Nešto se, drugovi, veliko dešava u Rusiji!

The popular Romanov
March 15, 2017 PaulR 5 Comments

Today is the 100^th anniversary of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Given the subsequent triumph of the Bolsheviks it is easy to see the February/March revolution which overthrew the Tsar as founded on the Russian people’s desire for ‘peace, land, and bread’. But this is to confuse one revolution with another. It is not even clear that in February/March 1917 Russians were rejecting the Romanov dynasty. Certainly, this was the demand of the more extreme elements who led the way in the capital Petrograd, but elsewhere in the country the situation was not the same. To understand this, it is worth looking at what happened to another Romanov in this period – Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich.

The Grand Duke had been Supreme Commander of the Russian Army until August 1915, when he was dismissed and sent packing to the Caucasus to be Viceroy. In one of his very last acts as Tsar, Nicholas II reappointed Nikolai Nikolaevich as Supreme Commander. In Petrograd, the appointment caused outrage among the more radical socialists who dominated the revolutionary mob. Elsewhere, though, the reaction was very different.

Local politicians in the Caucasian capital Tiflis (Tblisi) came forward to give the Grand Duke their support. This included people from across the political spectrum. For instance on 17 March (new style) 1917, Nikolai Nikolaevich met Noe Ramishvili and Noe Zhordania, who represented the Georgian branch of the Menshevik party, and who would later take turns leading the short-lived independent Georgian republic. The two men gave the Grand Duke their support and told him that they wanted a constitutional monarchy not anarchy.

Meanwhile, according to the British military attaché, General John Hanbury Williams, telegrams congratulating the Grand Duke on his appointment flooded into Supreme Headquarters (Stavka). More came to the Grand Duke’s office in Tiflis. The writers of the telegrams represented all classes of society, and numerous nationalities. To give a flavour, here a few:

From Allahiarbek Ziulgadarov, Baku: ‘I am happy to greet Your Imperial Highness on your high appointment. I pray to Allah for our complete victory over the enemy.’
From Sluchansk in Ukraine: ‘The workers of the Sluchanskii state stone and coal enterprise greet Your Highness and the glorious Army and do not doubt that under Your leadership the enemy will at last be smashed’
From Vyatka: ‘Your Imperial Highness. The workers of the Vyatka-Volga steamship line on the Vyatka River welcome You on your appointment to the high post of Supreme Commander, and wish you good health for victory over the stubborn enemy. Our dream of seeing You at the head of our valiant forces to save our Motherland has come true, and our faith in final victory has been strengthened. … Glory to You, defenders of Russia.’
From Sevsk in Bryansk province, south of Moscow: ‘The townspeople of Sevsk raise prayers before the Most High Throne for the victory of the Russian and allied armies over their stubborn enemy.’
From Starobelsk in Ukraine: ‘The eyes of all patriotic sons, at this long awaited moment of renewal of the state order, are directed toward YOU, valiant leader of our steadfast army, in the hope of a speedy end to the stubborn struggle with the external enemy. All our heart is with YOU and our dear army. We wish it and its Leader complete success for the good fortune of our precious fatherland.’

The theme of these and other messages was not peace but victory. The Grand Duke was well known for his fervent anti-German sentiment. As a regular French visitor to Stavka, Commandant Jacques Langlois, put it  ‘Everyone knew perfectly well the Grand Duke’s feelings toward Germany … The Grand Duke truly incarnated the Russian idea, the Orthodox idea, the loyalist idea, raised against Germanophile ideas.’ Compared with the ‘inner Germans’ (such as the Empress Alexandra) who had supposedly been betraying Russia’s war effort, he was seen as somebody determined to bring the war to a successful conclusion. This was the source of his popularity.

On 20 March 1917, the Grand Duke left Tiflis by train to travel to Stavka to take up command. The Belgian military attaché, General Louis-Désiré-Hubert, Baron de Ryckel, wrote to his government that the train journey turned into a ‘triumphal procession’. Eye-witnesses confirmed this. For instance, the Grand Duke’s nephew, Prince Roman Petrovich, who accompanied him, wrote that whenever the train stopped ‘crowds stood in the stations and cheered uncle Nikolasha as he stood at the train window.’ At Izium in eastern Ukraine, the train ‘was surrounded by a huge crowd. There were shouts of hurrah, people waved the national flag, and wanted to see the Supreme Commander. My uncle was forced to get out. With a loud voice he answered the greetings and declared that he was convinced of a glorious end to the war.’

In Kharkov, wrote the Prince, ‘A crowd poured in front of my uncle’s car and wanted to see him. When he appeared at the window, he was received with thunderous applause.’ According to another account, members of the local soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies met the Grand Duke with bread and salt and tried to persuade him to head straight to the front to take command of the front in person and thereby circumvent any attempt by the Provisional Government to remove him. The Grand Duke refused.

Among the crowd at Kharkov station was the former Governor of Moscow, Felix Iusupov Senior. He wrote:

The masses jumped over the barriers and gave the Grand Duke a grandiose ovation. I had not seen such a powerful demonstration for a long time. The ‘hurrahs’ thundered in the air. The mood of the people was exalted and their faces radiated with some kind of brave hope and joy. They seemed to be saying, ‘Go, go, my dear, to save Russia from shame!’ How many hands lifted and made the sign of the cross on the carriage where the Commander in Chief calmly stood and bowed.

When the Grand Duke reached Stavka in the town of Mogilev, however, he found a letter waiting for him from the Provisional Government dismissing him from his post. General Hanbury Williams recorded that when word of the letter leaked out, the local railway workers came to protest and threatened to go on strike to force the government to change its mind. Nikolai Nikolaevich himself confirmed the story, writing that the workers’ representatives came to see him:

Their visit lasted for quite a long time … The workers were enraged by [the head of the Provisional Government] Prince Lvov’s letter and told me not to give up the Supreme Command. They said that they wanted to stop the trains and drum up immediately all the workers in Mogilev to send a strong message. They said that they would immediately send a telegram to Petrograd. To avoid senseless bloodshed and to avoid worsening the prevailing chaos, I persuaded them to leave it alone.

A short while later, the Grand Duke resigned his post and left Stavka for what he hoped would be an honorable retirement.

The episode reveals a crucial point about the February revolution. Russians certainly didn’t like the war. Most of them would probably have been hard pressed to say what they were fighting for. But they certainly knew what they were fighting against – Germany – and they certainly didn’t want to lose. For many, the February revolution was an opportunity not to end the war, but to wage it more energetically, to ensure final victory. And many looked to a Romanov to lead them in this struggle. The Grand Duke’s popularity derived precisely from the fact that he was seen as determined to fight to the bitter end. This fact turns upside down the way people generally see the events of early 1917. It turns out that these events were perhaps not so much as a revolution against the Romanovs as a revolution against the Germans.

Robinson: From Russia with love – lessons for today from a revolution 100 years ago
Paul Robinson
   
Published on: March 10, 2017 | Last Updated: March 10, 2017 10:55 AM EDT


One hundred years ago this week, a protest about food shortages in the Russian capital, Petrograd, turned into the violent revolution that overthrew Czar Nicholas II and brought the Romanov dynasty to an end. The liberal-minded provisional government that assumed power did not last long, succumbing to another revolution eight months later, which inaugurated 70 years of Communist rule.

It was not meant to be like that. The initial revolution of March 1917 succeeded not so much because the mass of the Russian population wanted to overthrow the czar but because very few were willing to defend him. Three years of war had thoroughly tainted the government’s reputation and it was widely believed that the state was in the hands of pro-German traitors who were deliberately sabotaging Russia’s war effort. In the eyes of many, the purpose of the revolution was not at all to shatter the existing economic or social system, let alone to take Russia out of the war; rather, it was meant to strengthen the system and revitalize Russia’s military struggle in order to bring the war to a victorious conclusion.

The democratically inclined politicians who led the provisional government believed the czarist administration had weakened its country’s ability to wage war by failing to fully involve Russian society. Liberalizing the state and freeing people from autocratic rule would unite the country behind the army and release the people’s energy, they believed. Instead, Russia rapidly descended into anarchy, the army disintegrated, and finally the fanatical Bolsheviks took over.

The reason was simple. Once the czar was gone, people no longer felt under any obligation to obey authority. In liberal thought, legitimacy derives from elections, the state’s respect for its citizens’ human rights, open and transparent government, a free press and so on. According to these criteria, the provisional government ought to have been more legitimate than the unpopular monarchy it replaced. But it wasn’t. The legitimacy of the state proved to be inseparable from the person of the czar.

To understand why, one must look to an alternative concept of legitimacy. This sees legitimacy as deriving from history, tradition, nationalism and religion, as well as from force rather than from popularity and individual freedoms. Russians had regarded the czar as legitimate because the monarchy embodied centuries of Russian history, a sense of the Russian nation, and the idea of Orthodoxy. The monarchy was also feared. When it was gone, all that was left was an abstract commitment to liberal values. This was not sufficient. The result was the eventual triumph of Bolshevism.

This story continues to be repeated in countries across the globe today: Again and again, regime change leads not to liberal democracy but instead to civil war.

Despite this, many in the West continue to believe in the value of overthrowing what they consider to be corrupt or autocratic regimes, without in many cases taking due regard of the ways in which existing regimes have a form of legitimacy which is not easily replaced. Too often, a mere public commitment to Western values proves to be an insufficient replacement for power, tradition, religion or nationalism. Unless we can redefine our understanding of legitimacy in order to take such factors into consideration, our efforts to reshape the world are all too likely to continue to end up creating only chaos.


Russians are acutely aware of this. In opposing Western-led efforts at regime change in countries such as Iraq, Syria, Libya and Ukraine, they are showing a preference for stability over revolution. This is a preference grounded firmly in the experience of their own history.


Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Filipenko wrote:Hm, ja, da budem iskren, verujem prevashodno njegovoj neprejebivosti, potomku nekadašnjih visokovojvodskih ekselencija, Dominiku Livenu. Nikako da pročitam njegov The End of Tsarist Russia, a verujem da bi mi bilo višestruko bolje od njegove Battle For Europe: Russia Against Napoleon, koji me je bacio na dupe.

Spoiler:

Lenin's originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, Zizek argues in his new study and collection of original texts, Lenin's true greatness can be better grasped in the very last couple of years of his political life. Russia had survived foreign invasion, embargo and a terrifying civil war, as well as internal revolts such as at Kronstadt in 1921. But the new state was exhausted, isolated and disorientated in the face of the world revolution that seemed to be receding. New paths had to be sought, almost from scratch, for the Soviet state to survive and imagine some alternative route to the future. With his characteristic brio and provocative insight, Zizek suggests that Lenin's courage as a thinker can be found in his willingness to face this reality of retreat lucidly and frontally.