that form of government.15

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Substitute 'Russians' for 'Orientals', and you have a view that was widespread in the West in the nineteenth century, sustained by recurring waves of Russophobia. Let us remember that the link was made explicit by Kipling, who talked not only of East and West never meeting but of also of Russians as being perfectly acceptable as long as they remembered that they belonged to the East. Problems arose when they tucked in their shirts and pretended to belong to the West. If we return to the excerpt from Balfour's speech, we must certainly allow that in the Russian case many Western observers have found 'traces of self-government', and more. However, emphasis has undoubtedly also been given to Russia's unchanging nature, and its strong historical continuity. To put this in its context, we could at least consider the possibility that such characteristics have been discerned by Western analysts with increasing intensity the further East their scrutiny has moved. Thus, Germany possesses a large amount of continuity, Russia even more and China most of all. To be sure, China and even Russia have at times indeed been immobile, comparatively speaking, especially perhaps in the nineteenth century, when they were clearly discerned as such by rapidly changing Western powers. A further complication is that Russia was in an ambiguous position at that time, one of the weakest of the great powers from the economic point of view in particular, and therefore both giving and taking, as it were, within the broad framework of imperialism. Nevertheless, the case remains for arguing that the further their attention moved eastwards from the Western core, the more analysts discovered immutable, traditional societies at the periphery. As a corollary to this suggestion, we could perhaps put forward another: that the more familiar a society, the greater its apparent flexibility and adaptability. To some extent, at least, comparative ignorance, or rather inexperience of the complexities of Soviet life has persuaded some observers to accept the evidence of historical continuity that undoubtedly exists as a more central feature of that life than it actually is: the everyday is more today than yesterday. A further perspective on the subject - object relationship of the West to Russia and the Soviet Union may be gained by taking a glance at the manner in which imaginative English literature has addressed itself to the Russian and Soviet theme. One of the first examples is George Turberville's verse published in 1587, includ-

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ing such lines as 'The cold is rare, the people rude, the prince so full of pride' and 'As if I would describe the whole, I feare my pen would faint.' During the seventeenth century, according to A. G. Cross: Despite continuing diplomatic and trade contacts and an increasing flow of Britons, mainly Scots, into Russian service, general British awareness of Russia stagnated, allowing first impressions to harden into cliches, first attempts at characterization to become stereotypes. The first new accounts of Russia... did little to dispel, indeed sustained British negative attitudes towards a nation which seemed so far removed in matters of education, religion and more. The eighteenth century introduced new directions: often positive, if still usually ignorant, literary appraisals of Russia in the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. Then, the nineteenth century at first brought an increase in interest in Russia and an upsurge in Russophilia: panegyrical poems to the new emperor began in 1805 with an Alexandriad. But after the death of Alexander I, Russophobia, already a strong undercurrent, soon took over the mainstream. If suspicion of Catherine's motives in the war against Turkey in 1792 had inspired a parody entitled 'Semiramis: or the Shuttle' by one 'Zuingluis Zenogle, Yeoman of the Bulse', and a number of poems had deplored the loss of liberty involved in the partition of Poland, it was not until the suppression of the Polish Revolt of 1830 and suspicion of the Russo-Turkish Treaty of 1833 that the antiRussian feeling began to move towards the fever pitch that has ebbed and flowed ever since. To quote Professor Cross again: Nicholas became the personification of the Russian bear, no longer seen as an amusing shambling animal, securely chained, but as a ravenous, ugly, threatening beast, intent on destroying the innocent and helpless. It was a reputation that increasingly was to be imputed to his predecessors, his brother Alexander and his grandmother Catherine. Although there was a degree of political rapprochement during the 1840s, a new wave of Russophobia in 1853 was followed by the armed conflict between the two powers that had seemed imminent twenty years earlier. The Crimean War was, to say the least, an unforgettable way to mark three hundred years of Anglo-Russian relations.

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We have already observed in the preceding chapter how the Crimean War gave new and more intensive impetus to anti-Russian feeling in Britain and the USA. In the later nineteenth century, the tortured 'Russian soul' was gripped by nihilism, a cause for complaint in a paper given in 1899 by a Miss F. Toulmin Smith to the Anglo-Russian Literary Society which had been founded six years earlier: What is dark, what is sad, what is tragic in Russian life is mostly dealt upon in English literature, whether journalistic or fiction, and therefore my efforts are directed here to show you that everybody in the country is not belonging to a secret society, or being sent off to Siberia to endure a lasting exile. In spite of the valiant efforts of Miss F. Toulmin Smith and others of like mind, there was no change for the better in the early twentieth century. Indeed, with the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 revolution, things if anything took a turn for the worse. Russophobia was replaced after the revolution of 1917 by hatred and suspicion of the Soviet regime and communism; the keyword of opprobrium became 'red'.16 The 'Red Scare' literature of the inter-war years led the way towards an even greater efflorescence in the same genre after 1945 in both Britain and the USA: film and TV took the phenomenon to ever more extravagant excess. Nevertheless, there was at least some attempt to attack more seriously the central problem of our time, in TV 'Space bridges' from 1986 onwards.17 To take just one example, let us look at one of the spoken observations of Corde, the hero of Saul Bellow's novel The Dean's December: When we've worn ourselves out with our soft nihilism, the Russians would like to arrive with their hard nihilism. They feel humanly superior. Even the Russian dissidents, especially the right wing, take the high tone with us. They say' We haven't got justice or personal freedom but we do have warmth, humanity, brotherhood, and our afflictions have given us some character. All you can offer us is supermarkets.' Whereas the best defense that liberal democracy can make goes like this: True, we're short on charisma and fraternal love, although you have it in debased forms, don't kid yourself about that. What we do have in the West is a kind of rational citizens' courage which you don't

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understand in the least. At our best we can be patient, we keep our heads in crisis, we can be decent in a cold steady way. Don't underestimate us.' Good academic that he is, Dean Corde goes on to disavow his own argument, observing that he thinks it impossible to be 'managerial and noble at the same time'. To be sure, this is more an observation on his own personal predicament than the human condition in general.18 Regarding literature and culture as a whole, we need to recall the point made in the preceding chapter, that the failure of the Russian language to take a more prominent place in the Indo-European family at the end of the eighteenth century was an important contributory cause to the emergence of Russophobia in the nineteenth century. This consideration has become even more important in the twentieth century, as under the influence of the USA, English has become the world's lingua franca in a whole range of activities from technology to popular song, and the world's media have used English more than any other language. This has made it difficult to contemplate balance, still less achieve it. Returning to the social sciences, let us first note that there have been worthy attempts at comparison in many aspects of the Soviet - American confrontation. Among the more successful works in the genre has been that written by Zbigniew Brzezinski in collaboration with Samuel P. Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR: Similarities and Contrasts, Convergence or Evolution, first published in 1964. Under the heading, 'The Traditional Background', they assert: The Soviet ideology and American political beliefs are the products of the accumulated social experience of the two societies, which sets their respective styles. A brief glance into the recent past might thus set the stage for a discussion of their current functions. Commendably, they take the 'recent past' to mean at least a century, in some of their analysis even more. Unfortunately, however, their comparison is more than a little weighted: American political experience lacks tension, the anguish, and the drama of Russian political development. Ideology and revolution are the key-

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words for Russia; consensus and evolution describe America. They quote de Tocqueville to the effect that Americans were 'born equal', commenting that this happy circumstance coloured the rest of American history. They make no mention whatsoever of the eradication of the Indians, and one mention only of slavery, as a cause of the Civil War.19 Justifiably, then, Archie Brown has noted that, for American academics in the 1960s, 'the characteristics of a developed political system frequently bore an uncanny resemblance to the principal features of the American polity, though often in a somewhat idealised form'.20 At the same time, the 'totalitarian' model continued in wide although by no means universal use as far as interpretations of the Soviet Union were concerned. But, especially from the 1970s onwards, a revisionist school has argued for chronological and thematic differentiation, for a more historical and pluralist approach to Western analysis of the Soviet Union. Looking to the future, one such revisionist, Stephen F. Cohen, has argued that: The real scholarly mission is the further development of Sovietology in to afieldof competing perspectives, approaches, and interpretations grappling with the changing, multicolored complexity of the Soviet experience. There is no need for a new Sovietological consensus but ample room for all schools of thought, including the totalitarianism school.21 It is a measure of movement on the other side that a summary of some of Cohen's work has appeared in the Soviet journal SShA, in such a manner that Neil Malcolm believes that it could provide encouragement to the Soviet counterparts of Cohen and his colleagues. He asserts: Cohen's complaints about dogmatism in American Soviet Studies, and about the 'tendentious unanimity' enforced by the dominance of the totalitarian view of Soviet politics, must find a resonance with Soviet academics, and especially with foreign affairs experts, who had to struggle for a long time to break down simplistic models of American politics in their own country. In his own book, Soviet Political Scientists and American Politics, Neil Malcolm has pointed out how, during the course of the First

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World War and the Russian Revolution, Lenin laid down what would become law for Soviet analysis of politics in the Western world. In The State and Revolution, for example, he wrote of the transformation of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism, involving 'an extraordinary strengthening of the "state machine" and an unprecedented growth in its bureaucratic and military apparatus in connection with the intensification of repressive measures against the proletariat'. If such a development was already apparent to him in 1917, what would he have said about the 'military-industrial' complex discerned by Eisenhower forty years or so later? This is the kind of question that Soviet political scientists find necessary to consider when examining American politics. Many of them are to be found in the prestigious Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada, which was set up during the Brezhnev years. And so, the Institute's monthly periodical, SShA (USA)—subtitled ekonomika, politika, ideologiia—, first published in 1970, is an especially valuable source for Western researchers. However, it is a measure of an ever-widening Soviet interest in the all-important subject that Neil Malcolm has been able to use monographic material of considerable quantity and variety outwith the pages of SShA as well as within them. In his book, he argues that, more often than might be expected, Soviet political scientists are able to demonstrate insight and understanding. They are helped, in his view, by their intelligent reading of the best recent American authorities on the subject, David Riesman, C. Wright Mills and others. He also suggests that the train of events in the 1960s and 1970s has persuaded them to make at least guarded revisions in the observations of their founding father. For them, the part played by the power of public opinion in bringing about an end to the war in Vietnam showed that the people were able to counter the 'repressive measures' levelled against them. Some presidents, Kennedy for example, were able on occasion at least to raise their vision above the powerful conditioning influences of the * state machine'. However, the red-tinted spectacles give Soviet observers a rosier picture of the world than the evidence would seem to warrant, when they maintain that the American public is critical of the CIA principally because of its involvement in Cold War actions against the Soviet Union, or when they claim that the new Soviet constitution 'will exercise a great

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influence on many political and ideological processes in the whole world'. Does the outlook from the Soviet ivory tower influence that from the Kremlin? Not much, according to at least one defector, who revealed that one of the most common complaints of those working in the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada is that their copious reports and memoranda too often find their way directly to the wastepaper baskets of top party and government officials. Some American experts on Soviet politics may have a certain sympathy for this grievance. They may also see in the fact that the Institute's Director, G. A. Arbatov, does seem to be able to catch the most privileged ears a clear parallel to the influence that has been exerted in the USA by such academics as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Pipes. Since the arrival centre stage of Mr Gorbachev, Soviet experts in general have probably had more of a hearing, for 'new thinking' is recommended as an integral part of glasnost and perestroika}2 Among other promising modes of analysis of the Soviet Union in the pluralist Western world has been that of 'political culture'. We have already mentioned the definition and approach of Archie Brown and Stephen White, for example. This appears to be one of the most promising lines of enquiry, since it helps to systematize the discussion on continuity, avoiding crude anachronisms. More over, it promotes the understanding of the Soviet Union from the inside, as a complex social as well as political entity, rather than as an inert mass responding to the commands of the government with complete if sullen obedience. Its principal disadvantage is its tendency to view the Soviet Union in isolation, or at most part of the communist bloc, rather than as an active part of the world body politic. A further fault could be its difficulty in coming to terms with historical change, its failure to insist on a clear periodization. Another fruitful line of enquiry has been that of historical sociology. Our understanding of the process of modernization has been much enhanced by the studies of Perry Anderson, Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol, among others.23 Above all, they have promoted a coherent, general understanding of the great change that came over the world via the agency of Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. Unfortunately none of them, for various reasons, includes both tsarist Russia and the USA in their

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analysis. It is perhaps also unfortunate that they have focused our attention so much on modernization that we have neglected the subsequent process, that of 'contemporization'. The transition to contemporaneity has been brought about by some developments already apparent before the twentieth century as well as by others of more recent provenance. Unlike the transition to modernity, which was originally a West European phenomenon, the transition to contemporaneity has been closely linked with the superpowers, especially the USA, for the USSR achieved this status at least a decade later, and has never achieved full parity. Moreover, processes occurring in Japan, China and what has become known as the Third World have complicated what was for some years a bipolar phenomenon. The chief difficulty in analysis of the second transition is its proximity to us. It is not easy to subject to scrutiny the time in which we ourselves live, to separate the wood from the trees of our own experience. A second difficulty stems from the circumstance that, while modernization in its origins was confined to one continent, contemporization has been from the beginning in several senses global. But how to consider in a unified manner a fragmented world? Since the USA has been so closely identified with capitalism and the USSR with socialism, there have been few attempts to look at them in their full context, which also involves further fragmentation: along with the East - West split, there is also that between the haves of the North and the have-nots of the South. On the other hand, there were also huge differences in the Europe from which modernity arose, between Britain and France in the eighteenth century, for example. We are no longer inhibited from examining these earlier rivals in a single study involving their wider setting, and should strive harder to overcome our reluctance to approach the USA and the USSR in the same manner. The emergence of the superpowers was already discernible during the transition to modernity, especially its later stages. Already there are considerable problems regarding their inclusion in discussion. For example, much of the discussion of modernity has centred around the relationship in different settings between noble landlords and peasants. The USA at no time possessed either class. The forerunner of the USSR, tsarist Russia, has been considered to have possessed them in atypical form. Nevertheless, as has

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been argued throughout this book, the historical dimension, going back even beyond modernity, is one that could be employed much more than before in our attempt to understand the present superpower relationship as mutual rather than subject-object. However, in order to realize more fully the potential of the synchronic-diachronic approach to events, conjunctures and structures, historians would have to consider the approaches of political culture and historical sociology, as well as of other disciplines such as political economy and international relations. Here, too, from the historian's point of view there have been pitfalls. For example, the arguments advanced in The Wealth of Nations have sometimes been put forward as timeless, classical axioms without a full recognition of the circumstances in which it was produced. The England and Scotland discussed by Adam Smith was mostly rural and agrarian: he pointed out how the manufactures of Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield, Birmingham and Wolverhampton were the offspring of agriculture. Full industrial revolution transforming society was far from under way. And then, as we have seen in this chapter, at his death nearly a hundred years after that of Adam Smith, Karl Marx was struggling to accommodate the Russian commune within his overall analysis of Capital: industrialization had only just begun to arrive in the country where Marxism was to help give direction to the October Revolution about a third of a century later. Today, as Colin White points out with appropriate reservations: There are two conceptual frameworks in the context of which economic history is usually written in America and the Soviet Union. The neoclassical world in which economic agents are rational economic men, maximisers to the core, prevails among the 'new economic historians' of America; the marxist world of power relations based on economic class prevails in the Soviet Union. In both, economic agents are seen as operating in the environment of conflict or competition. In an appropriate social context either viewpoint may be deemed valid, but not generally.... A more universal goal, although never completely universal, is the desire for security. ... An environment of cooperation is therefore as common as an environment of conflict or competition.24 As far as the writing on the history of international relations is concerned, D. C. Watt has isolated two frequent faults:

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The treatment of legal concepts derived from international law as though they were real observable entities rather than legal concepts conceived as part of the development of jurisprudence. And: 'The concurrent and parallel reification of concepts, metaphors and images, even of collective nouns.' Undoubtedly, for such reasons, historians find it difficult to make use of the work of some of their colleagues in that discipline. Even the many studies in international relations which avoid these faults present conceptual difficulties to historians, although they also render great service in helping to give shape and direction to empirical researches. As Paul Kennedy puts it more generally from the point of view of his fellow practitioners in the field, 'the problem which historians—as opposed to political scientists—have in grappling with general theories is that the evidence of the past is almost always too varied to allow for "hard" scientific conclusions.' Nevertheless, his The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 must be included in the list of those books which have encouraged specialists in a wide range of disciplines to consider important questions of general interest.25 The purpose of this chapter has been to illustrate the manner in which interpretation has evolved through time according to changing circumstances. The Enlightenment in the eighteenth century prepared the way for the American and French Revolutions at the end of it. About fifty years later, Marx and Engels drew on such precedents for their own Manifesto, which, along with Capital and other works, helped to produce the October Revolution and also encouraged Weber to devise an alternative mode of enquiry, and so on down to our own day. Of course, there is no single line of filiation, and mainstream Western academic investigation is in a different tradition from that of the Communist East. Objective appraisal may be attained only through a full recognition of such separate intellectual paths to understanding and of the extent to which they must be modified to fit the new demands of our own time.

8

Conclusion In 1988, the world was much more dangerous than before the production of nuclear weapons, and very different in other ways from the world before 1945. Nevertheless, Chapter 1 argued, pre1945 history, even pre-1921 history, can be used for the purpose of understanding what has happened since. In Chapter 2 American and Soviet interpretations of the origins of the Cold War were shown to have been almost poles apart, as a result of experiences during the Second World War and of traditions established previously. An analogy with problems of interpretation in German history illustrated the necessity of calling upon the past to redress the balance of the present. We also noted how the Big Three, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, were confronted at Yalta with considerable difficulties in adapting their general outlooks to the rapidly changing circumstances in Europe and beyond as the Second World War was coming to an end. While Churchill was the heir to views not only of Marlborough and other ancestors concerning Britain's greatness but also of attitudes to the British Empire current during his youth and adolescence, Roosevelt and Stalin drew their outlooks largely from those of Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin respectively as well as from their own previous experiences. An understanding of the more remote roots of their ideologies could therefore be one of the items on the agenda for further studies on the Cold War, along with more emphasis on comparative history in a wider framework of space and time. Kto kogo—who whom? Lenin said that this was one of the central questions in politics. It could also be said to constitute one of the central questions in academic analysis. To put it another way, consider two axioms from E. H. Carr's What Is History?: 'Before 185

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you study the history study the historian', and 'Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment'.1 In Chapter 3, we looked at some reactions to the Cold War in answer to Lenin's question and in response to Carr's injunctions. All too obviously, American and Soviet environments were producing widely different reactions in the years following 1945, although, somewhat paradoxically, there was at the same time a high degree of similarity to the extent that the USA and USSR each saw the other and its fundamental ideological assertions as a mortal enemy. Again somewhat paradoxically, while the early years of the Cold War were the enemy of historical objectivity, they did encourage researchers to think about their subject in a broader manner than previously, owing to the global nature of the conflict and the apparent general contraction of the world. The greatest degree of success was achieved in the study of earlier centuries, but the implications were there for specialists in later periods, including those attempting to discern the principal characteristics of the postwar era. Meanwhile, by 1970, from their different points of departure, 'scientific' and 'artistic' both recent and remote, American and Soviet historians were showing at least some signs of rapprochement at the same time as their governments. Against the background of a growing appreciation of globality and the possible increase in mutual understanding, the 'founding fathers' of the two superpowers, Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin, were discussed in a comparative manner in Chapter 4. The purpose of that exercise was not so much the promotion of the 'cult of personality' in history as its reduction, in particular to demonstrate that Wilson and Lenin were less the fathers of their time than its children. The method of approach was to describe their intellectual evolution and the setting in which it occurred. While Wilson was British-American in his early world-view, Lenin was more German-Russian. Under the influence of the imperial rivalries just before and after the turn of the century and their denouement in the First World War, both Wilson and Lenin moved towards a more complete globality of view, enlarging and refining their earlier ideas without abandoning them. The experience of the First World War and the Russian Revolution obliged them to make further adjustments to their respective outlooks before bequeathing them to their successors. The exercise threw light not only on the difficulties experienced by their successors, Roosevelt and Stalin,

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in mutual comprehension, but also on the ideological divide between American and Soviet academic analysis of the early Cold War. Chapter 5 threw further light on this subject through a discussion of the process of modernization, which began in Western Europe, and then radiated outwards. A point of departure was found in the German example introduced in Chapter 2. How did the German experience of modernization fit into the European context? To what extent did its eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century abnormalities lead towards the painful reverses of the twentieth century? We then looked at two other experiences deemed to some extent to be abnormal, the modernization of the continent's outliers, the USA and tsarist Russia, in relation to that of the European core. In a schematic manner, eight points of contemporaneity were listed in the beginning of Chapter 5, and, later, roughly in parallel, eight points of modernity and their American - Russian variations. If revolution was often considered to be part of a normal transition to modernity, to what extent did it constitute a disruption in continuity? Chapter 6 changed the focus in order to make the American Russian experience appear less abnormal than at first glance. If such considerations as space and mass were given their full due, the chronological dimension could also be used to better effect. Medieval developments, such as the schism in the Christian Church, the emergence of a distinctive Muscovite and English political culture, were shown to have potentially significant implications for the early modern process of colonization and after. Cameralism and mercantilism as governors of policy in continental Europe and the transatlantic colonies were further moulding influences, as were serfdom and slavery within their broad conceptual frameworks. Economic development up to the nineteenth century followed comparable but divergent paths, which could also be examined from various cultural points of view. From about the end of the eighteenth century onwards, ideological attitudes on the part of the future superpowers were in process of formation, age-old Russian suspicion of foreigners being joined by Western Russophobia. But there was at least some sign of mutual appreciation, for example in the outlook of Alexander Herzen. While the American - Russian relationship was an accompaniment from the medieval to the modern period of the major theme

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of intra-European rivalry growing into the First Great Game, it assumed major importance from 1917 onwards. But rather than looking more closely at this contemporary eventuality, Chapter 7 concentrated on an examination of the evolution of interpretation from the Enlightenment through to Marx and Weber before turning its attention to some problems of interpretation in more recent times. Beyond any doubt, the rivalry between the USA and the USSR, the Last Great Game, like any other academic subject, must be scrutinized not only as a thing in itself but also as the manner in which it has been perceived. Both the subject and the perception have developed through time. This fourth dimension makes the structure of the Last Great Game different from, say, a literary text studied in isolation. Thus, the Cold War and its sequel may benefit from full reference back beyond 1945. Through an understanding of the gulf between US and Soviet interpretations in a long perspective, that gulf might possibly be narrowed. History, of course, is not enough. Nevertheless, explanation of a problem may contribute towards its solution, and here, the historical approach may complement other academic strategies. Certainly, in this as in other kinds of enquiry, there is little to be gained by the pretence of an unaffiliated, aloof intelligence bringing itself to bear on a world apart from it. All too obviously, we do indeed live in a global village, and belong to one huge family with a common ancestry. Our problems can be solved only by taking seriously the arguments of our neighbours and relations, and by admitting the partiality and limitations of our own. Let us return in the end to where we began, with the question of how the Second World War led towards the Cold War. In the new atmosphere of perestroika and glasnost, Soviet historians have found it easier to talk to their American colleagues about this vexed problem. Although there seems to be still a long way to go before the rapprochement already beginning in 1970 can develop into a full meeting of minds, both George Kennan and S. L. Tikhvinsky were able to talk of positive steps in the right direction at a Conference in Moscow in June 1987 on the theme of 'Soviet American Relations 1945 - 1950' following a Colloquium also in Moscow in October 1986 on the subject of 'Soviet - American Relations 1931 - 1942'. No doubt, progress has been assisted not only by the persistence of the possibility of more than a million Hiroshimas being unleashed upon the world but also by the realization

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that the arms race has contributed to the decline of the superpowers relative to other parts of the world. Commenting on a fourteenpoint plan (was the echo of Woodrow Wilson simply coincidental?) produced by a joint US - Soviet study group in May 1988, G. A. Arbatov observed, not entirely facetiously perhaps, that the Soviet Union was in danger of becoming a developing country and the USA a 'semi-colony' of Germany, Japan, and possibly South Korea. He called for superpower 'humility' at an uncommon juncture of 'synchronized phases of development' (another echo, not just coincidental, although probably unwitting, of the terminology of Braudel and Porshnev).2 As well as humility, the spokesmen of the superpowers will need all the help that they can get from any quarter, including their own joint past in the context of the history of Europe and other continents, coupled with an imaginative approach to the chronological dimension, cyclical, linear and relative. Equally, like James Madison before them, they must not suffer 'a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience.' Then, with a judicious but not too reverential regard to their predecessors, they might realize the aspirations of Alexander Herzen and use such a basis for efforts to remove their formal contradictions 'with the help of something broader—if only through mutual understanding and recognition'.3

Notes Chapter 1 Introduction 1. 2.

Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War, London, 1983, p. 5. Dawson and Skobelev quoted by Michael T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and an Interpretation, vol.2, New York, 1955, pp. 985-6; on Mahan, Mackinder and Seeley, see Paul Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 18701945, London, 1984, pp. 41-85, especially 47-8, 83-4; David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 1828-1914: A Study in British and Russian Imperialism, London, 1977, pp. 1-5, 181-5.

Chapter 2 Events of the Cold War: Approaches 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

Richard Dean Burns, 'Foreword', J. L. Black, Origins, Evolution, and Nature of the Cold War. An Annotated Bibliographic Guide, Oxford, 1986, pp. xx. In (4) Burns presumably means radical left-wing reform of a more extreme variety than that of the British Labour government. Ibid., p. xx. John Lewis Gaddis, The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War', Diplomatic History, vol.7, no.2, summer 1983, pp. 180-1. See, for example, John Young,4 Update: The Origins of the Cold War', The Historian, The Magazine of the Historical Association, London, no. 13, winter 1986-7, pp. 10-13. B.N. Ponomaryov and others (eds.), History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917 -1980, vol.2, Moscow, 1981, pp. 124 - 8; P. Sevostyanov, 'Soviet Diplomacy during the Great Patriotic War', International Affairs, no. 11,1984, pp. 80,90; A. Obukhov, 'Soviet- American Relations during the Second World War', International Affairs, no.5, 1985, p. 96. A. J. P. Taylor, The Second World War: An Illustrated History, London, 1975, pp. 2 2 9 - 3 0 . Oleg Rzheshevsky, World War Two: Myths and Realities, Moscow, 1984, p. 104. The fullest Western account is John Erickson, Stalin's War with Germany, 2 vols., London, 1974, 1983. 190

Notes 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

191

Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941 - 1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, London, 1986, especially pp. xi, 2-4,12,83,104, 107,141,153-4,156. See Gerhard Hirschfeld, 'Erasing the Past?', History Today, August 1987, pp. 8 - 1 0 ; Josef Joffe, 'The Battle of the Historians,' Encounter, June 1987, pp. 72 - 7; Peter Pulzer, 'Germany searches for a less traumatic Past' The Listener, 25 June 1987, pp. 16 - 18. Paul v. Mitrofanoff, 'Offener Brief uber das Verhaltnis von Russland und Deutschland', Preussische Jahrbucher, Band 156, Heft 3, June 1914, pp. 385 - 98.1 owe this reference to Derek Beales. See more generally Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbruck and the German Establishment: War Images in Conflict, Iowa City, 1985. Bartov, The Eastern Front, pp. 154 - 5. John Erickson, The Road to Berlin, 1983, p. 508; Nikolai Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta, London 1977; A. M. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples, New York, 1978. See, for example, Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth, New York and London, 1982. See, for example, Gregory F. Herkin, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945 -1980, New York, 1981. On aid and the Second Front, see respectively, for example, Albert Seaton, The Russo - German War, 1941 -1945, London, 1971, pp. 588-90; Geoffrey Warner, 'The Road to D-Day\ History Today, June 1984, pp. 10 - 14. Foreign Relations of the US; Diplomatic Papers: The Conference of Malta and Yalta, 1945, Washington, DC, 1955, pp. 571,612,664-9,718,844,970, 972, 975, 987. Some general use made of The Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam Conferences: Documents, Moscow, 1974. Vojtech Mastny, Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941 -1945, New York, 1979, pp. 1 - 35,307. See also William Taubman, Stalin's American Policy: From Entente to Cold War, New York, 1982. This covers the period 1941 - 53. Thomas G. Paterson, Soviet - American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War, Baltimore, 1973, pp. 9,33 - 56, 147. Gaddis, 'The Emerging', pp. 183 - 9. Ibid., pp. 192, 199. The most satisfactory general Western account is Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-1984, New York, 1985. See also Black, Origins,!: 1-47; 7: 1-143.

Chapter 3 Events of the Cold War: Reactions 1. 2. 3. 4.

Grover Smith, Archibald MacLeish, Minneapolis, 1971, pp. 5-9. Archibald MacLeish, Freedom Is the Right to Choose: An Inquiry into the Battle for the American Future, London, 1952, pp. viii, 79 - 81,84, 87 - 8. Kenneth Scott Latourette, 'The Christian Understanding of History', Ameri can Historical Review, vol.54, no.2, 1949, pp. 261, 276. Conyers Read, 'The Social Responsibilities of the Historian', American His-

192

The Last Great Game

torical Review, vol.55, no.2, 1950, pp. 283 - 4. For an earlier essay in the same genre, see his England and America, Chicago, 1918. 5. Michael T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and an Interpretation, vol. 1, New York, 1955, pp. v - vi; vol.2, New York, 1955, pp. 1477 - 8. 6. S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, vol.2, New York, 1950, pp. 826 - 7. 7. G. F. Alexandrov and others, Joseph Stalin: A Short Biography, Moscow, 1949, pp. 202 - 3; A. A. Zhdanov, On Literature, Music and Philosophy, London, 1950, pp. 1 0 8 - 9 . 8. Werner G. Hahn, Post-War Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946-53, Ithaca, NY, 1982, pp. 84 - 8; Nikolai A. Voznesensky, The Economy of the USSR during World WarII, Washington, DC, 1984, pp. 111,114; K. Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State, New Brunswick, NJ, 1962, pp. 220 - 3,233,234 - 5, 326. 9. Ilya Ehrenburg, Men, Years - Life, vol.6, Post-War Years, 1945 - 1954, London, 1966, pp. 7 9 - 8 1 . 10. See for example H. J. Ellison, 'Soviet Historians and the Russian Revolution', in L. H. Legters, (ed.), Russia: Essays in History and Literature, Leiden, 1972; George M. Enteen, 'A Recent Trend on the Historical Front', Survey, vol.20, 1974. 11. Alexander Rabinowitch, 'The October Revolution Revisited' Social Education, vol.45, no.4, 1981, pp. 245 - 8; Jesse Lemisch, 'The American Revolution seen from the Bottom Up', in Barton J. Bernstein (ed.),Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, New York, 1969. 12. Karl Dietrich Erdmann and Gyorgy Ranki at XVIe Congres International des SciencesHistoriques, Stuttgart, \9S5,ActesIII,Stuttgart, 1986,pp.499,507 - 8; Academician 1.1. Mints, as reported in Vechernaia Odessa, 20 May 1987. 13. For the Kosygin address and the sequel, see Paul Dukes, 'History Congress in Moscow', The Russian Review, vol.30, no.3, 1971, pp. 240 - 9. 14. Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, London, 1959, p. 15. See also Garrett Mattingly as quoted by T. K. Rabb, The Strugglefor Stability in Early Modern Europe, New York, 1975, p. 75: 'The clash of ideological absolutes drives diplomacy from the field.' 15. Of course, the computer has taken on a much wider range of subjects than envisaged by Academician Khvostov in 1970. 16. See pp. 50, 57. 17. C. Vann Woodward (ed.), The Comparative Approach to American History, New York, 1968. 18. A predecessor was W. Kloosterboer, Involuntary Servitude since the Abolition of Slavery: A Survey of Compulsory Labour Throughout the World, Leiden, 1960. 19. See more generally M. la. Gefter and V. L. Mal'kov, 'A Reply to an American Scholar', Voprosy istorii, no. 10, 1966, as translated in Soviet Studies in History, vol.5, no.3, 1966 - 7. The American scholar was A. P. Mendel, whose article 'Current Soviet Theory of History: New Trends or Old?' is in American Historical Review, vol.72, no. 1, 1966 - 7. 20. C. Vann Woodward, 'Clio with Soul', The Journal of American History, vol.56, no. 1,1969.

Notes 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

193

This is based on personal observations not appropriate for publication. See for example Alexander V. Muller's Introduction to Sergei M. Soloviev, History of Russia, vol.24, Gulf Breeze, Florida, 1980 and the first chapters of V. O. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii, vol.1, Moscow, 1956. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol.1, London, 1975, pp. 13-22; vol.2, London, 1975, pp. 1242 - 4. On Braudel, see for example Douglas Johnson, 'Braudel: The Historian as Dramatist',History Today, July 1986, pp. 51 - 4 ; Olwen Hufton, 'Fernand Braudel', Past and Present, no. 112, 1986, pp. 208 - 13. On Porshnev, see obituaries in Voprosy istorii, no. 1,1973, p. 218, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no.l, 1973, pp. 219 - 21. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, London, 1986, pp. 48 - 9,79. See also G. J. Whitrow, The Nature 0/r/me, Harmonds worth, 1975,pp. 102,139-41. Although ideas of space-time were formulated by Einstein and others before the First World War and elaborated between the wars, they made their greatest impact on historians after the reinforcement of the Second World War. On the other hand, even before 1908 when Herman Minkowski said it, historians would probably have recognized that 'nobody has ever noticed a place except at a time, or a time except at a place'. See Chapter 4, note 14; Chapter 5, note 17; and compare Vico's celebrated remark from his New Science written in the early eighteenth century: 'The nature of things is nothing other than their birth in certain times and in certain guises.'

Chapter 4 The Great Conjuncture: Leninism versus Wilsonism 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II, quoted by Lloyd C. Gardner in 'Responses' to John Lewis Gaddis, 'The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War', Diplomatic History, vol.7, no.2, summer 1983,p. 193; Lawrence S. Kaplan in ibid., p. 194. N. Gordon Levin, Jr, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution, New York, 1968, p. 260. See for example David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 1828 -1914: A Study in British and Russian Imperialism, London, 1977. For the background to the early careers of Wilson and Lenin, see for example A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848 - 1918, Oxford 1971. Among those considering the pre-1914 period as a cautionary tale have been Geoffrey Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon, London, 1982; George Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck's European Order: FrancoRussian Relations, 1875-1890, Princeton, 1979; George Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia and the First World War, New York, 1984. John M. Blum, Woodrow Wilson and the Politics ofMorality, Boston, 1956, p. 12, Chs. 1 - 4 . See also Edward A. Weinstein, Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography, Princeton, 1981, p. 6. Many works on various aspects of Wilson and his policies have been written or edited by Arthur S. Link. Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Biography, vol. 1, London, 1985, pp. 25 - 40. See also Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought, 2 vols., London,

194

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

The Last Great Game 1977,1981. For more personal detail, see, for example, David Shub, Lenin: A Biography, Harmondsworth, 1966. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, vol.6, p. 115; vol.9, p. 158,274; vol.12, p. 267; vol.15, p. 172; vol.16, pp. 341,365; vol.18, p. 594. Woodrow Wilson, The State: Elements ofHistorical and Practical Politics, Boston, 1899, pp. 620,624. It would seem that Wilson had already partially given way on the spelling issue. It should also be pointed out that many of the sources for The State were German. See The Papers, vol.6, pp. 245-6, 274. And see Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom, London, 1913. This work says very little about international relations. Woodrow Wilson, The State..., London, 1919, pp. 523-5. This revision was carried out by Edmund Elliott, Professor of International Law and Politics at the University of California. V. Vil'son Gosudarstvo: proshloe i nastoiashchee konstitutsionnykh uchrezhdenii, Moskva, 1905, pp. Hi - iii. Service, Lenin, vol.1, pp. 36-47, 92. And remarks by Robert Bideleux at Conference mentioned after note 28 below. Service, Lenin, vol.1, pp. 88 - 9, 97 - 100; V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Moscow, 1970, pp. 117-19. Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History, Harmondsworth, 1967, p. 76, and generally. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880 -1918, Boston, Mass., 1983, pp. 12-15, especially 14; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn, Cambridge, 1911, Time Standard', vol.26, pp. 987-8. And see concluding paragraphs of Chapter 3 above. Ibid., 'Navy and Navies', vol. 19, pp. 2 9 9 - 317; Telegraph', vol.26, pp. 510 - 4 1 ; Telephone', vol.26, pp. 547 - 57; Leslie Symons 'Russian and Soviet Aviation from the Beginning to 1930', at Conference mentioned in note 28 below; Woodrow Wilson quoted in James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History ofAmerica1 s Literary Taste, New York, 1950, p. 227. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol.17, pp.609-10. W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol.1, New York, 1965, pp. 441-3. Ibid., pp. 4 7 2 - 4 . Blum, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 130-1, 146. Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counter-Revolution at Versailles, 1918-1919, New York, 1967, p. 55. See also John M. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism and the Versailles Peace, Princeton, 1966. Blum, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 144 - 6. See more generally Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 19131921, Oxford, 1984, and his Wilson and Revolutions, 1913-1921, Philadelphia, 1976. James B. Scott, President Wilson's Foreign Policy, New York, 1918, pp. 354 - 63. And see Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 19171918, New Haven, Conn., 1959, pp. v - vi, where he writes of 'the dawning of a new ideological era in international politics, of which Lenin's April Theses and Wilson's Fourteen Points are representative and symbolic'

Notes 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

195

Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. 1, p. 500. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13th edn, vol.1, London and New York, 1926, pp. 753 - 5. Quoted in John M. Blum and others, The National Experience: A History of the United States, New York, 1973, p. 569. Of Allied disillusionment at Versailles, Harold Nicolson had written, 'We ceased to believe that President Wilson was the Prophet whom we had followed.... We saw in him no more than a presbyterian dominie.' Quoted by A. Lentin in Guilt at Versailles: Lloyd George and the pre-History of Appeasement, London, 1984, p. 74. G. V. Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History, New York, 1967, pp. 59 - 60. Compare Braudel, pp. 52-3 above. Another consideration here is that 'Wilsonism' as it has been generally accepted contains elements closely associated with the policies of T. R. Roosevelt. See for example, John M. Blum, the Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt, New York, 1980, and John M. Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Cambridge, Mass., 1983. Quoted by Daniel J. Boorstin, America and the Image ofEurope: Reflections on American Thought, New York, 1960, p. 21. V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, London, 1971, pp. 696 - 8. In an earlier version, this chapter was given as a paper at a Conference at Gregynog, Newton, Powys, on 28 - 30 April, 1985, organized by Roger Pethybridge and the Centre of Russian and East European Studies, University College, Swansea. 1 am grateful to the participants for their comments and suggestions. And see notes 11 and 15 above.

Chapter 5 Conjunctures in Transitions to Modernity and Contemporaneity 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

This list adapted from Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History, Harmondsworth, 1967. A.J. P. Taylor, The Course ofGerman History: A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815, London, 1945, pp. 7 - 15, 88 - 9. And see pp. 202 above. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, Harmondsworth, 1977, p. xvii. Disraeli quoted by George Earle Buckle, The Life ofBenjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, vol.5, London, 1960, pp. 1 3 3 - 4 , David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, the Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Oxford, 1984. Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities, pp. 39-43 and generally. Comparisons with Russia are relegated to a footnote on p. 118, and some other remarks on pp. 57,140 - 1; E. H. Carr, What Is History?, Harmondsworth, 1964, pp. 16-19. Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500-1660, vol. 1, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 3, 28 - 30, 139, 180 - 1. Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia and China, London, 1972. See also M. O.

196

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

The Last Great Game Gately, A. L. Moore and J. E. Wills, 'Seventeenth-Century Peasant "Furies"; Some Problems of Contemporary History', Past and Present, no.51, 1971. Zagorin, Rebels, vol. 1, p. vii. Eric Foner, 'Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?', History Workshop, no. 17, 1984, pp. 74, 76. Arnold Toynbee, 'Introduction', Arnold and Veronica Toynbee (eds.), The Realignment ofEurope: Survey ofInternational Affairs, 1939-46, London, 1955, pp. 1 - 20, 32 - 3; Jeno Szucs, 'The Three Historical Regions of Europe', Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol.29, no.2 -4,1983, p.133. Taylor, The Course, p. 8. Peter Burke,' Did Europe Exist Before 1700?', History of European Ideas, vol.1, 1980, p. 26. H. D. Schmidt, 'The Establishment of Europe as a Political Expression \Historical Journal, vol.9, 1966, p. 178. See Paul Dukes, 'How the Eighteenth Century Began', in A. G. Cross (ed.), Russia and the West in the Eighteenth Century, Newtonville, 1983. More generally, see Reinhard Wittram, Russia and Europe, London, 1973. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13th edn, vol.1, pp. 1061-2. G. V. Vernadsky, Opyt istorii Evrazii s poloviny VI veka do nastoiashchego vremeni, Berlin, 1934, p. 8. P. N. Miliukov, 'Eurasianism and Europeanism in Russian History', B. V. Yakovenko (ed.), Festchrift Th.GMasaryk zum 80 Geburtstage, vol.1, Bonn, 1930, p. 235. Lucien Febvre and Lionel Bataillon, A Geographical Introduction to History, London, 1925. Braudel and others were to develop these arguments and put them into practice after the Second World War. See pp. 51-7 above. Philip Longworth, Alexis: Tsar of All the Russias, London, 1984, pp. 249 50. Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945 - 1984, New York, 1985, p. 26. Karen O. Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580 -1640, London, 1980, pp. 85, 172. Max Silberschmidt, The United States and Europe: Rivals and Partners, London, 1972, p. 72. See also generally Daniel J. Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought, New York, 1960. Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, with an Historical Essay, 2 vols., Boston, 1864, vol.1, pp. vi - vii. M. C. Tyler, 'The Party of the Loyalists in the American Revolution', American Historical Revolution, vol.1, 1895 - 6, p. 26. William H. Nelson, 'The Revolutionary Character of the American Revolution', American Historical Review, vol.70, no.4,1965, p. 999. And see, for example, the observation of Richard B. Morris that the American Revolution is' not an event in American history alone but a turning point in world history, not a single crisis settled in a brief span of years but a broad movement of liberation which has not yet run its course.' Richard B. Morris, The American Revolution Reconsidered, New York, 1967, p. 85. George Bancroft, History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the Continent, vol.4, New York, 1886, p. 4. Generally, Edmund S.

Notes

26.

27.

28.

197

Morgan has commented that 'the Whig interpretation of the American Revolution may not be as dead as some historians would have us believe, that George Bancroft may not have been so far from the mark as we have often assumed.' See his The Challenge of the American Revolution, New York, 1976, p. 57. J. F. Jameson, The American Revolution considered as a Social Movement, Princeton, 1926, quoted by Crane Brinton, The Anatomy ofRevolution, New York, 1965, pp. 235 - 6. Brinton himself comments, 'All this sounds very like the original Thermidor in France.' Among the works prompting these thoughts, apart from those already cited, were J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Cambridge, 1986; F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, Cambridge, 1981; Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (eds.), Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, Baltimore, 1984. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation ofHistory, London, 1951, Preface.

Chapter 6 American-Russian Aspects of the Structure of the First Great Game 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

Shchapov and Bizzilli from P. Bizzilli, 'Geopolitical Conditions of the Evolution of Russian Nationality \/6>wr«tf/ of Modern History, vol.2, no. 1,1930, pp. 28, 3 1 - 2 . A. J. P. Taylor in review, 'Mapping the Cold War', in The Observer, 19 April 1981; Arnold Toynbee from 'Russia's Byzantine Heritage', Civilization on Trial, Oxford, 1948, pp. 181 - 2. Edward Keenan, 'Muscovite Political Folkways', The Russian Review, vol.45, no.2,1986, pp. 118, 125,128,135, 167. For criticisms of Keenan's article, see Russian Review, vol.46, no.4, 1987. For an alternative view of Byzantium, see D. Obolensky, Byzantium and the Slavs: Collected Studies, London, 1971, p. 35. See Alan Macfarlane,' Socio-economic revolution in England and the origin of the modern world', in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, Revolutions in History, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 145 - 66, especially 147, 163. Emmanuel Todd, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, Oxford, 1985, pp. viii - ix, 15 - 18, 130 - 2. R. Hak\uyt,the Principal Navigations..., vol.2, Glasgow, 1903,pp. 209-10, 297 - 8 (spelling modernised). Ibid., vol.8,1904, p. 138; David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 1 - 42, and 'Elizabethan America: "God's Own Latitude"?', History Today, July 1986, pp. 44 - 50, especially from 50. Vauban, 'Moyen de retablir nos colonies de l'Amerique et de les accroitre en peu de temps', 28 avril 1699, in Vauban, safamille et ses ecrits: ses oisevetes et sa correspondance: analyse et extraits, Tome 1, Paris, 1910, pp.

413-40.

Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change

198

9. 10.

11. 12.

The Last Great Game through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600 -1800, New Haven, Conn., pp. 5, 23, 31. G. Schmoller, The Mercantile System and Its Historical Significance, New York, 1902, quoted by Albion W. Small, The Cameralists: The Pioneers of German Social Polity, Chicago, 1909, pp. 9 - 1 0 . Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Cambridge, Mass., 1987, especially pp. 3 0 - 1 . See also Paul Dukes, 'Catherine IPs Enlightened Absolutism and the Problem of Serfdom', in W. E. Butler (ed.), Russian Law: Historical and Political Perspectives, Leyden, 1977, pp. 93-115. Colin White, Russia and America: The Roots ofEconomic Divergence, London, 1987, passim, quotation from p. 97. Paul Dukes (ed.), Russia under Catherine the Great, vol.2, Newtonville, Mass., 1977, pp. 12-15; Paul M. Spurlin, Montesquieu in America, 17601801, New York, 1969, pp. 2 5 8 - 6 1 ; Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America, Cambridge, 1988, pp.

138-43.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Harmondsworth, 1967, pp. 35, 38. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of North America: An Introduction, New York, 1986, p. 112; Lawson - Peebles, Landscape, passim. See Paul Dukes, Andrew Hook and others in Scottish Literary News, vol.3, 1973. See also Andrew Hook, Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750 -1835, Glasgow, 1975, pp. 119 - 27. Quoted by L. A. J. Hughes in 'N. A. L'vov and the Russian Country House', A. G. Cross and R. P. Bartlett (eds.), Russia and the World of the Eighteenth Century, Columbus, 1988. Johnson, Webster and Bridenbaugh all quoted by Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, New York, 1958, pp. 278 - 83, 295. See also J. S. G. Simmons, 'Samuel Johnson on the Banks of the Volga', Oxford Slavonic Papers, vol.11, 1964, p. 29; Paul Dukes, 'Some Cultural Aspects of the Context of Von Grimm's Prediction', Cross, Russia, and Lawson-Peebles, Landscape, pp. 7 8 - 8 3 . J. Godechot, France the the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770-99, London, 1965; R. R. Palmer, the Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ, 1959,1964. And see Edward Ingram, In Defence of British India: Great Britain in the Middle East, 1775 - 1842, London, 1984, p. 2, and more generally, Hugh Ragsdale, Detente in the Napoleonic Era: Bonaparte and the Russians, Lawrence, Kansas, 1980, pp. 138-41. J. C. Miller, Triumph of Freedom, 1775 -1783, Boston, 1948, p. 586; J. L. Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States, New York, 1978, pp. 1 - 5; Paul Dukes, 'Some Cultural Aspects', Cross, Russia. Albert Resis, 'Russophobia and the "Testament" of Peter the Great, 1812 — 1980', Slavic Review, vol.44, no.4, 1985. Joseph L. Shulim, 'The United States Views Russia in the Napoleonic Age', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 102, no.2,1958, p. 148. Shulim's remarks suggest that the concept of a pH-type test applied to Europe: America and Russia might be extended to the realm of ideology at this time.

Notes 22. 23.

199

Shulim, 'The United States', pp. 149 - 59. Theodore Draper, The Idea of the "Cold War" and its Prophets', Encounter, February 1979, pp. 34-45. See also David Griffiths, 'Soviet Views of Early Russian - American Relations', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol.116, no.2,1972, and the many works of the Soviet historian N. N. Bolkhovitinov. 24. Karl Marx, Secret Diplomacy ofthe Eighteenth Century, London, 1969. And see, for example, J. H. Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study ofthe Interaction ofPolicy and Opinion, Cambridge, Mass., 1950. 25. From Pamphlets on the Crimean War, and Other Russian Subjects, Aberdeen University Special Collections. Norman Rich, Why the Crimean War? A Cautionary Tale, London, 1986, discusses what he sees as inappropriate responses by Western statesmen to Russian expansion during the First Great Game as an object lesson for their successors in the Last Great Game. 26. A Defence of Armageddon, or Our Great Country Foretold in the Holy Scriptures. In Two Discourses, Delivered in the Capitol of the United States, at the Request ofSeveral Members ofCongress, on the Anniversary of Washington's Birthday, 1857, Baltimore, 1860. 27. Apart from those sources already mentioned, other possibilities would include David Pae,The Coming Struggle..., London, 1853,and lAme\\Gog and Magog: or, The Doom of Russia ..., London, 1854. Compare President Reagan as quoted by Martin Gardner, 'Giving God a Hand', New York Review of Books, 13 August 1987. 28. Frank A. Golder, 'Russian - American Relations during the Crimean War', American Historical Review, vol.31, 1926, pp. 464 - 5, 474. See more generally, Alan Dowty, The Limits of American Isolation: The United States and the Crimean War, New York, 1971. 29. Albert A. Woldman, Lincoln and the Russians, Westport, Connecticut, 1952, p. 9. 30. These quotations from L. A. Rand, 'America views Russian Serf Emancipation', Mid-America, vol.50, 1968, pp. 43 - 4, 47 - 8. See also Woldman, Lincoln, pp. 1 5 2 - 3 , and Kolchin, Unfree Labor, pp. 359 - 75. 31. E. A. Adamov, 'Russia and the United States at the Time of the Civil War', Journal ofModern History, vol.2,1930, pp. 598,603; Frank A. Golder, 'The Russian Fleet and the Civil War', American HistoricalReivew, vol.20,1914, pp. 807 - 8, 811; Woldman, Lincoln, pp. 142, 149. Compare Howard I. Kushner, 'The Russian Fleet and the American Civil War: Another View', Historian, vol.34,1971 - 2. And see more generally, D. P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861 -1865, New York, 1974. 32. Woldman, Lincoln, pp. 270 - 6. Among Tolstoy's remarks were,' the highest heroism is that which is based on humanity, truth, justice and pity; all other forms are doomed to forgetfulness. The greatness of Aristotle or Kant is insignificant compared with the greatness of Buddha, Moses and Christ. The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln'. 33. Adamov, 'Russia', p. 594. De Stoeckl went on to concede that there were among the demagogues a few honest men, notably Lincoln.

200 34. 35.

The Last Great Game See, for example, Max M. Laserson, The American Impact on Russia, 1784 -1917: Diplomatic and Ideological, New York, 1950. Alexander Kucherov, 'Alexander Herzen's Parallel between the United States and Russia' in J. S. Curtiss (ed.), Essay in Honor ofG. T. Robinson, Leiden, 1963, pp. 34 - 47. Compare W. J. Gavin and T. J. Blakeley, Russia and America: A Philosophical Comparison, Dordrecht and Boston, 1976.

Chapter 7 Towards the Structure of the Last Great Game: USA versus USSR 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

Woodrow Wilson quoted by A. Lentin, Guilt at Versailles: Lloyd George and the Pre-History of Appeasement, London, 1984, p. 7. And see David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 1828 -1914; A study in British and Russian Imperialism, London, 1977, p. 181: 'For "Great Game" and "Cold War" are simply different names for what is broadly the same immemorial phenomenon' . For the first use of the term, see Gerald Morgan, Anglo-Russian Rivalry in Central Asia, 1810 -1895, London, 1981, pp. 15 - 16. For some background to this use, see J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Idea, New York, 1986. See also Anatol Rapoport (ed.), Game Theory as a Theory ofConflict Resolution, Dordrecht, 1974. Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics, London, 1979, pp. ix - x, 1 - 2. For earlier definition and later discussion, see A. H. Brown (ed.), Political Culture and Communist Studies, London, 1984, p. 2 and passim. Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology, Near Shepton Mallet, 1982, pp. xviii, 191, 333 - 5. Abrams also refers to the work of B. F. Porshnev on peasant revolts in seventeenth-century France, pp. 214 - 16. This passage is adapted from Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History, Harmondsworth, 1967. See, for example, Roger Dow, 'A geopolitical study of Russia and the United States', Russian Review, vol.1, no. 1,1941, pp. 6 - 19; Chauncy D. Harris in Alexis D. Inkeles and Kent Geiger, Soviet Society: A Book of Readings, London, 1961, pp. 5 - 12; W. H. Parker, The Super-Powers: The United States and the Soviet Union Compared, London, 1972, pp. 1 - 98. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol.2, The Science of Freedom, London, 1973, especially pp. 491 - 3,563 - 8; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1967; Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, New York, 1978. Included under the heading of the Enlightenment would be a view of British liberties stretching back to Magna Carta. For a spirited latter-day defence of this tradition, see letters of J. H. Hexter to The Times Literary Supplement, 2 September and 28 October 1983. From a manuscript in Aberdeen University Archive identified by Dr Dorothy Johnson. Quoted in Public Record Office, Correspondence respecting Central Asia, c. 704, 1873, pp. 72 - 5. And see, for example, E. H. Zabriskie, American Russian Rivalry in the Far East, 1895 -1914, Philadelphia, 1946.

Notes 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

201

K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Moscow, 1969, pp. 10 - 12, 96; James D. White, 'Marx and the Russians: The Romantic Heritage', Scottish Slavonic Review, no.2,1983, pp. 51 - 81. One of Marx's correspondents concerning land ownership in Russia was Maxim Kovalevsky, as White points out on pp. 65 - 72. See also Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the 'Peripheries of Capitalism', London, 1983. See David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 46, 205 - 6. A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848 -1919, Oxford, 1971, p. 568. See Ch. 4, note 4 above, and, for example, George Kennan, Encounters with Kennan: The Great Debate, London, 1979, p. 47; 'Truth in human affairs reveals itself only... by comparison, and if you haven't the historical depth, you can't make the comparison'; and p. 13: 'there is a curious kinship between the American and Russian intellectual personality, ... a certain community in the collective experiences of the two countries which makes itself felt in the contacts between the two peoples'. For a succinct description of the evolution of Kennan's diplomatic views, see Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945 -1984, New York, 1985, pp. 53, 58 65,96-7,113. Geoge F. Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and his Russia in 1839, London, 1971, pp. 124-5. See pp. 35-8,93, 106-7, 122-5. Quoted by Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Harmondsworth, 1985, pp. 32 - 3. A. G. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature from the Sixteenth Century to 1980: An Introductory Survey and a Bibliography, Oxford, 1985,

pp.7, 19,24-5,45-6, 152-63.

See, for example, Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union, New York, 1988. Saul Bellow, The Dean's December, Harmondsworth, 1982, p. 273. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, Political Power: USA USSR: Similarities and Contrasts, Convergence or Evolution, Harmondsworth, 1977, pp. 24,29. Brown, Political Culture, p. 1. Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917, Oxford, 1985, p. 37. Neil Malcolm, 'Reading between the Lines',Detente, no.6,1986, p. 19; Neil Malcolm, Soviet Political Scientists and American Politics, London, 1984, pp. 5 1 , 5 9 , 8 5 - 6 , 154. See for example and full discussion Theda Skocpol (ed.), Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, Cambridge, 1984. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Harmondsworth, 1983, p. 506; Colin White, Russia and America: The Roots of Economic Divergence, London, 1987, pp. 13-14. D. C. Watt at Vie Congres International des Sciences Historiques, Stuttgart, 1985, pp. 489 - 90. Actes 111, Stuttgart, 1986, pp. 489 - 90; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall ofthe Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflictfrom 1500 to 2000, New York and London, 1988, pp. xxi - xxii. And see

202

The Last Great Game note 23 above. See also, for example, E. L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economics and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, Cambridge, 1981: and I. Wallerstein, The Modern World System, New York, 1974, 1980.

Chapter 8 Conclusion 1. 2.

3.

E. H. Carr, What Is History?, Harmondsworth, 1964, p. 44. N. I. Egorova, 'Kollokvium po istorii sovetsko-amerikanskikh otnoshenii', Voprosy istorii, no.4,1987, pp. 157-9; and N. I. Egorova, 'Konferentsiia po problemam poslevoennkh sovetsko-amerikanskikh otnoshenii*, Voprosy istorii, no. 12, 1987, pp. 138 - 40; Michael White, 'US - Soviet Study on How to End the Cold War', The Guardian Weekly, 15 May 1988. See also David P. Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alliance, Brighton, 1987; and Peter Savigear, Cold War or Detente in the 1980s: The International Politics ofAmerican - Soviet Relations, Brighton, 1987. See Ch. 6, note 35, and Ch. 7, note 6 above.

Further Reading Books A. M. Babey, Americans in Russia, 1776-1917: A Study of the American Travelers in Russia, New York, 1938. T. A. Bailey, America Faces Russia: Russian- American Relations from Early Times to Our Own Day, Ithaca, NY, 1950. N. N. Bashkina and others (eds.), The United States and Russia: The Beginnings of Relations, 1765 -1815, Washington, DC, 1980. J. L. Black (ed.), Origins, Evolution, and Nature of the Cold War: An Annotated Bibliographic Guide, Santa Barbara, Calif., and Oxford, 1986. N. N. Bolkhovitinov, Stanovlenie russko-amerikanskikh otnoshenii, 1775 -1815, Moscow, 1966. N. N. Bolkhovitinov, Russko-amerikanskie otnosheniia, 1815 - 1832, Moscow, 1975. N. N. Bolkhovitinov, The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775 -1815, Cambridge, Mass., 1975. D.BrQwster,East~WestPassage:AStudyinLiteraryRelationships,London, 1954. Z. Brzezinski and S. P. Huntington, Political Power: USA - USSR, New York, 1964. P. Dukes, The Emergence of the Super - Powers: A Short Comparative History of the USA and the USSR, London and New York, 1970. F. R. Dulles, The Road to Teheran: The Story of Russia and America, 1781 -1943, Princeton, NJ, 1944. P. G. Filene (ed.),American Views ofSoviet Russia, Homewood, 111., 1968. J. G. Fletcher, Europe's Two Frontiers: A Study of the Historical Forces at Work in Russia and America as They Will Increasingly Affect European Civilization, London, 1930. T. M. Franck and E. Weisband, Word Politics: Verbal Strategy among the 203

204

The Last Great Game

Super-Powers, New York, 1971. J. L. Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History, New Yoik, 1978. M. Garrison and A. Gleason, Shared Destiny: Fifty Years of SovietAmerican Relations, Boston, Mass., 1985. W. J. Gavin and T. J. Blakeley, Russia and America: A Philosophical Comparison: Development and Change of Outlookfromthe Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century, Dordrecht and Boston, Mass., 1976. J. J. Halperin and R. D. English, The Other Side: How Soviets and Americans perceive each other, New Brunswick, NJ., 1988. O. P. Hasty and S. Fusso (eds.), America through Russian Eyes, 1874 1926, New Haven, 1988. D. Hecht, Russian Radicals look to America, Cambridge, Mass., 1947. J. C. Hildt, Early Diplomatic Negotiations of the United States with Russia, Baltimore, 1906. P. Hollander (ed.), American and Soviet Society: A Reader in Comparative Sociology and Perceptions, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969. E. Holzle, Die Revolution der zweigeteilten Welt: Eine Geschichte der Machte, 1905 - 1929, Munchen, 1963. E. Holzle, Geschichte der zweigeteilten Welt: Amerika und Russland, Munchen, 1961. E. Holzle, Russland und Amerika: Aufbruch und Begegnung zweier Weltmachte, Munchen, 1953. Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, Comparison of the United States and Soviet Economies, 4 parts, Washington, DC, 1959 - 60. M. Jones, Big Two: Life in America and Russia, London, 1962. P. Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Cambridge, Mass., 1987. W. LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945 -1984, New York, 1985. M. M. Laserson, The American Impact on Russia, Diplomatic and Ideological, 1784 - 1917, London and New Yoik, 1962. J. Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War, New York, 1966. C. A. Manning, Russian Influence on Early America, New York, 1953. A. Nikoljukin (ed.), A Russian Discovery of America, Moscow, 1986. W. H. Parker, The Super-Powers: The United States and Soviet Union Compared, London, 1972. O. Prudkov (ed.), Soviet Writers look at America, Moscow, 1977. N. V. Sivachev and N. N. Yakovlev, Russia and the United States, Chicago, 1979. P. A, Sorokin, Russia and the United States, London and New York, 1950. J. J. Stephan (ed.), Soviet-American Horizons on the Pacific, Honolulu, 1986.

Further reading

205

A. Tarsaidze, Czars and Presidents: The Story of a Forgotten Friendship, New York, 1958. B. P. Thomas, Russo - American Relations, 1815 -1867, Baltimore, 1930. C. White, Russia and America: The Roots of Economic Divergence, London, 1987. W. A. Williams, American - Russian Relations, 1781 - 1947, New York, 1952.

Articles N. N. Bolkhovitinov, 'Russia and the United States: Analytical Survey of Archival Documents and Historical Studies', Soviet Studies in History, vol.25, no.2, 1986. N. N. Bolkhovitinov, 'Russia and the Declaration of the Non-Colonization Principle: New Archival Evidence', Oregon Historical Quarterly, no.72, 1971. N. N. Bolkhovitinov, 'The Study of the United States in the Soviet Union', American Historical Review, vol.74, no.4, 1968 - 9. R. Dow, 'A Geopolitical Study of Russia and the United States', Russian Review, vol.1, 1941. M. la. Gefter and V. L. Mal'kov, 'Reply to an American Scholar', Soviet Studies in History, vol.5, no.3, 1966 - 7. A. Kucherov, 'Alexander Herzen's Parallel between the United States and Russia', in J. S. Curtiss, (ed.), Essays in Honor of G. T. Robinson, Leiden, 1963. A. P. Mendel, 'Current Soviet Theory of History: New Trends or Old?' American Historical Review, vol.72, no.l, 1966 - 7. G. P. G. Siftzheimer, 'The Economics of Russian Serfdom and the Economics of American Slavery', Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, vol.14, 1966.

Index Note: An author cited in Notes not usually listed in Index. See also: Contents, pp. vii-ix, and Events p.3, Conjunctures p.61 and Structures p.l 19 Abrams, Philip, 158-61,169 Adams, John Q., 109 Aksakov, Sergei, 155 Aleksandrov, G., 41 Alexander I, tsar, 145,164, 176 Alexander II, tsar, 64, 152 Alexander III, tsar, 66,68, 166 Alexis, tsar, 106-7,131 Ames, Fisher, 145 Anderson, James, 162-3 Anderson, Perry, 181 Arbatov,G. A., 181,189 Avrekh, A. Ya., 49 Axson, Ellen Louise, 67 Bacon, Francis, 134 Bagehot, Walter, 67, 68, 69, 73, 79 Bailyn, Bernard, 162 Balfour, A. J., 174-5 Bellow, Saul, 177-8 Bismarck, O. von, 11, 93, 173 Blackbourn, David, 94-5 Blackstone, William, 136 Blake, William, 160 Blank, Maria A., 67 Bradford, William, 108 Braudel, Fernand, 10, 51-3, 57, 63, 86,95,159-61,189 Brezhnev, Leonid I., 171, 180 Bright, John, 67, 68, 69, 73

Bristed, John, 147 Brown, Archie, 157, 179, 181 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 178 Bukharin, Nikolai L, 83 Burke, Edmund, 69-70 Butterfield, Herbert, 115 Byrnes, James F., 107 Cabot, John, Sebastian, 127, 128 Candish, Robert S., 149 Carlile, Captain, 129 Carlyle, Thomas, 85, 86 Carr,E.H. 95, 185-6 Catherine the Great, 67, 134, 142, 148, 161-2, 176 Chancellor, Richard, 127-8 Charlemagne, 92, 93, 100 Charles, I, 97,114 Charles II, 114 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 141 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 7, 68, 73, 79 Chevalier, Michel, 147 Churchill, Winston S., 23, 25-6, 27, 100, 185 Clemenceau, Georges, 25 Cohen, Stephen F., 179 Columbus, 126-7, 128 Commager, Henry S., 38, 57 Cooper, J. Fenimore, 139-40, 155 Cross, A. G., 176 Curzon, Lord, 25 206

Index Custine, Marquis de, 171-3 Deane, Silas, 143-4 Defoe, Daniel, 144 Delbruck, Hans, 21 -2 Desnitsky, S. E., 139 Disraeli, Benjamin, 94 Dulles, John Foster, 64 Dymock, Thomas, 149 Edward VI, 127 Efimov, A. V., 49 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 42 Einstein, Albert, 56 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 180 Eley, Geoff, 94-5 Queen Elizabeth, 128-9 Engels, Frederick, 68, 73-4, 164, 1667, 168, 173-4, 184 Everett, Alexander H., 147 , ~, A ^ Faral, Edmond, 53 Fischer, Fritz, 21 Fisher, H. A. L., 36 Fleming, Sir Sandford, 77 Florinsky, Michael T., 36-7, 57, 107, 116,173 Foner, Eric, 99, 100 Franklin, Benjamin, 108 Freud, Sigmund, 68 Gait, Edith Bolting, 67 Garrick, David, 141 Gay, Peter, 162 Genghiz Khan, 148 Gibbon, Edward, 141 Giddens, A., 158 Gillan, Robert, 149 Gladstone, William E., 66,68,69, 73, 79 Glinkin, A. N., 48 Gorbachev, M. S., 16,169,181 Gorchakov, Alexander, 165 Gouber, A. A., 44 Grant, Ulysses S., 153 Grimm, Melchior von, 11,143,146, 148,164 Grossman, Vasily, 56

207

Hakluyt, Richard, 128, 129, 130 Hamilton, Alexander, 108, 135-6 Handlin, Oscar, 49 Harriman, Averell, 28 Hart, Liddell, 18 Hegel, G. W. R, 21, 50, 72 Herskovits, M. S., 50 Herzen, Alexander, 12, 154-6, 187, 189 Hexter, J. H., 45,46,47, 200n6 Hilferding, Rudolf, 75 Hitler, 11, 19, 35, 93 Hobson, J. A., 75, 82 Hogarth, William, 141 Hoover, Herbert, 64 House, Edward M, 67 Howe, General, 146 Hull, Cordell, 64 Huntington, Samuel P., 178 Ivan IV, tsar, 127-8, 129, 131, 154 , , , , , Jackson, Andrew, 172 James VII and II, 113 Jefferson, Thomas, 32, 69, 109, 139, 145,146 Johnson, Samuel, 141-2 Karamzin, N. M., 139 Keenan Edward L., 123-6, 133, 155, 173 Keenan, George F., 38, 170-3, 188, 201 nl 2 Kennedy, John F., 180 Kennedy, Paul, 184 Khvostov, V., 46 Kim, M., 49 Kipling, Rudyard, 175 Klyuchevsky, V. O., 50,116,127, 131,138 Kolchin, Peter, 131-2, 155 Kosygin, A. N.,44, 171 Kovalchenko, I. D., 46 Kovalevsky, Maxim, 72, 73, 116, 168, 201n9 Krupskaia, Nadezhda K., 69 Kuropiatnik, G. P., 49

208

The Last Great Game

Latourette, Kenneth S., 34, 57 Lawrence, D. H., 137 Lenin, V. I., 8, 10, 11, 25, 26, 37, 38, 43, 45, Ch 4 passim, 98,105, 115,123,159,168,169,171, 173, 174, 179, 182-7 Lermontov, Mikhail, 137 Lesovsky, Admiral, 153 Lincoln, Abraham, 64,151, 154 Lippmann, Walter, 171 Locke, John, 73, 134 Longworth, Philip, 106-7, 173 Louis XIV, 103 Luther, Martin, 92 LVov, N. A., 141 Macfarlane, Alan, 125,126, 155 Mackinder, H. J., 7, 122 MacLeish, Archibald, 9, 31-4, 39, 57 Macpherson, James, 139, 140 Madison, James, 134, 136, 161-2, 189 Mahan, A. T., 7, 122 Malcolm, Neil, 179-80 Malthus, 102, 111 Marlborough, 185 Marshall, John, 146 Marx, Karl, 12, 31, 37,46, 50, 68, 72 73-4,79,98,101,133,148,164, 166-7 168, 171, 173-4, 183, 184, 188 Mather, Cotton, 107 Mattingly, Garrett, 45-6 Medina Sidonia, 45 Michael, tsar, 131 Miliukov, P. N., 105-6 Mills, C.W., 180 Mitrofanov, P. von, 21 Molotov, V. M., 25 Moltke, Helmut von, 78 Monroe, James, 109,164 Moore, Barrington, 181 Morison, S. E., 38, 57 Morris, Gouverneur, 136, 146 Mussolini, 35 Napoleon, 11,65, 88, 92, 114, 145-6, 164 Newton, Sir Isaac, 134

Nicholas I, tsar, 166, 172, 176 Ossian, 139-40 Paul, tsar, 144 Perry, John, 134 Peter the Great, 104, 106, 111, 123, 131,144,148,171, 176 Philip II, 51, 57,128 Pipes, Richard, 49, 93,107, 173, 181 Pitts, F.E., 150-1,153 Plekhanov, G. V., 74, 85, 86 Popov, Admiral, 153 Porshnev, Bois F., 10, 53-7,64,95, 159,189 Pushkin, Alexander, 137 Radishchev, Alexander, 140, 154 Raeff, Marc, 130 Raleigh, Walter, 128 Read, Conyers, 35-6, 57 Reagan, Ronald, 169 Riesman, David, 180 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 9, 13, 14, 23, 24,25-6,31,41,64,86,100, 159, 169, 172, 185, 186 Roosevelt, Theodore, 65, 66, 76, 198n26 Rousseau, J. J., 136 Rubinshtein, N. L., 41 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 55 Schneider, Jean, 47 Schlesinger, A. M. Jr, 172 Schuyler, Eugene, 70 Scott, Sir Walter, 140 Seeley, Sir John, 7 Shchapov, A. P., 121-2, 155 Skobelev, M. D., 6 Skocpol, Theda, 181 Smith, Adam, 133, 174, 183 Smith, F. Toulmin, 177 Smith, John, 108 Solovyov, S. M., 37, 50 Stalin, J. V., 8, 9, 13, 15,23,24,25, 26,27-8,33,35,37,39,41,423,100,115,159,169,171,172, 185,186

Index Steiner, George, 137, 141 Stoeckl, Edouard de, 151, 154 Stresemann, Gustav, 95 Stroganov familly, 128 Taylor, A. J. P., 91-3, 94, 101, 122, 169-70 Tikhvinsky, S. L., 188 Tocqueville, A. de, 95, 125, 147, 155, 158, 164, 172, 179 Todd, Emmanuel, 125-6 Tolstoy, Leo, 68, 154 Toynbee, Arnold, 100, 122-3 Trotsky, L. D., 71,83 Truman, Harry S., 14, 33, 38,42 Turberville, George, 175 Turgenev, Ivan, 68, 70 Ulianov, Ilya N., 67-8 Varga, E. S., 40 Vauban, Marshal, 129 Vernadsky, G. V., 105 Viazemsky, P. A., 139 Voblikov. D., 41

209

Voznesensky, N. A., 40-1 Washington, George, 45, 86, 109, 164 Watt, D. C , 183 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 73 Weber, Max, 12, 98, 101, 164, 167, 184,188 Webster, Noah, 141-2 White, Colin, 132-4, 155, 183 White, Stephen, 158, 181 William III, 103, 114 Wills Gary, 162 Wilson, John R., 66 Wilson, Woodrow, 8, 10, 24, 26, Ch 4 passim, 115, 157,159, 168-9, 186, 189, 194n21,24 Winthrop, James, 135 Winthrop, John, 107 Woodrow, Jessie, 66 Woodrow, Thomas, 66 Woodward, C. Vann, 47-8, 50 Zagorin, Perez, 95-8 Zhdanov, A. A., 39-40, 41 Zubok, L. I., 41