Had the costs of war and revolution been understood, Russia might have avoided much of what it suffered over the 20th century

Hell Is Truth Realized Too Late: Russia and the Legacy of World War I

by WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY


Grandiose projects and messianic ambitions have too high a price, especially when modernizing a backward country offers enough to do.



Thomas Hobbes notoriously described hell as truth realized too late. Russia’s entry into World War I and the events that followed bring out the phrase’s meaning while highlighting the importance of balancing risk. Decisions in 1914 brought Russia into a conflict that strained its economy, political structure and social cohesion beyond the breaking point. Defeat brought collapse and then revolution followed by a brutal civil war. Totalitarian dictatorship brought order through terror. A crash program of industrialization provided the means to avoid defeat in World War II, but stagnation followed until the Soviet Union collapsed under its own contradictions at the end of the Cold War. Had the costs of war and revolution been understood, Russia might have avoided much of what it suffered over the 20th century.

Several Russian statesmen before World War I who realized the danger of conflict brought by assertive foreign policies instead urged a defensive strategy focused on economic development. Their arguments make important points for understanding the country’s history and its present outlook. Petr Stolypin, the premier who guided the country’s recovery from the 1905 Revolution, viewed anything other than such a cautious approach as insanity sure to put the Romanov dynasty’s survival at risk. His reforms sought to build a patriotic civil society, partly through agrarian measures favoring peasant proprietors who improved their land from profits in a market economy. Such a bet on the strong, as Stolypin described it, required time and stability to bring the stability he anticipated. Serge Witte, his predecessor, also believed Russia needed a generation of peace to realize its economic potential. Vladimir Kokovtsov, who combined the roles of finance minister and premier, thought an assertive policy beyond the country’s means fundamentally unnecessary. Developing Russia’s existing territories provided ample scope for its people’s energies so long as peace allowed them to do it. Responsibility for domestic rather than foreign affairs made all these men sharply aware of Russia’s true state and resources.

Durnovo’s Plea
Petr Durnovo, a former interior minister who had reasserted the government’s authority during the upheaval of the 1905 Revolution, made the most insightful case for restraint with a memorandum given to Nicholas II in February 1914. Besides predicting a long war and the strains it would bring, he demonstrated a shrewd grasp of Russia’s predicament from long experience with the country’s internal affairs. His brief memorandum rewards consideration both for the range of topics covered and for anticipating the deluge that overwhelmed the Tsarist regime. It also sharpens the question of why Nicholas and his ministers chose to risk war later that year.

Nobody would mistake Durnovo as a friend to liberty. A former director of police for a decade, he resigned over a scandal at Alexander III’s insistence, though the misstep did not derail his career. After stepping down from the interior ministry, Durnovo led the most hard right faction within the State Council. His outlook reflected a brand of Russian conservatism that Richard Pipes has described as operating along different lines from its counterparts elsewhere in Europe or the Anglophone world. It emphasized state power, which needed no constraint by the impartial rule of law, while recognizing how fragile tsarism’s brittle authority was. On this view, only the tsar could hold selfish elites in check and uphold the common good. Rather than establishing self-government, political change in the absence of civil society would instead produce a social revolution. Hence the almost Hobbesian preoccupation with order in Russian conservatism that Durnovo’s outlook reflects.

His concern with preserving order focused Durnovo on the question of what Russia gained from a foreign policy that set the country on the path to armed conflict. Framing the international scene in terms of an Anglo-German rivalry driven by commercial interests but grounded in a clash between their respective liberal and conservative orientations, he warned that aligning Russia with a British led coalition threatened to involve it in a prolonged war. It also sacrificed important regional interests along Russia’s extensive periphery, notably Persia, Central Asia, and the frontier with China, to rapprochement with London. Before this step, Durnovo argued Russia had combined a defensive alliance with France—which assured assistance if attacked without a blank check pledging military force to actions by either partner—and friendly relations with Prussia to help keep the peace. France had a guarantee from attack by Germany, which likewise had protection from French revenge by Russia’s commitment to peace. Germany restrained Austria from intrigues against Russian interests in the Balkans, while isolation kept Britain in check. Now, with that balance of power upset, in Durnovo’s view, by Russia giving up its defensive policy to align with Britain, the country stood on the wrong side of a looming war.

Russians had seen Britain as a geopolitical rival since the late 18th century with Napoleonic France and even the United States as possible counterweights. Indeed, resentment of British maritime supremacy spurred cooperation or at least sympathy between St Petersburg and Washington despite the ideological gap between Tsarist Russia and the United States. Durnovo’s memorandum also raises a common charge among Continental European conservatives in complaining that “England, monarchic and conservative to the marrow at home, has in her foreign relations always acted as the protector of the most demagogical tendencies, invariably encouraging all popular movements aiming at the weakening of the monarchial principle.” Hostility toward Britain slanted his reading of international politics. Durnovo also misreads German intentions, underestimating the ambitions of its elites along with France’s willingness to accept war as the price of recovering losses from their earlier defeat by Prussia in 1871. His slanted read on foreign politics makes it the weakest part of the analysis.

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